an excerpt from "The world is flat" page 512
same reason I want to do business


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What would possess a 43-year-old father to abandon an extremely  successful 20-plus-year career in the non-profit world for a two-year slog through business school and the trauma of starting a new business halfway around the world? My life has always been about doing the greatest good for the greatest number. I have chosen to focus my efforts on protecting the environment, which is the underpinning of human existence on the Earth. For me it has always been about the mission,with organizations being the means to that end. For over twenty years that organization was the non-profit Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), one of the world's most effective environmental advocacy groups. At NRDC I had the good fortune to have worked on four continents helping goverments and businesses create policies, programs and projects that help the environment. As a founding member and volunteer for the U.S. Grean Buidling Council, I founded the LEED(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building rating system, which - due to the dedication of hundreds of volunteers like myself and tireless efforts of the USGBC staff - has become the premier green building ceritification system in the world. Without a doubt I had made a difference.

 Yet, my experience in the field made me realize that I needed to chart a different course. For many years when people come to me at NRDC for advice about how to get involved and make a difference with the environment, invariably they would ask me to which law program or environmetal science program they should apply. Instead, I would recommend that people go to business school. My advice was based on my belief that the legal and regulatory frameworks for environmental protection largely have been established. Given our current situation, I realized that now it was about diffusion and implementation - and implementation is where business excels. This belief coupled with the simple fact that there were far more environmental lawyers and scientists floating around than environmental businessmen and that green business was needed to put environmental protection on the ground

 I felt that the main reason mainstream business continues to be a cause of environmental problems instead of its solution is that business-as-usual continues to use 19th-century economics and 20th-century engineering when trying to solve 21st-century problems. i saw the need for new green frameworks for business- where the clean path is the most profitable. Economics, finance and accounting are human laws and can be changed unlike, say, gravity, which is a natural law- one that applies to all species,not just one. We need to realign these human laws with natural law unles we want to be a bad biological experiment on the planet. I felt that as a (hopefully to be successful) businessperson I could make the case for this paradigm shift more effectively than as a non-profit environmental advacate. But to be an effective change agent, I felt I needed to know something about the system I was trying to change. So I finally took my own advice and went to Columbia Business School. Over the course of my MBA program I learned or reaffirmed three main things

1. Doing business well is very, very hard.
2. Few people do business well
3. The conceptual frameworks and tools underlying the conduct of today's business are hopelessly  outdated - as noted above

 I think the process of establishing a new business framework will be one of learning by doing - where theory and observation play each other to create a truly sustainable way of providing people with what they want. As a first step, we need to get the market and regulatory polemicists off each other's back. Both are right and both are wrong: markets and regulations each are necessary, but not sufficient. Good regulation makes markets work properly and removes the worst actors, while markets stimulate innovation and efficient delivery of goods and services. My goal in going to business school and switching hats from the non-profit to the business sector is to be a model for a new paradigm where business can effectively and efficiently operate on a large scale for the betterment of humankind. Wish me luck.

"The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today"

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

눈치 채지 못하게 가르쳐라

배움은 아는 것을 찾아내는 것이다. 행함은 아는 것을 증명하는 것이다. 가르침은 다른 사람들에게 그들도 당신만큼 잘 알고 있음을 알려주는 것이다. - 리처드 바크

알렉산더 포프는 ‘사람을 가르칠 때는 그 사람이 눈치채지 못하게 가르치고, 새로운 일을 제안할 때는 잊어버렸던 것이 생겨난 듯이 말하라’고 말했습니다. 사람들은 누구나 남에게 가르침을 당한다는 것을 꺼려합니다. 스스로 알게 된 것 처럼 생각할 수 있도록 해주는 조그마한 배려가 결국에는 혼자 일어설 수 있게 하는 자양분이 됩니다.

p.s how can I do this? um... I really want to learn these skills.