Wealth and Climate Competitiveness: The New Narrative on Business and Society

PRAISE FOR WEALTH AND CLIMATE COMPETITIVENESS

The importance of narrative and storytelling comes through loud and clear in Piasecki’s new book. His sourcing is rich and wonderful on competition and social needs. Like in his prior books, we can hear the nascent tales of today becoming the truisms of tomorrow.

—Dominic Emery, former chief of staff of bp and distinguished engineer, Board Member

Piasecki is a master storyteller of both history and personal insight. Informative, persuasive, delightful—this is a great tale rendered in personal narrative like a Henry David Thoreau and Piasecki’s heroes Churchill and Orwell. This book is full of insights in each passage, and the complete short manifesto reads with persuasive rage.

—Ken Strassner, former senior executive of Kimberly Clark, Board Member

What I love most about this book is Piasecki’s passionate appeal to shared feelings about our near future. As in his prior books, Piasecki challenges you to grasp a broad array of history and literature in compelling prose designed for global translation. He will challenge you to change in ways you had not considered yet. Suddenly these better selves seem both logical and justified in his life summary book.

—Ira Feldman, Attorney/Founder of Adaptation Leader.

"From Knoke’s Bold New World in 1996 to Bogle on the Soul of Capitalism in 2005 and then to Piasecki’s own World Inc. in 2007, great books have been released on mixing the needs of the new world with capitalism. In this new book, Bruce Piasecki offers a dramatically engaging manual and a new generation manifesto for the ages. In this regard, Bruce is the current successor to Peter Drucker.

—Darryl Vernon Poole, accountant, CEO newsletter founder, and cultural historian

WEALTH AND CLIMATE COMPETITIVENESS

The New Narrative on Business and Society

BRUCE PIASECKI

OTHER TITLES BY BRUCE PIASECKI

Beyond Dumping

America’s Future in Hazardous Waste Management

Corporate Environmental Strategy

Corporate Strategy Today

Doing More with Less

Doing More with Teams

Environmental Management and Business Strategy

In Search of Environmental Excellence: Moving Beyond Blame

New World Companies: The Future of Capitalism

Stray Prayers

The Surprising Solution

World Inc.

2040: A Fable

A New Way to Wealth

The Quiet Genius of Eileen Fisher

Giants of Social Investment

Great Contemporaries: The Collected Biographies by Bruce Piasecki (pending publication)

The Voice of the CEO: An Anthology on the Path to Climate Competitiveness

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: What is Climate Competitiveness?

Passage 1: On Money, People, and Rules

Passage 2: The Five Prejudices

Passage 3: The Distortions Prejudices Create

Passage 4: Private Wealth and Corporate Sprawl

Passage 5: The Rich as Robber Barons—A Lasting Nineteenth-Century Prejudice

Passage 6: Why Trane Technologies is an Exception

Passage 7: Speculative Capitalists as Birds of Prey —A Lasting Twentieth-Century Prejudice on Climate and Wealth

Passage 8: Five Leading Firms Active on Climate Competitiveness

Passage 9: There is a Paradox in Advancing History

Passage 10: The Creative Force in Social Movements

Passage 11: The Fabulous Birth of Leisure Class Capitalism

Passage 12: Why bp is Transforming with Consequence to Many

Passage 13: What is Social Response Capitalism

Passage 14: A Few Tales that Defeat the Popular Prejudices

Passage 15: Seeking a Balance Between Past Mistakes and Present Predicaments

Passage 16: What Robin Hood Tells Us About Climate Competitiveness

Passage 17: The New Narrative

Passage 18: The Elephant in the Room

Afterword: Humility as the Best Finale

Postscript by Bill Novelli, Founder Porter Novelli, former CEO of AARP, author of Good Business

Annotated Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without the steady routines of working with my editor of six books, Peter Lynch, this book on wealth would have remained much longer. Without the brilliant improvements suggested by my agent and owner of www.scottmeredith.com, Arthur Klebanoff, this book on climate and social movements would not have had the impact we anticipated. Arthur helped this writer see many uses in the realm of corporates, individuals, and governments.

And again, without the love of my daughter and wife, I would not have had the routines that allow such books at all.

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS CLIMATE COMPETITIVENESS?

Over the last century and more, there has been a tense relationship between business and society, and how they interact with each other. A set of prejudices on both sides lead to a general understanding that business and society were at odds, especially when it came to our planet and the effects of climate change.

However, by the end of the twentieth century, a new social contract began to emerge. Business and society, wealth and the commonwealth, began to be perceived as intimately related. With this change, I believe that we have reached a turning point toward a better future, which is rooted in a new concept: climate competitiveness.

What is climate competitiveness? At its core, climate competitiveness is about using your business, with all the tools of capitalism, to address and respond to large social demands.

Climate competitiveness is a comprehensive corporate response to a range of issues surrounding business and society. It is larger than the kinds of corporate strategy seminars you hear at the best business schools. Climate competitiveness involves the blending of private scientific and market knowledge, along with corporate culture and ambitions, to create solutions years ahead of when governments might try to solve them with taxes or regulatory demands. And by creating such solutions, you can put your company or firm years ahead of its competition.

Climate competitiveness engages the more positive forces in social change. This happens without revolution or social chaos. In fact, the opposite happens. Societies across the nations re-achieve the lost balance between business and society, between wealth and the commonwealth, in ways that redistribute wealth to those that are climate competitive (while those who aren’t lose).

But this is not simply an altruistic mission. (Although those who approach it with a sincere goal of benefitting society will succeed best.) The relationship between the financial success of a business and its efforts to create social good are intertwined. Creating innovative solutions requires capital in order to research and fund the efforts. And the solutions developed must bring in further capital in order to fund the next innovations.

Climate competitiveness is about balancing the cash flow needs of innovation with the arts of competitive frugality. People need enough excess in their lives to be creative and to know their roles in the expanding, globalized world. In the same way, the great value-based corporates need enough excess in their firms to afford the major innovations. You can see how this approach re-engineers the pursuit of profit to a way that benefits business and society alike.

That is what has been missed too often since the last financial meltdown: The people who are profiting also believe in investing along the lines of environmental, social and governance metrics (ESG). This ESG movement is now dominating oil valuations. While it is still a method of some controversy, ESG has demonstrative social value in the way major firms position themselves for change. I find this hard to write about because every day the issues are hotly debated in the press and in the boardrooms on which I serve; yet what is clear is that winners are on the path of climate competitiveness, and losers are those refusing the new ESG investment monies now available.

Now, climate competitiveness may mean different things for different companies. For bp, it means a fundamental shift in energy sales and selection. At Trane, it means bringing the outside megatrends inside, through human resources retraining.

Regardless of how you define it in your field, the lesson is that the future worth of your firm lies in finding your role on this path of climate competitiveness.

Climate competitiveness involves a responsible, steady, resolve-based focus on lessons derived from human behavior and social movements. This book is designed to give you a deep understanding of the changed landscape we now face, and how you can resolve to embrace climate competitiveness to drive your success, and the success of our world.

PASSAGE 1

ON MONEY, PEOPLE, AND RULES

When you get down to essences, most business success depends on the smart alignment of money, people, and rules.

How you define your staff, its functions, and its accountability, is the first high-octane fuel in the engine of business success. In short, how you manage your people, find brilliant deputies, and structure your differentiated organization remains key. In my firm, the people element was critical.

I started my journey aligning money, people, and rules with few funds. I succeeded because of the talent of individual teams, not big loans. Money is not just the world of finance, as the best firms are not debt bound but frugal in a competitive sense. Wealth we find in people, social networks, and professional communities and organizations. Wealth is human worth made operational. In this book, we examine the arts of competitive frugality both in principle and in case examples.

The rules part is where the social movements and governments come in. Issues such as toxic waste contamination, or the vaccine crisis of the last pandemic, or climate change require the heavy feet of government to set the rules by which competition for innovation begins and ends.

Yet you cannot solve the climate crisis only with government mandates. That is sharpening only half of a pair of scissors. To cut through these issues of the many greenhouse gas emitters in transportation, big pharma, buildings, and hospitals, we need to be more clever than simply be pro-regulation. We cannot strangle the neck of innovation, or the inherent powers in private and corporate wealth.

This book offers eighteen related passages that offer the new narrative on business and society, which will allow us to compete in a carbon- and capital-constrained world. We have centered each of the passages on two historic insights, one on the past