I do a lot of public speaking on sustainability, but my very first speech after
The Triple Bottom Line
appeared in print over a year ago is still the most memorable--not for
the speech itself, but because of what happened afterwards.
I
was running late for the airport and my cab was waiting in front of the
hotel. Before I could sit back, the cabdriver asked: "How was your
speech?" I looked up and saw, looking at me in his rear view mirror, an
older cabbie with a scraggly goatee and a cloth cap.
I asked him
how he knew I had been giving a speech, and he told me that the hotel
concierge had told him. "What was it about?" he asked.
Hmmm, I
thought, how to explain this? "Well, I am an expert on something called
sustainability. It's about how companies are expected to do more than
just make a profit, and I was speaking about how profits can actually
be increased by good social and environmental performance."
He didn't reply, so I tried again.
"Sustainability is about how companies can do the right thing and make money at it."
He still said nothing.
Instead,
he reached over into the front passenger seat, and, without taking his
eyes off the road, handed back to me a fifteen-page, single-spaced
manuscript entitled Sustainable World.
"Read this," he said. "I wrote it three years ago and have given out over 1,700 copies from this very cab."
Huh? The first paragraph began with a quote from the UN Commission On Our Common Future. As I read it, I had three thoughts.
The first one was: "Am I on Candid Camera?"
If you're too young to remember, Candid Camera was
a TV show from the 1960s that featured practical jokes played on
unsuspecting victims--an early form of reality television. Laugh if you
will, but I have three jokester brothers, and it seemed entirely
possible that one or all of them had hired an actor and rented a cab to
do this to me on my maiden voyage.
I actually accused the cabbie of this. I really did. He assured me he was on the level and had never met my family.
As this sunk in, my next thought was: "Wow, do I have the right book at the right time, or what?"
And
then, as I continued to read his highly articulate tract on what
companies, governments and NGOs needed to do to save the world, a final
and more somber thought occurred: "This guy is a competitor of mine.
And at the moment he's 1,600 copies ahead of me."
In hindsight,
I realize that the second thought is the most important one. When
cabbies are talking and writing about sustainability, can real change
be far behind?
