Frugal Value: Desigining Business for a Crowded Planet.
The dodo, a flightless bird of Mauritius, became extinct during the mid-late seventeenth century after humans destroyed the forests where the birds made their homes and introduced mammals that ate their eggs. Source: Wikipedia.
Much has already been written on the subject of business growth. But while business manuals explain how to grow your business – how to attract new customers, gain market share, fend off competitors, develop new products and reach new markets – few consider the desirability or indeed feasibility of business growth. To grow is assumed to be the goal of all businesses, and growth is the yardstick by which we measure the success of company executives. Growth seems to have become an end in itself. In this article, I critically examine the notion of business growth in our time, reflecting on the purpose, nature and workings of individual firms in the age of the Anthropocene.
The what? The Anthropocene is a term denoting our new geological era. The Anthropocene is characterized by a wholesale change in our relationship with the natural world. Humans are affecting planetary systems so powerfully that we are changing how they work and the conditions they create. This is the era where human action guides environmental change. Once the preserve of eco warriors, this kind of talk has become mainstream: in 2011, the Economist welcomed its readers to the Anthropocene with a full-page cover and leader entitled This Time it’s Different – but the tone of the article was somewhat at odds with the enormity of its content. We have left behind the geological era, the Holocene, during which human civilization flourished, and entered new, uncertain territory. The most obvious manifestation of the Anthropocene is climate change, recently described by David Cameron as “one of the most serious threats facing our world”[i]; by Barack Obama as the “one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other” [ii]; and by Ban Ki-moon as the “defining issue of our age”.[iii] Worse, climate change is only the tip of the melting iceberg. Other related and unwelcome features of the Anthropocene include resource depletion, biodiversity loss, species extinctions, ocean acidification and freshwater scarcity. The Economist was right: this time, it is different.
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