Sustainability

A friend of mine doing a consultancy stint in sustainability was talking about how large organisations can do a lot if they choose to be sustainable. The issue, as per him is, they pay lip service to sustainability and are interested only to the extent of publishing annual reports that has a page on sustainability.

I understand his frustration. I was sharing with him, Its the same when it comes to large countries talking about global warming, they feel its more for others than themselves and that nothing is going to happen immediately so why bother. The day it starts hurting them, they will wake up and get serious about it.

On the flip side, I was thinking, what is sustainability - maintaining the current lifestyle for the future generations. And, how have we come to this lifestyle, by our own choice, by doing a lot of innovations and inventions. So why this effort of preserving this lifestyle? if 17th century or 18th century people would have thought about sustainability, would we have achieved the current lifestyle? Don't get me wrong, I am more of a preserving type, I still drive around a 10 year old car, but I do get these questions, what am i pushing to sustain?

There are two examples I have which can trip sustainability paradigm. First is about eating. Do we know how much quantity of food in the world is had everyday per person? its highest in USSR at 1.01 kgs per day to lowest in India at .567 kgs per day from amongst the surveyed countries. Most of the developed world is around 900 gms to 1000 gms per day, developing world is around 600 gms per day. Within this consumption, the affluent in the developing world consume close to the averages of developed world taking the average for the poor far lower. Over a period of time, the consumption of calories per day has gone up from sub 2000 to in excess of 3200 in the developed world and 2600 in developing world. The question I have is, if we have improved on the comfort and in the process have reduced the calorie consumption, shouldn't we be staying at the 2000 levels than taking it to 160% and more. We all know the disadvantages of over eating, that itself leads to high medical costs. Is this the sustainability we are looking to preserve? the best that can happen is, we all go down to even food consumption and to 500 to 600 gms per day reducing the pressure on the resources that get used up. And through invention, if we can improve the photo synthesis efficiency from close to 1% to even 2%, we may see abundance of food energy with the least amount of resources.

The second is about energy. With the evolution we have seen in extracting energy of the past, we have become the highest consumers of energy and in the process making life far comfortable than that has ever been thought on this planet. If we add up the nos, the earth has received abundant energy for the last 4.2 billion years from the sun and it has been preserved through plant and animal life. Except in cases where the energy has already been utilised by burning the CH, most of it is still preserved and we will need different methods of extracting the same. Utilising the same will mean release of CO2 and in the process heating of the planet but that is more due to the energy utilisation than the abundance or scarcity of available sources. In that sense, its not so much of sustaining of the available resources but reducing the consumption of the same. By innovating, we should become energy efficient than just the conservers.

In both the cases, we need to change, we need to invent the next stages of evolution so that we prolong our comforts and our experience of the planet.

Peer pressure and entrepreneurship

"How can you leave such a good job that pays for your car, a house and promises phoren postings?" asked a friend of mine when I had almost made up my mind to move on and plunge in the darkness called entrepreneurship. It was a very important question for me to answer. Infact, one of the blogs I wrote in those days was, what will it take for me to continue with the daily life without compromising the basic necessities.

This probably is one of the most important things one needs to consider while thinking of entrepreneurship. How long can you live in a world of your own that does not need external validation. Its the toughest time as you have not proved anything, you are burning cash for the business and hence not in a spending mode, are trying to leverage your personal equations than positional ones.  Many of the highly intelligent people I meet in the corporate world and doing wonderfully well have this urge of doing something on their own. I definitely ask them to consider this question before even thinking of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is madness at one level. It will take you out of your social circle, sometimes owing to the change in lifestyle or simply your inability to compete on objects of desire. That can lead to low self esteem and inturn an indirect impact on the business.

Hence, for you to succeed, you will need nerves of steel and huge self confidence, an ability to believe in self to the extent of ridicule. If peer acceptance is an important criteria for your existence, I am not sure you will find joy in entrepreneurship.