Bruce Piasecki is a NYTimes bestselling author, and organizational innovator. As founder of AHC Group, Inc. a global management consulting firm advising major corporations on social response capitalism, sustainability, and innovation, he has worked for over a third of the Fortune 500 in change management, including BP, Merck, and Toyota. Piasecki has been an agent of climate solutions for over 40 years. He’s also co-founder of the Creative Force Foundation which annually awards young authors writing on business and society issues.
Corporate Environmental Strategy, 1995
George Orwell is a supreme writer. He experimented with many genres—essays, letters, broadcasts—in a lifelong effort to communicate the importance of political choice. Orwell’s dual emphasis—on literary form and political ideals—gives all his work special power and the tension of honesty.
Today, on the environmental front, we need environmental essays, which like an Orwell parable, cut through the blinding complexities that cloud our understanding. What Orwell achieved in his fight against totalitarianism, this book attempts by challenging many of the popular assumptions grounding our government, corporations, and activists. Reform is needed, but it must be suffused with vision and direction to make sense. The method chose in Corporate Environmental Strategy: The Avalanche of Change Since Bhopal, is dramatic case study, which like an essay can prove representative details that, when collected, offer a guiding sensibility that interprets historic change.
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World Inc, First edition, 2007
On Competition and Social Needs
There is something incredibly rapid and shocking about global consolidation. When one company merges with another, they grow exponentially overnight. We see it happen all the time, but we do not know exactly what it means.
I once shared a five-minute elevator ride with a senator in Washington before a key session of Congress. As we discussed the global phenomenon, he said: ‘Certainly, the seven sisters—the world’s largest oil players—must be doing something right to get that big. It could not just be there love of debt, their faith in complex technologies, and their thirst to span the globe. They must be doing something right, don’t you think?’
I have been pondering that question for ten years now. There are only five oil giants left standing, so not all do it exactly right. Yet, overall, is this rapid expanse of companies a results of doing things right? And by ‘right’, what exactly is meant: right for the environment, right for people of all means, right for the profitability of the owners at any cost to others? Is the growth of these companies good or bad for our world and those who live in it? Consider these facts:
Fifty-one of the one hundred largest economies in the world are now corporations, not nation states.
They are massive mansions unto themselves that have great political leverage….
6. Only twenty-one nations have gross domestic product markets larger than the annual sales revenues of each of the six largest multinational corporations like Microsoft, Wal-Mart and Unilever.”
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After ten foreign editions of World Inc, Sourcebook Publishing releases an updated edition as The Surprising Solution with a new introduction by Darryl Poole. In it, I write an introduction:
I have been humbled by the way people perceive World Inc. Some see it as a guidebook for social and business leaders. Many others see it as a plea for a saner world in the near future. A few see it as a way out of this new global financial meltdown of 2008. Darryl Poole, the founder of a consequential newsletter for CEOs, and an important commentator on social trends, even compares this book to a set of inspiring predecessors form Rachel Carson to Malcolm Gladwell in his new introduction.
When I look back to what I was trying to do in this book, I was actually doing several of the things George Orwell said he did when writing… I am more a social historian than a classical advocate. Think of this book as written more by a fly on the wall than another Socratic gadfly.
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From creative memoir Missing Persons, published by Square One at age 60—
Colette Discovers this Memoir
That October morning, her breasts were warm. This muse, however worldly she appeared, wore the rightness of his home inside of her. The scent of the musty leaves of his Old Stone Church’s many massive oaks and maples were blended with the astral perfume of this nearing but not nursing muse.
A bad heart, a bad set of eyes, ears half forgotten, and a set of twisted neck nerves—these were the things of his physical life now. Yet his spiritual life, when shared with other people, was at an all-time high. In fact, these higher facts of people and their nature were making him into a man who lived often under the total absorption of a reader list in a great book….
He’d roam his hand over these book covers during dreamy afternoon naps like he had once roamed the sensual curves of his lovers. Yes, he said to himself—he had been hand marbled by women, making each of his books unique, but all of a human pattern. He was not shaking outside now; he was shaking inside.
He was descending into a depth in tradition that showed him how superficial and wanting all his work remained—that is, superficial if compared to the tradition now in his lap. He was glad he had left the study of Shakespeare to others. For the study of the Bard could have consumed his entire life….
Varlissima was now telling him that this was a special day. Colette would be visiting with her now thirty year old daughter, Ariel. But he had fallen into a deepm, amost misty sleep, still clutching The Tempest.
….He fell into a deeper, hotter sleep, still clinging to The Tempest. Colette chatted with Varlissima outside his room. They were drinking jasmine tea. They could still talk, intimately, for hours. He had sometimes been jealous of this mother-to-daughter closeness; but now he felt it all good, and sensible, and even wonderful.
The wind collected outside.
Colette had discovered his memoir the day before.
What a persistent bastard he had turned out to be, Varlissima had hinted during that afternoon chat—both to Colette, and surprisingly, to Areal. He had suffered from vertigo since 2007, but the family had never let that settle in, as he kept travelling, as he kept earning, as he kept writing for decades after that. This made him hard to live with at times. Perhaps the dream irritation was a result of this advanced vertigo.
After Colette left that night, he deeply regretted missing her and Ariel.
