There Is A Light That Shines In Almost All Of Us

It is also prudent to recognize that businesses are not impenetrable, unreachable, or ambiguous organisms. Businesses are accessible living things that are comprised of people. People have hearts and are the beating heart of any organization. As such, businesses can, just as people can, be transformed to serve as a force for good. Dignity in business is attained when all stakeholders of the business have a voice that is heard and listened to and enveloped into the culture, strategy, operating system, and measured impact and performance of the enterprise’s people, processes, and profits. Dignity in business then, is the underlying code of conduct by which its purpose is defined and put into action. Dignity for business is a license to operate, a fundamental right to serve and be in business in the first place. If business fails to live up to its dignity code, customers, shareholders, and stakeholders will react and push back on its very foundation resulting in either a correction in behavior or complete cease of operations. In April 2018, a Starbucks manager at a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, location called police on two African American men who were waiting for a friend at the retail establishment. As the story goes, the two men were quietly waiting for a friend but had not purchased anything at the store. One of the men asked to use the restroom and was denied because he was not a paying customer. The location manager called the police who arrived and arrested the two men for trespassing but later let them go without charges.

Hand In Hand

The event stirred a great deal of emotion and drew into question the prevalence of racial bias at the world’s leading coffee brand. The incident resulted in Starbucks issuing numerous apologies and instituting classes in rooting out racial bias. The training, which included approximately 175,000 Starbucks store employees as well as its headquarters focused on understanding prejudice and the history of public accommodations in the United States.50 The training was received with mixed responses. The curriculum of the training also was criticized for perpetuating racial stigmas, potentially inflicting more harm than good,52 based upon one of its core messages, which challenged individuals to become more color brave in their daily life. Society and business are both losing ground, however. It is no wonder more and more people point their finger at Big Business and Big Government for challenges they faced. Although there is significant evidence about how Big Business and Big Government have magnified and perpetuated unsustainable business models, assigning blame will get us nowhere. The truth is we need to point our finger to ourselves and ask what role we have played in this equation. What role can we play to move beyond blaming people and organizations and toward a more sustainable future? Our reality is that we all represent citizens and consumers, but we are also parents, teachers, community activists, policy makers, designers, and business and government leaders. Sustainability also has to be put into effect. It is not enough to think about ideals.

Too Marvelous For Words

We have to put them into practice if they are to have any value, consequence, or impact. Thus sustainability needs to be exercised each day if it has any chance of achieving a level of strength and flexibility that is high performing. They supported society, balanced each other, and enabled, at least in the United States, generations of improved growth, and progress. Today, social actors are influencing our collective mindset more rapidly and with greater conviction than business or government. Social media, for instance, has proven itself to be a tremendous factor for mobilizing people around issues quickly. The art of storytelling and act of owning the narrative have proven to be effective means of motivating people and stimulating social change. Our definition of progress is changing. Today we don’t only value currency and trade as indicators of success. In the past century, a great deal of emphasis was placed on economic progress, often at the detriment of human health and the environment. Today we continue to clean up our pollution of the past while working to limit waste from our more modern processes. We are not perfect, but slowly moving in the right direction. As a concept and discipline, the word sustainability is like leadership.

How Many More Times?

It is hard to define, there are varied points of view about it, and we all know it is in short supply and needed more than ever. In the late 60s, environmental movement was born out of necessity, in order to change the laws on pollution and waste. Sustainability is more than the pursuit of green or an exclusive focus on the environment. How do we become doers, not just bystanders or thinkers? Achieving sustainability requires more than vision. It requires an incredible amount of deliberate teamwork, collaboration, and contribution. Technological and product solutions exist, but there is no silver bullet! We have the knowledge and innovation to make incredible advancements in how we conserve and consume natural resources, energy, and water. We cannot [exclusively] buy our way to a greener, sustainable, better, holistic, peaceful, and just eco future. Sustainability is the core of life itself. To sustain life we need to be interdependent on each other and upon how you, me, and we can take personal and collective responsibility for our behaviors, as citizens and consumers. Sustainability relies on our ability to integrate the past, the present, and the future. We have to account for prior knowledge, and we have to make hard but smart decisions in the present. We also cannot forget that our future is partly unknown and partly defined by our own hands and doing. The question is, do we have the will to act and the ability to sustain proactive action over time? There is a light that shines in almost all of us. Let your light shine brightly to be a beacon of hope and humility, particularly in our world that is struggling to illuminate a path free of fear and hopelessness. You shine the brightest, and are serving yourself and humanity the best, when you are being true to yourself.