by David Cooperrider, Spring | Summer 2016

The purpose of this article is to join with what I’m now sensing as the most important business-for-good movement in the world today. Its message, paradoxically, is to declare that it’s time to abandon the language, the cultural meme, and the vision of a ‘sustainable’ economy. Just at the historic inflection moment when it seems like the whole world united in common cause in Paris around the call for sustainability, recent thinkers and researchers of pioneering stature are casting doubts. There is the very real possibility, says the evidence base, that the incrementalism involved in sustainability-as-less-harm is going to wear itself down to a trickle of energy, deplete our intrinsic motivation, and ultimately, result in too little too late. Our frames are like eyes and if we want a quantum leap in society we need the gift of new eyes.