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Jamais Cascio, Ethical Futurist
The Family Business School Principal, Stephen Bray, has long held that the key to the future rests with small firms, and their financiers, rather than governments and global corporations. In 1999 in conjunction with Britain's Barclays Bank Plc. Bray, and fellow thinkers Amanda Knight and Tracy George, helped Barclays engage in an unusual dialogue between family business owners and their bankers.
Today the importance on on-line communities, which were part of the project, social networking face-to-face, and customer participation are commonplace ideas. This is good since the world has many problems to resolve, and quickly, and global corporations and government policies are heavily invested in the hydrocarbon industries which do nothing to ameliorate the crises we face.
The United States, in particular under the Bush administration, has pursued a policy of looking at future technology as the solution to hydro-carbon emission rather than politically unpopular environmental controls.
In the video, above, Jamais Cascio discusses the issues we must face if we are to build a sustainable world. The technology, claims Cascio, is not to be found in some far distant future but exists today.
The responsibility for the future, however, Bray claims, lies not with governments or politicians but is in the hands of those family business owners who are committed to preserving something of their wealth for future generations of family members, and their loyal employees.
We live in a new time. One in which self-interest and other-interest coincide more than at any time in the past. There is little point in hoping that a family business will successfully pass from one generation to the next if the world the next generation inherits is an arid dust bowl with an unbreathable atmosphere.