Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money.

—Chief Seattle, leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish people

BLACK FRIDAY, THE FRIDAY after Thanksgiving in the United States, is the traditional kickoff of the Christmas shopping season, which accounts for 20 percent of most retailers' annual sales. With the average American spending approximately $1,050 on gifts, the competition to lure customers into one's shop with heavily discounted Black Friday doorbuster specials is intense.¹ By running costly ad campaigns for their reduced price one‐day bargains, stores create a frenzy of rabid consumers lining up and even camping out overnight. Against the backdrop of all this clamoring for a piece of the $7 billion being spent on this one day, imagine the shock readers of the New York Times experienced in 2011 when they saw a full‐page advertisement with the massive headline “Don't Buy This Jacket.”²

Beneath the photo of a Patagonia jacket, the ad read “It's Black Friday, the day in the year retail turns from red to black and starts to make real money. But Black Friday, and the culture of consumption it reflects, puts the economy of natural systems that support all life firmly in the red. We're now using the resources of one‐and‐a‐half planets on our one and only planet.” The ad went on to explain that while Patagonia would like to be in business for a long time, it was more important to leave the world inhabitable for our kids. “We want to do the opposite of every other business today. We ask you to buy less and to reflect before you spend a dime on this jacket or anything else.”

What Patagonia and its founder, billionaire Yvon Chouinard, recognized was that even if its garments were organic or made from recycled materials, each article of clothing they produce emits several times its weight in greenhouse gases, generates at least another half garment's worth of scrap, and draws down copious amounts of fresh water. Chouinard, a committed environmentalist, said that it would be hypocritical to work for environmental change without encouraging consumers to think before they buy.

The R2 jacket in the ad, one of Patagonia's best sellers, uses 135 liters of water to be produced (the equivalent of three glasses a day for 45 people). Its production generated 20 pounds of carbon dioxide and created two‐thirds its weight in waste. By educating their customers, and hopefully all the readers of the New York Times that day, on the true cost of consumerism, Patagonia launched the Common Threads Initiative. The initiative encourages all consumers to reduce, repair, reuse, recycle, and reimagine. Reduce waste by purchasing quality products that last a long time. Patagonia promised to repair any of its gear that may have been broken or damaged from use. The company pledged to find a home for customers' old clothing items and to recycle gear that was worn out, and asked consumers to pledge to keep old stuff out of landfills and incinerators. And the company added one new “R” to the ecology movement – it wanted everyone to reimagine a world where we take only what nature can replace.

More than an attention‐getting stunt, the Don't Buy This Jacket campaign reflected that sustainability was a core value of the company. In 2002, Chouinard founded the 1% for the Planet initiative and became the first business to commit 1 percent of its annual sales to the environment. What Yvon Chouinard recognized is that capitalism as we have known it is broken, and even with his billion‐dollar fortune, he alone can't save the planet. You can't become Future Proof without Future Proofing our world.

Human activity is killing the life on this planet. Dozens of plant and animal species go extinct every day. By 2050, between one third and half of all species on Earth will have vanished.³ Climate change is overheating our world and may cause the sixth mass extinction on the planet. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 20 of the warmest years in recorded history have happened in the past 22 years.⁴ Carbon emissions continue to rise unabated each year and yet the UN Climate report warns that global carbon pollution must be reduced by 50 percent to avoid a catastrophic end to civilization this century.⁵

As more and more consumers awaken to the need for more sustainable business practices, corporations have begun to embrace social responsibility. Unfortunately for many businesses, the more companies make consumers aware of their impact on our environment, the more corporations get blamed for society's failures. The Occupy Wall Street movement grew out of the growing chasm between the needs of the public and the needs of the boardroom. The root of the problem isn't that corporations and their executives are evil villains determined to destroy our planet, but rather, that our current measurement of success, both corporate and personal, is outdated and out of touch with ecological realities. The solution is sustainable capitalism, and businesses from startups to multinationals are rapidly responding to this societal need.

Sustainable Capitalism

Sustainable capitalism is a new paradigm where societies weigh the true cost of a product (resource depletion, environmental impact, etc.) in calculating profitability. In our current form of capitalism, when a company like Hooker Chemical (now known as Occidental Chemical Corporation) dumps 21,800 tons of carcinogenic toxins and chemical byproducts into Love Canal, New York, harming the health of local residents, the US taxpayer pays $400 million to clean up the disaster.⁶ With sustainable capitalism, the lifecycle of everything manufactured – including dealing with the waste it creates – is factored into a product's true cost. This is demonstrated in both large companies and local businesses just getting off the ground, such as when your local sandwich shop stops using plastic containers and straws.

Currently, with shareholders able to move their money instantly to whichever company they perceive to be the most profitable at the moment, CEOs have been forced to maximize for short‐term quarterly profits over any longer‐term societal goals. This profit bubble ignores the well‐being of customers, the depletion of natural resources, and the long‐term economic impact instant gratification is having on all living things. Extending beyond just ecological issues, focusing on short‐term profits also drives down wages and shifts jobs to locations where people are willing to work for an unsustainable wage and further undercuts the buying power of the very customers to whom the company is trying to sell its products. This vicious cycle of cutting costs at any price is unsustainable for people, communities, and the environment. Profit at any cost isn't profiting society.

If modern capitalism isn't broken, then how else can one explain that Walmart's low‐wage employees, who don't earn enough salary to survive, cost taxpayers more than $6.2 billion a year in public assistance such as food stamps and Medicaid. Walmart is just one of many examples of the growing trend of having taxpayers subsidize corporate workforces. “America's fast‐food companies have quietly outsourced a significant chunk of their labor costs to the taxpayer, with more than half of the industry's 3.65 million low‐wage workers on public assistance at a cost of $7 billion each year,” according to Forbes.⁷ A National Employment Law Project report estimates that the 10 largest fast‐food corporations in America are responsible for nearly 60 percent, or $3.8 billion, outlaid by taxpayers for low‐wage workers. “Anyone concerned about the federal deficit only needs to look at this report to understand a major source of the problem: multibillion‐dollar companies that pay poverty wages and then rely on taxpayers to pick up the slack, to the tune of a quarter of a trillion dollars every year in the form of public assistance to working families,” Former Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa explained. “Seven billion of this is just for fast‐food workers, more than half of whom, even working full time, still must rely on programs like food stamps and Medicaid just to make ends meet.”⁸

The solution to this systemic societal problem is perhaps the biggest void or problem that smart entrepreneurs and corporations need to address. Companies must move beyond the attention‐getting public relations focused, but low‐impact, corporate social responsibility programs of today. The next generation of sustainable companies need to evolve their business practices to ones of shared values. Shared value companies understand the need to generate the right kind of profits. Profits that enhance society, not diminish it. As more consumers make conscious choices in their spending, more investors will move their capital to companies whose prosperity is not at the expense of society at large. As capitalism evolves, the definition of value creation must expand beyond short‐term profits.

Purpose‐Driven Profits

Burger King, the fast‐food giant, is a great example of implementing sustainable business practices. As humorous as it may sound, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 14.5 percent of all global greenhouse emissions comes from cattle flatulence (aka cow farts). Recognizing their role in serving 2.4 billion hamburgers each year, Burger King began adding 100 grams of lemongrass to cows' diets, which reduced methane emissions from cattle by 33 percent – a small action with a huge global impact.

In addition to consumers and investors, employees are growing more socially aware about the impact their jobs have on their environment and community. A 2019 poll from Gallup and Bates College highlighted the fact that 95 percent of four‐year college graduates “considered a sense of purpose” important in their work.⁹ “This ‘purpose gap’ is a glaring problem for the younger work force, as millennials place a higher priority on purpose in their lives than previous generations, and they look to work more than other sources to find it,” according to Bates College president A. Clayton Spencer. “The purpose gap is also a challenge for employers because of a strong correlation between employees' purpose and engagement and an organization's bottom line.”¹⁰

Sustainable capitalism isn't driven by marketing needs or charity, but rises from a deeper understanding of what true value creation can be. Sustainable capitalism, powered by a range of new technologies, is fueling innovation across virtually all sectors of business. Consumers are expecting societal and economic costs be thought of if corporations are to maximize true profits.

Kansas‐based startup Greenfield Robotics, of which I am the chairperson, is a personal example of how shared values and technology can address unmet market needs while helping improve our environment. Agriculture, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), accounts for nearly 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.¹¹ To reduce the impact of farming on the environment, many farmers are now switching to no‐till regenerative farming, which lowers greenhouse emissions, conserves water, and increases crop yields per acre. Unfortunately, not tilling the soil leaves farmers no choice but to rely on poisonous herbicides for weed control.

Greenfield Robotics' aim is to use herds of small, autonomous robots to destroy weeds without damaging broad‐acre crops such as wheat, soy, sorghum, and cotton. Much like releasing a herd of goats onto a grassy field, Greenfield's robots use machine vision to direct themselves up and down rows of crops and cut down the weeds so that crops can grow. Using robots‐as‐a‐service is less expensive for farmers than spraying crops and does away with using toxic herbicides such as glyphosate (Roundup) and dicamba, which are hazardous to people, pollinators, wildlife, and aquatic organisms. With over 2 million farmers planting 915 million acres a year, the value created by the company goes far beyond financial profits. Our company motto at Greenfield is “Healthy people, healthy planet.”

In addition to creating awareness around the plants in our lives, rethinking the pet food business also creates new opportunities for sustainable growth. Mars Petcare, the global leader in the pet‐food industry, reimagined its purpose as “a better world for pets.” Looking beyond the pet food aisle, the company began to look at the totality of having a healthy pet. Valuing pet health drove the companies' board to acquire Banfield Pet Hospital as well as BluePearl, VCA, AniCura, and Linnaeus veterinary services. The better world for pets approach transformed Mars Petcare into the largest and fastest‐growing division of Mars Inc.¹²

Similar reimaginings are transforming drug stores into medical clinics to provide end‐to‐end solutions for customers' health. CVS, with nearly 10,000 retail locations, introduced MinuteClinics, where nurse practitioners and physician assistants can perform health screenings, provide wellness services, as well as diagnose and treat minor health conditions. With the US facing a shortage of nearly 122,000 doctors in coming years, diagnostic wearables – think a super Fitbit that monitors a myriad of bodily functions such as glucose levels, heart rate, and blood oxygenation – will launch a new wave of health‐related devices and services that not only improve users lives, but reduce healthcare costs and hospital overcrowding.¹³

The Sharing Economy

The sharing economy is another great example of how corporate values, sustainability, and technology are fueling innovation. Uber and Airbnb are the flagships of the sharing economy. Fewer people will need to own cars as ride sharing becomes ubiquitous. Airbnb makes more efficient use of underutilized existing structures, thereby reducing the need to build more hotels. According to the Brookings Institute, the sharing economy will expand massively from $14 billion in 2014 to a third of a trillion dollars ($335 billion) by 2025.¹⁴ Mobile phones, machine learning, and data analytics enable sharing across a wide range of business sectors from peer‐to‐peer lending, crowdfunding, couch surfing, car‐sharing, co‐working, bartering, talent‐sharing, and even dog walking. What all these new companies have in common is using technology to reduce or reuse our impact on the environment.

Rover connects pet owners with dog sitters, walkers, and doggy daycare providers. Similarly, SitterCity offers caregiver services for kids instead of critters. Reviews and background checks assure the more than 7 million parents using SitterCity that their little ones are in good hands.

JustPark is an innovative parking space sharing company that connects people not using their home or apartment parking space with commuters in congested cities frustrated by limited or costly parking. Apartment tenants make extra income while they are away, or at work, from the over 2 million drivers who use the app.

Instead of begging friends to help you move heavy furniture, paint the living room, or decipher the 40 plus steps to assemble IKEA's Hemnes dresser, TaskRabbit will help you find local experienced labor. The gig economy, as it is commonly referred to, lets people leverage technology to create part‐time or full‐time income.

No part of the sharing economy became more vital during the Covid‐19 pandemic than food delivery services such as DoorDash, GrubHub, UberEats/Postmates, and Caviar, which were used by more than 40 million Americans in 2020. Internationally, Deliveroo, Delivery Hero, Takeaway, DiDi, and Rappi allowed millions more to shelter‐in‐place without starving. The delivery of meals has grown into such a major business that it created an entirely new sustainable sharing business: the ghost kitchen.

Rather than have food couriers waste gasoline driving around to dozens of franchise locations, ghost kitchens are shared spaces in lower rent areas built just for delivery‐only food preparation and can house many restaurant brands under one roof. The concept is so popular that it in turn spawned the creation of virtual restaurant brands such as Califlower Pizza, Ginger Bowls, Krispy Rice, Plant Nation, and F#CK Gluten that actually have no retail locations at all. By leveraging shared commercial kitchens, and not having to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to open a brick‐and‐mortar location, virtual brands are a low‐cost way to keep up with the ever‐evolving consumer palette and test new cuisine concepts before opening a real restaurant. More than 4,500 virtual brands now exist and are reshaping America's $863 billion restaurant industry. Recognizing the symbiotic relationship between delivery services and ghost kitchens, Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick launched startup CloudKitchens to incubate more ghost kitchens.

The sharing economy is more than just sharing resources; it is about sharing values and community. With this philosophy in mind, Camille Rumani and Jean‐Michael Petit created Eatwith. Connecting travelers with every day people that host meals, cooking classes, and food tours, Eatwith builds communities around a culinary experience. The company, which has quickly expanded to over 130 countries, grew out of the founders' frustration of traveling abroad without actually meeting local residents or experiencing local cultures. “We felt very disconnected from the places and the cultures we were visiting so we wanted to create a platform to facilitate the connection between travelers and locals by serving up great food and great company in an intimate atmosphere,” Rumani explains, adding, “I think Eatwith truly empowers women because it helps them tell their stories about who they are, what they want to achieve, their culture and tradition, and their abilities and creativity.”

As the world's population nears 8 billion people, now more than ever, every business needs to focus sharing resources, benefiting the entire community, and building profitable sustainability. If you want to live a purpose‐filled life, what better goal to guide your career is there than saving the planet? To help align your personal goals with those of your business and society at large, one should ask these four questions when creating or managing a sustainable business.

Four Questions for Creating Sustainability