Creating A Curriculum for Sustainability
If commerce is the language of the emerging and interdependent global city, then sustainability has to be its core and most driving principle. Leaders everywhere will have to know the concepts, skills, behaviors and measures that characterize sustainability in action.
©2007 McVinney & Company
Whether dealing with sudden trauma, or with the usual rigors of ongoing change, individuals, teams and whole organizations will have to embody the best characteristics of effective community to survive and prosper in troubled and uncertain times. The skills essential to thriving in the midst of ambiguity and chaos are new to most of us, and not easy to embrace. It's no longer just about building competitive business units, it's about building lasting community. Lasting communities are sustainable over the rigors of time and change, and hold core values that create and re-create human connection and social development. The skills in support of those values are the behaviors of collective stewardship, co-creation and sustainability.
Preparation for leading others through the newly emerging quagmires of the complex 21st Century comes from many places. Certainly the old MBA model of business leadership development, already under fire for the narrow perspectives it yields, is now an anachronism. Current and future leaders will have to learn the concepts and skills that contribute to social and environmental creativity if they are going to be able to create wealth for themselves and others.
Furthermore, capitalism must change from its purely competitive model of consumption driven selling, to a more integrated natural model of resource management, able to create life enhancing services and products for all of humanity. The only way we can survive even the first few hours of the 21st Century is to translate our economic model to one of planetary sustainability - a model which re-defines wealth as abundant living and includes everyone in the process. We must be committed to sharing the wealth around the globe, and creating sustainability through the inclusion of the wide diversity of thinking and cultural backgrounds available to us.
All of this requires new ways of thinking and learning about leadership. Leaders will need to create and nurture communities of employees and stakeholders who can think in the short and long term ways essential to sustainability. The new leadership will also have to be highly sensitive to the implications of every decision on the long term interdependencies and relationships that will more and more characterize the nature of planetary commerce. Creativity in support of sustainability as its core principal will have to become a dominant discipline, and people will have to be widely trained and reinforced in how to think innovatively and differently about almost everything.
Core management education curriculum will have to introduce business leaders to the emerging literature and research about sustainable practices in business and community development. The notion of sustainable development will have to be transformed from a buzzword of the new age to a mainstream principle of ongoing business activity. Without that basic shift, the planet and its population may not survive at all.
Nevertheless, both creativity and sustainability are positive concepts and activities, embodying a positive orientation to life and work. The sustainability we need to teach and practice is, ultimately, an exciting partnership with nature and each other. It is a commitment to the continual and conscious creative evolution of life and its wonders.
All of our programs, facilitations and interventions are designed and delivered with the marriage of sustainability and creativity at the core. The programs listed below represent an integrated curriculum, designed to begin the process of re-tooling our business leadership to meet the new and dynamic challenges ahead. They are challenges we cannot shrink from. Our success will be ultimately measured in the preservation of our lives and of our future.
Teamwork
Leadership
Creativity
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