Business & Society

Dr. Mona Sarfaty is the Executive Director and Founder of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, comprised of societies representing 70% of all U.S. physicians. She founded the Consortium in 2016 in conjunction with the George Mason University Center for Climate Change. Under her leadership, the Consortium has grown into a nationwide coalition of societies, organizations, and advocates mobilizing support for equitable policies that address the health impacts of climate change.

Edward Maibach is Director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, a distinguished University Professor and communication scientist who is expert in the uses of strategic communication and social marketing to address climate change and related public health challenges. His research – funded by NSF, NASA, and private foundations – focuses on public understanding of climate change and clean energy; and the psychology underlying public engagement. In 2021, Ed was identified by Thompson Reuters as one of the world’s 10 most influential scientists working on climate change.

“The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is really a bill which is using the financial structure of the country to stimulate business. This is a very different kind of solution than one might have conjured up some years ago. Back in 2010, Congress tried to do something on climate change and the main solution under consideration was a carbon tax. So that was also an effort to use the financial system, but this is a very different approach.

This is putting out stimulus so that the business community can do what's necessary to build a clean energy economy. And so consumers can help support the growth of that clean energy economy by purchasing all those products that will allow individual people, families, and communities to be part of the solution by owning electric cars, by putting solar panels on their homes, by buying heat pumps to put in their homes, by improving the insulation in their private homes or buildings and thereby cutting their heating and cooling costs.”

https://medsocietiesforclimatehealth.org

https://twitter.com/docsforclimate

www.climatechangecommunication.org/all/climate-change-american-mind-april-2022/

www.climatechangecommunication.org/all/politics-global-warming-april-2022/

Business & Society is a 10-episode limited series co-hosted by Bruce Piasecki & Mia Funk.

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Designer, author, educator and artist Bruce Mau is a brilliantly creative optimist whose love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for life-centered design. Across thirty years of design innovation, he’s collaborated with global brands and companies, leading organizations, heads of state, renowned artists and fellow optimists. Mau became an international figure with the publication of his landmark S,M,L,XL, designed and co-authored with Rem Koolhaas, and his most recent books are Mau MC24: Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change in Your Life and Work and, with co-author, Julio Ottino, dean of Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World – The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science. Mau is co-founder and CEO of Massive Change Network, a holistic design collective based in the Chicago area.

"I don't start knowing what to do. I start trying to understand what the opportunity is. It was actually my friend Marc Mathieu, who is the head of global brand at Coca-Cola, who - after we built the global sustainability platform for Coca-Cola, after we finished the work, Marc said, 'You know, Bruce, the best thing you did, you didn't charge me for it. You didn't tell me you were going to do it. I don't know if you even know that you did it.'  And I said, 'Please, please tell me.'  And he called it 'branding the opportunity.' And I said, 'What do you mean by that?' And he said, 'Well, you were able to articulate the opportunity in a way that inspired everyone on the team to move in the same direction. Before you arrived, we had 150 people pointing in 150 directions, and the way that you were able to see the problem and articulate the opportunity – What would happen if we accomplished it, the impact that we could have in the world, it inspired everyone to work towards it.’

That's an important thing to do in your work is to actually articulate the opportunity and not only the problem. To say, look, here's what happens if we do this? If we do this, and we succeed, how is the world different? I like to say that when you lock in, you also lock out. So the moment that you lock in on what you're going to do, you're also locking out everything else. Right? So when you define what you're going to work on, you're defining the scope of the opportunity.”

www.massivechangenetwork.com

www.Brucemaustudio.com

Mau MC24

The Nexus

Image Courtesy of Massive Change Network

Business & Society is a 10-episode limited series co-hosted by Bruce Piasecki & Mia Funk.

Chris Coulter is CEO of GlobeScan, an insights and advisory consultancy helping companies, NGOs, and governmental organizations know their world and create strategies that lead to a sustainable and equitable future. He is a co-author of All In: The Future of Business Leadership, and The Sustainable Business Handbook. He is Chair of Canadian Business for Social Responsibility, a member of B Lab’s Multinational Standards Advisory Council and serves on Walgreen’s Corporate Responsibility Advisory Board. Chris also co-hosts All In: The Sustainable Business Podcast.

"While we need action, I think at the same time, the world and the agenda are moving so quickly. We're learning more all the time. We really can't skip the dialogue part, and we need to create more space and more opportunity to think through - What are we trying to do? What have we learned? How do we move smarter and more quickly? So it's not just about doing more action constantly. It's taking stock consistently because the agenda keeps evolving at a more rapid pace than it has historically, which means we need to find more places for proper dialogue that are springboards for this action, but we shouldn't discount the fact that we've got to sometimes just stop and chat and listen and learn and that makes us better and stronger."

https://globescan.com

https://allinbook.net

Business & Society is a 10-episode limited series co-hosted by Bruce Piasecki & Mia Funk.

James Fallows has been a national correspondent for The Atlantic for more than thirty-five years, reporting from China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe, and across the United States. Winner of the National Book Award and National Magazine Award, he’s the author of twelve books and his work has appeared in numerous publications and on public-radio. For two years he was President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter.

Deborah Fallows is a linguist and writer. The author of Dreaming in Chinese and A Mother's Work, she has written for The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The New York Times, among others and has worked at the Pew Research Center, Oxygen Media, and Georgetown University.

Following the success of their NYTimes bestselling book Our Towns and HBO documentary based on their reporting on around 50 towns around the country, they formed the Our Towns Civic Foundation to promote reporting from under-served areas across the US, connect innovators and give Americans a fuller and more realistic picture of their country’s challenges and opportunities.

Our Towns (HBO Movie):  https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/our-towns

Our Towns (book): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/550194/our-towns-by-james-fallows-and-deborah-fallows/ 

Our Towns Civic Foundation: https://www.ourtownsfoundation.org/ 

Our Towns Civic Foundation is a new non-profit organization that promotes reporting from under-served areas across the United States, to connect innovators dealing with the problems of this era, and gives Americans a fuller and more realistic picture of their countries challenges and opportunities."

Deb Fallows, Dreaming in Chinese   www.bloomsbury.com/us/dreaming-in-chinese-9780802779144/

Deb Fallows, A Mother's Work   https://www.amazon.com/Mothers-Work-Deborah-Fallows/dp/0395362180

Jim Fallows, More Like Us  https://www.amazon.com/More-like-Strengths-Traditional-Challenge/dp/B0010HBVYQ

Other books https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/8383/james-fallows/
Substack: https://fallows.substack.com/

Photo © Michael Shay Polara Studio

Daniel Sherrell is the author of Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, a memoir on the climate crisis framed as a letter to Sherrell's potential future child. He is a climate movement organizer and has led successful campaigns to phase out coal-fired power plants, divest millions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry, and pass a Green New Deal bill for New York State, legislation that the New York Times called “one of the world’s most ambitious climate plans.” He’s Campaign Director for the Climate Jobs National Resource Center, where he works with the American labor movement to tackle the climate crisis, reverse income inequality, and win millions of unionized clean energy jobs. The New Yorker and Publisher’s Weekly named Warmth one of the best books of 2021 and he’s a recipient of the Creative Force Foundation’s Award for “igniting positive social change through writing.”

“It felt to me that if I wasn't able to figure out a way to orchestrate a genuine emotional encounter for myself with the enormity of this thing I was meant to be taking action on, then something in me was going to break, and I just wouldn't be able to keep doing the work. So, there was never a point where it's like, I'm going to write a book, but I did turn to the written word, almost little diary entries, to make psychological and spiritual sense of the crisis that I was dealing with in a thin way every day."

www.danielsherrell.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/670357/warmth-by-daniel-sherrell/

Climate Jobs National Resource Center www.cjnrc.org

Photo by Giovana Schluter Nunes

Frank Loy was Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs from 1998 to 2001. His portfolio included human rights, the promotion of democracy, refugee issues, international law enforcement and counter-narcotics, and the environment. He served as chief U.S. climate negotiator.
He was a senior official in the State Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs, and Director of the Office of Refugee Affairs. He served in the Obama Campaign as a co-leader of the Energy and Environment team. Formerly, he was president of The German Marshall Fund of the U.S. He has been chair of numerous non-profit boards, including the Environmental Defense Fund, and Resources for the Future. And serves on the boards of The Nature Conservancy, EDF and a number of climate change-related organizations.

“We have a number of problems, but two of them are war - we see that at the very moment - but the one that is relatively new, that we didn't have a word for it when I grew up, we certainly didn't understand when I grew up, is environmental consequences. And we have gone from not understanding that to understanding it pretty well, but having a difficult time responding appropriately to that threat.

When I decided I would spend some time in the nonprofit sector, it was my wife who said, ‘Don't diddle around with a whole bunch of things, focus on something that you care about, and spend both time and your money on that.’ And so I picked the environment because it seemed to me it had a rather unusual and unique combination of social, economic, political, technical, and scientific elements to it that made it a really interesting complex issue.

Environmental Defense Fund www.edf.org

Resources for the Future www.rff.org

The Nature Conservancy www.nature.org/en-us/

The German Marshall Fund of the U.S. www.gmfus.org

Bill Novelli co-founded Porter Novelli one of the first social marketing companies and now a global PR agency, he started the Business for Impact program at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. He is formerly the CEO of AARP, the president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and the COO of CARE USA. He’s the author of Good Business, The Talk, Fight, Win Way to Change the World and coauthor of Fifty Plus: Give Meaning and Purpose to the Best Time of Your Life. He served in and helped reposition and market the Peace Corps and began his career in marketing management at Unilever.

“This is one of the biggest problems that we have in this country. So, on the one hand, we know that we have to take personal responsibility for ourselves, our own health, our families – it's up to us. As some people like to say, you're on your own. And we have to balance that against the concept that we're all in this together. You know, the idea that it takes a village and both sides essentially disrespect the other side. They criticize the other side. No, we're not in this together. It's your own responsibility, and vice versa. If we're going to be good citizens, and we're going to make progress, we have to see both sides of that equation. That's not easy to do.”

businessforimpact.georgetown.edu/

www.billnovelli.com