-
Natural Capitalism Right on the Money Feb 1, 2000 (106 of 118 found this helpful)
In the summer of 1999, the Harvard Business Review treated the business community to a glimpse of a bold new model for business and industry in the 21st century. The HBR has been filling requests ever since for the article by Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken titled "A Road Map for Natural Capitalism." The article described how businesses could profit by employing strategies built around a more productive use of natural resources. The authors explained in a very practical, yet compelling manner how these strategies could go a long way toward solving many current environmental problems.
Business readers and anyone concerned about the changing global economy and its impact on the ecosystem will want more than copies of the HBR article once they realize it was actually a tantalizing synopsis of the authors' new book, "Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution" (Little, Brown, 1999). This important book can take its place alongside such touchstone volumes as "Future Shock," "Megatrends " and "The New New." The authors describe in vivid detail how business and industry can gain competitive advantage through a new business model based on doing much more with much less.
The authors set out to prove that changing realities of the information economy and global competitiveness are already transforming industry and commerce in ways unforeseen even a few years ago. The new business model takes into account the values of all forms of "capital" including human, manufactured, financial, and natural. "Natural Capitalism" starts with an elegantly simple premise: economies need no longer be based on the idea that human capital is finite and natural resources are infinitely abundant when the obvious truth of the 21st Century is exactly the opposite.
With mounting confidence, Lovins, Lovins and Hawken predict that the latest industrial revolution will create "a vital economy that uses radically less material and energy." Businesses that recognize the trend toward this new type of industrialism will gain advantage over their less alert competitors. Those that postpone this shift will be left behind and will eventually, make themselves irrelevant in the new economy.
Theirs is not merely a detailed updating of Buckminster Fuller's "small is beautiful" thesis. Rather, the authors describe a step-by-step process of business restructuring that should result in more efficiency at the corporate, national and global level. Such a process, if carried out across several industries simultaneously, would make it much easier for governments to promote social equity and conserve or even restore the natural ecosystems reaching across traditional borders.
This next stage of industrialism, the authors' "natural capitalism," is founded on four core business strategies already being adopted by the most innovative corporations across the globe. The strategies suggest that companies need to:
1) employ technology and design innovations to use resources much more productively. This results, of course, in companies using fewer resources, reducing pollution, and setting the stage to create more jobs;
2) practice "biomimicry" by redesigning industrial systems to be more like biological systems, leading to an elimination of even the concept of waste;
3) shift from an economy based on goods and purchases to an economy based on service and flow. This concept leads to a quantum shift in how manufacturing companies service their clients, especially in terms of inventories, sales strategies, etc; and
4) reinvest in "natural capital" to sustain, restore and expand the resources on which industry, and ultimately all life, and therefore all livelihood, depends.
"Natural Capitalism" is not a "gloom and doom, industry vs. the environment" anti-consumerism rant. Neither do the authors fall into the trap of proposing a Pollyanna hypothesis that begins with "if only
-
Beyond Darwin Jan 4, 2000 (80 of 91 found this helpful)
As this new century begins, if there is only one book which everyone on the planet should read, it would be Natural Capitalism. Why is it so important? In my opinion, because it provides the most convincing, the most compelling argument in support of Wendell Berry's assertion that "what is good for the world will be good for us." Darwin's concept of natural selection becomes irrelevant if there is no environment in which such selection can occur. The authors introduce us to "The Next Industrial Revolution" with all oif its emerging possibilities. In subsequent chapters, they continue to examine natural capitalism in terms of "four central strategies": radical resource productivity, biomimicry, service and flow economy, and investment in it. According to the authors, natural capitalism "is about choices we can make that can start to tip economic and social outcomes in positive directions. And it is already occurring -- because it is necessary, possible, and practrical." For me, the information provided in Chapter 3 was almost incomprehensible in terms of the nature and extent of waste. Of the $9 trillion spent every year in the United States, at least $2 trillion is wasted annually. How? For example: Highway accidents ($150 billion), highway congestion ($100 billion in lost productivity), total hidden costs of driving (nearly $1 trillion), nonessential/fraudulent healthcare ($65 billion), inflated and unnecessary medical overhead ($250 billion), and crime ($450 billion). All of this waste can and should be reduced, if not eliminated. What the authors present, in effect, is a blueprint for the survival of the planet. All manner of statistical evidence supports their specific recommendations. Unless "The Next Industrial Revolution" succeeds in implementing those recommendations, natural capitalism will eventually be depleted ...and no one left to regret its loss.
-
Another dissenting opinion Mar 10, 2000 (55 of 74 found this helpful)
Any book that seeks to bring the economic and business system more into alignment with the natural processes of the Earth, is surely welcome. And like the other reviewers, I find much that is attractive, sensible, innovative and informative in the book. It's the things that are left out that are troubling. Why, in a work of synthesis, that proclaims the launch of a new economic paradigm, would something as fundamental as ecological cycles and their economic implementation, get such short shrift? Yes, recycling within firms is discussed at some length -- but recycling through the economic system, with firms interlinked through economically driven connections, is ignored. For that matter, it is inexplicable that the very term "industrial ecology" is completely absent from the text -- and yet the structuring of the economy so that it mimics ecological cycles should surely be one of the central aims of "natural capitalism." The inexplicable absence of such an important topic bespeaks partiality, and that spells trouble for a work of synthesis.
Another troubling oversight concerns recycling manufacturing materials. There is a lengthy discussion of corporate recycling initiatives, covering paper, carpets, fibers, food etc. All depend on individual company initiative. This is fine, as far as it goes. But when it comes to the critical issue of a whole industrial economy tackling the problem, as Japan has done, mandating through MITI regulation that all components to be used in an increasingly wide range of manufactured products are to be recyclable, over a span of years -- well, this kind of initiative is completely ignored. It can't be because the authors are ignorant of Japan -- after all they devote an entire chapter to the impressive achievements of "lean thinking" which originated in Japan. One suspects that the authors simply have no political tolerance for solutions that span more than single firms, and particularly for solutions that have governments imposing enlightened directives on all firms in an industry that are designed to give these firms a collective competitive advantage.
Natural capitalism is an attractive concept -- but it is given a very particular slant in this text. The chapter on markets, for example, is really a diatribe against market inefficiencies and management short-sightedness. One looks in vain for a constructive sense as to how markets might be harnessed more effectively to achieve natural objectives and biomimicry. The work of firms like Enron, which very creatively makes markets in resource use where none existed before, is completely ignored. Let us say that these authors have created some interesting signposts, but there is still a long journey to be accomplished before the conceptual apparatus of business and economics is in harmony with Gaia.
-
Natural Capitalism is a MUST READ for MBA's, CEO's, Politici Nov 1, 1999 (48 of 50 found this helpful)
Throughout this extensively researched book, the three authors (Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins) eloquently describe the mind-set required of businesses that wish to evolve their models of business successfully into the next millennium.
By providing a mix of real-world examples, coupled with logical extensions to the philosophies that have dominated main stream economic theories for the majority of the 20th century - the authors allow us to peak through the curtain - to catch a glimpse of what the world will be like in 50 years time.
Natural Capitalism espouses a vision of a world where long term profit is the driving force behind global strategy, where 'whole system thinking' dominates rather than simplistic compartmentalised agendas.
We have only just discovered the technologies that allow us to assess the impact of the techno-industrial systems which we have grown over the past 150 years. With a little imagination, and a lot of logic Natural Capitalism gently points out the way forward. Toward a trajectory where the (re)application of such systems can construct a new environment, together with the economic opportunities and rewards that come from such an evolution...
This a must read book for all entrepreneurs, businessmen, politicians, researchers, economists, environmentalists, educationalists in fact just about anybody who wishes to live both comfortably, profitably and in harmony during the next century. It argues for an extension to the economic theories that pervade organisational thinking, for a more realistic assessment of the life cycle costs involved in business processes, and above all for a more realistic assessment of the value of natural resources.
This book will help you think. This book will help you live. This book will help you work. This book will help add value to your life... READ IT!
-
Natural Socialism Sep 22, 2000 (41 of 93 found this helpful)
I had been excited by the title, thinking it offered some bold new green ideas - but it offers up recycling, solar energy, greater manufacturing efficiency, and leasing copiers? I agree with the environmental problems presented, but not with most of the solutions. There were a lot of "duh" moments while reading, i.e. "Innovations in manufacturing help cut...costs." or "A further key way to waste fewer materials is to improve...quality". Also, the author has a socialist bent I found disturbing. "The economy is massively inefficient," "The Capitalist system is based on accounting principals that would bankrupt any business" "The best...environment for commerce is provided by systems of governance that are based on the needs of people rather than business" "Societies need to adopt shared goals that enhance social welfare but that are not the prerogatives of specific value or belief systems" (What about freedom and democracy as values?). One chapter is called "Making markets work" - I think our market already works. The author also assigns too many ills of society to our economic theory, which is an oversimplification. Capitalism will create a new economy based on info technology that will run cleaner and more efficiently! We shouldn't still be focused on creating the new "industrial" revolution, but the new "information economy". Had they created more efficiency or more green building in Socialist countries? Seems like the Internet, green building, and fuel cells are only happening in our competitive Capitalist markets.