When I decided to start my sustainable marketing consultancy Semiosis Communications, I consulted with a friend who has an MBA and is running a small business. My main concern was that even though I had a business degree and marketing experience in a variety of organizations, I had no experience running my own business in the United States. She said it was easy: the only thing to always keep in mind is, “Revenues must exceed expenses”.
Before becoming a university building facilities manager, my uncle Frank had owned a landscaping business for more than 20 years. He said landscaping is easy: the only thing you have to remember is, “Green side up”.
I may be stretching it a bit here, but it seems that in guiding human relations all major religions share one rule human relations, which is a variation of, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
These are what I call “the one rule”: an entire body of knowledge and experience in a field or discipline boiled down to five or less words that express its essence. I’ve been thinking for a while what the one rule of sustainability could be. I thought it would be more fun to pinpoint it through crowdsourcing.
So I hereby issue a challenge to you, dear Sustainable Marketing Blog reader:
What is the one rule of sustainability?
As with the above examples, the one rule must contain five words or less and express the irreducible essence of sustainability. After I collect a dozen great responses, I’ll create a poll and submit the definitions rules to a vote. The winner gets the cred of coining the one rule of sustainability.
Happy definition rule crafting!
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Image credit: danarjordan
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Update 10/21/09: Read the follow up post, “Report: The one rule of sustainability challenge” or the list of all submissions.
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@All: Thanks, everyone, for your contribution. The challenge garnered more than 160 comments (and counting), both here and on LinkedIn groups. I report on the challenge in a follow up post:
http://www.semiosiscommunications.com/report-sustainability-rule-challenge/
from Linear to Circular
1) “There are NO simple rules!”
Sustainability is about managing complexity. One size can’t fit all.
2) “Collaborate or Die”
No single entity has all the answers. Sustainability practicioners must do better at pooling scarce resources.
(This is a good one for small business to remember also.)
“In the aggregate, resource integration.”
Every place, every time exists within its own set of standards and complexity. In order for sustainability to exist, every place, every time must be carefully studied and evaluated for potential systems that will help in the decision making process. True sustainability can never exist. Systems evolve. So anyone attempting to standardize sustainability risks unbalancing the system, which happens in nature all the time. For us (humans) we must create “actions and constructs” that will have adaptability.
Resources are not static. Most of the time we don’t ask ourselves what resources we need to acknowledge when attempting to create sustainable “actions and constructs”. More often than not most sustainability professionals only talk about three resources: people, planet and profits. The triple bottom line is simply “too simplistic”.
Let’s list resources (still rather general): natural (both renewable and non-renewable), environmental, economical, cultural, social, civic, political, educational, spiritual, etc. Sustainable models will address each of these resources on a case to case basis and remember that we should not only look forward, but backward. By recognizing trends we can then create adaptable sustainable models.
Hoping to sound not too trite: sustainability is thus holistic.
“Vivo sur Tero daÅru!”
or in English:
“Life on Earth must last!”
It is good that sometimes somebody will ask the question the answer to which is too obvious to be spoken.
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