A Poem

The Future of Business

I see shiny buildings

they are interacting with the sun

water circulates within their walls,

purifying and being purified as it circulates.

I am in those shiny buildings

and I look back at my history.

Business was once powerful;

it wrote the rules

it competed and grew fat

it depleted our resources;

it conquered, and brought inequality.

It served itself.

But now, we have learned to really live, together.

Business is at our service

to build the technology we need.

We have a new model.

We are, each of us, both consumer and producer.

We create and we share our gifts and our products.

When we are finished using a product, the waste becomes a resource

for something new.

How did we get here?

Business had to become sustainable.

Company by company, it adapted its financial reporting to sustainability reporting.

Consumers became loyal only to brands that continued raising the bar on transparency, human rights, and better environmental practices.

Technological innovation brought us the ways to fulfill all our basic needs

and disrupted all the top-down models we were used to.

The internet of information brought us the internet of things.

It was exciting to come forward with one's own invention and to share a new product

that others would want to use.

We had an explosion of entrepreneurship.

With so many entrepreneurs, our largest businesses had to become not only leaders in sustainability,

but great places to work

for creative, entrepreneurial individuals.

So in the end we let go of our old addiction to squeezing quarterly profits

out of our people and our resources.

The businesses that held on to that old model

simply lost their best employees, their consumers, and, inevitably, their investors too.

And here we are, in our shiny, self-sustaining buildings

in sustainable cities,

feeling creative.

And we still have nature.

She has not been destroyed.

She is, in fact, happy.

June, 2015