Catching up

I have a bit of catching up to do, it seems...

Starting with tonight's festivities -- at 5:30 today several of us went to a special "Lucia" performance... From what I understand, Lucia is the saint of light and there is a big ceremony involving candles and singing that the children put on every year around this time. I must admit that I didn't fully grasp the history, but it is rooted in Christianity... And they sang several songs -- I recognized a few of the melodies and the words to the two they sang in English: "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and "Jingle Bells".

Class this week has been focused on our presentations for the Strategic Management class. My group's presentation focused on the Madison Children's Museum -- an organization that Antoine, Heidi, and I have been working with for the past several weeks. We presented our proposed business goals, including the adoption of a procurement process that aided an organization in more thoughtfully considering all of the things that it purchases in order to provide its services. We gave our presentation yesterday; it went quite well and I'm glad to have it finished so that I can sit back and watch other groups give their presentations. And there are some interesting ones!

Other groups have chosen to create potential sustainability-focused business plans for organizations like ADM (Archer Daniels Midland -- the business that earns government subsidies to the tune of $2.85 for every person in the US each year!), Coca-Cola, and BPH -- an (I think Australian?) mining company. I mention this because it's so easy to become quite angry with these businesses when you look at it from a whole systems perspective and see the damage they are doing... And at the same time, it's important to remember that it is intelligent people that are running these companies, and that they are only doing what is best for the situation that they are operating in -- a situation in which they are first and foremost responsible to shareholders to earn the best return on their investments.

As I think this through, I begin to realize that if people are going to act in their own best interest, then we need to find a way to help people realize what really is in their best interest... For the LONG term. It seems like influencing laws and regulations might be a key way to do that -- to adjust subsidies and taxes to encourage businesses directly or indirectly to work in a way that will allow us to be around for the long term. And since the government is the body that sets these laws, regulations, taxes, and subsidies... Perhaps the government is the leverage point. And the governement is - at least in the US - made of the people, right? It's this systems perspective -- this idea that things operate in a circle rather than a line -- that makes it so challenging to know where and how best to intervene.

There are several morales in this story... the most important, however, I continue to learn the hard way: that the vast majority of people aren't silly, but rather they are operating in ways that they believe to be in their own self-interest. It's kind of like with traffic -- we have traffic jams because people want to drive the speed at which they are most comfortable... and it may range from 40 to 80 mph... Even though we would have far fewer traffic jams and accidents if everyone would drive 55. If you're in a helicopter looking down at traffic during rush hour, you see how silly it is...but you don't have much control over it. Looking at the way people treat the earth - and each other - is much the same: when you take time to step back and think and begin to undertand, you realize how silly so much of what we do really is... but people are habitual creatures, and it's so hard to change.

Someday I'm going to make some great diagrams and analogies that explain this all much more clearly. For now... You'll just have to do the best you can to undertstand my pieced-together thoughts.