“Knowledge is power.” A received truth that leaders live by. But what if what-you-know was hindering, not helping, you? That what you “know” is an obstacle to getting where you need to be? Welcome to the Know-It-All Paradox. The Veil of Perceptual Omnipotence People go through life as if they…

The geo-engineering proposals, made by eminent scientists like Stanford’s Ken Caldiera and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, represent the third stage of the climate debate. Most people are still stuck in the first stage, debating whether climate change is real and whether humans are to blame. The second stage began with…

I learned something about how we see ourselves from a close psychologist friend. We were discussing relationships and I was told that people can only have relationships with other people, which startled me because I thought I had relationships with my pet dog Fritz, the tree in my front yard…

If you want to hear a collective groan from a group of CSR directors, just mention filling out a customer CSR survey. Idealistic MBAs may imagine that being promoted to the post of “director of sustainability” means they will lead a company’s social and environmental agenda and make their business…

The first biosphere rule is materials parsimony and it is, quite simply, about simplification. Materials parsimony is minimizing the types of materials used in products. I want to be careful here because I’m not talking about minimizing the amounts of materials. Minimizing the amounts of materials is a different sustainability…

“Business sustainability? Embed it and forget it.” As soon as I said it, the journalist furrowed his brow. I knew the inevitable follow-up was coming. “Embed sustainability and forget it? How can you say that? Sustainability is a huge problem for business managers. You can’t just tell them to solve…

Defining the Frontier — President Thomas Jefferson spent the autumn of 1806 waiting impatiently for the return of longtime friend Meriwether Lewis. The President had acquired the Louisiana Territory from France three years earlier, doubling the land area of the United States, and had sent Lewis, Lieutenant William Clark, and the 33 volunteers that…