November 17, 2022
One year ago, the company I founded and lead hosted a dinner in Glasgow for the Directors of Sustainability at nearly two dozen of the world’s fastest growing global companies, all of whom were participating in COP26. The plaque pictured below hung on the wall of the Board of Directors room in Glasgow’s grand “Merchants House,” where we dined and the British royal family had dined weeks earlier. Its inscription was an understated reminder of the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade that helped fund the palatial building we were in and, indeed, the monumental George’s Square the building fronts in Glasgow.
All attending the roundtable dinner were more than a decade experienced in working to lead global companies in understanding and responding to the challenges created by human-caused climate and environmental breakdown. This was not a table that needed to be briefed on the depth, breadth, or urgency of our challenge, or even anything but the most cutting edge management best practices in how to optimize global operations towards greater sustainability. They had an expert understanding of both the challenge and the current solutions. So it is perhaps surprising that over drinks before dinner, a vast majority of them indicated a striking level of support for Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg’s simple moral indignation and attack on COP26 as only more “blah, blah, blah.”1
Since I shared with my guests a deep concern that the world was not making demonstrable progress towards the halving of global emissions the 2018 UN IPCC Special Report on 1.5 C had made it clear was necessary before 2030 (96 months from that dinner), and I also shared with them a delight that only a month earlier the UN had recognized the right to a healthy and sustainable environment as a human right protected by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I had only one question for the diners.
So before the first entrée was served, I welcomed the diners, invited introductions, and then went around the table with the single question:
Could your company move from volunteering leadership in more sustainable business to making an unequivocal demand that all authorities, public and private, that it does business with commit to comply with relevant UN Agreements and Guidance regarding responding responsibly to human-caused climate and environmental breakdown?
The answer from every diner was a longer version of “no.”
In the shadow of the global climate conference, dining in what amounted to a palace of the Atlantic slave trade, the response was candid and sobering. The explanation for why their CEOs could not do this varied. They all were, however, consistent with the argument: “our corporation is a global machine that does not operate like that.” What seemed to resonate best in follow-up discussion was the possibility of analogizing our climate crisis to the issues of forced labor and LGBTQ rights, regarding which corporations have been willing to embrace a relatively simple and effective moral framing, language, and demand.
Steps away from the Merchants House dinner a year ago, UN Secretary General António Guterres was continuing his crusade to “stop runaway climate change,” for not doing so was not only “immoral, but suicidal.”2 He expressly called for “maximum ambition from all countries on all fronts.”3 Meanwhile, UNICEF had recently reported that more than a billion children currently faced “deadly” threats from human-caused climate breakdown. Due to the increasing frequency of “once in a thousand year” floods, drought, famine, wildfires, and extreme weather, occurring in the 33 most climate vulnerable countries that collectively have contributed less than 9% of the heat trapping GHG pollution that has been spewed into the thin band of life that is our biosphere.
Fast forward to today. Sustainability leaders around the world have gathered again at the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh for COP27 in Egypt. Now we are only 85 months from 2030. The year by which the IPCC reports we need to have roughly halved global emissions. Tragically, GHG emissions have only continued their uninterrupted rise. The recently released UN Emissions Gap Report provides yet another detailing of our current challenge and possible futures, aptly titled “The Closing Window.” Which echoes the sentiment of co-chair of the report Hans-Otto Pörtner, quoted in a press release as saying: “any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”
Unfortunately, climate pledges from the world’s largest emitters are not remotely on track. There are, however, rays of hope. One is certainly the US Inflation Reduction Act, designed to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 1 gigaton in 2030, or a billion metric tons – 10 times more climate impact than any other single piece of legislation ever enacted.”4
It is, however, unequivocally clear that deep, broad, and building change is needed. Our current approach is not coming remotely close to working. Far too many hear the framing, language, and initiatives of the IPCC and the thousands of organizations and companies involved as only more “blah, blah, blah.” I agree with Harvard Law’s brilliant polymath and systems change theorist Roberto Unger who has advised both Barack Obama (whom he also taught Constitutional Law) and Brazil’s Lula. As Unger recognizes: “Ideas alone are powerless to produce…However, we cannot bring [reorientation] about without ideas.”5 Moreover, I also agree with leading business strategist and co-founder of the Center for Systems Awareness Peter Senge, nearby at MIT. Senge recognizes the power of “awakening to the central role of deep personal change to any systems change.”6
Consequently, I have become persuaded that there is great and immediate promise in helping those who aspire to leadership towards greater sustainability to explore reframing how they think, talk, and act to advance leadership. Indeed, I am persuaded that those who aspire to leading to greater sustainability will benefit greatly and become far more effective if they embrace a new and emerging approach to leadership itself. Some top leaders across fields are already demonstrating the catalytic effectiveness of this approach, which is grounded in emerging behavioral science and aligned with ancient wisdom across multiple cultures.
If those who hope to lead towards greater sustainability inspire their companies to embrace this new framing and approach, there is no question that those dining with me one year ago will be able to answer my question in any dinner we share at COP28 with a: “hell yes, we already are.” Indeed, nothing bars us from hoping that the number of companies adopting a wildly more ambitious and human centered approach to human-caused climate breakdown can, with this new framing and approach, extend far beyond a few hundred top corporate climate leaders to ultimately include most of the 18,700+ corporations who have already filed a Climate Report to the CDP in 2022. If this happens, it will not be difficult for many to see how this emerging paradigm of leadership could change the global conversation and global probabilities for success in reversing climate breakdown.
What I propose is that those who hope to lead towards greater sustainability recognize that there is an opportunity for catalytic and needed change in embracing a “Dignity First” approach to leadership at all levels and across executive, enterprise, and economic leadership. This is a change that is increasingly demonstrated by vanguard leaders of global note – often using slightly different terminology and regularly not working to define guiding principles, even as they take action that is aligned with a Dignity First approach.
I recently and explicitly promoted a “Dignity First” approach to leadership in a blog post entitled “Dignity First: Executive, Enterprise and Economic Leadership,” which grew out of my longer and broader investigation of the subject from almost two years ago, “Leading with Dignity in 2021”. Understanding the opportunity to embrace a deeply and broadly resonant “Dignity First” approach to executive, enterprise, and executive leadership will help those who want to accelerate the move to greater sustainability understand how CEOs of ultimately thousands of influential, globally scaling companies could come to demand that all the public and private authorities they work with commit to coming into compliance with U.N. Agreements and Guidance on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
This new leadership paradigm is grounded in more than a generation of experimental and theoretical science across disciplines, which has prompted a revaluation of human nature, and it can effect remarkably penetrating, broad, and needed change. It offers a practical path to move from an assumed, need-based seeking of efficiency to a care-based offering of dignity to ourselves, others, and the natural world that sustains us all.7 Some of the world’s most successful and revered corporate leaders – such as Paul Polman, Yvon Chouinard and Muhammad Yunus – provide a compelling model of this still largely unnamed approach to leadership. Current leaders at all levels can play a needed and impactful role in successfully defining, reifying, and promoting this fundamental paradigm change – to help catalyze its full flowering – even on the scale of global systems change.
This is because – as leading experts in systems change have long recognized – it is possible to deliberately change fundamental frameworks of perception – and when these frameworks change, the cascading effect can cause a far broader systems-level change. This is not another call for experts in sustainability to be trained in a more sophisticated, necessarily esoteric understanding of regenerative leadership (as much as that is needed), but instead a call for an approach to leadership at every level that is premised on greater simplicity, deeper personal connection, and an immediate and broader resonance with far more people than currently galvanized for the response to human-caused climate breakdown the global scientific community has for decades made it clear we need.
Leaders who embrace a Dignity First paradigm, holistically putting individuals, community, and the natural world before short term benefit, and center organizational strategy and execution that magnifies the dignity of human beings and the nature that sustains them, can build remarkably creative and resilient organizations with growing positive societal and environmental impact.
Beyond paradigm change being possible and consequential, there are several reasons that underscore the case for this change in fundamental framing driving the nature and purpose of leadership at this point in time, despite the almost absurd audacity of seeking to name, promote, and help effect a paradigm change. They include:
The Needed & Emerging Paradigm Change
The scholarship supporting the proposed change to dignity-centered leadership is impressive and growing. What has yet to be acknowledged is that this is happening not only within executive leadership, enterprise leadership, and economic leadership, but also across these spheres. To understand the potential importance of this cross- discipline change, that can be recognized by careful review as reflecting a foundational change in assumed frameworks of perception and objectives, it is helpful to examine the prescient work of Donella Meadows, a Dartmouth College environmental scientist. Meadows’ work popularized the concept that paradigm changes have the power to achieve systems level social change. Meadows published a seminal essay in 1999 entitled: “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” Therein, she detailed twelve leverage points through which one could work to change large and complex systems, such as a large corporation, an economy, or even our relationship to the natural world. Meadows identified “transcendence” and “paradigm change” as the first and second most highly leveraged ways to effect change in complex systems. By the first, she meant the ability to intellectually and emotionally internalize that every system is premised on certain paradigms or fundamental “mental models,” such that someone could transcend their own most ingrained or assumed frameworks of perception. Regarding the second, “paradigm change,” Meadows was borrowing a concept from Thomas Kuhn’s well-noted 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” which held that once a “paradigm” or fundamental framework is changed (e.g., the idea in early medicine that sickness was in the blood and that, therefore, bloodletting would help), the entire related field would change.
Meadows asserted that leaders can transcend their received traditions and that largely unconscious paradigmatic frameworks of perception can be identified and deliberately changed through concerted efforts to effect great practical change system-wide. To the extent that a market-based model of behavior focused on controlling, extracting, and exchanging “things” is a degrading instrumentalization of the natural world, then this is exactly the type of paradigm Meadows would hope leaders could change. To advance that, Meadows counseled both a dramatic and also systematic highlighting of the faults of the incumbent paradigm and a relentless assertion of the supplanting paradigm’s advantages. To follow Meadows’ lead, it is necessary to move beyond a critique of the faltering market-based paradigm and to highlight the advantages of a proposed superior paradigm.
Five years after Meadows’ essay was published, business consultant Stephen Covey (who authored the hugely popular “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”) also argued for paradigm change without mentioning Meadows. In “The 8Th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness,” published in 2004, Covey identified the “industrial age paradigm” – in which controlling, extracting, and exchanging “things” is de rigueur – as the fundamental “problem.” Even though history has moved on to the current “post-industrial knowledge economy,” most managers continue to embrace an “industrial age paradigm” that seeks to control, extract, and exchange “things,” including people, as opposed to respecting people as creative, choice-making ends in themselves, who seek their own voice and purpose. Covey quotes Henry David Thoreau in saying “there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” And in identifying what Covey conceptualized as the “industrial age paradigm,” he seems to have been striking – so many years ago – at the root of business leaders’ continued backward thinking on climate.
A Paradigm Change Grounded in Science
Science is revealing the daunting breadth, depth, and urgency of the existential challenge we face in human-caused environmental breakdown that is undermining the order of life on earth in our time. But it is also, through digitalization and the internet, increasingly connecting us as never before. Moreover, across disciplines including social psychology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, a new understanding of human nature has emerged over the last twenty to thirty years that validates ancient art and wisdom that long held that human beings have a passionate need – and talent – for creating shared meaning. So, we have reason to have faith in the success we increasingly understand that we must together create. The emerging (though in actuality, immemorial) appreciation for our irreducibly social nature as human beings helps us understand how and why it is reasonable to hope we can evolve in our basic frameworks of perception from always looking to “utilize” – seeking greater and greater efficiency – and become what we as humankind can be, both for others and for our natural world, with a deeper sense of gratitude for what we already are. This is the essence of Dignity First.
Dignity First Executive Leadership
The changed and emerging understanding of human nature is increasingly supporting and encouraging a Dignity First paradigm in executive, enterprise, and economic leadership, even if this precise term has not previously been considered in this expansive context. The paragon of this in executive leadership is Dr. Donna Hicks of Harvard’s JFK School of Government. She is the most explicit among top thought leaders in urging the embrace of “dignity-centered leadership.” Hicks is a psychologist who gained global notice through her success in advancing the peace process in Northern Ireland, and between Palestine and Israel. In her 2017 “Leading with Dignity: How to Create a Culture that Brings Out the Best in People,” Dr. Hicks proposed a new paradigm for leadership that is premised on a scientific understanding of human nature and centered on a leader’s relationship with themself, other people, and the world at large. Since she emerged as a leader in international dispute resolution and teaches at a leading school in public administration, Dr. Hicks’ ground-breaking work on the role of “dignity” in organizational leadership has not been as widely discussed as it deserves in the popular and academic discourse on responsible business leadership. Ken Frazier, Chairman & CEO of Merck & Co., Inc. has, however, recognized that: “Donna Hicks articulates for business leaders not only a grand concept but also a practical framework for strengthening corporate culture by recognizing and promoting the inherent value of each employee.” Her work is exceedingly well-aligned with the markedly expanded social and environmental expectations and demands facing today’s corporate executive leadership.
What Dr. Hicks proposes is relatively simple: a focus on personal excellence and relationships, as opposed to system or model optimization. Dr. Hicks expressly focuses on the quality of relationships, including an important relationship with the broader world. Hicks’ work supports an emerging, relatively simple, human, not market-centered paradigm, premised on a generation of scientific learning across disciplines that validates ancient thought traditions about human nature. Her work could prepare enterprises and, ultimately, economies to address the immense challenge a generation of global science has revealed we face in human-caused environmental breakdown. It is a new paradigm of leadership that seems well designed to resonate with the souls (i.e., in Greek: “psyche”) of those women and men inclined to work together in a creative and purposed solidarity to transform our “human problem” into a demanding but brilliant flourishing. A flourishing wherein complex and even chaotic systems, including large enterprises, markets, and economies, are organized by a well-reasoned and passionately lived commitment to make them serve the demands of the universal, inviolable, and inalienable dignity of all the individuals involved and the natural environment that sustains us all. Those who embrace this approach should enjoy a flourishing that will be first their own but – as science suggests is necessary – expressly for the benefit of others.
Furthermore, Dr. Hicks’ proposed paradigm for leadership is also aligned with, first, the emerging consensus in enterprise theory and practice to shift from “shareholder first” approaches to purpose-driven multi-stakeholder value creation; and second, the distinct, aligned evolution of macro-economic theory and analysis that also seeks to take into account current science about human nature as well as complexity theory and the mounting existential threat of human-caused environmental breakdown.
Dignity First Enterprise Leadership
At the enterprise level, the mechanics of leading with dignity have already been established and compellingly demonstrated. There is a through line that connects Meadows and Hicks to Rebecca Henderson, who published “Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire” in 2020. Henderson’s focus is on next-generation enterprise strategy. She makes an important contribution to that through her persuasive arguments and case studies, encouraging business leaders to move beyond a prioritization of short-term shareholder interest to shared purpose-driven, multi-stakeholder, long-term value creation. Henderson recognizes that this now must occur in a changed context that is shaped by a world that is actually and increasingly “on fire.”
Outside of the academic realm, there is emerging consensus that, at the enterprise level, a new paradigm should be embraced. In August of 2019, 181 CEOs of America’s largest corporations committed to a purpose driven, multi-stakeholder approach to long-term value creation. In the Business Roundtable’s Statement on the Purpose of the Corporation, these CEOs specifically recognized that corporations exist to benefit stakeholders such as customers, employees, suppliers, and host communities as much as shareholders. This represented an unnoted but unmistakable reversal of a Business Roundtable publicly declared definition of the purpose of the corporations from 1997: “The paramount duty of management and of boards of directors is to the corporation’s stockholders. The interests of the other stakeholders are relevant as a derivative of the duty to the stockholders.”
This high-profile reversal has helped catapult the “multi-stakeholder capitalism,” championed for more than a generation by the World Economic Forum, which meets annually in Davos and is reflected in the Davos Manifesto 2020, into mainstream business strategy in the U.S. and globally. Most recently, Andrew Winston and former Unilever CEO Paul Polman’s “Net-Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take,” serves as a rallying cry for corporate social responsibility rooted in stakeholder primacy. What’s missing, however, is an explication of the necessary paradigm shift – not only from short-termism to long-termism and from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy, but also in the even more fundamental framing that imagines a reductionist, closed-loop, machine-like system that needs greater efficiency to one that recognizes complexity and seeks to offer greater dignity to all the stakeholders involved. For this, we look to Mark Carney’s opus, “Value(s),” in which the foundation of values-based leadership is grounded in dignity. In 2021, Carney exposed the schism enterprise leadership must address: “Value in the market is increasingly determining the values of society. We are living Oscar Wilde’s aphorism – knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing – at incalculable costs to our society, to future generations and to our planet.”
Dignity First Economic Leadership
In Kate Raworth’s 2017 book “Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist,” the former long-time economist for Oxfam who helped develop the UN Sustainable Development Goals is especially cogent when arguing against a macro-economics that assumes perfect information, rationalism, and the absence of politics. More persuasive than dozens of prominent thinkers before her, Raworth lampoons the development of a reductionist economics that assumes those participating in an economy are not committed parents, children, citizens, and faith and community participants before they are perfectly informed, individual utility- maximizing consumers. And which assumes economies should be optimized to increase Gross Domestic Product, even if “GDP” does, as Robert Kennedy once observed, “measure everything but what makes life worth living.” And fails to measure all sorts of value – like that of parenting – as well as all sorts of costs, like the world-threatening cost of carbon pollution. So, Raworth proposes a well-being – or what might fairly be described as a Dignity First–centered “Doughnut Economics,” which asserts that to enable personal and societal development and avoid citizens falling into a proverbial hole of only growing need, while also setting limits on consumption required by environmental limits, it is necessary to meet real human needs.
Beyond Kate Raworth, top thought leaders in economic planning have also been embracing a Dignity First paradigm. This new paradigm of leadership has even reached the highest levels of policy development in the United States. Gene Sperling, former Chief Economic Advisor to Presidents Clinton and Obama, published a book in 2020 entitled “Economic Dignity,” which proposed bringing a dignity first approach to economic policy making. Although he does not reference Hicks or Raworth, in his book Sperling advances an organizing and multi-faceted commitment to meeting the minimum needs required to enable every person’s flourishing as a recognition of – and investment in – their inalienable human dignity. In doing so, Sperling recognizes the inadequacy of former approaches he helped lead that sought to optimize a massive and complex U.S. economy but failed the very citizens it was supposed to serve. He proposes to now begin with meeting minimum needs first, which is consistent with the hard-won wisdom of Germany’s post World War II 1949 Basic Law (i.e., Constitution) which begins: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To protect and respect it is the duty of all state authority.” Global businesses should apply this foundational principle to the private enterprises that public authorities charter.
For a systems-change roadmap in the public sector, we can look to economist Mariana Mazzucato’s “The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy” (2018) and “Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism” (2021). Mazzucato is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College, London. In both books, she argues that capitalism can be redefined not by the private sector, but by governments and policymakers willing to commit to the currently “impossible” – to define the value that will make it possible and even get it done. Mazzucato argues that we can do better than Oscar Wilde’s cynic who “knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.” If we return to the center of economics, the examination of the nature of “value” which needs to be expressly tied to how an item or process within complex systems advances human purposes. This is, in turn, advanced by a theory of micro-economic value creation within a given enterprise that dignifies multiple stakeholders, including supplier, labor, manager, consumer, and citizen of an enterprise’s host community, who all help create and evaluate an enterprise’s value.
Answer the Question: Hell Yes.
In what appears to most to be an increasingly complex, even chaotic world that is ever more globalized and science-informed, there is now a brilliant opportunity to embrace this simple but profound new paradigm of executive, enterprise, and economic leadership. Doing so can enable the most courageous, compassionate, and creative to out-perform peers by moving beyond a deadening attempt to extract value by seeking to make incompletely imagined machines more “efficient” to no less than systematically, regularly, and practically vindicating the dignity of the specific human beings and specific parts of the natural world that sustain us all. A self-serving attitude that seeks to “utilize” what Pope Francis described in “Laudato Si: Praise Be of Common Home,” his epic encyclical on integral ecology, as “the rest of the single garment of creation” is individually and cumulatively bankrupting, whereas a thriving individual organism will regularly provide generous “net positive” and regenerative contributions to a broader ecology to help the organism and the ecology it is dependent on become sustainable. This is consistent with the ancient Vedic wisdom that recognized “the fruit is not for the tree.” And we can dare to imagine – even those of us who are not religious – the change of consciousness that Pope Francis proposes in “Laudato Si: Praise Be of Common Home,” when he communicates a radically de-centered and complete sense of gratitude through quoting the presumably Shinto-influenced Bishops of Japan and recognizes: “To sense each creature singing the hymn of its existence, is to live joyfully in G-d’s love and hope.”
In executive, enterprise, and economic leadership, there is now an opportunity to center and magnify the dignity of all the unique and irreplaceable stakeholders who sustain us as leaders. It is now intellectually deeply supported in leadership literature, in the emerging understanding of human motivations, and in behavioral economics. Practically, we can apply this through the trinity of self-chosen, self-sacrificing commitments Dr. Hicks proposes: to be our best servant leaders, to enable our colleagues’ and customers’ greater dignity, and to celebrate a regenerative, net-positive relationship to our environment that sustains us all. In a time of manifesting crisis and attendant confusion brought on by human-caused climate and ecological breakdown, this can be a shared and mutually redemptive purpose. At every level of leadership – family, community, corporations, nations, and the world – a commitment to offer a net positive and regenerative magnification of every stakeholder’s inviolable and inalienable dignity recognizes us all as irreducibly social. And allows the answer to the question I asked at the Merchants House – about whether one’s organization could demand every authority it deals with to commit to complying with relevant UN agreements and guidance about human-caused climate breakdown – to be: “Hell yes!”
Footnotes
Jim Boyle is the CEO & Founder of Sustainability Roundtable, Inc. For more than a dozen years, Jim has led full-time teams of diverse experts to assist nearly 100 Fortune 500 and growth companies in their move to more sustainable high-performance. Specifically, SR Inc has helped world-leading corporations, real estate owners, and federal agencies to set goals, drive progress, and report results in their move to greater Corporate Sustainability. Mr. Boyle led in the creation of SR Inc’s Renewable Energy Procurement Services (REPS), which advises and represents Fortune 500 and fast growth companies across the U.S. and internationally in the development of renewable energy strategies and the procurement of both on and off-site advanced energy solutions. Before founding SR Inc, Mr. Boyle co-led Trammell Crow Company Corporate Advisory Services in San Francisco and returned to his native Boston and Trammell Crow Company’s market leading team in Greater Boston where he received the Commercial Brokers Association’s Platinum Award for the highest level of commercial real estate transactions. Earlier, he advised companies on real estate and environmental matters as an attorney at a large law firm based in Boston. Jim is a graduate of Middlebury College, where he co-captained the football team, and Boston College Law School. Early in his career, he served as a federal law clerk, an aide to John F. Kerry in the U. S. Senate, and on Vice President Al Gore’s campaign for President. Jim lives in Concord, MA with his wife and kids a half mile across the street from Emerson’s house and museum on the route to Walden Pond.
