October 15, 2007

Blog Action Day

Yup, that's what it is...Blog Action Day...when all participating blogs say a word or three about the environment.

Fifteen years ago, MTV did a special on our planet's precious resources. The program's host and catalyst was Al Gore. Fifteen years ago.

Here is South Carolina, there are still some people who don't believe that global warming is a scientific fact. Maybe they're the same people who believe that evolution is not a scientific fact. Old habits die hard.

But fortunately, there are plenty of others who not only recognize the threat of global warming, but are actually doing something about it in a leadership way. And that's very heartening.

As individuals, we can all do our part. But the only real action will occur when public policy kicks in...not with woosy low-level standards designed to molify the folks in Detroit, but with bold actions that are as serious as the threat itself. History will prove that the disgrace of the current administration may not be Iraq, but may rather be its shameless neglect of our planet's precious resources.

What we do as individuals needs to include putting as much pressure as possible on our elected officials to make the policy decisions that will really make the difference.

Drew Gilpin Faust Tells It Like It Is

In our business, we talk a lot about measurement and specificity and training for specific skills, etc. And all of that is important, to be sure. But I've always thought that it was most important to be able to think and reason and understand the context of things...to be able to see things differently and come up with creative ideas that sparked attention, catalyzed action, and produced results.

In her inaugural speech at Harvard, the new president Drew Gilpin Faust spoke about the need for higher education to resist demands that it quantify what it is teaching. "A university is not about results in the next quarter," she said. "It is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning the transmits the heritae of millennia, learning that shapes the future."

Our industry is now populated with public companies that do indeed focus almost singularly on the next quarter (as, regrettably, do so many of their clients). And what is lost is the larger, longer perspective that can lead to much richer results in the long term. I find that our company's independence is increasingly valuable to our work product and our clients. And so is our willingness to think courageously and talk straight.

Dr. Faust's words http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/faust/071012_installation.html
are great food for thought on this Blog Action Day.