Thank you, Steve. Well, thank you for coming.
I was feeling pretty good about this until Steve then mentioned that I'm going to read the paper.
This is more a collection of thoughts that have come out of the work that I do around business
and its relationship to climate change and other basic challenges of the 21st century.
And for anybody that has taken an interest in climate change, sustainability, resource constrained economies and all these things,
it will be quite apparent that there is a strong ethical dimension to this, or at least the issues are often portrayed in an ethical way.
The title, the intriguing title.
One of the strange things about business, I think, is this love hate relationship that we have developed with it on the one hand.
Obviously, we look to business to provide goods and services.
Sometimes we get very worked up about the idea that the private sector is going to provide public goods.
The current debate around the reform of the National Health Service or the current debate around the Big Society is an example of this.
Why are these things being privatised? Do they need to be privatised?
What does the private sector offer and always think?
I'm currently preparing my panel for the march on March 26th, and it does occur to me that we were not to blame.
It was the public sector that was to blame, and yet it was the private sector that was to blame.
And yet we are being asked to embrace more and more the private sector.
So we have this kind of thing of we do we love business.
We love the things that it brings. We love the shops. We love the fact that the electricity arrives on time.
We love the fact that that we can move around transport wise.
We love the fact that we can communicate with each other very freely.
We like the innovations that the private sector brings and so on and so forth.
Even indeed, despite certain things going wrong with the financial sector, certain fundamental things going well with financial sector,
we do actually like the fact that the banking system doesn't lose our money incredibly often, certainly not as often as it historically did.
So we have this very ambivalent relationship now.
There's two things behind Mr. Burns here, that interest trade.
One is the idea that this this gentleman, this Scott millionaire is so rich.
How on earth could he possibly be a normal person?
Would it actually represent is how much money I would have if I had a dollar for every time I have said I work in business ethics and people say,
isn't that a tautology? I would be a very rich person indeed.
But there is a field. There is a long established field of business ethics.
And I'm just going to. In order to understand what the challenges of the 21st century,
I want to give a bit of a backdrop to how business ethics itself has been interpreted and how it has evolved.
So one meaning the way we talk about business ethics is that there are objective ethical perspectives on business itself.
They can be pro business. I love capitalism.
Just look at what growth brings to our society.
Or it can be very anti-business. With the protests, protests against capitalism many times.
Many of you will remember the riots in Seattle in the late nineties, early 2000s.
This whole movement against the World Trade Organisation and the whole idea that the one
functioning governance body that we have for a globalised era is the World Trade Organisation,
which seems to be putting, putting a flag in the sand that says what we value above all is, is business.
A business pretty much is used interchangeably with capitalism.
I mean, business itself actually is very resilient to different political economic systems.
So you do have business tree capitalism.
Obviously, you have business working quite successfully under national socialism and so on and so forth.
But by and large, what I'm talking here, I am talking about business within the capitalist system.
The second meaning is the idea that business is made up of individuals.
And individuals are moral beings. They bring in particular values.
They often feel very uncomfortable. When I am teaching business ethics to business school students.
One of the things that comes across is they are very uncomfortable about, as they put it,
talking their values in and outside the building whenever they go into work.
And so as individuals with an ethical perspective, taking those ethical perspectives into the business environment,
not surprising they would draw on established ethical theories,
whether that be Aristotle or John Stuart Mill, John Rolls or any other of the systems that they are part of.
And this we see this in practice.
We see this panning out in a number of different circumstances. We see Bernie Madoff, the the American guy behind the biggest Ponzi scheme ever.
Here he is being arrested as an individual acting unethically and that not just the law, but society as a whole condemns that kind of practice,
even at the same time as it praises and encourages the kind of entrepreneurship, the kind of rush for wealth that Madoff symbolises.
This is the gentleman behind Polly Pick in a similar situation.
And it's not just about people being caught out. It's also people taking a moral stand.
So this lady here was the woman who blew the whistle on Enron.
This is the lady who blew the whistle on WorldCom.
People taking an ethical stand that goes against the interests of these businesses.
Moving on from that, within ethical theory, we find that we know from the ethics of individuals to then say,
well, we can aggregate ethical individuals and that becomes the ethics of the business itself.
So rather than think of who I am as a whistle blower,
that somehow all the ethical values that we bring into the workplace here and that silhouette is meant to be a factory.
Each of us brings in our ethics, and so the workplace becomes a forum, a context within ethical, within which ethical issues are played out.
And out of that, we have an ethics emerging that is not simply the ethic of an individual,
but it's something that is the result of the aggregate of individual ethics.
So we have coming from that,
we have organisations making statements about their ethical stance as we treat others as we would like to be treated as such.
We do not tolerate abusive and disrespectful treatment.
Ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don't belong here.
The kind of thing that clearly makes a very strong stand about the values of business and the idea what company companies.
It was annual that was in its statement in the year that they won the Corporate Responsibility Award,
which is the most corporately responsible company in the world.
And that was the year before they became the biggest bankruptcy in history.
So I don't believe what you read necessarily. But companies do have these strong statements.
And what this symbolises I mean, clearly, this is a lot of B.S.,
But what it does symbolises the feeling within companies that you do have to make to speak out an ethical space.
And that leads us into the fact that business becomes a forum, a field where power,
responsibility and duty relationship between means and ends and business.
Business is purpose. Purpose. All of these things play out.
But it's not simply I go into business or league.
I go into the university and I have my values.
But that the ethical space, the ethical context, the subset of society of business is a is a moral agreement,
which, as with any societal more moral arena, does not mean that it is always 100% ethical.
What I mean here is a moral arena is a space where these things are played out.
Coming from that. We have the fourth mainland.
That business itself wants to be recognised as a moral and ethical entity.
This is a very strong argument, particularly in the US.
It's become a strong argument in the US, partly because because of this gentleman and partly because Amendment 14 to the American Constitution.
Which was about guaranteeing the rights of slaves.
That property could not be seized. That has been taken by business itself to say we have rights, we should be treated as an ethical being.
We can dispose of of what we own prior to that in the States.
Also in Europe. The idea was that business would often chartered East India Company would be an example of that.
It was chartered to do certain things, it had certain functions and at the end of its charter that organisation, that company ceased to exist.
So you didn't have a company like Unilever or a company like Cadbury that went on in perpetuity.
You had companies that were limited by charter to perform certain functions for a limited amount of time.
So a classic example of that was the rights to operate turnpikes on roads, and you have that permission for a certain time.
You owned the turnpike on the road. You could collect the revenue for that, but that was all you could do.
With the Dred Scott case. This is this is the man that was at the point of this was with the Dred Scott case.
What it said was. When it was when it was repealed, what it said was the people have the right to dispose of their.
Dispose of their goods. And so for companies, suddenly they picked up on this and they said, well, you know what, we're going to look at it,
we're going to follow the story, and we are going to we are going to have to be treated as individuals.
And the fear of the difference between that is that whereas I as a person, I have the right to own things.
I have the right to free speech, if I have the right to vote in elections and so on and so forth.
These are all rights and responsibilities the companies themselves do not have in the States.
But you see it filtering through in Europe and elsewhere.
It's very noticeable in the States. You have this idea that's been going on really since the 1800s of fighting for the
rights for companies to be recognised as ethical entities in their own right.
And the fear that is out of this, you get some kind of Frankenstein monster.
But the consequences of this today are that.
A company like BP. Regardless of the individuals, a company like BP becomes liable for its actions as a cover entity.
This, by the way, was a genuine BP advertising slogan.
Google in China. Google has said it has got into, well,
making the announcement that it would withdraw from China because the government was insisting
that it hand over confidential information and not confidential information to Google,
but confidential information about Google's users. And Google made the stance that this was immoral.
Google took that stance as an as an ethical entity.
Google famously has the slogan Do No Evil.
Nike is a very interesting one.
This is Nike swoosh, because Nike actually ended up in the Supreme Court on an issue about whether a corporation is an Achilles heel.
The way it did this was a case called Kashi versus Nike.
This was in the mid 2000.
It began in the California Supreme Court before that.
What it was, was that Nike?
Nike was produced. Nike was involved. So let me take a step back.
Anybody that knows about the history of Nike will know that Nike was under great
pressure because the production of its sports shoes from the early 1990s onwards.
There was allegations about child labour, particularly about very low wage labour in countries like Indonesia.
Nike first denied this was happening, but over a period of time,
Nike began to try and take these things seriously and in its corporate responsibility report, which came out alongside its corporate report.
So it's got it was intended for the shareholders.
It said we are combating and abusive labour practices in the factories that produce
for us and we have succeeded in raising workers wages and bringing out child labour,
forcing out child labour, Marchesi said. No, you didn't.
Here is the truth. There is still child labour in these factories.
There is still workers working for less than the minimum wage, and he can prove it.
So he said this was false advertising.
Nike responded and said it wasn't advertising.
It was free speech. And with free speech you can say whatever you want.
It doesn't matter whether it's true or not.
Until that point, corporations have not asked to be considered ethical entities with the right to free speech.
This was the first time the case eventually went up to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court sent it back to the California court and Nike settled out of court.
So the whole thing was not resolved, I think, to the chagrin of a lot of people in corporations who actually wanted a solid ruling.
But the point here is that it's part of this trend for companies to be seen not as the aggregation of the ethics of individuals,
but to be ethical entities in their own right.
And that goes back to the Dred Scott case.
From that, we see people like R.G. Kowal coming up with, okay, how can we define business as an ethical and ethical entity?
What are the different parts of that ethic?
So like Cheeto came up with the pyramid of corporate responsibility, and it's got these four components.
You've got economic responsibilities, the responsibility to produce goods and services that society wants at a profit for investors.
That's one dimension to that ethic. You've got legal compliance.
You've got to obey the law. You've got the ethical responsibility which goes beyond the legal, that goes beyond the economics.
And it says you've got certain obligations as a corporation to be a good citizen.
And then you've got discretionary ones which boil down to philanthropy and how
much money you're going to give Oxford University for that chair in business,
ethics is important. The audience that knows anyone that would like to endowed chair in business ethics.
I'm available. And so out of this, we come back to with business emerging as an ethical entity in itself of the last hundred years of law.
What form of ethics, what moral system are we actually talking about?
And there's a lot of books you can go and find. You can go and find the Aristotle, Aristotelian perspective on business ethics.
You can go and find Descartes on business ethics.
Know not Descartes wrote himself about.
So can you help writing himself about business ethics, about the Kantian perspective on business ethics and so on and so forth.
But really the one that stands up, if you think of business as an ethical entity, really the only one that stands up is utilitarianism.
It's. I'm out because you see that there are these moral values that are inherent in business, in business, in a modern capitalist society.
Some of these are reflected in law. Some of them are reflected in company law.
Some of them are norms. Some of them are about to do with businesses license to operate.
But put them all together. And they become the system.
The duty to generate jobs, wealth and products.
It's a very, very much about an end result.
It's not about everybody.
It's not as if you haven't got the you have you couldn't really introduce a rules in perspective into that.
Even even if you were talking about Maxim, I actually mean the duty to obey the law, the right to extract to profit,
the right to own and dispose of assets to rights, commoditized goods, products and labour.
I mean, this is this is particularly important one, not often a very stated one.
And we business ethicists love to talk about behaviours.
They're almost fearful of talking about things like this, whether this is actually an acceptable right.
So when it comes to the head, this comes to the head as a more as a business society type thing.
So you have well,
if I've got the I feel I have this right as a business to to commoditize products and to put what's inside the example of commoditized labour.
So I pay you your wages. Once you've paid your wages, you're not beholden to me.
I'm not beholden to you. I can sack you. I've got no longer term responsibility, at least under the law.
Or there might be certain things about a lot of periods.
And but essentially I can treat you as labour, as a commodity.
It's a very Marxian idea of what commoditization is.
We don't question that.
You will hear on the news almost every day that whether we are talking about the A or the Royal Mail, the Royal Mail is in conflict with its workers.
What do we mean by the road map? Well, we've made these courses for the newspaper.
So, yes, Royal Mail management is in conflict with its workforce.
It's never presented work that is presented as Royal Mail.
Being the company is in conflict with these workers,
which de facto in that statement and in the common way that we look at things, the workers are not part of that company.
They are a commodity that can be disposed of. You can lay them off.
You can move the factory overseas and so on and so forth.
And in fact, you may be punished by your shareholders if you do not do that.
Now from this, what we are seeing with this is very much the ethics of neoliberal capitalism,
whether we're talking about Nozick, whether we're talking about Ayn Rand,
and it's summed up by Milton Friedman, The only social responsibility of a law abiding business is to maximise shareholder profits.
In fact, I was listening to the radio yesterday and there was somebody on the radio from
the interview perspective on the radio who presented this to somebody they were
interviewing as a statement of fact that this was the only possible thing that you
could ever think about with faxes in business schools and in senior management,
in business itself. There's a lot of questioning about whether this is accurate anymore, not in terms of common thinking about business.
This is still a very common way of thinking.
This these ideas, one, two, three have become the norm of the way that we think about business, particularly in most of the OECD countries.
So there is there are differences in Continental here. I am talking quite a lot about the the Anglo-Saxon model and.
And what that leads us to is this kind of the fifth meaning that capitalism itself is a moral construct.
If we go back to meaning one business is seen as something that is is morally judged by society,
it's either very good or it's very bad or something in the middle.
But actually, capitalism itself is a moral construct of the meaning of life and business.
Within that is, as Drucker called it, the representative institution.
And the conditions of that neoliberal capitalism under that is that growth is essential,
competition is essential, free flow of capital trade, labour is essential, and the rule of law is essential.
Those are two things that you've got to have in order to deliver that that idea of capitalism.
These are the absolute must haves. So that brings us nicely, if you like, to the end of the 20th century.
That was pretty much if you looked at any books on business ethics up until 2000, that's pretty much the perspective that you get.
You would have one of those five main interpretations of what business ethics was.
So now let's look from the C-suite where where all the executives hang out.
Let's have a look at what they're looking at today. We've seen in recent times a lot of discussion about water.
And this is just a quick diagram of the changing water availability and the red bits mean extreme stress to hear of.
It's high stress. You can see if you go from 1960s.
2020 is predictions for the 25th is more and more water stress.
You are sitting in business. You are not really worried about the idea of a finite planet.
This is one of the examples where a finite planet is affecting everyone and it is affecting business.
It is affecting business because just look at what's happening with the floods.
Well, you know, when we talk about the floods in Australia and so on recently, but this this is not one off.
It's not the kind of thing you can instantly attach to a very recent climate change.
It's some. It's a trend that has been going on since 1950s.
Always upwards, always upwards. More and more and more flood events.
And that's something that for a business that is very dependent on stable supply chains, very dependent on the growth of urban areas.
This is something that is going to matter to you as an executive.
It is said that Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-Mart,
the thing that got him thinking about sustainability was Katrina and the and the floods that have been.
And that's one of a number of changes in our ecosystem that you are observing from the C-suite.
You're also looking at the demographic change,
the fact that we've gone from two and a half billion people in 1950 through to where are we now, 6.1 billion today and a projected 9 billion.
And so 9 billion and change by 2050 is thinking about that.
What does it mean for me as a business? Right. If opportunity, lots more people are going to go out and don't go out and buy my widgets.
Is that good news? Well, now, hang on. Where are those people going to be?
Are they going to want the same widgets? Am I going to get enough raw materials?
My widgets, because my widgets growing,
the raw materials come from farmlands and people are starting to move into the farmland and so on and so forth.
And this is one of the big changes is that my markets are going to shift into much more in the developing countries.
The population growth is here in the developing world.
It's not here in the markets that I understand.
These are now saturated markets and they're not going to get any bigger.
Here is where my growth is going to be. But a lot of those people there are going to be relatively poor.
A lot of them are going to be on less than 2.9 billion people on less than $2.
A lot of them may not want to go out and buy my widgets and so on.
And so it's a change. I won't go into the details of what that change means, but it's a change.
Here from my perspective, but I don't think I'm completely off the wall in this my perspective.
This is the biggest change. Here we are today.
Greenhouse gas pollution, tons of CO2 or equivalent emissions per year.
And you know the famous things Australia, the United States, Canada,
all off the charts with only the slim hope that, hey, we're not doing quite as badly as United Arab Emirates.
So you've got this about 25 tonnes of emissions per year.
And then you've got places like India, India, China saying, hey, we want to make more.
We want to be up here as well. Either these guys are going to come down or we're going to go up.
We want to work. You know, we would make more. And yet all these scientists to say emissions are a bad thing.
Well, the fact is, if we were to allocate a budget for carbon emissions, it would happen in order to avoid catastrophic climate change.
It would have to be about five gigatons of an across the board spread across.
Everybody in this room would get there five gigatons.
So for the space, you're going to go from 25 down to five.
Between now and some people still say between now and 2050.
Realistically, we're probably now talking about 2040. Do you got to do that?
But also China, all its aspirations, India, all its aspirations can only go up that much.
They've got about one. You get some surprising.
So here you are. You've got your markets growing here. This is where you're going to be.
But they can't wait more.
And put that in another way.
If all the world this is what illumined luminosity in 1996 and you can see lots of the lights on in the States, lots of lights on in Britain.
You can see that we are in Oxford. How lights on that and not too many lights on in Indonesia over here quite a lot.
And in Japan, what if all the world was to be as luminous of America?
This is what it would look like. How do you get the energy to do that?
Put that another way. This is our carbon intensity.
The so the emissions that we have for GDP per dollar of GDP, and this is what it was in 2007.
Carbon intensity goes carbon emissions by per dollar.
And here we are. The world average is 7.768 grams.
UK we are 347. Japan did a little bit better 244 if all the world just carried on with its trend income growth.
So no closing of income gaps, just carrying on with trend income growth.
We would have to get that carbon intensity down to 36 grams per person.
If everybody in the world does 9 billion people by 2050, we're going to be have the same incomes, the same standard of living as we do in the EU.
We've got to get back down to six grams.
You get confused in the numbers, get confused about whether climate change is real, get confused about anything.
But if you are in business, if you are in the C-suite, this is something you have never had to face before,
that you are going to grow as a company because all you can do is grow.
And that's what we will have to do. You're going to grow and your at the same time,
you're going to have to get your consumers reducing their carbon intensity by astronomical amounts by 2050.
So if you're in the C-suite in 2010, you've got the old values of corporate growth, shareholder value, obey the law, meet customer needs.
This is where it gets interesting because now you are doing that.
You're looking for prosperity in a resource constrained economy.
You're looking at success in emerging and poor markets where you may not have had to really focus before.
You're looking what to do to establish a license to operate when the legal infrastructure is weak.
One of the things that Milton Friedman says is companies should go out and make profits within the boundaries of the law in a global society.
The difference is in the strength of sovereign law.
I'm going to be very clear today. And so you are going to very often going be have to maintain standards, even though the law itself is weak,
because if you don't, then activists, other governments will be and you might do bad things in Ecuador.
You get away with it because the law says this.
But some smart American lawyer is going to have you in court in New York, and you've also got the public desire for more Medicaid services.
Now, historically, this is where we were.
This was our conventional. This is the external environment.
We the business is you. So far, the growth goes up, carbon goes up, price goes up, com goes up.
Where we are now is the hope that growth will keep going up.
Carbon comes down. The problem becomes that as carbon comes down, what on earth happens to us?
So what we're betting on at the moment is this that we can decouple economic growth.
Well, carbon growth. Well, this may be the other.
This one doesn't exist anymore. You've written that off as a business,
yet this is the one that you were most used to you when you went to management school as a as a as a as a budding executive.
You and when you went became part of the private sector.
You had a political, legal, technological, social, economic system that all supported a strategy of growth.
And everybody Council of Government said you were doing the right thing.
The public say you were doing the right thing. A few people [INAUDIBLE] and bombed about it,
but generally everything was bubbling along because what was happening internally was congruent with the external environment.
And he's got this thing bouncing. I think this would also remain true if we managed to do this.
Well, this goes up. This comes down essentially. That is that is the the big bet that is being made on geoengineering that we can
carry on the way that we're living because we will come up with something really,
really smart technologically. That means that we can keep on spending carbon markets going out of fashion.
Then we can carry on. The external environment doesn't really shift.
There are certain things that shift, but it's not a major shift. Everything remains congruent.
But the real question is what happens when our external environment moves because of resource constraint,
because we don't find that geo engineering solution, because of demographic shift, because of ecosystem shift, with the growth in floods,
the shortages of food, the food crisis, the food prices and so on and so forth.
The this has moved over here. And yet we have political, legal, technological, social, economic system that really still is focussed on this.
So it's this is not followed the changing external environment, in which case Australia, your growth then just starts to spiral out of control.
So what does business do in that kind of situation? Well, it could look to government to provide leadership.
So we've got two very green oriented leaders here.
Any idea who the top one of the bottom lines of the negative.
Which one? But someone. The Governator has got to be on Schwarzenegger.
So one can really help Cameron. This was what they said afterwards.
The forensic, relentless focus on growth is what you will get from this government.
I always want to see cranes everywhere. 70%, 25%, which is the 75% I want a have.
This is my last year. Well from New York, I take that.
Yeah, pretty much. Huh. You get the picture? Urban planning applications, wind farms.
The thing that we're all talking about, this is the thing that's going to save us. 25% of those applications were approved.
There's a great part. Anybody that wants to go on this trip this summer, they go out to Horse Path.
The road between Wheatley and Horsepower,
I think is brilliant because you come down this hill and there's all these signs that say, Please, no windmills in horsepower.
These little signs point about something when you see this and it's great and you come downhill.
The backdrop for this is pylons. Pylons, as far as the eye can see,
the people for most are defending the right to have pylons because pylons are aesthetically pleasing the wind farms.
Sorry, that was a complete diversion, I think. Just you wonder sometimes.
But we are happy to have applications from other supermarkets and other major infrastructure which has no green component.
So what was this? Any idea? This was a site I'll give you to give you a bit of background that this conference was the theme of the conference.
Big Society could be. The Big Society are on the right path of who does it.
It was the Conservative Party conference. Green Growth.
Please find any thing there that is about Green. I challenge you.
Child benefit, government costs. Benefits.
Osborne There was no mention.
In fact, there is a great sign tucked away on Google somewhere where this is actually a little film clip where this journalist goes and looks for the
green growth part and comes to a little room at the back of the Conservative Party conference and it says Councils Green Growth Council.
So we've got this situation here where we've got to get from somewhere like this down to somewhere like this,
actually down to that if we're going to have an equal kind of distribution and that's the situation, where are we going to do that?
Are we going to get to decarbonisation 2000?
The goal was to decarbonise 2% per annum. We achieved 2.8% per annum from 2000 until about 2007.
Who? So we missed it by 1.2, let's say about this, the equivalent of 13.4 gigatons.
So basically, if you've got China and the USA to turn off all their lights for a year, we can play catch up.
That's all it would take. Just get them to turn the lights off.
That meant the way we came into 2008, we had a goal of 3.4%.
We didn't achieve it despite the recession. The target now, the latest two figures, and these are the figures from PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The latest figures are that we would need to decarbonise at 3.8% to avoid exceeding 450 parts per million of emissions.
450 parts per million is the cut off point for most people between manageable carbon change, climate change and catastrophic climate change.
We have wasted ten years again coming back to so that.
So maybe if government isn't there to sort this out, maybe technology, maybe people will invest in this post-COVID.
You know, when the numbers get really, really, really big and they are talking billions and you just lose all sense.
This is my new denomination of currency.
This is the parts of Caribbean three past. Caribbean three has a budget of $300 million.
That is exactly the same as the amount of money that Britain is going to invest in new forms of alternative energy.
Our commitment as a country is the same as the budget for the poorest Caribbean three.
Kind of weak, isn't it? So the.
So there is, I think, a good argument to say we're in this bin.
We don't know what's going to happen with that growth. We are in a situation where we are in conflict with our external environment because
we're asking business to carry on doing all this stuff to maintain its old values.
And yet we're not providing any solution about how it can grow, what the impacts of free flow of capital, trade and labour is going to be.
And we're not finding any solution about how to create a rule of law, at least business on its own.
In wrestling these big, big challenges for the 21st century.
And that brings us to meaning six, which is really to be determined are we going to have a future for business of prosperity without growth?
And if you read the books of Tim Jackson, for instance, you will see that.
Bill McKibben They talk about that. What we have why is growth?
We growth is invested in things that help society rather than is simply about consumption no matter what.
Are we going to redefine the corporate purpose in the way that, say,
fair trade or social enterprise wants to be, where the emphasis is not on profits.
It's about using the management practice and the thinking of business, but for social, environmental purposes.
Or are we going to get into something like engineered spending, the anathema to the neoliberal,
so that you will find ways of controlling or engineering the consumer spend?
It's not about reining it back. It's saying spend on some things and not on others.
And so somebody like one of our local franc in luxury thing that talks about consumption taxes,
a lot of talk about consumption tax cuts in the right wing and the left when a lot of economists on both sides actually like consumption tax,
but politicians hate it. If we come back to our C-suite, it means each of these are possible horizons for business.
None of them are very comfortable.
The business is seen as inherently unethical moving forward because it defends this old paradigm that is not congruent with the external environment.
That business becomes some kind of ethical leader in taking on these challenges.
It comes at the forefront of the new paradigm. Business becomes a follower of a new emerging form of ethics, whatever that may be,
in which case, followership or business is a representative institution of the new paradigm.
The business plays a central role because governments and other institutions are not up to the challenge.
It is likely to be one of these or a mix of these that they are all there to play because there is no clear.
We are really at a stage of of uncertainty and a very great deal of confusion about how to move forward.
One thing is for sure is that what we are trying to do at the moment is the equivalent of rolling the dice in an attempt to win a cricket match.
We are simply playing the wrong set of games in order to try and win the game that we think we're playing.
It's never going to happen.