Ray Anderson

“Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them” —Paul Hawken The Ecology of Commerce

In the program guide for TED 2009, the above quotation accompanies the bio of Ray Anderson founder and CEO of Interface and a sustainable business pioneer. Can’t wait for the video to to be posted at TED.com

Here’s a short YouTube video where Anderson talks about how reading the book The Ecology of Commerce changed his life (and business).

More With Less

A week ago, during the TED 2009 conference, Ray Anderson’s talk generated a fair amount of discussion.

During the talk, Tim O’Reilly offered a summary: “The new civilization = more happiness with less stuff.”

This is a theme I’d like to explore. Can we recognize non-traditional examples of doing more with less?

In America at least, more with less sounds like “making due,” forgoing the pleasures in life, the rewards, missing out. Look from a different angle and you can see how less can be more rewarding, including financially.

“The world just saw the first $200 million of sustainable business.” —Ray Anderson, (Fast Company, September 2008)

Orthogonal Examples of More With Less

“The reason we aren’t all driving electric cars has little to do with a Detroit conspiracy. It’s that nobody has invented a lightweight, inexpensive battery that can store enough electricity to make such a vehicle practical.

If anyone can change that, it’s Angela Belcher….”

A smaller lightweight battery. the above quote is from an April 2007 Time magazine profile of Belcher, a MIT Professor and MacArthur genious grant recipient. 16 Months later a team including Belcher, announced “… first instance in which microcontact printing has been used to fabricate and position microbattery electrodes and the first use of virus-based assembly in such a process.”

It’s not about sacrifice or limits. Adjust the prism. Microbatteries, an example of more with less

It’s dangerous for you to be here

Some thread-pulling on my part to weave together the thoughts whirling around in my head.

In the movie “My Blue Heaven,” Steve Martin’s character (Vinnie) says to Shaldeen (Carol Kane):

“You know, it’s dangerous for you to be here in the frozen food section.”

Shaldeen: Why is that?

Vinnie: Because you could melt all this stuff.

Today at TED, there’s been a lot of chatter today about Ray Anderson’s talk which was summarized (and prominently “Re-tweeted”) by Tim O’Reilly: “The new civilization = more happiness with less stuff.” (I’m not at TED and I haven’t seen the talk, so this whole post could be grabbing at straws imitating thread-pulling)

More with less.

John Sterman, head of MIT Sloan’s System Dynamics Group, explores how to get people to think for real on sustainability saying: “As long as everybody in the world wants more, there’s no solution.”

Sterman’s take on “more with less” is a systems outlook—Jay Forrester, the father of system dynamics has somethings to say about this too. He speaks in this interview with MIT Sloan Management Review’s Michael Hopkins about “opportunities to begin to operate at the no-growth….”

In an excerpt from Art Klein’s book “Age of Heritics,” Dana Meadows, Sterman’s Mentor and Forrester’s student, concludes with this: “What we are growing for? For whom? For how long? And at what cost?” — in 1971!

So my question is, how do we responsibly encourage global development and raise the living standard for billions of people? How do we prevent the meltdown(s)?

What is the right balance of “more with less?” What aisle should we be in?