This Sustainable Life

As a professor of leadership, host of this podcast, and constant student of acting by my environmental values, I live and work in the intersection of leadership, education, and the environment. Ken Robinson does too, but with a big difference: he's been here for decades longer, actively practicing in each. This episode approaches each of education, leadership, and the environment from several pers...

Business, based growth, loves the ideas of a circular economy and recycling because both promotes more, but may keep us on track to unsustainability, global warming, plastic, etc. I don't know the answer, but the city of Charlotte contacted me about their Envision Charlotte program I told them I'm cautiously optimistic and am not sure what they're doing is in the long run helpful. I'm not saying i...

With some guests I have a hard time finding a quote to start the episode with. With Anand, I had the opposite -- at least half of what he said wowed me. When I first saw him speak and saw the title of his book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World , I wondered if someone at the elite event I attended would really challenge a community he was in. He did. You'll hear Anand in th...

I met Colonel Read through Colonel Everett Spain , who has also been a guest of the podcast. Two myths about the military have unraveled in me as a result of seeing West Point from the inside and talking to 4-star Generals and department heads. One is that the military practices command-and-control and that someone of any rank can just order people to do things and get compliance. On the contrary,...

Anna is down to earth for anyone, let alone a gold medalist and Crossfit champion. Watch her videos to see the contrast with what she does, her abilities, and how she doesn't have to be humble. She does something hard, that most can't do, like a clean and jerk or climbing a rope, then does as many as she can in a cycle with other hard things, to past exhaustion. She shows us what people are capabl...

Kevin and I have been friends since we both wrote for Inc, and before I appeared on his podcast , which always opens a conversation. It's two guys talking about leadership and love with examples of hardball football and basketball coaching and the like. That leadership view isn't the only perspective on leadership, but it recalls my blurb that I wrote for his book: If you want to lead so people lo...

I got an email that Bob Langert, McDonald's former head of Corporate Social Responsibility, wrote a book on his experience in over two decades at the corporation. From my view, seeking change, I see places like McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Exxon, and Monsanto, to name a few, as the places with the greatest potential. Many protest them, which I consider important, but I also believe they could use help....

Katie continues the line of world class sailing champions who have translated their athletic success to leadership in their sport, business, and beyond. What success? How about three America's Cups, including being the youngest member of the first ever all-female boat, two around the world races, as well the famed Sydney Hobart and Worrell 1000 Extreme Catamaran Races. She's also a lawyer and is p...

This episode is about a simple experiment anyone can do. It costs nothing and takes no extra time or other resource besides carrying a mug with you. Everyone knows how much garbage we're dumping in the ocean. Everyone knows they can pollute less, including me. Probably including you. This episode shares Sean's experience cutting out coffee cups. I'd say you never have to use another coffee cup aga...

Do you feel gratitude toward people who have helped you? Do you express that gratitude more than enough, not enough, or about right? You're probably familiar with research that expressing gratitude and feeling it improve people's lives . I loved my exercise of writing ten gratitude messages a day for a week. Here is the Inc. piece I wrote on it: I Wrote 70 Gratitude Emails. Here Are My Awesome Res...

For context for today's guest, those who know I'm avoiding flying might also know I'm learning to sail to explore off North America. When considering acting on their values, most people focus on the part they like of what they're stopping. They don't seem to have trouble ignoring undesired side-effects, like the pollution flying causes. Sailing and the other things I've replaced flying with have g...

Tom Szaky has been working on waste since his undergrad days at Princeton in 2001. Then I suddenly heard about him from many sources in the past few months. His company, Terracycle, recycles waste others don't. The new initiative, Loop, got attention at Davos and support from many companies whose business plans depend on producing waste, within an economic model that promotes growth. He also publi...

If you've never heard Carl Sagan's spoken essay Pale Blue Dot , you'll get to hear it in today's episode. It still chokes me up. Here is an Earthrise image taken a few years ago like those he contrasts the pale blue dot image with. The Earth straddling the limb of the Moon, as seen from above Compton crater. Taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2015. Here is the Pale Blue Dot image. Seen f...

A few months ago I attended the Summit. It was expensive, so I wasn't sure I'd get the value out of it that I paid. As it came together for me, I met the founder, Elliott Bisnow, and then happened to meet his mother, Margot, this episode's guest. She was a big part of making the event great for me. As you'll hear in the conversation, she was like a force of nature, connecting people, doing what le...

Today, I'm sharing what value being a guest offers to influential, well-known people. I call Oprah and her peers the single-name people -- people everyone knows by single names: LeBron, Serena, Sergey, Larry, Barack, Elon, Bill, Mark, Madonna, Giselle, Venus, Meryl, Bruce, Maradonna, Cher, Beyonce, Messi, Jay-Z, and so on. I also mean anyone influential or with an audience -- people in politics, a...

Today's guest, Sean, is a friend. We recorded this conversation before the podcast launched in November 2017. It took a while to get through the editing process, but I wanted to post it to document the evolution of the podcast and me. For Sean, it shows him as a leader of leaders, since all the guests since followed him. In showing that I grew as an interviewer, finding a purpose, strategy, and vo...

Nobody likes being coerced to do something you don't want under threat of punishment. Nor do people like being told they're wrong or ignorant by someone else telling you they know better. Yet it happens all the time. Much of our politics and public dialog -- our leadership -- is about coercion, self-righteousness, hitting people over the head with facts, and the like, especially around the environ...

I confess I haven't interacted directly with Al Gore so I don't know how he leads in person. I saw him on stage once, but the person interviewing him, Jaden Smith, was 20 years old and I didn't see grasped the situation. Jaden is Will Smith's son and promotes a bottled water brand---that is, he sells something nearly free with extraneous packaging, which I consider needlessly polluting. My main in...

Everyone thinks about the environment. Nearly everyone gets bogged down in questions. What's best? Will this or that change make a difference? What does all the science mean? What should I do? Science answers some of these questions. Science is the study of nature. People associate it with going to the moon or people in lab coats, but it's about nature -- sunsets, gravity, why the sky is blue, as...

Ana works in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, Executive Director for Nipe Fagio (Give Me the Broom! in Swahili), my first guest who works in Africa. This conversation is about leadership in an area lacking it -- environmental action. I wish I met her before! It sounds to me like she leads effectively -- not telling people what to do but leading them. Ana promotes doing things, focusing on action. She's st...

When I met Ron in business school, he and Recycle Bank, which he co-founded, were well regarded. He's continued to grow since. Beyond contributing into entrepreneurship in sustainability as an entrepreneur, he's helped create policy, appears often in the media, and now invests. In our conversation you'll hear on the personal side his passion. On the business side you'll hear the opportunities to s...

I recorded a preface to episode 142 because I got the backstage pass, attended the meet and greet, shook Sam's hand, and asked him if he was open to alternatives to conversation and violence. I won't be able to do his answer justice here, but his views of conversation and violence were broader than mine, so if he hears episode 142 without this preface, I suspect he'll think I don't understand his...

This conversation is about joy, responsibility, community, and values you undoubtedly share. Rob Greenfield lived like an average American. He saw the environmental problems we all see on headlines and dismissed them as most do. Then he decided he could no longer abdicate the responsibility of how he affected others and our world. I consider him a role model. Nearly everyone I talk to describes wh...

While Nikole's being a celebrated director and writer is a great reason to feature her and listen to her, I approached her because she graduated from Sudbury Valley School. I hope you've heard of Sudbury. If not, it's likely a different school than any you've heard of. Learning about in inspired me to learn as much as I could about it. Here are many of the links I read on it. As an educator I am a...

Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about a negative peace, where a problem exists but people don't face it or deal with it, and a positive one, where people solve the problem, which requires facing it. He used non-violent civil disobedience to lead people to face problems that affected others, but as voters and citizens, they could do something about. People didn't always like it, but you can't get ch...