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PART VII

THE BIG PICTURE

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LEADING FOR THE LONG FUTURE

My late uncle, Alvin Weinberg, was a nuclear physicist who often acted as the conscience of that sector. He was fired as director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory after twenty-five years in the job because he would not stop talking about the dangers of reactor safety and nuclear waste. He also, controversially, opposed using the type of reactor fuel that produces material for weapons.1 Then, as founder of the Institute for Energy Analysis, he initiated one of the nation’s pioneering R&D units on alternative energy—he was one of the first scientists to warn about the threat of CO2 and global warming. Alvin once confided to me his ambivalence about for-profit companies running nuclear power plants; he feared that the profit motive would mean they cut safety measures—a premonition of what contributed to the Fukushima disaster in Japan.2 Alvin was particularly troubled that the nuclear energy industry had never solved the problem of what to do with radioactive waste. He urged it to find a solution that would persist as long as the waste remained radioactive—such as an institution dedicated to guarding those stockpiles and keeping people safe from them over centuries or millennia.3 Decisions with the long horizon in mind raise questions like, How will what we do today matter in a century, or in five hundred years? To the grandchildren of our grandchildren’s grandchildren? In that far future the specifics of our actions today may well fade like distant shadows of forgotten ancestors. What could have more lasting consequence are the norms we establish, the organizing principles for action that live on long after their originators have gone. There are think tanks, as well as corporate and government groups, that deeply ponder possible future scenarios. Consider these projections for the world in 2025, made by the U.S. National Intelligence Council:4 • Ecological impacts of human activity will create scarcity of resources like farmable soil. • The economic demand for energy, food, and water will outstrip readily available sources—water shortages loom soon. • These trends will create shocks and disruptions to our lives, economies, and political systems.

When that report was delivered, the federal government ignored the results. There is no agency, office, or particular government position charged with acting for the long term. Instead politicians focus on the short term—what it takes to get reelected, particularly—with virtually no attention paid to what needs to be done now to protect future generations. For too many politicians saving their jobs commands more of their attention than saving the planet or the poor. But it’s not just politicians—most of us prefer immediate solutions. Cognitive psychologists find that people tend to favor now in decisions of all kinds—as in, I’ll have the pie à la mode now, and maybe diet later. This pertains, too, to our goals. “We attend to the present, what’s needed for success now,” says Elke Weber, the Columbia University cognitive scientist. “But this is bad for farsighted goals, which are not given the same priority in the mind. Future focus becomes a luxury, waiting for current needs to be taken care of first.” In 2003, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg decreed that smoking was banned in bars. His decision got huge opposition—bar owners said it would ruin their business; smokers hated it. He said, You might not like it, but you’ll thank me in twenty years. How long does it take before the public reaction becomes positive? Elke Weber looked at Bloomberg’s smoking ban, among other such decisions, to answer that question: “We did case studies of how long it took for a change that was initially unpopular to become the new, accepted status quo. Our data shows the range is nine to six months.” That smoking ban? “Even smokers liked it after a while,” Weber adds. “They got to enjoy hanging out with other smokers outdoors. And everyone likes that bars didn’t reek of stale smoke.” Another case study: The provincial government of British Columbia imposed a tax on carbon emissions. It was revenue neutral: the fees collected were distributed among the province’s citizens. At first there was tremendous opposition to the new tax. But after a while people liked getting their checks. Fifteen months later the tax was popular.5 “Politicians are in charge of our welfare,” says Weber. “They need to know people will thank them later for a hard decision now. It’s like raising teenagers—sometimes thankless in the short term, but rewarding in the long.” RESHAPING SYSTEMS

Soon after Hurricane Sandy devastated large parts of the New York City area, I spoke with Jonathan F. P. Rose, a founder of the green community planning movement, who was writing a book that looks at cities as systems.6 “We’re at an inflection point about the belief that climate change is a serious long-term problem we must deal with,” Rose said. “Sandy’s worst hit was the Wall Street area. You don’t hear any climate warming deniers down there these days. In the Wall Street culture a quarter is a long time away. But Sandy may have gotten them to think about a much longer time horizon. “If we reduce our production of heat-trapping gases today, it would still take at least three hundred years for the climate to begin to cool, perhaps much longer,” Rose added. “We have strong cognitive biases toward our present needs, and are weak thinkers about the long away future. But at least we’re starting to recognize the degree to which we have put human and natural systems at risk. What we need now is leadership. Great leaders must have the essential long view that a systems understanding brings.” Take business. Reinventing business for the long future could mean finding shared values supported by all stakeholders, from stock owners to employees and customers to communities where a company operates. Some call it “conscious capitalism,” orienting a company’s performance around benefiting all such stakeholders, not just aiming for quarterly numbers that please shareholders (and studies show that companies like Whole Foods and Zappos with this broader view actually do better on financials than their purely profit-oriented competitors).7 If a leader is to articulate such shared values effectively, he or she must first look within to find a genuinely heartfelt guiding vision. The alternative can be seen in the hollow mission statements espoused by executives but belied by their company’s (or their own) actions. Even leaders of great companies can suffer a blind spot for the long-term consequence if their time frame is too small. To be truly great, leaders need to expand their focus to a further horizon line, even beyond decades, while taking their systems understanding to a much finer focus. And their leadership needs to reshape systems themselves. That brings to mind Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, who surprised me when we were both members of a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He took that opportunity to announce that Unilever had adopted the goal of cutting the company’s environmental footprint in half by 2020 (this was in 2010, giving it a decade to get there). That was laudable, but a little ho-hum: many socially responsible companies announce global warming goals like that.8 But the next thing he said really shocked me: Unilever is committed to sourcing its raw agriculture material from small farms, aiming to link to half a million smallholders globally.9 The farmers involved mainly grow tea, but the sourcing initiative will also include crops for cocoa, palm oil, vanilla, coconut sugar, and a variety of fruits and vegetables. The farms involved are in areas ranging from Africa to Southeast Asia and Latin America, with some in Indonesia, China, and India. Unilever hopes not only to link these small farmers into their suppalso to work with groups like Rainforest Alliance to help them upgrade their farming practices and so become reliable sources in global markets.10 For Unilever, this diversification of its sourcing lowers risks in a turbulent world, where food security has come on the radar as a future issue. For the farmers, it means more income and a more certain future. This redrawing of the supply chain, Polman pointed out, would have a range of benefits, from leaving more money in local farm communities to better health and schooling. The World Bank points to supporting smallholder farming as the most effective way to stimulate economic development and reduce poverty in rural areas.11 “In emerging markets three out of four low-income people depend directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihoods,” according to Cherie Tan, who heads this Unilever initiative on sourcing from small farms. Eighty-five percent of all farms worldwide are in this smallholder class, “so there are great opportunities,” she adds. If we see a company as little more than a machine for making money, we ignore its web of connections to the people who work there, the communities it operates in, its customers and clients, and society at large. Leaders with a wider view bring into focus these relationships, too. While making money matters, of course, leaders with this enlarged aperture pay attention to how they make money, and so make choices differently. Their decisions operate by a logic that does not reduce to simple profit/loss calculations—it goes beyond the language of economics. They balance financial return with the public good.12 In this view a good decision allows for present needs as well as those of a wider web of people—including future generations. Such leaders inspire: they articulate a larger common purpose that gives meaning and coherence to everyone’s work and engage people emotionally through values that make people feel good about their work, that motivate, and that keep people on course. Focusing on social needs can itself foster innovation, if combined with an expanded field of attention to what people need. Managers at the India division of a global consumer goods company saw village men bloodied by barbers using rusty razors, and so found ways to make new razors cheap enough that those villagers could afford them.13 Such projects create organizational climates where work has meaning and engages people’s passions. As for teams like the one that developed those cheap razors, their labor can more likely become “good work”: where people are engaged, work with excellence, and find meaning in what they do. BIG-PICTURE LEADERS

Imagine taking to scale what’s been happening for years at Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. One of its popular flavors, Chocolate Fudge Brownie, calls for brownies to be broken up into the ice cream. Ben & Jerry’s gets its truckloads of these tasty cakes from the Greyston Bakery, located in a poverty-stricken neighborhood of the Bronx. The bakery trains and employs those who struggle to find work, including once-homeless parents who, with their families, now live in nearby low-cost housing. The bakery’s motto: “We don’t hire people to bake brownies. We bake brownies to hire people.” Such attitudes represent the kind of fresh thinking intractable dilemmas call for. But there’s a hidden ingredient in any true solution: enhancing our attention and understanding—in ourselves, in others, in our communities and societies. In the sense that leaders influence or guide people toward a shared goal, leadership is widely distributed. Whether within a family, on social media, or in an organization or society as a whole, we are all leaders in one way or another. The good-enough leader operates within the givens of a system to benefit a single group, executing a mission as directed, taking on the problems of the day. In contrast, a great leader defines a mission, acts on many levels, and tackles the biggest problems. Great leaders do not settle for systems as they are, but see what they could become, and so work to transform them for the better, to benefit the widest circle. Then there are those rare souls who shift beyond mere competence to wisdom, and so operate on behalf of society itself rather than a specific political group or business. They are free to think far, far ahead. Their aperture encompasses the welfare of humanity at large, not a single group; they see people as We, not as Us and Them. And they leave a legacy for future generations—these are the leaders we remember a century or more later. Think Jefferson and Lincoln, Gandhi and Mandela, Buddha and Jesus. One of today’s wicked messes is the paradox of the Anthropocene: human systems affect the global systems that support life in what seems to be headed for a slow-motion systems crash. Finding solutions requires Anthropocene thinking, understanding points of leverage within these systems dynamics so as to reset a course for a better future. This level of complexity adds to layers of others facing leaders today, as challenges escalate into messes. For instance, through the health and ecological impacts of our lifestyle, the world’s richest people are creating disproportionate pain for the world’s poorest. We need to reinvent our economic systems themselves, factoring in human needs, not just economic growth. Take the growing gap between very richest and most powerful and poorest worldwide. While the rich hold power, as we’ve seen this very status can blind them to the true conditions of the poor, leaving them indifferent to their suffering. Who, then, can speak truth to power? “Civilizations should be judged not by how they treat people closest to power, but rather how they treat those furthest from power—whether in race, religion, gender, wealth, or class—as well as in time,” says Larry Brilliant. “A great civilization would have compassion and love for them, too.” While the perks and pleasures of a robust economy are alluring, there are also the “diseases of civilization,” like diabetes and heart disease, which are worsened by the rigors and stresses of the routines that make those lifestyles possible (plus, of course, by that economic marvel, junk food). This problem intensifies as we fail in much of the world to make medical services equally available to all. Then there are the perennial problems of inequities in education and access to opportunity; countries and cultures that privilege one elite group while repressing others; nations that are failing and devolving into warring fiefdoms—and on and on. Problems of such complexity and urgency require an approach to problem-solving that integrates our self-awareness and how we act, and our empathy and compassion, with a nuanced understanding of the systems at play. To begin to address such messes, we need leaders who focus on several systems: geopolitical, economic, and environmental, to name a few. But sadly for the world, so many leaders are preoccupied with today’s immediate problems that they lack bandwidth for the long-term challenges we face as a species.14 Peter Senge, who teaches at the MIT Sloan School of Management, developed the “learning organization,” which brings a systems understanding into companies.15 “Essential to understanding systems is your time horizon,” Senge told me. “If it’s too short, you’ll ignore essential feedback loops and come up with short-term fixes that won’t work in the long run. But if that horizon is long enough, you’ll have a chance of seeing more of the key systems at play.” “The bigger your horizon,” adds Senge, “the bigger the system you can see.” But “transforming large-scale systems is hard,” said Rebecca Henderson at an MIT meeting on global systems. Henderson teaches on ethics and the environment at Harvard Business School and uses a systems framework to seek solutions. For instance, recycling, she points out, represents “change at the margins,” while abandoning fossil fuels altogether would represent a system shift. Henderson, who teaches a surprisingly popular course at the business school on “reimagining capitalism,” favors transparency that would accurately price say, CO2 emissions. That would cause markets to favor any means that lowers those emissions. At the same MIT meeting on global systems where Henderson spoke, the Dalai Lama said, “We need to influence decision makers to pay attention to the issues that matter for humanity in the long run,” like the environmental crisis and the inequity in income distribution—“not just their national interest.” “We have the capacity to think several centuries into the future,” the Dalai Lama said, adding, “Start the task even if it will not be fulfilled within your lifetime. This generation has a responsibility to reshape the world. If we make an effort, it may be possible to achieve. Even if it seems hopeless now, never give up. Offer a positive vision, with enthusiasm and joy, and an optimistic outlook.” A triple focus might help us become successful, but toward what end? We must ask ourselves: in the service of what exactly are we using whatever talents we may have? If our focus serves only our personal ends—self-interest, immediate reward, and our own small group—then in the long run all of us, as a species, are doomed. The largest lens for our focus encompasses global systems; considers the needs of everyone, including the powerless and poor; and peers far ahead in time. No matter what we are doing or what decision we are making, the Dalai Lama suggests these self-queries for checking our motivation: Is it just for me, or for others? For the benefit of the few, or the many? For now, or for the future?