My proposal for changing the world, for good.

The proposal is this:

At the beginning of the year every company publicly engages itself into establishing sustainability targets additionaly to their financial goals.

At the beginning of the year each of these targets are made public together with a suggested roadmaps.

The key rule is this:

Profits will not be paid out to any staff member, nor to any shareholder in the form of dividends if at the end of the year one of these targets isn’t met.

All financial gain should be reinvested into reaching the other targets until they are reached.

These targets are suposed to be:

• significantly more advanced than the targets the year before (if reached)
• reduction of ecological strain + advancement of ecological gain
• reduction of social strain + advancement of social gain
• reduction of financial strain + advancement of financial gain

What targets are chosen and how companies define advancement is left to their responsibility.

But what is obligatory is that these acts are made public at the beginning of each year and are publicly accounted for at the end of each year.

The penalty on still paying dividends and bonuses while not meeting the sustainability targets is this:

Nothing. Still, make no mistake, the cost of ignoring this rule will be tremendous. It will be so high and so destabilizing it will definitely make more sense to try and make things happen.

The tipping point is this:

This rule will affect positive change on a global scale if and only if:

• some companies who are willing to lead voluntarily adopt this proposal as a key part of their mission statements
• some national governments of nations who are willing to lead voluntarily adopt this proposal as a part of their legislation
• some stock exchange authorities who are willing to lead voluntarily adopt this proposal as rule for any company who wants to enter their stock exchane
• some people who are willing to lead voluntarily take it upon them to spread this message, bring it to the people who can actually make things happen in the places mentioned above and engage them in making the change

My appeal to you is this:

• spread the word
• make it happen

Want to make a big difference? Act smaller.

If there’s one thing we should learn from our holistic world view, it’s that we should pay more attention to what’s near us, not to what’s happening at the other side of the world.

We simply can’t control what happens over there. Too often it’s just too far out of reach.

We can, however, control what we do right here. And by changing things here, we might end up changing the world after all in some pretty unexpected ways. Ask the boy / girl who … (you probably know a story of something local going global. Write it down and tell your neighbour about it, or someone else.).

So if you want to be responsible for your actions and be a true global citizen, if you want to care for the world, for the globe, for the environment, then please, take care of yourself and take care of yourself and the world near you.

Get in touch with your smaller world, with the things you touch and get touched by on a daily basis.

When you’ll start doing things differently those are the places where the real change is most likely going to happen, these are the places where most likely you will actually make a difference.

“I have this fear that we aren’t feeling enough as a culture right now. (…) And one of the causes of this I think is, as each of us attempts to build this new kind of holoptical worldview, this holographic image that we’re all trying to create in our mind of the interconnection of things – the environmental footprints of thousand miles away of the things that we buy, of the social consequences ten thousand miles away of the daily decisions that we make as consumers – as we try to build this view and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture, the information we have to work with is these gigantic numbers, things in numbers in the millions, in the hundreds of millions, in the billions and now in the trillions, and these are numbers that our brains don’t have the ability to comprehend. We can’t make meaning out of these enormous statistics.”

Chris Jordan, Picturing Excess, TED TALK 2008

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