Sustainable Leadership: Recent Episodes
Dan Montgomery
Join host Dan Montgomery as he interviews provocative thinkers, business leaders, activists and educators on Sustainable Leadership. We explore the idea that sustainability requires a deep personal and cultural shift in the ways we see, think, act and do business in the world. In even the best case future scenarios, we need to find new ways to live, produce and consume. We explore how to create a business culture that helps build a world we can all thrive in, that does not rob future generations and other species, and is more enjoyable for us to live in now.
For reviews and reflections on archived shows, see www.resilient-strategies.com/blog
We're taking a break over the summer but we'll be back in the fall with a new format! Watch this space for details!
Guest: Dr. Don Beck. We welcome back Dr. Beck for a conversation about the future of business. In Dr. Beck's Spiral Dynamics parlance, we've had an unbalanced excess of individualistic, entrepreneurial energy that the more collective "memes" in our society were unable to check, leading to rampant greed and corruption. The tendency now is to swing the pendulum the other way, creating a more interventionist and collectivist ethic that may well create its own set of problems. What can business learn from the mistakes of the past few years? How can entrepreneurship respond to the needs of the whole system instead of individual acquisitiveness?
In this episode, we welcome back Robert W. "Doc" Hall for a follow up to last month's conversation about Compression. In this segment, we will look further into what happens to our individual psychology and our culture when material expansion hits a wall. How will this affect our sense of time, of growth, of our very purpose?
Guest: Arron Mansika, Owner. Boulder's Best Organics is an up and coming success story in the local organic products industry, selling over 10,000 organic gift collections in its first two years. Arron started with a business model designed to create a "win" for everyone it touched, and has both capitalized on, and reinforced, Boulder's emergence as the "Silicon Valley" of the industry. Join us for a conversation about how Arron created the business, and his personal journey as an entrepreneur.
LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) consumers are a huge and growing market - a market with some distinctive differences. Join retail consumer marketing veteran and LOHAS industry insider Bill Capsalis as he shares some secrets on the eve of the big Natural Products West Expo, the industry's largest trade show.
Guest: Robert W "Doc" Hall. Doc Hall has been a leading light in the adoption of lean manufacturing practices in the US, and the author of six books on manufacturing practices. In his forthcoming book, Compression, Doc explores how we can create a business system that will "globally create at least the same quality of life as in industrial societies today, while using less than half the energy and virgin raw materials, and cutting toxic releases to nearly zero."
Guest: Ryan Martens, Founder and CTO, Rally Software. Rally Software has become a model for sustainable practices in IT - as well as for innovative collaborative methods in software development itself.
Guest: Verna Allee. Verna is a pioneer in the field of Value Network Analysis, helping companies work with the power of social networks, intangible assets, and knowledge management. Value Network Analysis is a profoundly innovative tool for visualizing, planning and managing complex adaptive organizations. Verna has been a trusted advisor to more than 100 Fortune 1000 companies, leading government agencies, civil society organizations, and entrepreneurial startups — including Cisco Systems, the Boeing Company, HP, Telenor, AgResearch, PwC, and Mayo Clinic. We'll be talking about how these new tools help us understand how to build robust, innovative, resilient and sustainable business models.
Guest: Tami Simon, Founder, Sounds True. Sounds True is a multimedia publishing company dedicated to disseminating spiritual wisdom. Tami lectures widely on conscious business practices, authenticity in the workplace, and other topics concerning the expression of values through work. Tami's story of how she came to found the company is a testimonial to the power of spirit in business. And, we'll be talking about the challenges of balancing a spiritual perspective – and a very spiritual product – with the hard realities of business.
Guest: William Shutkin, Chair in Sustainable Development, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado. A global leader in sustainability and social entrepreneurship, Bill joined the faculty of the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder in July 2008. Bill is the author of two books, the award-winning The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, and A Republic of Trees, Field Notes on People, Place and the Planet. Our pre-show conversations have already run a gamut including business education, economic development, environmental justice, and the biggest question: what dream is our way of business serving?
Guest: Jahn Ballard, Founder, Performance Management Institute. PMI uses financial statements and other metric tools to create a whole systems approach to improving performance, transparency and collaboration in business organizations. This approach is a hallmark of lean manufacturing, and we'll be talking about how this approach can support the greening of your business in a way that also improves profitability and performance.
Guest: Steve Meyer, Founder and CEO, Mainstreet Pedicab. Pedicabs are human-powered taxis seen in many of the major cities around the world. They work well for not only transporting people, but also for the delivery of food and merchandise. In a world that is becoming overwhelmed with too many cars, pedicabs offer a green and sometimes romantic alternative. Steve Meyer didn't invent the pedicab, but he is in the process of perfecting the marketplace for it. Steve started out in real estate development, and his story about the insights he gained, and how he developed Mainstreet Pedicab is a great example of a sustainable business model.
Guest: Joshua Onysko, Founder and CEO, Pangea Organics. Pangea is the fastest growing organic skincare line in the world, and is a model of how to grow a green business from the ground up, up to and including plantable packaging. We'll talk about how Josh started the company, the influence of buddhist practice on his leadership style, the role of consumers in creating change, and the need for greater transparency in the organics industry.
Guest: Kim Callis, Group Leader, Global Sustainable Development, General Mills. General Mills is the 6th largest food company in the world. Kim will be talking about leading sustainability initiatives in a far flung organization, with operations in more than 100 countries. In addition, we will be talking about transparency and reporting, including Kim's involvement with the Global Reporting Initiative.
Guest: Will Sarni. Will is the Founder and CEO of DOMANI Sustainability Consulting, with 30 years experience providing sustainability and environmental consulting to global private sector companies. In addition, he is a regular columnist for Venture Magazine as well as Climate Management Weekly. Will's down-to-earth focus includes maximizing revenue, mitigating risk, and improving operating efficiency through sustainability programs. We will be talking about the obstacles that companies face when integrating sustainability into the ongoing management cycle of planning, budgeting, and performance management.
Guest: Graham Russell. Graham has nearly 25 years of CEO experience, mostly in the environmental services industry. He is the Executive Director of CORE Colorado, a trade association dedicated to promoting sustainable business practices in the Rocky Mountain region. CORE has been engaged in research as part of the Greener Denver program. This research looks at the attitudes and issues connected with sustainability among small/medium businesses in the Denver area. We will discuss CORE's findings, and talk about the opportunity for business to spearhead the move to a sustainable economy, as well as the challenges.
Guest: Don Beck. Don Edward Beck, Ph.D., has inspired thousands of people toward a new experience of organizational and personal empowerment through Spiral Dynamics™, his unique values-based model that charts the evolution and emergence of human nature and society. Dr. Beck has very practically applied this model in a number of global hot spots, including South Africa and the Middle East.
In this special post-election conversation, we will explore what "sustainable culture" might look like. In particular, we'll be talking about the American political system, and the need to move beyond our current political stereotypes in order to deal with our many environmental and economic problems.
Guest: David Karr and Alex Pryor, Co-Founders, Guayakí Maté. Guayakí is a business that's been built on sustainable principles from the ground up since its founding over 10 years ago. Maté is a caffeine beverage that is enormously popular in South America and rapidly growing in the North. While most maté production is fundamentally exploitive of the environment and farmers, Guayakí was deliberately founded as a for-profit restoration business. That is, it has been designed to enhance the rain forest environment and the lives of the people in it while operating profitably. The company has pioneered new practices for management decision making and financing that are worth emulating!
Guest: Marsha Shenk ( www.bestwork.biz ) Marsha is a Business Anthropologist, and works actively with a number of business clients. The term "sustainability" would seem to imply that we are trying to maintain a steady state, yet the term "resilience" might serve us better. Marsha has been helping business clients develop "neuroplasticity" as a capacity for adapting, innovating and thriving in rapidly changing circumstances. We tend to evaluate every situation from a basis of previous experience. But, big changes in the economy and the environment will demand that we learn to see every day with fresh eyes.
Guest: Dick Wagner. Richard B. Wagner, JD, CFP® has been a thought leader in the financial planning world for twenty-five years and is a past president of the Institute for Certified Financial Planners. Dick is a radical thinker about the very nature of wealth and money.
Conventional thinking about economics would tell us that money is an objective store of value, that growth is essential, and that money must by definition be scarce. What if someone told you that all of your assumptions about money are, well.... cultural artifacts, not objective truth? Dick will talk about how our assumptions about the nature of money have contributed to both environmental degradation and a devaluing and underfunding of services like education and health care. And, he will offer his thoughts on new stories about wealth and money that offer us a way forward.
Guest: Michael Brownlee. Michael is CoFounder of, and Catalyst for Transition Boulder County, the first Transition initiative in North America. The rapidly growing Transition Movement is a path for local responses to the challenges of peak oil. The "descent" from our energy-intensive economy offers scary prospects in the short run, but also holds the promise of re-establishing healthier communities and lifestyles in the not-too-distant future.
Dan interviews climate scientist and Jungian analyst Jeffrey Kiehl. Jeff has been investigating connections between psychology and environmental issues. We will explore the question of why humans treat nature they way we do, and how nature becomes "invisible" to us.