In our second conversation, Giora reveals more about his developing as a leader. If you listen for it, you can hear the vision he had for himself and his profession, but also the development he needed to realize it.

This podcast is about sustainability leadership. You probably envision a sustainable world, or at least trying with everything you can to help achieve it. Maybe you've adopted my vision and mission. Developing leadership skills and experience as Giora have is essential. We can learn from him.

Beyond his leadership skills and experience, his doing the reps earned him credibility and developed integrity, essential elements for effective leadership.

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I found Alex when listeners sent me an opinion piece in the New York Times he wrote, The Story You’ve Been Told About Recycling Is a Lie.

Getting to where I take years to fill a load of trash means I've researched waste a lot, so based on the headline, I thought, "yeah, I've read this story before. I'll skim it so I can say I read it and then move on to important things." Instead, I was fascinated and found plenty new. I had to read his book, Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, which came out last month. I can't recommend it enough.

Whatever you know about waste and pollution, the book shares more and it's relevant to your life if you value liberty, freedom, justice, not killing people for profit, and not destroying your own health, safety, and security. Our system of waste forces us to act in opposition to those values.

We don't have to. We can change the system. Understanding it helps. Listen to this episode, read Alex's book, and read his opinion piece. Here are its opening paragraphs:

• The NY Times opinion piece Alexander wrote that led me to him: The Story You’ve Been Told About Recycling Is a Lie
• Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash at Hachette

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Silvia created the course Sustainable Marketing at Columbia. It's an elective and has become the class at the business school with the most students from other schools at the university.

In looking for a guest speaker on sustainable consumerism, she found the New York Times profile on me. She decided to invite me before realizing I'd gotten my MBA where she teaches. Only when we spoke did she learn I focus beyond just living sustainably to creating a leadership program with a mission to change global culture.

When I spoke to hear class, I spoke about changing culture, which in some ways conflicted with the marketing goal of selling more products. It also resonated with many of her students' interests in creating a more sustainable world. I got a lot of attention after class. We recorded this episode before I guest-spoke at another section of her course.

We talk in this episode about how that class went from her perspective as well as differences between sustainability leadership and marketing. We did the first part of the Spodek Method. You can hear that as a business educator, she analyzed it, so we talked about that analysis.

• Silvia's page at Columbia Business School

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Are you reaching your potential, professionally or personally? Have you wondered what would happen if you got coaching?

Giora did. A friend of his who was a client of mine recommended he get coaching from me. We worked together for several years. People who think my podcast is primarily about sustainability may think it's off-topic, but those who know I focus primarily on leadership will see this conversation is exactly what I focus on and I think is most necessary and lacking from sustainability.

Recently he told me one of the most heartwarming things I'd ever heard. Despite that our coaching focused on his professional life, he told me that coaching improved his relationship with his daughter in ways he couldn't have imagined. That improvement was one of the greatest changes to his life.

Since I teach leadership to people who took my sustainability leadership workshop, I asked if he would share for this podcast his experience learning leadership through me. I believe his experience will tell people in the sustainability simplified community what to expect from learning leadership.

In this conversation, Giora and I focus on three points in our coaching relationship:

1. Before starting: his decision to get coaching
2. His reaching the c-suite and finding the culture there
3. His transformation with his family and daughter

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Dr. Bob shares more about his experience acting during the 1960s, as well as today on helping prisoners and more. I hope you can hear the electricity I felt listening. Two kinds of electricity: one for the stories, another for how they resonated with the community, teamwork, and passion I see in the team I'm working with creating sustainability leadership workshops to change culture. He describes how they saw abolitionism as a role model movement. I see how they and abolitionism are role model movements for us.

We did the Spodek Method. Since he works on engaging people to create mass change, you'll hear him both responding and evaluating the technique.

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I was pleasantly surprised in reading Osprey's book The Story is in Our Bones that she also sees the need to change culture, including elements like our stories, role models, images, and beliefs. Focusing on cultural elements doesn't mean ignoring or leaving out measurable things like greenhouse gas emissions or plastic waste. On the contrary, focusing on those things without addressing our stories tends to result in people complying at best, more often feeling despair at the lack of vision.

Regarding role models, she also looks to sustainable indigenous cultures, and not to give solar panels or western-style schools to, as if we know better, but to learn from with humility.

She uses different language, which I tried to learn from.

• Osprey's book: The Story is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis
• An excerpt in Resilience.org

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People call my behavior extreme, though I'm just acting in service of others. To be more precise, I'm acting in love for others. When people suggest what I'm doing is too hard, I sometimes remark how during America's Civil Rights era, some people went to jail for different people's freedom.

Nobody looks forward to going to jail, yet people did. Their actions make mine look easy and fun. Still, I suggest, I bet they consider those actions of going to jail or even being attacked by dogs or beaten some of the best events of their lives. I doubt they regret it. I wanted to confirm my beliefs.

I didn't go out of my way, but I looked out for people who had marched, protested, and gone to jail then. Then, a few months ago, I saw Robert Fullilove speak on a panel on leadership for Columbia's alumni community. He stole the show. That is, he was entertaining, engaging, fascinating, and informative. He spoke about many things: education, public health, prisons, and, catching my ear most, his involvement in the Civil Rights era.

I brought him to the podcast as soon as I could, meeting him in his office. We talk about all the topics he did and more: education, public health, prisons, his involvement in the Civil Rights era, and more. In particular, not only does he not regret going to jail for other people's freedom, he considers that experience essential for him teaching public health today.

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You probably came to hear Nick's experience exploring Rock Creek Park in Washington DC based on his childhood experiences in nature with his father. Since we recorded shortly after my visit to DC, where I missed Nick but visited his friends and colleagues, and podcast guests, Jack Spencer and Travis Fisher, we talked about them. I mentioned visiting Heritage and Cato. Then we spoke about differences between conservatism and classical liberalism, as well as their different approaches to energy and the environment.

Then we spoke about his experiences recreating the awe and wonder he recalled from his childhood. I predict you'll find the experience heartwarming.

We inadvertently ended on a cliffhanger: if his experience improved his life while leading to consuming less and requiring less extraction, what if everyone improved their life while lowering overall economic activity? I think you'll enjoy our build up to that view. You'll have to wait like us for the next conversation.

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I start by sharing how much value I get from participating in Lorraine's weekly coaching group.

Then she shares her path to coaching on sustainability. She worked in the heart of the corporate sustainability accounting and reporting. She saw it mostly did nothing and often exacerbated the situations it purported to solve.

She has created a practice that exposes and helps fix these problems. I ended up coaching her back in asking her to clarify what a potential client would see in her work to start working with her.

As I wrote before, Lorraine understands our environmental situation more accurately than nearly anyone. We have to change our culture. Transforming leaders of industry is necessary if we expect to change the system.

• Lorraine's home page

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Meaningful interactions don't have to be complex. Travis simply shares his experiences in nature in childhood and finds ways to recreate the emotional experience today. To me the most meaningful part is the result: he expects to spend more time with his children (and dog) doing something he's meant to do a long time. It doesn't cost money. It sounds like it will give him more time. The cleaning part, we'll see how it goes, though I predict the activation that comes from that part of it will affect him.

He works in policy so he describes how he sees personal change leading to systemic change more than trying to start with something top-down alone, like working from government or coercion. As I understand, he sees more than most that starting from intrinsic motivation, as the Spodek Method does, can lead to exponential growth in cultural change.

Time will tell, but I see it happening.

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