Archive for March, 2009
Ghandi, Business Values, and Green IT
I attended (and spoke at) the Eleventh Annual Symposium on Spirituality and Business yesterday. I am not a religious person. But it was a great opportunity to step back and reflect. The highlight of the day was listening to Kevin Lynch, Executive Director of Rebuild Resources. He reminds himself daily of all of the advantages that he was born with that he has not earned. That he has suffered from drug and alcohol addiction, like those he serves. The people Kevin works with are not clients, but fellow human beings.
This is the concept of the servant leader that I spoke of earlier in the day. My speech was called: Satyagraha for the Business Leader:
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If you like this then please subscribe to the I am afraid for our planet, the way I was afraid for my dad
During the three years my dad lived with incurable cancer, I tried not to wallow in fear. But shielding myself by living in denial wasn’t an option. Dad needed me to find clinical trials, look for new treatments, talk to doctors–anything to try to keep him alive. I spent hours and hours on the computer, trying to find something that would give my family hope.
It was hard to keep trying. Because I knew all along that he wasn’t going to make it, no matter what I did. Just three weeks after he was diagnosed, I found a retrospective study that showed that no one, not one person in all the case records they had found, had survived this cancer more than five years.
Sometimes, I would find myself drifting away from the hard reality. Hey, let’s not think about it. Forget the cancer newsgroups tonight. Don’t bother with checking clinicaltrials.gov. But then that tight lump of fear in my chest would return.
My dad’s been gone for a long while now. When my dad died, I was very sad, but I was also relieved. He wasn’t suffering any longer. And I no longer had that lump of fear.
But now the fear is back. James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis, says there will be less than a billion people on Earth in 90 year’s time. Wildlife and whole ecosystems will vanish… Polar ice is melting faster than scientists had anticipated. Polar bears are drowning. The glaciers on Mt. Kilimanjaro are disappearing. That will mean drought and death for the elephant orphans I love so much in Tsavo National Park.
It’s like coping with incurable cancer. The years ahead will be ones of pain, loss, and sorrow. Each animal extinction will be a death knell for me. The large mammals will go first. Polar bears, penguins, tigers, gorillas… Then birds, amphibians, whales, fish, coral reefs. And trees! We will lose so many beautiful trees.
Are you afraid of global warming? Please leave me a note. They say there’s strength in numbers…
I also have a request for global warming naysayers who may read this: Please do me a favor and surf on by. Or discover what thousands of Nobel Peace Prize winning-scientists have to say on the subject: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Good to Great?
Thomas Falk, CEO
Kimberly-Clark
351 Phelps Drive
Irving, Texas 75038, USA
Fax: 972-281-1490
Email: thomas.j.falk@kcc.com
Dear Mr. Falk:
I am currently reading Jim Colin’s classic book: “Good to Great,” which lists Kimberly-Clark as one of the nation’s great companies. There is a quote in the book from Dick Appert, a former Kimberly-Clark executive. “I never had anyone in Kimberly-Clark in all my forty-one years say anything unkind to me. I thank God the day I was hired because I’ve been associated with wonderful people. Good, good people who respected and admired one another. ”
To me, it seemed SO incongruous. This is the same company that is purchasing virgin pulp from clear-cut Canadian Boreal forests! Is your company truly composed of good, good people? Why are you spending millions of dollars convincing Americans that only super soft paper is good for wiping their bottoms?
If you are truly a “good” company, I hope that you will change your marketing strategy, and change your purchasing ethics as well.
Perhaps it bears mentioning that I am also the CEO of a company. Tech Networks of Boston has 25 people and four restrooms. You would never find a Kimberly-Clark bathroom tissue product, or any other non-recycled bathroom tissues in our facilities.
Sincerely,
Susan Labandibar
President,
Tech Networks of Boston
Greening IT in the Hotel Industry
Last week I gave a presentation on Sustainable IT in the hotel industry. It’s surprising how much IT equipment goes into building the IT infrastructure of a larger hotel. There is the server that handles the reservations, another to handle programming the room keys. There are the restaurant servers, the gift shop servers, and the rooms management servers. There’s even a server to handle the in-room movies!
There are computers in the office, computers in the business center, and–in some hotels–computers in the rooms. There are displays in the hallways guiding guests to their conference rooms, computers at the front desk, and in the kitchens. Not to mention the wireless Internet access that is available throughout the hotel.
Server consolidation, server virtualization, and enabling power management are the three fastest ways to reduce IT-related energy consumption in the hotel industry.
How the Internet Can Create Jobs and Green Our Economy
On February 5th, Time magazine published an article written by former Time managing editor, Walter Issacson, called: How to Save Your Newspaper. Mr. Issacson calls for an end to major newspapers making content available free on their websites. As he points out, newspapers depend on three types of revenue for their survival: subscriptions, newsstand sales and advertising revenue. A newspaper cannot afford to employ dozens of full-time writers and investigative journalists on revenues generated by Internet advertising.
As an environmentalist, I don’t see anything praiseworthy about making everything on the Internet available for free. Our current system only functions when economic activity is increasing. But in a world of limited resources, we are destroying that which has real value (nature) in the struggle to maintain economic activity. Our economic system cannot function without our ecosystem. We are turning our planet into the ultimate economic bubble.
So where will we get the resources to continue to fuel economic growth? Some people look to outer space for more room. I think we should look at cyberspace. The Internet is one place where we can achieve greater economic activity without a concurrent increase in resource consumption. If we can shift much of our product-based economic activity to web-based economic activity, we can create green jobs and rebuild our economy without damaging the environment.
But here’s where we run into a problem. How can we create Internet-based green jobs if most people are accustomed to receive valuable information, goods, and services in cyberspace for free? We need to transfer money from the real world to the virtual world. Even on the Internet, there is no such thing as a free lunch.