3.8 Billion Years in Sustainability R&D

Berkeley, CA  – Thought Leadership

“Everything we need to know is right in front of us.”

When I hear this I sometimes say, “obvious to you, perhaps…”. But what is often the most obvious is often the most overlooked. Gil Friend of Natural Logic believes that all we need to do is follow a few billion years of research and development Nature presents us each day.

The subtitle of his latest book, “The Truth About Green Business”, summarizes Gil’s advice to businesses,

“You don’t have to choose between making money and making sense.”

Gil Friend helps companies and governments design, implement and measure profitable sustainability strategies. Leading the giant elephants, he turns the greatest ship toward a safe horizon focusing on sustainable solutions and the areas chewing up resources and realigning them to the path of least resistance.

“Businesses face a new world of uncertainty and challenge. For some long sighted businesses, sustainabiliity will be the biggest opportunity in a generation. For others – those that ignore it – the prospects are bleak.”

Visionary leaders at the corporate level such as, Michael Kobori of Levi Strauss & Co, have hired Gil to work with international management teams to develop corporate sustainability strategies from the supply chain to the market.

For CocaCola, Gil developed and conducted two-day Innovation Charrette™ to engage diverse stakeholders in collaborative design of a national Extended Producer Responsibility policy.

And for Conair, Natural Logic developed and conducted Sustainable Design FrameWorkshop™ to engage and train product designers, product managers, marking and legal in embedding and communicating sustainable design.

These big companies are the investors in much of the research leading the sustainability movement. The result of public pressure and the reality of limited world resources, often lead companies to discoveries that save them, and even earn them money.

And he does all of this patterning natural systems. His methodology includes biomimickery in business. This probably comes from being a systems ecologist, and a deep love for Nature.

From  designing scalable green product “gating system” for rating products across tens of thousands of product categories, Natural Logic created a “shades of green” intranet to guide buyers and merchandisers and provide the means to make appropriate buying decisions.

Reality is, every time I turn around, Gil Friend is speaking at a high level event leading the pack. With major companies as client, he is on the board of multiple NGOs, including Inquiring Systems, which hosts environmental education programs such as Into Outside.

Gil is widely considered one of the founders of the sustainability movement, and was recently named to the Sustainability Hall of Fame (along with Ray Anderson, Amory Lovins, Karl-Henrik Robert and Bob Willard) by the International Society of Sustainability Professionals

With each step, Gil does his work with the kindness and humility of a sage, and the intention of a warrior.  He is a natural force with his own logic – and a force to be reckoned with if lucky enough be guided by him to use 3.8 billion years of R&D he has tucked under his hat. And that’s a mighty big hat. Since, the big bang exploded the entire universe from one atom sized dense object…it seems only natural logic.

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