Is Business Innovation Itself Sustainable?
Harvard biologist, Edward O. Wilson, once wrote, "Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself." Indeed, intelligence often makes it possible for falsity to pass for knowledge. For with intelligence comes the ability to define truth in more than one way and to rationalize error. Could that account, then, for the unsustainable and self-destructive course of human affairs? We think so, but only in the hands of an institution with overwhelming influence on Earth.
Corporations now represent over half the world's largest economies; sales of the largest 500 companies in the world now account for two-thirds of global trade. Business has become the dominant human institution on Earth, consuming resources and producing wastes like no other.
In epistemological terms, the prevailing basis for knowledge in business is notoriously invalid. What passes for truth in commerce frequently has more to do with power and authority than with correspondence to facts. Knowledge in business is too often determined by managerial command and control, which inappropriately creeps into learning and innovation where it does not belong.
What we get, then, is exactly what we deserve. Unsustainable behaviors and outcomes taken by organizations whose patterns of learning and innovation are, themselves, unsustainable. Only when we manage to cure the latter can we expect to see progress in the former.
