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24 Jun 2008

Alan Knight: Optimism, Conflict and Planet Earth Plc

Posted by: Henry Hicks

Alan Knight: Optimism, Conflict and Planet Earth Plc

Alan Knight was one of our lunch guests last week and treated us to a wonderfully frank, and insightful presentation based on his Planet Earth Plc concept.

Before anyone gets excited Planet Earth Plc is not a corporatist plan to privatise the world! Rather it’s a creative way to frame the challenge of sustainability that will engage a top-level business audience. In short the argument Alan puts to business leaders is this: You wouldn’t run your business the way we run the planet.

It’s impossible to do justice to the presentation in a short blog post based on scribbled notes... so forgive me for this unjust, brutal summary...


Planet Earth Plc: The Earth is the business; the customer is mankind; the business proposition is wellbeing, shelter and food etc; customer growth is conservatively predicted at 15,000% and the supply base cannot match the predicted growth; what’s more customer satisfaction is decreasing...

Those results would make for a pretty grim Board meeting.

He went on to prescribe the following aims for the sustainable management of the ‘business’

  1. Low carbon
  2. Poverty free
  3. One planet economy
  4. Well-being as the measure of success (not economic growth)

Amongst many other pearls of shiny wisdom he also encouraged us to stop being so nice. There will be business winners and losers as we move to a sustainable planet Earth, we should back the winners and enjoy the (intellectual) conflict and arguments.

Finally, as someone who works within the top levels of business and policy Alan is especially well placed to offer an assessment on the chances of Planet Earth Plc’s survival.

We asked him if he was optimistic. He replied.

“You’ve got to be optimistic because you’ll fail if you’re not. Why are you doing this job if you don’t feel you can succeed?”

So here’s to success and optimism and to not always being nice. grrrrr.

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