Creating Sustainable Organizations

By Chuck McVinney
©2001 McVinney & Company

8. In Summary

Finally, the clarity of purpose and direction that are determined by the nested hierarchy of the vision-values-mission-goals and measures management strategy, allows individual jobs and roles in the company to be more tied to the overall company direction and spirit. This is a natural, organic approach to business and community development, allowing for more collaborative relationships, more useful and concrete feedback, enhanced company learning processes, and more manageable performance systems. In the best situations, it also promotes real personal and career growth, better alignment between individual interests and the available work, and more successful teamwork.

These are only the front edges of the sustainability model in action. There are new and bigger questions to ask than we as a consumer society have dared ask before. Some of these are:

• How will we shift the core values of organizations to include sustainability at the core?
• How can we create an enlightened leadership that understands the reality that business is destroying the ecosphere and only business can lead the way to save it?
• Is it possible to marry the profit motive, as we know it with the responsible stewardship of the Earth?
• Can we base capitalism on something besides a worldview driven primarily by consumption?
• How do we sustain the kind of standard of living we have become accustomed to because of cheap fossil fuels, in a post-fossil fuel world? Or do we?
• How do we respond to the obvious and resurging need for enhanced community, revitalized connection with nature, and commitment to higher purpose (spirituality) in a world more and more characterized by strip malls, automobiles and 7x24 work demands?
• Will business motives continue to drive the destruction of the biosphere, or will business exercise its potential to become the salvation of the planet?
• Can we leverage technology to solve the huge environmental problems we have created with technology?

Finally, sustainability starts at home. If we build the values and behaviors of sustainable work and sustainable work relationships into the fabric of our organizations, we have taken the first step. Now we need to dig deeper and deeper into the lessons of our ancestral planet and its place in the universe to ask and learn even more about what makes things last. If we are to succeed as a species in the next century, indeed, the next decade, say nothing of the millennium we hear so much about, we have to shift from our short-term urge to consume everything to a long-term co-creative partnership with life. ::