Creating Sustainable Organizations

By Chuck McVinney
©2001 McVinney & Company

Introduction
1. The Idea
2. Why care?
3. The Challenge Ahead
4. The First Principle: Stewardship
5. The Second Principle: Creativity
6. The Third Principle: Community
7. Some Common Sense Guidelines
8. Summary

4. The First Principle of Sustainability

The first principle component of sustainability is stewardship. Since we have done our homework about other definitions of words associated with sustainability, here is the dictionary on stewardship:

Stewardship:

(American Heritage Dictionary - 1981)
Managing another's property, finances, or other affairs.

So we are guests on planet earth - renting it from the universe, you might say. But as Peter Block, the well-known business consultant has pointed out, Stewardship is more than care taking - it is sophisticated involvement. As a dynamic combination of responsibility and accountability, stewardship in our age embraces the best aspects of empowerment while challenging all the notions of entitlement. This is true of companies doing their business as well as environmentalists protecting the wild places. Stewardship means understanding the sophisticated concepts and dynamics that run human institutions and how they interact with the sophisticated and dynamic processes that govern the natural world we live in.

Stewardship has a traditional base - caring for the land, the property of others. Whether the earth is God's or man's or only a random accident of creation, we are now called on to be the master caretakers of its present and its future. In addition, we are stewards of our own lives and well-being. We have to ask ourselves what enhances our lives and our health, and sustains us as individuals, families and communities. The incredible burn-out pace of work modern organizations demand of us is probably not sustaining that health and fulfillment, even though it is often sold to us as if is an essential ingredient of success to work 'til you drop. >>