Last year, I watched a TEDx Honolulu talk by a man named Matthew Lynch.
That’s where I learned how business can be regenerative. It can build community instead of taking resources, and to top that off, he had just published a free e-book titled Regenerative Business 1.o so you, too, can design your businesses to give back to the community and the world as it grows.
At that point, Cloudhead was just getting started, so I immediately e-mailed Matthew to ask his advice and perhaps some guidance in our work. That first e-mail lead to a number of discussions about the nature of business, how we can incorporate permaculture and regenerative design into our projects and ultimately ended in an exchange. Matthew highlighted our work on his website, Beyond Sustainability first.
This year, Matthew is also curating and hosting the 2012 TEDxHonolulu Salon discussing The Artist as Activist. It begins July 10, 2012. So if you’re lucky enough to be in Honolulu for this event, do join in.
WHAT HAS BEEN THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE YOU’VE FACED WHEN WORKING WITH A GROUP OF PEOPLE ON A PROJECT.
Last December, I was embedded knee-deep in mud, in the middle of the Hana winter. Yes, Hawaii does have a winter season, and it can be very wet!. I lived in a construction site with 10 people sharing one bathroom and one kitchen.
The lesson for me is patience, compassion, and creating personal boundaries to give myself some space. There’s a lot of truth in the saying strong fences make for strong relationships.
YOU MADE A HUGE AMOUNT OF MONEY IN REAL ESTATE ONCE? WHAT DID YOU LEARN FROM YOUR REAL ESTATE DAYS THAT APPLIES IN THE WORK YOU DO NOW?
An MBA gives you a great framework, equips you with fantastic tools, but I’ve met brilliant business minds that have worked on billion-dollar transactions, yet their personal lives are shattered because their emotional development has been somehow neglected.
Emotional intelligence is something that is honed through the fires of our life journeys, something that is constantly evolving. I guess those lessons are what I hold as the most valuable: knowing how far I will take a vision, seeing who sticks by me when my chips were down, learning what is truly important.
I don’t have much money in the bank, but with the quality of relationships I am blessed to have in my life right now, I feel richer than I ever did when I was making the big bucks.
Saying no to the wrong projects allows me to remain inspired and engaged, which is a wonderfully empowering place from which to operate.
HOW DO YOU CHOOSE YOUR PROJECTS?
I am very careful to pick and choose which projects I take on nowadays, because I don’t do anything half-way. Unless a project sings to me, I’ll pass.
Saying no to the wrong projects allows me to remain inspired and engaged, which is a wonderfully empowering place from which to operate. I feel happy and blessed that I get to work on projects that I love, and feel that in some small way I am making a positive difference.
The BeyondSustainability project is certainly the common thread that binds together all the projects I engage with nowadays, so I’d have to say that this has been the most inspiring adventure so far – especially as it’s still early days for this one!
DO YOU REMEMBER THE MOMENT WHEN YOU KNEW YOU HAD TO START BEYOND SUSTAINABILITY?
I had my epiphany while sitting on the dusty old couch in Rick and Naomi’s mudbrick classroom at Southern Cross Permaculture Institute in Australia. Rick was reviewing of Permaculture Design Principles, and a thought sorta hit me like a wooden plank across the side of my head.
What if we were to design or redesign our businesses according to these same principles?? What kind of world could we create?
The idea percolated for another year while I immersed myself in my permaculture education, and the scenery changed from Australia to Mongolia, to New Zealand then to Hamburg then back to Mongolia and finally to Berlin. My wife was finishing up a movie project, and suddenly I found myself with all this free time to haunt Berlin’s cafes. That’s when the first draft of the Regenerative Business 1.0 book wrote itself.
WHAT IS YOUR ULTIMATE GOAL IN CREATING THIS VENTURE? WHAT IS YOUR BLUE SKY, WHEN YOU HAVE ACHIEVED WHAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE?
I wrote the book to be a catalyst to conversation, something that entrepreneurs everywhere can take home, read in one sitting, and then ask themselves specific questions to help guide their actions towards creating business and enterprises which create restorative impacts upon the planet.
For most of the world, sustainability is not a choice. Either you live within your means, or you are dead. For those of us lucky enough to live in the wealthier nations, we live in such comfort and abundance that we can fool ourselves into thinking that living sustainably is a consumer choice.
We’ll know we’re there when sustainable is no longer a marketing buzzword, and instead has evolved to a milestone marker along the way to creating a regenerative enterprise.
Reality is something different. Wealthy nations have wreaked havoc on our natural resources that it is in fact our moral duty to put things right. To do so, we must think bigger than merely aiming to become sustainable. We have to fix the damage we’ve done.
The exciting thing is that we have all the tools we will need to do so, right in front of us.
The BeyondSustainabilitymag.net website is a platform to share these kinds of success stories, lessons learned and toolkits, so that we can see how other like-minded entrepreneurs are creating businesses & enterprises to maximize their positive, restorative, and regenerative impact upon the planet.
We’ll know we’re there when sustainable is no longer a marketing buzzword, and instead has evolved to a milestone marker along the way to creating a regenerative enterprise.
