While beginning to teach at the Stockholm School of Economics in 1975, and establishing the Institute of International Business, David Hawk created its benchmark research project titled: “Environmental Deterioration: Analytic Solutions in Search of Systems Problems.” The Institute was to redefine business as implicitly international and in search of differences that would make a difference to an improved human future. One objective was to replace conflictual nationalism with global appreciation of the context of all business. This would involve aspects of moving from business-as-usual differences to unusual difference business ideas. One aspect was coming to appreciate contextual resources as the basis for planetary life thus business leaders should learn to use them more carefully.
The above research project was set up to improve private and public collaboration to manage industrial pollution in better ways. Product design, production and use would do so in the light of a context of natural increases entropy increases via the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Important to this was the work and guidance of Gunnar Hedlund and Lars Otterbeck. We jointly hoped to find ways with our PhD students to reduce the impending costs of misdirected industrialization, including nationalistic arguments and their misdirecting of limited resources from nature. We hoped to raise the status of the natural context, the context on which life and business depended.
At the end of the two-year project, it became clear that humans didn’t care very much about the commons or its role in their life, nor each other. They disregarded the picture of a grim future from the long-term pain of typical economics of short-term gain. How humans came to value what was valued needed to be changed. The industrial means to satisfy human needs and wants needed to be changed. The research participants came to see such as urgently necessary, but the wider group of researchers in science, technology and economics did not. There were 20 major international firms and six governments in the project. A recent book goes into 2022 detail about the results published in 1979.
The 1975 project problem came to see flaws in the industrialized logic from 400 BC that sought to have more things and lower price as a goal. This logic became formalized in the 1850’s then pushed onward and upward in society. Only the research of a female scientist, Enice Foote, in 1856, who first argued that this would result in climate change. She was concerned with the eventual cost for this pathway to economic development. We attracted much criticism in our final reporting in 1979 calling for discovery of business as unusual to replace the approaching harm from business as usual. Sweden’s Prime Minister agreed and presented our results to OECD. So did the CEOs of Exxon and Texaco as they initiated research into alternatives to oil. They were both replaced by their Boards. The head of US EPA agreed with those corporate board members. He banned future US Government support of David Hawk’s research on climate change.
Religions teach us early on that the world is simply a resource lying in wait for human use, for what humans do.
“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:28, Bible)
Since the time of Aristotle it thus seems obvious that humans should, even must, develop processes to use them productively via an ever larger and faster industrial processes. In this way more could be produced for more humans at a lower cost. Productively would thus come to mean fewer human hours to product more, and more cheaply. As such we forgot to where a growing need for more materials and energy would take us. This measuring of success would inevitably become very expensive.
Efficiency, measured as more stuff from less labor, became the important objective in lecture halls, design labs, and board rooms. The phrase of learning to do well by humans doing good came to be missing. The emphasis was on the “cheaper” then ever more “cheaply” by those managing the systems of design and production. Only now do we begin to see the results as the improved productivity of increasingly irrelevant. Work of Mike Kelly[1] in his “factory of the future” program at Georgia Technological University showed a quite different way, as he developed it as VP at IBM then Associate Director at DARPA. He called it: ”single copy production,” with emphasis on value of the product, not its mass production and consumption. His thinking did not catch on at the universities nor in many companies, even though the results were exciting and attractive. We called it “too different, too soon.”
The situation that we instead continued with was cleanly stated by Leonard Cohen in his last album. He underlines the key achievement of the industrial phase of human development. As such he trivialized the recommendations found in MIT’s takeoff analysis of earlier Club of Rome thinking based in the early systems thinking of Hasan Ozbekhan in Rand Corporation and then in Wharton teaching. He was a beloved teacher that had introduced the MIT crowd to the Club of Rome group he started, and forever regretted it. He felt their analysis and particular solution, called “Limits to Growth,” to a systemic problem was not a good pathway to the future. Sadly, he seems to have been right. The problem is better stated in a Leonard Cohen song, on his last album before his death.
“As he died to make men holy, Let us die to make things cheap.”[2]
[1] I helped bring Mike to New Jersey Institute of Technology from IBM Headquarters to demonstrate a different model of industrialization, one he had very successfully demonstrated at IBM. The leadership of the university could never understand what he was up to, nor why he saw a need for change that he infected students with. After three years of effort, he gave up on NJIT and became a director in the $2 billion/year research group at DARPA. Their mission was to improve national security via single copy production. [2] Leonard Cohen, from song 8, “Steer your way,” in his last album, prior to death: “You Want it Darker?”
Now, in 2024 we see things, i.e., those human values ending in destruction, have become much more serious. The title of this book seeks to portray the urgency for constructive change.
David Hawk’s current location, this is part of his 1,500 acre farm near Fairfield, Iowa.
