Over the last few days, I have been sitting in a taxi cab and found myself watching the recent Budweiser Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive drunk campaign, and each time I watch it I am left with the feeling that it is nothing more than marketing. The setting, a bar full of dancing people, is [...]

There was a time where China could legitimately stand up and say that they were “cleaner” than everyone else, and use a per capita statistic to back that information up. Over the years though, it has grown tougher because the audience (1) began adjusting for the fact that China had hundreds of millions of farmers [...]

A couple of months back while speaking to a group of 200 international students at the Global Youth Leadership Conference in Shanghai, I was asked to speak about leadership and the next generation. A keynote that I have delivered to other groups before, I decided to focus less on the intangible “leader” and “organization”, and [...]

If there is one thing that the recent rash of scandals in China’s charities proves, it is that China has a long way to go with developing a credible and robust culture of philanthropy. A few weeks back there were the pictures of a woman named Guo Meimei caught posing with luxury cars and accessories, [...]

When working with my students on the issues of sustainability, one of the fundamental facts that I am trying to impress upon them is that ultimately there is no “away”. That ultimately, the wastes that we are creating through the economic models we have developed will at some point grow so large that they cannot [...]

When charged to keep an economy running at 10+% economic growth year in and year out, there are going to be times where short cuts are going to be taken, and accepted. At times, the short cuts are (fortunately) benign enough to not have a wider impact on the economy, community, or environmental, but in [...]

With the conversations around systems and sustainability still largely a moving a target that bounces between emotional polar bears and destructive weather systems, I honestly cannot think of a better time for a focus on understanding the systems that exist in our economy, the impact of our economy on our environmental systems, and taking steps [...]