See? Even the economists are doing it.

Encouraging responsible economic growth, that is. In the May 28 edition of Business Week, Clayton M. Christensen (professor at Harvard B-School) and Scott D. Anthony (president of Innosight, a consulting firm) urge managers to shift away from paradigms that maximize profits for shareholders in the short term, to ones that focus on responsibly growing the companies in the long term.

Christensen and Anthony advise managers to tell people who hold their company's shares:
"You are investors and speculators, not shareholders, and you temporarily find yourselves holding the securities of our company. You are responsible for maximizing the returns on your investments. Our responsibility is to maximize the long-term value of this company. We will therefore act in the interest of those whose interests coincide with our long-term prospects, namely employees, customers, the communities in which our employees live, and the minority of investors who plan to hold our securities for several years."

They continue:
Well-intentioned, smart managers are systematically destroying companies by failing to take actions they know are right in the long term. . . managers should find ways to reward investors and stakeholders who want innovation, not plunder.

Kudos to them.

Still relevant almost 60 years later

I'm reading A Sand County Almanac this week. It's my dad's copy, which has a short poem penciled in the front to my dad from an old girlfriend of his. But what I really wanted to share is this paragraph written by Aldo Leopold in 1948 in the introduction.

Our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the tap. Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

And from the Center for a New American Dream, a page of ideas on living better, with less stuff.

http://www.newdream.org/live/