Sustainable is the new Profitable. Green is the new Digital. Futurist Gerd Leonhard

Hello, this is Gert Leonhardt, Futurist. These are my keynotes as audio podcasts. Enjoy. Sustainability. The circular economy has been around for 30 years. The discussion, the Sustainable Development Goals and on and on. But so far it has been that sustainability is not a major item on the agenda, at least not for most companies. Has become so the last few years. But now we're thinking, if we can make compromises with COVID so that we can get out of this emergency and go forward, can we do the same for climate change? Can we put human benefit in the center of things? Can we have holistic business models? And I think this is the future. Because it doesn't just make sense in terms of the philosophy and in terms of being a humanist, it makes sense for business. It is a business strategy. Milton Friedman has a great quote on this. It takes a crisis to produce real change. And that is so true. We, God knows we have a crisis now. I mean, we can just feel it and we're tired of it, let's be honest. But what happens in the crisis is the ideas that are lying around are going to show our way into the future. And what are those ideas now? Sustainability, solidarity, working together, solving problems, collective benefit. It's really quite clear. Imagine yourself being in therapy, same situation when faced with a disaster or likely demise. We're much more ready to jump and make a reset. And this is what's happening right now. We're ready to say, well, we've done this because we had to survive this crisis. Now we're going to do it for the next one, which is about climate change, global warming. And this is not idealism or altruism or any such thing. This is about progress, about the business model of the future to consider a reset. So this is where my lovely graphic comes in. We are now shaking up the world in terms of priority. What used to be on the top, dropping to the bottom and vice versa. And what used to be on the top, of course, flying, luxury vacations, little bit of sustainability, and of course technology. But what we have now, it's all about technology. It's all about health care, it's all about being well off. It's about remote work, it's about green energy, it's about the state, it's about truly making a difference. And this paradigm shift is encompassing not just consumers, but also businesses, of course, and governments and politicians. Here's the waves of what's happening. The first wave is dealing with COVID and that is really strangulating us right now. And it's also Quite scary where we're thinking about how long will this last and how we're going to go on from this. And here's the other wave, the next one. It's quite clear what's coming here. Climate change. And that wave has been there before, but now it's intensified when we're thinking about what do we have to do to preclude another major disaster, to change the way that we're looking at the world, to change our habits. Let's be clear about this. COVID 19 is a test run for climate change. It is a test run because it's making us ready to make sacrifices to change our lifestyle because we have to and because it is a business. I mean, COVID 19 is a reset of what we're thinking here. If we want sustainable everything, then we have to look at it no longer as an ideology or just a utopian concept, or I think it's a business plan. Not just because we should, but because it works and it makes economic sense. Look at the stats here. 3D printing, part of the same agenda is at the tipping point. Battery prices. Of course, you've seen all these stats, but basically, look at this one. Now we even have a stock exchange that is all about sustainable. The long term stock exchange just launched in San Francisco. I mean, this is clearly a trend where we're saying, wow, maybe now investors will also honor the promise of sustainable everything. So I want to give you some feedback here and some comment from Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, who talks about this a lot. Brilliant stuff. You really have to dive in. It's on YouTube, so take a look. But here it is.

Capitalism. Capitalism is dead. We know that. Just look around. We need a new capitalism. A more fair, more sustainable and more equitable capitalism. A planet pays capitalism, A capitalism that works for every human being. We need a new capitalism, and I call that a stakeholder capitalism. One that values not just shareholders, but also stakeholders. Our employees are stakeholders. Our customers are stakeholders. But our public schools are stakeholders. The homeless in our cities are stakeholders. Our nonprofits and NGOs are also stakeholders.

Pretty powerful message. Capitalism as we know it is dead. A new kind of capitalism has to be grown. And what exactly will that look like? Well, I think going back to what I said earlier, there's three principles of exponential technological change. Convergence, combinatorial products. But these are the future principles built on sustainable capitalism. Those six, print those out and put it on the wall. On the one hand, technology. On the other hand, environment, People, humanity. Human centered approaches. Human benefits. Circular economy. That's called long term thinking. So I think it's quite clear we're heading to a world where this is the economy. This is not just an aberration or wishful. I mean, going Back to Spotify 10 years ago, we thought of the cloud as a wishful exercise and now it's normal. Now it is music. There is no music business really, apart from the cloud. So it's going to be the circular economy. That's what we have to put our money, that's what we have to plan for. It may be more expensive initially, but ultimately it'll be a lot cheaper, especially when we take out the externalities of the previous building.