Getting Trumped On My First Speech On Sustainability
I was running late for the airport and my cab was waiting in front of the hotel. Before I could sit back, the cabdriver asked: "How was your speech?" I looked up and saw, looking at me in his rear view mirror, an older cabbie with a scraggly goatee and a cloth cap.
I asked him how he knew I had been giving a speech, and he told me that the hotel concierge had told him. "What was it about?" he asked.
Hmmm, I thought, how to explain this? "Well, I am an expert on something called sustainability. It's about how companies are expected to do more than just make a profit, and I was speaking about how profits can actually be increased by good social and environmental performance."
He didn't reply, so I tried again.
"Sustainability is about how companies can do the right thing and make money at it."
He still said nothing.
Instead, he reached over into the front passenger seat, and, without taking his eyes off the road, handed back to me a fifteen-page, single-spaced manuscript entitled Sustainable World.
"Read this," he said. "I wrote it three years ago and have given out over 1,700 copies from this very cab."
Huh? The first paragraph began with a quote from the UN Commission On Our Common Future. As I read it, I had three thoughts.
The first one was: "Am I on Candid Camera?"
If you're too young to remember, Candid Camera was a TV show from the 1960s that featured practical jokes played on unsuspecting victims--an early form of reality television. Laugh if you will, but I have three jokester brothers, and it seemed entirely possible that one or all of them had hired an actor and rented a cab to do this to me on my maiden voyage.
I actually accused the cabbie of this. I really did. He assured me he was on the level and had never met my family.
As this sunk in, my next thought was: "Wow, do I have the right book at the right time, or what?"
And then, as I continued to read his highly articulate tract on what companies, governments and NGOs needed to do to save the world, a final and more somber thought occurred: "This guy is a competitor of mine. And at the moment he's 1,600 copies ahead of me."
In hindsight, I realize that the second thought is the most important one. When cabbies are talking and writing about sustainability, can real change be far behind?
Labels: Personal Musings, The Triple Bottom Line
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By 
Sam Davidson, on
March 4, 2008 3:49 PM
Andy, quoting what the local taxi driver said is usually the cliche that a newspaper columnist resorts to when he can't think of anything to write. But your story is unique.
By KW, on
March 4, 2008 3:55 PM
There is a well documented progression to public consciousness. Economist Hyman Minsky describes a version of it in his work on Asset Bubbles, sort of typified by Joseph Kennedy’s quote that he knew it was time to sell stocks in 1929 when Shoeshine boys were offering stock tips.
Studies in the discipline of Social Psychology describe the process by which a minority becomes a majority. The first stage contains a latent assimilation of the dissenting view while conforming to the majority in a manner akin to the Asch Effect (self-imposed conformity to the norm despite contrary observations). Slowly the dissenting perspective is gaining traction in an unconscious or ‘latent’ manner. Change only becomes observable, or begins to crystalize, after a sufficent period of latency.
The Yunus and Gore Nobel Prizes, Triple Bottom Line bringing the lesson to the ‘hardest sell’ wing of the unsustainable majority, I think are the groundhogs predicting the end of winter, the end of latency. These works I think are the crystallization or emergence from latency of the many small dissents documented in stray case studies, news articles, litigation verdicts (the status to which Gore and Yunus were previously relegated). Business school professors gathered these stray dissents and wove together a story about sustainability, to skeptical students.
The civil rights movement had a period of latency from 1955 (Brown v Board of Education) until a crystallization in 1963 with “I have a Dream”. Civil rights rapidly evolved in the ensuing decades. Perhaps history will view 2006-7 as the “I have a Sustainable Dream’.
By Bradley, on
March 4, 2008 5:30 PM
Wow. This is a great story. And I agree, that change can't be far behind. Here's to all the regular folks out there who are willing to share their ideas!