Comments on: Using critical thinking to benefit human kind (and create killer content)

By: Peter Korchnak

Peter Korchnak — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:37:14 +0000

@Justin: I have been unsubscribing from social media blogs for some time now. After a while, the discourse turned out to be and very much admiring its own reflection in a pool. The few that remain in my Reader represent as wide a spectrum as it gets, as narrow as it may be overall…

Action must, indeed, follow the questioning process. Words without follow through are just rambling. Those jeans must come out of the dryer some time!

Re sustainability: Like a vessel that you fill, the meaning and application of every concept relies on human interpretation. It behooves those who see beyond environmental sustainability to contribute to the record.

@Matt: “Mob mentality of sustainability” – nice! I, too, see business put in the bad guys corner when it comes to advancing sustainability. However, I believe business has a central and strategic role to play in the big scheme of things; without business, sustainability will be just a movement.

By: Justin Kownacki

Justin Kownacki — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:36:53 +0000

I think the term “sustainability” has become synonymous with “minimizing environmental impact.” Lost in the equation is the pert where the venture itself needs to be sustainable, and that involves countless variables that have nothing to do with the literal size of one’s ecological impact. The trick is in getting people to look beyond the entry point of a complex concept and helping them to understand the entirety of what that concept entails. And in this bite-sized attention span economy, you have your work cut out for you.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:43:35 +0000

Great post. I am trying to build a practice of strategic CSR consulting and it’s really difficult to fight the mob mentality of sustainability. To me, sustainability means a lot more than impact but that’s definitely not commonplace. It’s not business vs. the environment in a cage match; they must work together. CSR should be strategic for brands to follow it in the long-term beyond any flash-in-the-pan, non-strategic, purely reputational benefits.

Anyways, nice post.

By: Justin Kownacki

Justin Kownacki — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:32:01 +0000

I think you’re close: every field or industry isn’t high school all over again; it’s college. Instead of petty cliques, you have proactive rivalries among self-contained choirs.

In all fields, you need divergent opinions in order to propel the conversation — and the resulting actions — forward. But because social media is such a homogeneous group from end to end (minus the MLM crowd), it’s hard to generate the kind of productive discourse that leads opposing sides of the same issue to generate enough velocity via action to prove their points. Instead, too many practitioners attempt to please (and agree with) the hierarchy, in the hopes that trickle-down popularity — rather than separatist opinions — will make them successful.

Question everything? Sure. But sooner or later, you need to convert your questions into a line of action, and hope that at least some of the old choir (but not all of them) follows.