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Category Archives: Rio 50+20


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En route to Rio

As I stand in the long line before for the security check it hits me: the moment has finally come and nothing but a 12 hour flight separates me from actually being in Rio! 12 hours is a long time and I wonder if we can really justify the negative environmental impact we cause with our travels to go to a sustainability conference. I ask my travel companion if he chose the carbon offset option that was offered when we registered for the conference. He tries to remember. Well, I didn’t offset and suddenly feel kind of guilty about it. My president, who is also coming to Rio, chose to pay for the $40 carbon offset charge. I remember how surprised I was and how stupid I felt. Part of the reason why I declined the charge was my insecurity about how my institution would feel if I chose to incur such a voluntary expense. While the environment is personally important to me, I was not sure I could actually impose this sensitivity on my work. My colleague sheepishly admits that he also did not choose to offset. We wonder why!? If we, two environmentally conscious, comfortably employed academics specialized in Responsibility and Sustainability wont do the carbon offset, who will? When booking Easyjet, we have a choice to pay more for the offset, so far I never clicked on the option. Making a “donation” which is how offsetting carbon feels like right now is contrary to the  spirit I am in when booking a low-cost airfare. My money-saving mode prevents me from doing what is right.

When we dig deeper, we identify another disruptive emotion that perverts us: when paying an indecently low amount for a flight (Easyjet and co.) we somehow refuse to donate money without knowing what is going to happen to it. My colleague ventures that there are questions like “where is the money going?” and “will it be used in a sensible way?” suddenly come up. Not that such questions aren’t justified, but would we ask them before making a carbon-offset contribution while we don’t ask them for other expenditures. Not really consistent! I, for one, don’t consistently ask where some of the clothes I buy are made and under what conditions.

We further explore, what would change if we could choose where our money ended up?If, for example, we could select between investments to ensure biodiversity, reforestation, revamping production in the Northern hemisphere or social enterprises in emerging countries. What bothers me in particular is the idea that such donations at least partially end up in contributing to expand our already out-of-hand consumption pattern. I don’t want to support new innovations of even more stuff that I don’t need, even if it has a significantly improved carbon-footprint compared to the previous year’s gadgets I already didn’t really need. I realize that I don’t really know what projects can get funding from these offsets. I should read up on this on “my climate”. While it is critical to significantly reduce our footprint, we can’t fool ourselves by believing that investing in green growth will get us there. We in the wealthy West or North must fundamentally rethink how we want to live, what is important to our quality of life and as a result how we want to spend our personal resources (time, energy, money, and share of mind and heart) to live well and within the limits of our planet.

I recognize very humbly that I have a long way to go before I will be the kind of role model I would like to be. But, let us start talking about what we can do in every aspect of our life’s. And now that I am en route to Rio, my determination to make the best out of it increases by the hour. Two year’s ago we promised the U.N. a scandal and today we are ready to deliver it. Back in November 2010, I made that promise to the U.N. division in charge of the business sector (UNGC), namely to help save the RIO+20 conference with a significant, important contribution. With a scandal. What I had meant with it was that we would work on a radically new vision of how management education would contribute in all possible ways to a world worth living in. Already in 2010, it was rumoured that the 20th anniversary of the original Rio Earth Summit may well become another Copenhagen. A large scale disappointment. It became apparent that governments would not be able to agree on the kind of break-through agreements needed to assure the future of our planet. The private sector and namely business would have to make the difference.


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Katrin goes to Rio

Today is the day. I am packing for Rio. Analogous to “Frankie goes to Hollywood”,  this is not just another business trip, this is not business as usual. Looking at my wardrobe, I skip the usual formal work clothes and I create a mixture of casual and funky that I hope I can get away with in the many very formal sessions and presentations. I grab the “A Rebel with a Cause” t-shirt, my partner brought me from Amsterdam with the instruction that this is THE right t-shirt for me in Rio!

I remember the feeling 20 years ago, when the original Rio conference took place. I was   22 and studying business (yes, at BSL) at the time. The world stopped and watched – Rio was the news and suddenly everybody was talking about the environment, the role of business, of rain-forests dying, the ozone layer disappearing over Australia and the extinction of wildlife. Schmidheiny’s book “Changing Course” changed my life. I remember sensing a new possibility – something shifting within me. The so-far unimagined possibility of maybe, just maybe, being able to combine two parts in me that I thought could not be united in the adult world I was entering.

On one hand, I have always felt this deep sense of connection and care with nature and the world. I spent my youngest childhood roaming the forest in the area I grew up. Ah, that smell, that light! I am tempted to say that anybody growing up in Switzerland automatically becomes an environmentally conscious person. It is so much part of the Swiss DNA, this ridiculously serious sense of responsibility for the “Gemeinwohl” (the common good, although that is a sad translation lacking the caring cosiness the German word radiates and makes you want to be a part of this common thingie) that is instilled in all of us through our upbringing both at home and in school. I am personally scandalized if I see spray-paint. When I pick up my mobility car, a 80’000 members car-sharing organization, the car is spotlessly clean and I make sure I leave no garbage in the car when I return it. To us, public property feels like private property and we treat it very similarly.

On the other hand, my three year commercial apprenticeship and my jobs in Australia and then at a F50 US multinational had kind of implicitly taught be that bringing my whole self to the job was not what was required or even desired. At age 16, my initiation to business at my apprenticeship included all kinds of hurdles. The three years tamed me into a somewhat more docile corporate citizen and I laughed exclusively in private. I had understood that my passions and interests had nothing to add to being a good employee. When interviewed for a promotion at Alcoa, the manager mentioned that she knew that I played nearly every Saturday night in a jazz band and that if I wanted the job I would certainly have to forget about such extravagance. I was 21 at the time and this was the craziest thing I had ever heard.

The two versions of me, the fun-loving tree-hugger and the serious professional, had little to do with each other. Until the Rio Earth Summit hit me. Suddenly, I felt that a bridge could be built between these two sides which generated a boost in creativity unlike anything I had experienced before. I started dreaming about helping companies become sustainable. I thought that maybe I could start a consulting company, I still have a hand-drawn logo of “stratecology” which included a blue planet. But things worked out differently, I kept on getting promoted and ended up in the U.S. In mergers & acquisitions, then in Russia in charge of a manufacturing start-up and life took off. Rio and sustainability gathered dust in my soul.

It was only about 2 years ago, during a side conversation at the “breaking the silo” pre-conference of the Academy of Management annual meeting in Montreal, when we established that business schools had done nothing as a community to participate in the public debate around the increasingly complex social, environmental and economic challenges we faced. The business community had at least created the World Business Council for Sustainable Business (WBCSD), yet what had we to show for? Wasn’t it even more our task to ensure that the world had responsible leaders? Wasn’t it up to our professors to come up with interesting alternatives to our defunct economic system and our “make-break” growth-driven consumption pattern? After all, who if not us would be there to figure out a solution?

The WBCSD had been founded by Schmidheiny (a fellow Swiss who obviously also had gotten his proper dose of Gemeinwohl-DNA) right around the 1992 Rio conference. As an act of self-depreciation we decided in Montreal to founded the World Business School Council for Sustainable Business (WBSCSB) – the world’s most unpronounceable acronym. Our aim, to take part in the public debate on sustainability and to do our job in providing the right kinds of leaders and the right kind of research that would actually serve the world. Since then, we worked on our contribution for the 2012 Rio conference: a radically new vision for management education that would contribute in all possible ways to a world worth living in. This is what we are now about to go and do.

Join me on my personal journey and follow our initiative which we call 50+20 on www.50plus20.org  (#50plus20).