What Tachi Kiuchi Learned in the Rainforest

I have no idea where I got this little booklet. There's no publication date in it, but it's  probably almost 15 years old.  I keep it on the coffee table in my living room a) because it makes me look soooo environmentally conscious and b) because I have to keep working hard on understanding Mr. Kiuchi's message.

Tachi Kiuchi was Chairman and CEO of Mitsubishi Electric America when he received letters from elementary school children asking him to help save the rainforests.  Next thing you know, he's conducting primary research in Malaysia.  Here is what he learned.

Well, the first lesson actually came from his father, long before his sojourn into the forest: "Do what you want. Follow your purpose.  But don't die."  Kiuchi writes, Lesson One: Stay alert. Watch where you're going.

Lesson Two: I learned that saving the rainforests - in fact, saving the environment -- is more than an environmental necessity.  It is a business opportunity, to use creativity and technology to substitute for trees and for resources of any kind.

I didn’t know that "a rainforest has almost no resources.  The soil is thin. There are few nutrients.  It consumes almost nothing."  This understanding led Kiuchi to Lesson Three: The real value of the rainforest is not in the timber or pharmaceuticals.  It is in the design and relationships.  This becomes the most important question for today's corporate executives to answer: How can we redesign, reinvent our corporations, so that they fully harness the human mind and spirit? How can we transform our top-down hierarchies, our conformist monocultures, to engage the magical creative qualities we see in the forest?

Lesson Four: To succeed in the new economy, we must operate by the design principles of the rainforest, and of all complex natural systems.  Among those principles are feedback, differentiation, cooperation and fit.

Lesson Five: The highest mission of business is to help fully develop the human ecosystem, sustainably like the rainforest, in all our diversity and complexity.

Here in Northeast Ohio, many of us are forming collaborative relationships to design ways to help organizations adapt and create prosperity.  As Kiuchi says, "Only together can we make the world whole."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Example of Resilience Thinking

The project I told you about in May of 2012 was to develop a process to solve a complex problem involving a natural system of the restored Cuyahoga River, the Cleveland Cuyahoga County Port Authority’s responsibility for managing the disposal of sediment dredged from the river, and the community’s obligation to pay the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for dredging the material in the first place plus building more combined disposal facilities (CDFs) to store it – a cost of tens of millions of dollars.   The Port saw an opportunity to put these problems together into one solution process, since each stakeholder was somehow connected to the sediment.   To solve all their problems at once would mean that the River would stay healthy, the Port would manage the disposal well and the community would pay less or have more benefit.   The Port began investigating options related to harvesting sediment from the moving water upstream from the ship channel.   The idea was that if the sedimen
Read more

Reflections on the Course I Just Finished Teaching

I haven’t written a post since the end of January when I told you about the course on which I was embarking.   Here, and in the next few posts, are some of my reflections.   The course I told you about at the end of January has filled my mind and my days.   It ended last week and has been a joyous, if hard slogging, ride.   I loved the design of the course – from the flow from high level skills overviews, through the focus on three ways to view human systems that are placed in and interact with the environment, the team projects and our 11 amazing speakers, including a panel of four from the Flats Forward Project.   The students in this MBA course were top-notch and delivered high quality projects to their clients in a celebratory last class.   One change from the original concept was clarity about not designing solutions.   The effective and ethical thing to do when faced with a problem that spans one or more boundaries, is to design a solution process, or even just the start
Read more

Urban and Rural Paradigms

This post was originally written in January of 2012. This morning I attended a forum on the controversy surrounding horizontal fracking. The session was offered by a community minded church to educate the public   on the issues involved in the controversy. The panel was well-organized, prepared and diverse.  The hosts had invited people from the energy/fracking industry to come, but they declined.  So, it seemed that a fairly homogenous crowd gathered - homogenous in this case meaning urbanites against fracking.  Now, with my background in dangerous manufacturing, I’m sure that there are ways to safely extract gas from shale. If we apply OSHA-like regulations to the storage of the wastewater, then that storage could be done safely as well.   However, I'm really skeptical of energy companies’ willingness to protect people and the environment without regulation and mandated accountability requiring them to do so.  But something else bothered me. There were several
Read more