Revolution at the Door
Part Two: Cultural Creatives
[This thread started 10/16/00]
Here’s a group of folks that you would generally expect to be sitting on
opposite sides of the negotiating table or have no contact with one another
at all:
- Bill Coors, past CEO of Coors Brewing Company and inventor of the aluminum
can
- Anita Burke, Royal Dutch Shell engineer
- Karl Tiefert, Agilent engineer
- that bulldog for the environment, Randy Hayes of Rainforest Action Network
- systems philosopher Ervin Laszlo, Club of Budapest president
- Heidi Hall, U.S. EPA, Region 9, San Francisco Office, Director of Solid
Waste Programs
- evolution biologist Elizabeth Satouris
- Janine Benyus author of Biomimicry
What would bring them together? Last week’s fifth annual Industrial Ecology
Conference, sponsored by Global Futures, at the University of California,
Berkeley, Haas School of Business.
And what do these people have in common? An emerging set of values that
includes environmental awareness.
In the mid-1990s Paul Ray discovered that 24% to 26% of Americans fit into a
demographic group he calls "Cultural Creatives." The individuals of this
group are prime supporters of natural and organic products, alternative
medicine, ecological goods and services, and personal development tools.
Ray’s survey information, soon to be published in a book co-written with
psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson, and its implications for business seem to
be gathering steam. From the first chapter:
Imagine a country the size of France suddenly sprouting in the middle of
the United States. It is immensely rich in culture, with new ways of
life, values and worldviews. It has its own heroes and its own vision
for the future. . .
You are likely to be in this Cultural Creative group if you
- Love nature and are deeply concerned about its destruction.
- Want more equality for women at work and more women leaders in business and
politics.
- Want to be involved in creating a new and better way of life in our country.
- Care intensely about both psychological and spiritual development.
- Like people and places that are exotic and foreign, and like experiencing
and learning about other ways of life.
Frank Lampe, managing partner and co-founder of Natural Business
Communications LLC, has launched a new magazine that tracks and speaks to
this developing demographic group. The journal is called LOHAS, for
Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability. And according to Bill Capsalis,
vice president of marketing for Gaiam (NASDAQ: GAIA), the LOHAS marketplace
includes more than 50 million consumers who generate $230 billion in sales.
This demographic group may provide the beginnings of a marketplace structure
that, in combination with IT, industrial ecology, and the refocusing on human
values, will change the landscape of human existence on our planet-home. I
believe that business organizations and processes will be the engines of this
transformation.
More next week when I talk about how a young French friend of mine, studying
for her Ph.D. in architecture and computer science at University of
California at Berkeley, fits into the picture.
