Leadership And The Environment

I got an email that Bob Langert, McDonald's former head of Corporate Social Responsibility, wrote a book on his experience in over two decades at the corporation.From my view, seeking change, I see places like McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Exxon, and Monsanto, to name a few, as the places with the greatest potential.Many protest them, which I consider important, but I also believe they could use help. I don't know how many large organizations can change without outside help. Am I the one to do it? I'm not sure, but I can't ignore their potential for change.I read the book and scheduled a conversation with Bob. My goal is to understand the man and his experience to find opportunity for help, if desired.I took more notes on his book than any other, a lot critical or challenging. I opted to make my goal with the conversation meet the man, not debate or criticize. If you think I should have acted otherwise, let me know.My goals, as ever, are, regarding the environment: to lower our effects that threaten life and human s

Katie continues the line of world class sailing champions who have translated their athletic success to leadership in their sport, business, and beyond.What success? How about three America's Cups, including being the youngest member of the first ever all-female boat, two around the world races, as well the famed Sydney Hobart and Worrell 1000 Extreme Catamaran Races.She's also a lawyer and is president of the Rising Tide Leadership Institute.She just got back from Olympic racing in Miami, which followed placing second in the Sydney Hobart race, sponsored by Ocean Respect Racing, who promotes reducing pollution.We talk about seeing plastic in the remote ocean as well as in much greater density closer to shore, especially America's shores. Around the world sailors see parts of our planet farthest from human establishment. Sadly, I've found it's a standard response that they've all seen plastic human junk however remote they've traveled.She also describes waves towering over her boat's 81-foot mast---that is, h

This episode is about a simple experiment anyone can do. It costs nothing and takes no extra time or other resource besides carrying a mug with you.Everyone knows how much garbage we're dumping in the ocean. Everyone knows they can pollute less, including me. Probably including you.This episode shares Sean's experience cutting out coffee cups. I'd say you never have to use another coffee cup again, but you may hit challenges. Sean did. This episode shares his experience. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Do you feel gratitude toward people who have helped you?Do you express that gratitude more than enough, not enough, or about right?You're probably familiar with research that expressing gratitude and feeling it improve people's lives.I loved my exercise of writing ten gratitude messages a day for a week. Here is the Inc. piece I wrote on it: I Wrote 70 Gratitude Emails. Here Are My Awesome Results.Today's episode is Chris Schembra interviewing me as part of his project including Bill Gates, Simon Sinek, and other luminaries. He asks us:If you could credit or thank one person that you haven't enough, who is it?The conversation doesn't directly relate to the environment, but does to leadership. The leadership part of this podcast is about joy, passion, meaning, value, importance, purpose, growth, and so on.And what Vince Lombardi says about winning, that it's not a sometimes thing but on all the time thing, applies to leadership.Too many people say things like that coal miners in West Virginia simply have to ac

For context for today's guest, those who know I'm avoiding flying might also know I'm learning to sail to explore off North America. When considering acting on their values, most people focus on the part they like of what they're stopping. They don't seem to have trouble ignoring undesired side-effects, like the pollution flying causes.Sailing and the other things I've replaced flying with have given far more than I could have predicted at a fraction what I used to spend on flying. Among its many benefits is the sailing community.In that community, today's guest, Dee Caffari, is off the charts. Once a school teacher, she started sailing to world-athlete levels. Now the international sailing community calls her a legend. Watch her videos. They look like they're from movies but they're her life, which she describes in our conversation.She's gone around the world in both directions, won races, led teams, been named an MBE. She shares her experiences, since sailing spans calm sunsets to life-and-death struggles w

Tom Szaky has been working on waste since his undergrad days at Princeton in 2001. Then I suddenly heard about him from many sources in the past few months.His company, Terracycle, recycles waste others don't. The new initiative, Loop, got attention at Davos and support from many companieswhose business plans depend on producing waste, within an economic model that promotes growth. He also published a book, the Future of Packaging, coauthored by top executives from these waste and growth places. I wrote more notes from that book to prepare for this conversation than any book, including Bob Langert's, McDonald's former head of Corporate Social Responsibility (that episode is still being edited).It never mentioned reducing consumption, twisting, as I saw it, the idea to reducing material per package. Almost no one gets the subtle but critical distinction between efficiency and total waste. Our polluted world is the result of centuries of increasing efficiency and total waste. Nearly every initiative extends tha

If you've never heard Carl Sagan's spoken essay Pale Blue Dot, you'll get to hear it in today's episode. It still chokes me up.Here is an Earthrise image taken a few years ago like those he contrasts the pale blue dot image with. The Earth straddling the limb of the Moon, as seen from above Compton crater. Taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2015.Here is the Pale Blue Dot image. Seen from about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot (the blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right) within the darkness of deep space. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A few months ago I attended the Summit. It was expensive, so I wasn't sure I'd get the value out of it that I paid.As it came together for me, I met the founder, Elliott Bisnow, and then happened to meet his mother, Margot, this episode's guest. She was a big part of making the event great for me. As you'll hear in the conversation, she was like a force of nature, connecting people, doing what leaders do despite no formal role, as many leaders work.To give you some background on her formal leadership, she was an FTC Commissioner and Chief of Staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Today we more talk about her book: Raising an Entrepreneur: 10 Rules for Nurturing Risk Takers, Problem Solvers, and Change Makers, which applies more to leadership and non-parent relationships than I bet she expected.I wish you could see her at work. She would say she wasn't working, but I think effective leadership, like any active, social, emotional, expressive, performance-based art, when mastered, feels and looks

Today, I'm sharing what value being a guest offers to influential, well-known people.I call Oprah and her peers the single-name people -- people everyone knows by single names: LeBron, Serena, Sergey, Larry, Barack, Elon, Bill, Mark, Madonna, Giselle, Venus, Meryl, Bruce, Maradonna, Cher, Beyonce, Messi, Jay-Z, and so on.I also mean anyone influential or with an audience -- people in politics, accomplished actors, journalists, singers, artists, and the like, bestselling writers, public speakers, winning athletes, and so on.If anyone listening is someone like them or knows them, this episode is for you.I'll say it bluntly, but nothing you haven't heard before: we could potentially could lose civilization. If we don't, it will likely be because people changed culture.Rare moment in human history, where change can create legacy on the scale we see only every few thousand years. Buddha and Jesus level influence and legacy.This podcast emerged from seeing that we lacked leadership. Every scientist and engineer say

Today's guest, Sean, is a friend. We recorded this conversation before the podcast launched in November 2017. It took a while to get through the editing process, but I wanted to post it to document the evolution of the podcast and me.For Sean, it shows him as a leader of leaders, since all the guests since followed him. In showing that I grew as an interviewer, finding a purpose, strategy, and voice, I hope it shows the accessibility for anyone to take an environmental leadership role.This conversation helped the podcast's strategy emerge. It's largely based on learning that community influences behavior more than facts.So I'm bringing world-renowned guests -- people in everyone's communities. If Oprah shares her environmental values, acts on them, and shares that the results bring her joy and liberation, I think many others will -- not blindly following her as a celebrity but acting on their values as she acts on hers.This conversation enabled what came next. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out inf

Nobody likes being coerced to do something you don't want under threat of punishment. Nor do people like being told they're wrong or ignorant by someone else telling you they know better.Yet it happens all the time. Much of our politics and public dialog -- our leadership -- is about coercion, self-righteousness, hitting people over the head with facts, and the like, especially around the environment.It doesn't work. Rather it works at something -- at people resisting, disengaging, undermining leaders' authority. The opposite of what we want. Particularly in the area of environmental behavior. There's a lot of self-righteousness, attempts to coerce, expectations that facts will change behavior.Why do we do it? Would you be surprised to find that our educational system specifically teaches us that way, yet almost no one notices it. W don't have to work this way. For most of human history we haven't. People are recreating education that works at not just factual recall and coercion but developing children as pe

I confess I haven't interacted directly with Al Gore so I don't know how he leads in person. I saw him on stage once, but the person interviewing him, Jaden Smith, was 20 years old and I didn't see grasped the situation. Jaden is Will Smith's son and promotes a bottled water brand---that is, he sells something nearly free with extraneous packaging, which I consider needlessly polluting. My main interaction with Al Gore is through his movies and reading about him in the media.I would love to have him as a guest. I would love to hear him share his history and the history of the movement from his view. He's won a Nobel Prize, multiple Oscars, and more. I could learn incomparably more from him than he could from me. So when I suggest he's missing something, I mean that in the context of his getting much more. But he's not perfect or omniscient.I love what he's done to reach where we have, but reaching the next step is going to require leaders who live consistently with the values they recommend to others. People

Everyone thinks about the environment. Nearly everyone gets bogged down in questions.What's best?Will this or that change make a difference?What does all the science mean?What should I do?Science answers some of these questions. Science is the study of nature. People associate it with going to the moon or people in lab coats, but it's about nature -- sunsets, gravity, why the sky is blue, as well as global warming, pollution, and resource depletion.Using computers, motors, eye glasses, and so on means your life relies on science. I find it beautiful, which is why I got the PhD in physics.Not understanding science or math means not knowing how to reach or understand answers resulting from studying nature and its patterns. Even understanding science doesn't mean knowing the answers. You have to do the experiments and calculate the results.Tom Murphy created his Do The Math blog to calculates the main questions on environment: solar, wind, nuclear. When someone says we can't grow forever, why not? What works and

Ana works in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, Executive Director for Nipe Fagio (Give Me the Broom! in Swahili), my first guest who works in Africa.This conversation is about leadership in an area lacking it -- environmental action. I wish I met her before! It sounds to me like she leads effectively -- not telling people what to do but leading them.Ana promotes doing things, focusing on action. She's starting with beach clean ups and organizing people to act, but you can tell her vision is broader.I've spoken a lot about people delaying action by making a goal of awareness when they're already more than aware enough that their values are telling them it's time to ac.t Ana's focus on action reminds me that a main goal of leadership is to help people do what they already want to but don't know how.People want to act, they're just frustrated by mainstream society and comfort and convenience. I wish people saw how much people want to act. The potential to lead is huge. Ana is stepping up. You can hear the passion resulti

When I met Ron in business school, he and Recycle Bank, which he co-founded, were well regarded. He's continued to grow since.Beyond contributing into entrepreneurship in sustainability as an entrepreneur, he's helped create policy, appears often in the media, and now invests.In our conversation you'll hear on the personal side his passion. On the business side you'll hear the opportunities to start businesses and solve problems are increasing -- from the sounds of it, dramatically.He puts his money where his mouth is. If you came here for examples of leadership in the area of the environment, I'd say he sounds like a role model. He achieves business success. It emerges from transparency, which creates, as I hear it, trust, joy, and liberation where others might feel guilty.Restricted on connection, so sorry for connection problems.His success reminds me of Sandy Reisky's episodes. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I recorded a preface to episode 142 because I got the backstage pass, attended the meet and greet, shook Sam's hand, and asked him if he was open to alternatives to conversation and violence.I won't be able to do his answer justice here, but his views of conversation and violence were broader than mine, so if he hears episode 142 without this preface, I suspect he'll think I don't understand his views.In a funny way, I hope he sees I misunderstood what he meant by conversation and violence because, as he'll recognize, I recorded that episode before his explanation, but more because I hope my being open to his more expansive view will open him to mine.He asked me about alternatives. I suggested a few, closing my answer with Mandela, Gandhi, King, and Havel. He described, as I recall and my hearing and memory aren't perfect, nonviolent civil disobedience as a mix of conversation with the people going to do it and violence in the form of disrupting others.But my not being able to give alternatives in the moment

This conversation is about joy, responsibility, community, and values you undoubtedly share.Rob Greenfield lived like an average American. He saw the environmental problems we all see on headlines and dismissed them as most do.Then he decided he could no longer abdicate the responsibility of how he affected others and our world.I consider him a role model. Nearly everyone I talk to describes what I do as a big deal. I'll grant I'm far from mainstream -- about 10% of the pollution of the average American -- but it's not a big deal.The more you act on your environmental values, the more you'll find typical American behavior is extreme. An aberrant from how humans act. Once not polluting was normal. It's returning that way to me. Rob helps reset my bearings away from accepting what America has become as what it could be.Rob finds joy in living sustainably and responsibly toward others. He creates joy. I recommend getting to know people like him to learn what you can do.Rob is not buying food, yet gives food away

While Nikole's being a celebrated director and writer is a great reason to feature her and listen to her, I approached her because she graduated from Sudbury Valley School. I hope you've heard of Sudbury. If not, it's likely a different school than any you've heard of.Learning about in inspired me to learn as much as I could about it. Here are many of the links I read on it. As an educator I am as fascinated by its success and how it overturns my view of childhood, education, and humanity, as well as my own childhood.What better background could I find and feature on it than a student who loved her experience there and shares it.Nikole shares openly about herself, her childhood, her education before Sudbury and at Sudbury. This episode is longer than most, in part because I believe you'll find self-directed learning as fascinating as I do. I recommend learning about self-directed learning as part of learning about yourself, democracy, systems, . . . many important things in life.This conversation was beautifu

Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about a negative peace, where a problem exists but people don't face it or deal with it, and a positive one, where people solve the problem, which requires facing it. He used non-violent civil disobedience to lead people to face problems that affected others, but as voters and citizens, they could do something about.People didn't always like it, but you can't get change otherwise. Nonviolent civil disobedience works with human laws but doesn't apply so much with our environmental problems.So how do we face these problems? How do we get people who are already aware that they are polluting and emitting greenhouse gases way beyond what risks undermining society, yet people using 90% less are more happy to stop choosing doing what they've been doing?Environmental leaders are struggling to find a strategy that works for us as non-violent civil disobedience did for other problems, however uncomfortable it makes people in the moment.If you hear about straws recently, Dune and her work

In End of Faith Sam Harris says "We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence."I like his podcast, listened to most episodes, read several of his books, support him with cash. I will see him in person this week for the first time at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan with Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman. It looks like I'll get back stage passes so may meet him.One of my goals with today's recording (that isn't obviously about the environment) is to prompt the chance of meeting in person.I support his initiatives on free speech, not just for myself and people who agree with me, freedom from religious oppression, identity politics, and more. I'm glad and grateful that he's approaching issues others fear to, even when I disagree with him..Anyone who knows me knows I support and act for equality, diversity, freedom, environmental stewardship, universal education, healthy food, and access to all these things. Also empowe