2100

It’s 2100. We are still here. We have avoided the worst impacts of climate change. Carbon capture and sequestration technology saved the day in the end. Carbon parts per million has dropped to 1950 levels.The oceans will take a couple of decades to recover, bio diversity several more. Our global green house gas emissions have dropped to 20 Gigatons per year, down to 30% of what it was in 2024. Developing countries didn’t have to pay the price for the unbridled growth of the Global North and the biodiversity destruction and climate catastrophe it left its wake. The top five fossil fuel companies came together and formed a clean energy alliance and transitioned just in time.

Sustainability is not a movement any more.  It is integrated into every aspect of our lives. We eventually acted on the long list of lessons not learned at the turn of the century. We now know that infinite growth in a finite world is an impossibility, but long term sustainability is not.

We know that holistic business models that include rather than exclude, to better encompass the context they are operating in , are more robust, create greater long term value and are more profitable.  Reductionism has been replaced by a systematic integration of interdependencies (people, climate, biodiversity, etc) within organizations, industries and economies.

Private  enterprises around the world, big and small, are operating business models with a hundred year perspective, much longer than career-spans and in most cases life-spans of their staff.  Short-termism has been replaced by strategic, long term worldview. Corporate performance reporting includes financial performance, ecological impact data, performance against regeneration targets, community engagement and social equity. Both inside-out and outside-in perspectives of performance. Stock markets are driven by performance across all these vectors not just earnings. So is executive compensation.

Business principles taught in MBA schools across the world have been turned on their head. Many heads of our early 21st century corporations had derisively written most of these new principles off as silly, naive and impractical. But today, 22nd century heads of corporations cringe when they look back at their corporate ancestors. How could they have been so one-dimensional, short-sighted, or worse still, knowing and active contributors to the biggest market failure of all time, climate change and the destruction of our ecology, by not pricing environmental services into their products and services?

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State of the business union in 2124:

1. The most successful businesses are purpose driven, with profits being a means to the end, not the other way around. Where the end is maximizing stakeholder well being. A 180 degree turn from the dysfunctional business models of the 21st century where profit was the end and maximizing shareholder wealth the only goal.

2. All externalities have been internalized. The Delaware company is no longer limited liability. A set of enforceable laws hold businesses liable for deliberate, inadvertent and accidental impact on the environment and society. 

3. The economy includes the ecosphere. Evolutionary economics previously driven by human-engineered forces like market forces, politics, societal trends,  radical moves by single entrepreneurs, now leverages principles that operate in natural systems such as zero waste, regeneration, collaboration, diversity, built in curbs to excesses, reliance on local expertise. 

4. Critical Stakeholders include investors, customers, employees, suppliers, partners, the environment, society and additional  industry specific  stakeholders. Not necessarily in that order. Organization boundaries have  extended beyond the corporation to ecosystems it is  embedded in and they are permeable, including all players required for impacted community participation, circularity and regeneration. It also includes representation from future generations.

5. Businesses adopt cradle to cradle design, manufacturing and operating principles. Regeneration of consumed natural capital, social capital and economic capital is legally required in company performance reporting, with mandatory audits.

6. Where sustainability was all about risk management, requiring only minimal  compliance to regulations, risk management now is mostly around unintended consequences, rebound effects, paradox risk in sustainability plans.

7. Full-spectrum materiality, including 2nd order, 3rd order implications, have replaced  financial materiality as drivers  for strategic and tactical business decisions.

8. Scope-3 emissions are automatically calculated. Suppliers freely and voluntarily share data up and down the supply chain. Deep collaboration with suppliers and distributors are the only path to profitability. 

9. All successful businesses have redefined their value creation process, often involving the customer in the process. For example, products that  promote and actively engage the customer in a culture of repair, extending a product’s useful life. Extended Producer Responsibility, including reuse, recycling, upcycling, is legally mandated.

10. Most important innovations now occurs at a business model and value chain level, pushing classic innovation of product, process and organization to a lower tier.
    

At the time of this writing, the number of die-hard optimists that see this future as possible is not very high and rapidly declining.