Top Ten Tenets of Sustainability

1. Our economic system is about 10% efficient.  Take a styrofoam cup for instance.  Its material constituents and its embodied energy are effectively 0% efficient about five minutes after the cup is first used.  Add the near 0% efficient consumer items that are used for less than a month.  It’s the 80/20 rule.  “Disposables” and short-use consumer goods account for about 80% of the material throughput in our economy.  We could do much much better and IMPROVE our standard of living.

The Case for Sustainability Planning

Organizations of all types are recognizing that their core missions are strengthened when tenets of sustainability are their guide.  Increasingly, organizations of all sizes are being drawn into sustainable practices.  Beginning with multi-nationals and very large institutions, the trend is now being adopted by medium sized companies and institutions.

The Building Delivery Process is Broken

The Team is Fractured

The typical design and construction process is wasteful of money and natural resources.  It is laced with CYA attitudes and burdened by adversarial players.  In the labyrinthine contractual bindings that typify modern construction project delivery, the focus on client interests is often lost.  Clients typically find themselves working with a team of rivals and receiving avoidable change orders and cost overruns.  Result?  Typically, only super-human effort by everyone on the team provides more than mediocre value. 

Leading Creative People

 

Leadership in a healthy professional setting requires respectful collaboration, clearly understood expectations and applause once in a while.  Here is my approach.  This is what I’ve done for over 20 years – rising in the architectural profession as designer, senior project manager, and leader of strategic transformational initiatives.

Sustainable Business Strategies

Sign up for our executive level continuing education seminar series on leading edge sustainable business practice.  Next session is March 26.  Sustainability is a core driver of innovation in business – lowering cost of business, opening new market space, attracting telent and improving managerial capacity AND benefits communities and the environment. 

This I Believe – 2day

In our quiet moments – when we pray – when we wake slowly on a beautiful morning – we all feel glimmers of a better world.  We know that we have profound opportunities to make personal contributions, but the picture doesn’t materialize in action – these luminous inspired calls instead morph into a reliance on heavenly intervention … or luck or social largesse, depending on worldview and cosmology.

This I Believe

“I believe in deep expertise, exceeding expectations, the law of attraction, and the interconnectedness of all things.  These beliefs animate my joy in absorbing new ideas and new viewpoints, my blessed life, and why I’m called to environmental stewardship and the tenets of sustainability.”

John Ware

Recommendations of John’s work

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