Table of Contents

When you get down to essences, most business success depends on the smart alignment of money, people and rules.

Many of the central concerns of the 21st century—racial inequity, white supremacy movements, greater inclusiveness of diverse peoples—are rooted in facing and overcoming prejudices.

Yet our grounds of hope are not based on blind hope. We are aware of the retarding forces, the prejudices, that have tripped up proper responses to wealth creation and the climate crisis.

Much of social history focuses on the private wealth of individuals, their dynastic families, and the corporations made by such titans of industry. Yet beneath this corporate sprawl you can find examples of more frugal leadership, and answers to our climate crisis.

Edwin Drake discovered oil for profit in 1859. But it was the discovery of the Spindletop oilfield in Texas that launched the modern oil boom. Through the 19th century this caused the biggest extended boom of economic superabundance in human history.

Trane Technologies, a global firm of now over 50,000 technically gifted engineers and executives, is today’s poster child for a rich stock that operates as a socially responsive capitalist organization. While the S&P Industrial Index rose in stock value nearly 250 percent during the days of the Covid pandemic, Trane’s stock increased in value 408 percent.

But in contrast to Trane, why do so many firms remain blinded by prejudices that do not allow such coordinated transformation? Why do so many mighty talented firms still fail, and why do many drive themselves into bankruptcy?

A corporation could not become climate competitive without social demand for it. That is the higher fact of social history. There is a set of signals in capital markets and government rulemaking that requires, by implication, such changes in corporate practice.

Every human is the product of their culture and their history, both family history and general social trends.

There are two primary captivating metaphors in the works of Thoreau that fill the lungs of youth through the ages: The first presents the dominant culture as a machine, where an informed minority has the dignified ability to stick their shoes in the machine to stop it. The second metaphor, more hidden yet persistent in cultures, presents capitalists as birds of prey.

The wealth of this world surrounds. Yet excessive wealth exhausts our resources and our lives. That much has been displayed by the environmental and sustainability movements since the 1970s. The world needs a new narrative on private wealth, corporate purpose, and future solutions on climate challenges.

In this passage, we explore the complex case of bp since Bernard Looney became CEO in December of 2020.

We can now return to our opening claims about aligning money, people and rules with a sharper certainty, and relate this formula of competitive frugality to the needs of the climate crisis.

Part of doing more with less is making prayer of the best conversations, learning about our better selves in them. The point of this book is that wealth surrounds you, no matter your economic or educational status, everyday, when we get back to basic humanity.

The path of climate competitiveness is strengthened again when we involve youth, yet is weakened when we slip back into the past prejudices and mistakes of speculative capitalism, a perennial problem—as evident this year of 2023 by the failures in the Silicon Valley Bank.

It is not what you say, it is what they hear! This insight is one of the key discoveries of the last century.

Popular prejudices have deceived and distorted lives for too long. It is time to return to a set of human-scale ambitions dictated by corporate industriousness, social care, and personal and competitive frugality. 

What this this new narrative and new ear require, to be visual and sportive, is the wisdom and persistence of what I call “the elephant in the room”.