Adaptive Path Blog

A couple of weeks ago I participated on a panel on Conscious Capitalism at the Commonwealth Club of California. We covered quite a bit of ground in an hour, from how experience design could offset conspicuous consumption to issues like making meaning in the lives of customers, consumer activism, and lifestyle brands.

We had a packed audience for the panel, which I shared with Rajan Dev of Hot Studio, Nathan Shedroff of the Design MBA program at CCA, and Eric Ryan, co-founder of the Method line of green cleaning products. I’d love to tell you more about the discussion, but can do one better, since Fora.tv is now broadcasting their recording of the panel:

Some of the issues we didn’t have time to hit on that I really feel are a part of this discussion on conscious capitalism:

• The design stage for a product or service is worth investing in. It’s when 80-90% of a product’s life-cycle economic and ecological costs are determined (Hawkins, Lovins, and Lovins, Natural Capitalism), but it’s also the best time to incorporate insights about people and their needs. The design stage is often rushed through to be first-to-market, but that’s rarely that big of an advantage — anyone remember the first MP3 player? (hint: it wasn’t the iPod.)
• People’s attitudes towards consumption are hopefully nearing a change. Individuals in the U.S. consume roughly twice as much as they did 50 years ago, and 99% of what we buy isn’t even in use 6 months later (Annie Leonard, Story of Stuff). But recently there has been a shift in attitude, where some consumers look to buying more services and experiences (e.g., travel, spas, OnStar) as a sign/use of their wealth rather than buying more goods. And while new consumer markets are springing up around the world, many of them can leapfrog bad old systems of production and consumption.
• A 21st Century business will operate (not just talk) differently than the old models. Some qualities I foresee: [1] a strong passion for addressing the needs of a customer over the short- and long-term; profit is a by-product of this passion; [2] a focus on services and experiences; designing, supporting, and continuously improving a total customer relationship; [3] measuring development in means other than just aggregate growth more sales isn’t the sole indicator of a better business.

Big thanks to Kevin O’Malley of TechTalk for hosting a great panel!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Conference commentary, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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