MIT Sloan Management Review

Jeffrey Hollender, a founder of Seventh Generation, spoke at the MIT Sloan School of Management today. Apparently he spoke several times around campus, but we caught him at a lunch time talk billed as “creating a game plan for transition to a sustainable economy.”

During a compact introduction, Dean David Schmittlein noted that introducing the notion of corporate responsibility into one’s business as Seventh Generation has, “adds complexity.” Hollender’s talk delivered some of that complexity.

Hollender is the “chief inspired protagonist” of Seventh Generation (some founders get to pick their own titles). As someone whose role at the company revolves around thinking, it’s no surprise that he started and ended his talk with words about consciousness in the most basic sense: the decisions you make are based on what you pay attention to. In world full of unintended consequences, he argued, “what you pay attention to helps you end up with more of the consequences you want.”

The consequences Hollender wants, for his business, his society, and his planet, are “revolutionary. Many of our problems will not be solved by the sort of incremental change that we see in the political process and in business.” He went on to diagnose our current predicaments (economic, environmental, and moral) and offered some possible ways out. Although the audience was a mix of students, faculty, and staffers, it was clear that it was the students he was talking to. “We don’t want to sustain the world we have,” he said. “We want to change it.”

“The single greatest challenge we face,” he said, “is the system we have created, embodied in academics and business. We have taken a world that is endlessly interdependent and divided it into countless pieces. There are two million NGOs that have taken a piece of the problem, same in business, but failed to realize that everything one does affects the other.” He celebrated cross-disciplinary collaboration (citing the global sustainabile food lab associated with MIT Sloan’s Peter Senge) and identified what he said are the “keys that are critical to what kind of solutions are necessary”:

• He talked how how business money in politics is “negative and disruptive, and it prevents the transition to a sustainable economy.” He advocates full public financing of elections.
• He argued for full cost accounting. “In our society, good things cost more than bad things. Why? Government rules lead to an incredible distortion in the economy … if you’re a business and you do the right thing you get no benefit from an institutional perspective.”
• He laid out an argument against the current structure and ownership of business and financial markets. “Things get more expensive even when there’s no increased demand. The purpose of business has become misguided, immoral even … we need the influence of government to be in line with the interests of society. Right now the deck stacked against sustainable businesses.”
  

Hollender’s proposed solutions are those he has made in print and in person before — businesses should practice radical transparency, treat their employees as their greatest assets, and exert leverage through supply chains (he spoke at some length on how WalMart has become a de facto regulator). During a brief question-and-answer session, he emphasized that his own company has far to go to live up to its own values. “Out biggest failure as company is that we have failed to make even marginal impact when it comes to justice and equity… We make compromises every day. The key is to be transparent about them.”

And Hollender concluded with a note about the contradictions inherent in the economics and politics of our time. He spoke of meeting a representative of the Service Employees International Union, who told him that, to get an acceptable return, “the SEIU pension fund invests in mutual funds that are full of companies who want to put labor unions out of business.” It’s quite complicated.

Vivienne Cox, former executive vice president of BP Alternative Energy who recently retired from BP after 28 years, gave a lunchtime presentation here at MIT earlier this week. Her subject? The challenges of providing energy to today’s world — and the threat of climate change.

Interestingly, Cox came not only to speak but also to listen. She spent a portion of the one-hour presentation encouraging the audience who had come to hear her to talk in small groups among themselves, sharing their views about how serious the world’s energy and environmental challenges are — or whether they can be addressed through technological advances.

Cox herself didn’t sound very sanguine — except about the supply of fossil fuels in the coming years. (”It’s my view that there’s plenty of fossil fuels around,” she said.) But on environmental issues — from climate change to fish populations — her tone was more somber.  ”We just cannot sustain the resource-intensity of the last 20 years,” Cox said at one point.  

While she observed that there is a growing consensus around the science about climate change, Cox admitted that she worries that our “system is stuck” on a path that will not allow the  problem of climate change to be addressed until it’s too late. “I have to say I am not optimistic,” she said. However, she added, “I do not believe that that is in any sense an excuse for inaction.”

Here’s a paraphrase of a discussion-starting question Cox posed to the attendees at her presentation. On a scale of  -10 to +10 — where +10 means we are fundamentally mismanaging the resources of the planet in a way that’s unsustainable and -10 means that technology will solve the problems – where do you each stand? What’s your personal perception about how serious the earth’s environmental and climate change problems are?

Smart managers are wary of epiphanies. “Suddenly, everything looked different” should be the last line of a short story, not a report from the management front. But sometimes, something makes you look at a matteryou’ve paid a lot of attention to in a different way. Even if you look at everything differently for only a moment and then you return to your original perspective, that perspective has been changed.

That may have happened to some people at last week’s Pop!Tech conference, in Camden, Maine. One of the speakers was Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire, who delivered a variation of his standard talk on sustainable food. In that talk, he dropped this nugget:

“A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius.”

It’s unlikely that Pollan’s talk will drive meat eaters to the tofu aisle in the supermarket; it’s even more unlikely that it will make a Prius driver feel comfortable making a guilt-free move to a Hummer. But what Pollan did was frame the sustainability question in a new way, a way most of his audience (both in Camden and on the Internet) had not considered. At the least, it may make Prius driver feel a little less smug about their auto choice. At most, it may help viewers (managers among them) understand that sustainability is more complicated than a few consumer choices. It’s complicated stuff; that’s why we produced a special report on the business of sustainability.

Interested in seeing more of Pollan’s talk (and excerpts from other Pop!Tech talks)?

UPDATE (Nov. 12): You can now see all of Pollan’s talk:

The nations of the world are in a “peaceful competition” to develop the energy technologies that will power the 21st century  – and the nation that wins that competition will be the nation that will lead the global economy, U.S. President Barack Obama told an audience at MIT today. “And I want America to be that nation. It’s that simple,” Obama added.

Obama visited the MIT campus to deliver an address about American leadership on clean energy. In his speech about the topic, Obama evoked the pioneer history of the U.S., noting that the American people have always sought new frontiers. Todays’ pioneers, he suggested, include entrepreneurs, inventors and researchers.  As a nation, Obama said “we have always been about innovation. We have always been about discovery.”

Obama noted that the stimulus bill represented the largest single boost in scientific research  in history. He discussed the need to transform our energy system into one that’s far cleaner and more efficient – and said that transformation will be made as swiftly and carefully as possible. Obama said that the Pentagon has declared dependence on fossil fuels a security threat.

On October 23, President Barack Obama will deliver at MIT “an address about American leadership on clean energy.” This blog will cover the talk, of course, and you can watch it live, October 23 at noon. If there is any problem with the stream, as there sometimes are with live events, MIT World will post a video by 3 p.m.

While you’re waiting for Obama’s address on sustainability to start, read our special report on the business of sustainability.

Next month, MIT Sloan Management Review editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins will speak at the Opportunity Green business conference at UCLA. He’ll be expanding on our recent special report on the business of sustainability. For a hint of what he’ll discuss, there’s an interview with him on the conference website. Some highlights:

One of the most baffling results from your survey is that while 92% of respondents said their company was “addressing sustainability in some way,” 70% said they still had not developed a clear business case for it.

That is the contradiction that gets to the heart of the issue, and as we continue with the second round of the survey that is probably where we’re going to do the most digging. It’s one thing for an executive to understand that sustainability is going to have a major impact. It doesn’t mean they understand how to make a case for investing in products that will capitalize on it.

One reason for this contradiction is this enormous gap between experts, or “thought leaders,” and novices. Novices recognize sustainability is going to have a big impact, but they are stuck in the “green” silo. To them, sustainability can seem like a cost rather than a benefit. Unfortunately, that’s not going to drive company behavior.

Thought leaders see sustainability in system-wide terms. Improving products, motivating employees, lowering costs, and improving relationships with governments, the public, the capital markets — even competitors. They think about many, many different things — it’s a bigger way to think. Suddenly opportunities to create value seem much more obvious.

According to your survey, improving company reputation seems to be the major driver of sustainability. Do you see this as a weakness, going forward?

I can see it cutting both ways, both for good and for ill. Depending on how well we do in ferreting out green-washing. For the typical company, reputation is the reason they think they’re doing sustainability, so if they got away with making false claims, that would be bad. And yet as a driver of activity, what’s wrong with reputation being a good return loop, a good feedback loop?

Reputation is very complex when it comes to sustainability. One of the examples is Nike. They have made amazing progress in improving the sustainability of their products, by redesigning them to use fewer materials, for example. But they are really in a quandary because they don’t feel they can promote that fact, because they worry it stands in direct contrast with what their customers want them to do.

Nike fears that by going out and saying look what we’ve done — and it’s really win win — customers will say “wait, I thought you created your product solely to make sure I got the best performance out of it. Sustainability has to compromise your other goal.” Nike is really worried about it, and as a result, they’re quite decidedly not pushing it.

I think reputation benefit is driver now, but will greatly diminish. As time passes, reputation will just be table stakes. Already seeing that in certain parts of the food industry: almost becomes difficult to find a product that is environmentally sound because they all claim that they are.

How is sustainability changing the way companies operate?

When you talk to people that are trying to do sustainability initiatives in companies, it’s a completely different business process, because it requires collaboration across all different boundaries, both inside and outside the firm. Inside firms, sustainability often requires collaboration across divisions and departments that don’t have to deal with each other. Outside, it requires collaboration with governments, NGOs, communities, citizen groups, and competitors about standards and practices. It requires an ability to collaborate that is unprecedented. Most execs don’t have it, or don’t know how to do it.

It also means companies will have to find ways to be more transparent about their practices and activities. People want to collaborate with people they can trust. If Company A runs their operation in a way that allows me to see inside it, then I’m more likely to collaborate with them. Certain things about management, like accounting and financial reporting, have to change.

It’s the same with the greening the supply chain, where suppliers are being asked to go into detail about manufacturing processes, materials, etc. Of course, some suppliers say “thanks, but no thanks” we’re not going to share that information with you. Herman Miller’s response is, well then we’re going elsewhere. Plenty of people would rather hold their cards close to their chest, but it is going to be less beneficial to do so, and more beneficial to be more transparent.

Sustainability issues are going to drive management harder towards transparency than almost any other challenge we’ve seen.

Sounds like a tall order — I’m thinking of companies trying to survive in a highly competitive market. Why risk being more transparent?

The risks far outweigh the rewards. Like for instance, protecting patents. A lot of companies don’t care about patents at all. Patents aren’t going to protect them, if [competitors] know what they do and how they work, by the time they copy it they’re on to the next thing. Companies need to think about service.

Also, companies will begin to see that in an age where it’s harder to get capital than it used to be, if you can be the kind of company to make outside providers of capital more comfortable, you’re going to attract more capital.

There are a lot of green companies that are glad about the widespread mistrust of sustainability – they realize that “because these other folks are too scared, I have a competitive advantage. My competitors are in the stone age.”

One would think that, during the current downturn, sustainability initiatives would be the first programs cut, but your survey shows fewer than 25% of respondents had cut their sustainability initiatives recently.

Honestly, I don’t understand it. I have posited a thesis to others which is that in some measure, especially early on in the trajectory, sustainability is often about savings and waste, and so there are ways in which a downturn can push a company to invest more in efficiency. “If we use less materials and cut emissions, we know it can save us money.” There is a menu of sustainable activities that look more attractive when you’re in a downturn.

Could it be that sustainability is a “growth industry,” and thus immune to the downturn?

I am hesitant to say its because it’s a growth industry, because I think the typical business person is still an novice, and I don’t think they believe it’s a big enough business opportunity yet. But, that 92% [who believe it is important] number is huge, and that fact plays into this. People really do believe they’re likely to keep paying attention to it because they don’t want to be blindsided.

Yesterday on our Twitter feed, we directed readers to our special report on design thinking and noted that a TEDtalk by design thinking icon Tim Brown had just been posted.

There was other Tim Brown-related news yesterday that’s relevant to two of our favorite subjects here: design thinking and sustainability. Turns out Brown’s firm, IDEO, launched Living Climate Change, which hopes to be “a clearinghouse for design thinking about the environment.” The site is just getting started; right now it’s just a showcase for selected designers. But the site makes a promise:

Living Climate Change is a place where the most defining challenge of our time is explored through design thinking. It’s also a place to show, discuss, and share compelling and provocative thoughts and ideas about the future.

If the site really attempts to keep this promise, it should be, at the least, a fascinating experiment.

“One casualty of the financial crisis and subsequent global economic downturn has been employment in the financial sector,” observes McGill University’s Dror Etzion in an essay in the Summer 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. But, in that bleak labor market for finance professionals, Etzion sees an opportunity for an unexpected area: environmental sustainability efforts.

In his essay “Creating a Better Environment for Finance,” Etzion reasons that some of the efforts to create and redefine markets to address sustainability challenges will require financial acumen — in areas ranging from cap-and-trade programs to biodiversity offsets to financing for solar projects. He writes:

Perhaps even more intriguing is the possibility of crafting new offerings that integrate economic and environmental concerns. For example, the city of Berkeley, California, is working with Renewable Funding LLC, a financial services company based in Oakland, California, to offer an innovative new program that helps homeowners purchase solar installations. The model allows property owners to install solar panels with little upfront cost, via funds generated through the sale of bonds. The property owners then pay for their solar installations over 20 years, through a line item on their tax bills — and thus repay the bonds.

Etzion’s conclusion? Companies pursuing environmental sustainability initiatives may find this downturn is a good time to attract financial professionals.

Looking for ways to keep the cost of materials low? In an article in the Spring 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review, John A. Pearce II discusses the opportunities represented by product reconstruction —  which can take the form of recycling, refurbishing or remanufacturing.

While Pearce notes that such product reconstruction is not appropriate for every company, he reports that product-reconstruction activities tend to have higher average profit margins than typical manufacturing processes. What’s more, Pearce points out that legislative trends may favor product reconstruction going forward — as some governments start to place restrictions on certain kinds of waste disposal or to promote the purchase of reconstructed products.

Last week I blogged about an executive who thinks that environmental sustainability initiatives helped his company survive the last recession. Now, this week, here’s another example of a company reporting economic benefits from environmentally sustainable practices.

The new edition of Business Insight, which MIT Sloan Management Review produces in collaboration with The Wall Street Journal, contains a fascinating case study of a Subaru plant in Indiana that has found that reducing its environmental impact saves money.  For example,  the company says that it has reduced electricity-per-car consumption 14% since 2000. (Researchers Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder report that they confirmed the company’s claims.)

The article goes into interesting detail — including a passage about how Subaru employees explored the contents of the company’s dumpsters to figure out ways to reduce waste. The most substantial cost-saving impacts, according to Subaru? “Where the biggest savings have been achieved, in descending order: reducing waste by revising processes, conserving energy; and working with suppliers.”

 

Here’s an innovative approach to getting through a recession: Ray Anderson, founder and chairman of Interface, Inc. notes in our Executive Roundtable on Capturing the Green Advantage that he thinks Interface’s commitment to environmental sustainability helped the company get through the last recession. Observes Anderson:

We went through one recession earlier this decade. We came out of it in ‘04. It was very clear that we survived largely on the strength of the sustainability initiatives, what they had brought to our operations: the reduction in cost, the better products, the motivation of our people, the goodwill of the marketplace. All of those were working right through that recession. As the marketplace went down 36 percent, our sales went down only 17. We gained market share through that recession. We believe the same thing will happen this time.

Read Anderson’s entire commentary.

 

Two news items that capture some of the spirit of the times:

 

• In a New York Times column, Thomas Friedman raises the question of whether this downturn may signal the end of an era of unsustainable growth.  Asks Friedman: “What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall….”
•  On a more mundane note, Google applies “crowdsourcing” to the question of spending less – with a new web site, Tip Jar. Tip Jar uses a Google tool called Moderator to allow visitors to submit and vote on money-saving lifestyle tips. Google announced Tip Jar’s launch earlier this month — and so far the Tip Jar site contains more than 3,000 tips.

For more on sustainability  and what it means for businesses, explore the Sustainability area of our site.

For more on collective intelligence techniques such as crowdsourcing, see “Decisions 2.0: The Power of Collective Intelligence,” in the Winter 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.

(Follow all of MIT Sloan Management Review’s coverage of TED.)

Yesterday I promised to direct you to the Bill Gates TED Talk video when it was posted. It is now available:

Follow all of MIT Sloan Management Review’s coverage of TED.

Someone doing a study of collaborative innovation could start with a look at the TED Prize, three of which were awarded here last night. The winners this year were extraterrestrial life searcher Jill Tarter, ocean researcher Sylvia Earle, and economist, musician, and advocate Jose Antonio Abreu. The idea is that the prize winners announce their dream. TED kicks in $100,000 to start funding that dream. More important, the prize winner now has access to the people in the TED community. Immediately after the acceptance speeches and into today, I’ve seen dozens of TED luminaries pledge in-kind support to the dream of one winner or another.

This stone soup approach isn’t uncommon, but it’s particularly impressive because all these people are at the center of other communities and have much to offer: that’s how they wound up at TED. Indeed, previous winners of the TED prize have had their dreams fulfilled because of intervention and assistance from (that word again) TEDsters. The most high-profile example of that is photojournalist Jim Nachtwey, a 2007 prize winner, who had to surmount multiple political and technical hurdles to tell his story of a deadly disease that’s hidden to most people in the developed world. Contacts at TED helped him do that.

The TED Prize ceremony capped a day in which it was definitely technology, the “T” in TED, held sway. Some of it was about robots. We learned about medical robots that permit minimally invasive surgery and biologist Robert Full revealed what he learned about how tails work while building robots that mimic geckos.

The first day there was plenty of talk about robots, too, and some of the breakthroughs demonstrated on the TED stage have been placed in the lobby so attendees can get a closer look. You can, for example, interact with a realistic Albert Einstein head that changes its facial expression based on yours:

Yesterday’s talk from Shai Agassi, who, like so many other TED speakers, began his talk with a provocative question — “How would you run a country without oil?” — and told the story of his journey to build an electric car. He noted that “electric cars have to be more convenient and more affordable than what they’re replacing” and maintained that the way to do this is to “separate ownership of the car and ownership of the battery” and replace it with a business model in which people and companies “own the car but subscribe to miles.” When explaining why he decided on an all-electric car rather than a hybrid, he got off the line of the day when he quoted Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn, who’s one of many funding Agassi’s international effort:

Hybrids are like mermaids. When you want a fish, you have a woman. When you want a woman, you have a fish.

You can learn more about Agassi’s company, Better Place, which he’s using to develop — you guessed right — a community around his endeavor.

And, finally, there was a big storm yesterday in Long Beach, as you can see:

(See all of MIT Sloan Management Review’s coverage of TED.)

The last session of the day, the awarding of the TED Prize, has ended. I’ll post an overview of the long day’s sessions tomorrow morning. For now, a few people have written me today, so I’ll answer their questions and try to give a sense of what it’s like being at the event.

What’s the new venue like?

This note came from someone who attended a few TEDs when it was held at the smaller Monterey Convention Center. It’s much more spread out. At Monterey, where TED was held since the mid-’80s, it felt like most of the attendees stayed at two hotels, both of which were connected to the Convention Center.

One of the benefits of moving to Long Beach is that everyone can be in the same room now. The auditorium in Monterey had seats for only 400 or so, which meant that most of the attendees relaxed in simulcast rooms with plush chairs and big screens. The networking made it worthwhile to go anyway, but the idea of spending thousands of dollars to plop down in front of a big TV screen is a bit nuts. For an event that’s supposed to be about guiding a community, it helps to have the community all together.

I wrote earlier that the more spread-out environment makes it feel like TED has taken over the city. It hasn’t, though. Right next door to where TED is held you can attend a very different event.

For the record, there are no sports dealers at TED either, to my knowledge.

Is all this save-the-world stuff for real?

I got this note right after the TED Prize simulcast ended — those awards are the apotheosis of TED’s do-goodism. There are plenty of things a reasonable person could argue against TED — the inevitable elitism that comes with the high entry fee and the occasional self-congratulatory tone come to mind — but by adopting a web-centric “ideas worth spreading” meme, TED curator Chris Anderson and his team have worked hard to make the ideas expressed at TED as available as possible. Most TED talks are available for free on the TED website. An official blog and Twitter feed is following the events of the conference in near-real-time, as are dozens or so unvetted ones. You don’t have to be here to know much of what’s going on here. TED can’t fix the world. No mere conference can. (Indeed, as it did last year, the even more elite Davos conference this year seemed to be full of leaders just throwing up their hands.) Anderson’s goal is transformational change, and the simple act of sharing transformational ideas — first to a room of elites and then to the growing percentage of the world with Internet access — lets them take root in unexpected places. But it is true that, when not changing the world, TEDsters are indulging themselves:

What’s Al Gore really like? (Note: no one actually asked this question, but I’m answering it anyway.) I don’t know. He gets a much better seat than I do: even at an elitist event like TED, there is a hierarchy. I can tell you what he talked about, though. He extended his Inconvenient Truth argument with updated data that makes it sound like we are all doomed. As noted before, this is a conference for optimists and Gore’s day job is as a venture capitalist so he must believe there are solutions, but at least in the latest version of his talk, he’s not offering any optimism.

And now on to the evening’s remaining events.

Do you have (real) questions? Ask them in the comments below and I’ll get to them as soon as I can.

If our posts about TED have left you interested in a taste of the conference, the TED Prize ceremonies are streaming live now.

This is our second daily post covering this week’s TED conference. You can follow all our TED coverage.

For a conference that’s supposed to be about long-term ideas, those ideas sure get spread at record speed. Thanks to blogs and especially Twitter, reports from the first day of this year’s TED conference (here’s a TED primer for managers, if you need one) began flowing within seconds after a speaker noted something particularly noteworthy. As I write this post before dawn the following morning, I see that there is plenty of good, almost-instant coverage, particularly from Ethan Zuckerman, BoingBoing, and the official TED blog. Rather than deliver a blow-by-blow list of everything that happens, which can get tedious quickly and allows for hardly any reflection, the idea here is to identify the most important parts of the long day and night (with 48 speakers or performers, events started at 8:30 a.m. and ran past 11 p.m. — and that’s just the official events) and give a sense of what it is like to be here.

The two stars of the big morning session were Juan Enriquezand Bill Gates. Enriquez is the sort of polymath made for a diverse conference like TED: he’s done everything from run the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School to serve as a member of the peace commission in Mexico that negotiated the cease-fire in Chiapas’ Zapatista rebellion. He’s best-known, perhaps, as a presenter: I’ve witnessed him speak engagingly on everything from why schools in the Arabic world used to be the best in the planet but aren’t anymore to why being knowledgeable about genetics is just as important as being digitally literate.

Back in October, just as the political and business leaders were starting to understand the ramifications of the financial crisis, Enriquez delivered a raw, whirlwind presentation at the Pop!Tech conference that focused on what the then-yet-to-be-elected new president needed to do, with an emphasis on austerity. I don’t know how long it will be until Enriquez’s talk yesterday is posted to TED.com, but those who want a taste of it can see an earlier iteration from Pop!Tech:

Juan Enriquez (2008) Pop!Tech Pop!Cast from PopTech on Vimeo.

Enriquez started his talk and the conference by jumping straight into the economy. TED is 25 years old this year, and Enriquez was the first of many speakers the first day to couch his analysis in terms of a 25-year cycle. He’s updated the talk substantially since its October debut; its tone is now more optimistic than its shell-shocked counterpart at Pop!Tech, with a persuasive argument that, in the long term, technology is more powerful than the current financial catastrophe. He identified our ability to engineer cells, tissues, and robots as the economic engines that will outlast the downturn. Among his most compelling examples was a realistic robot from Boston Dynamics that comes astonishingly close to moving like a human:

In a later presentation, coincidentally, another speaker cited the same robot in a talk about the future of war: most technology is neither inherently good nor evil. It’s all in how it’s used.

Bill Gates needs no introduction: he’s the most successful capitalist and philanthropist of his time. And, in keeping with the theme of the event, he stated “I am an optimist” (why shouldn’t he be?) and spoke fluently and passionately about two of the big questions his foundation is trying to answer: how do you stop deadly diseases spread by mosquitos?” and “how do you make a teacher great?” He spoke with both anger (”there’s more money put into treating baldness than malaria”) and disbelief (in some school districts, teacher contracts require that a principal can only enter a classroom once a year, with advance notice). But the blogosphere and twittersphere (there has to be a better word than this) were, er, buzzing with a stunt Gates pulled while discussing malaria, the deadly disease spread by mosquitos:

“Not only poor people should experience this,” Gates said as he opened the jar and let a pair of (malaria-free) mosquitoes into the room. Several prominent blogs referred to Gates “unleashing a swarm of mosquitoes on his audience” but I don’t think two counts as a swarm. The move did lead TED curator Chris Anderson, who’s got a background in publishing, to crack that a good headline for the talk would be “Bill Gates Releases More Bugs Into the World.” Anderson also said that Gates’s talk will be posted to the TED website later today. We’ll point to it.

The pick of the afternoon sessions included talks by co-chairman of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani, filmmaker Jake Eberts, MIT’s own Pattie Maes, and Interface CEO Ray Anderson. The morning sessions start soon, after a breakfast appointment, so for now let me offer some highlights (more detail coming later in the day):

• Nandan Nilekani spoke about his upcoming book, Imagining India, in which he endeavors to consider the wild disparities of India in terms of four types of ideas: ideas that have arrived, ideas in progress, ideas in conflict, and ideas in anticipation.
• Filmmaker Jake Eberts showed a nine-minute rough set of excerpts from Oceans, a new film from the team that made Winged Migration about the underwater world. It was jaw-droppingly beautiful and earned a standing ovation for its thrilling shots of jumping whales, forests of jellyfish, and (apparently) friendly sharks. There’s no link available yet for the video; the film isn’t coming out in the U.S. until April 2010.
• Pattie Maes, who runs the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab, showed off an early version of “Where Ur World,” a multitouch system developed with Pranav Mistry that seeks to combine online information with real-world interaction in surprising ways. The example that left the audience smiling was one in which Pranav shook hands with someone and a tag cloud relating to that person was projected onto that person’s shirt. The website for the project is still under construction.
• Almost-president Al Gore offered an update of his Inconvenient Truth talk (summary: things are getting worse), but more compelling was Ray Anderson, founder and chairman of Interface, who spoke of how he’s turning the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpet into a model of sustainability. Anderson had plenty of useful nuts-and-bolts information about how companies should think about sustainability, which we’ll spell out later, but his money quote came from Amory Lovins: “If something exists, it must be possible.”

The sun is up, the day is beginning. I have much more to pass on about Day 1 of TED (yes, I waited on line for food with stars; yes, the Long Beach experience is different from Monterey) and I will as the day progresses. But right now I’m interested in learning more from Ray Anderson, which is why I’m signing off and going to interview him.

Much more to come …

(Housekeeping note: someone has asked what the “#TED” in the headline means. It’s a hash tag, intended to make it easier for people to search for, in this case, blog and Twitter posts about TED.)

This week, MIT Sloan Management Review is in Long Beach, Calif., for this year’s TED conference, which starts tomorrow. We’ll report daily. Now in its 25th year, TED remains an unclassifiable event. The letters of the name originally stood for technology, entertainment, and design, but in recent years the tag line for the event has become “ideas worth spreading.”

The event is certainly an elitist one. It’s expensive, hard to get into, and you’re just as likely to bump into web inventor Tim Berners-Lee as Overboard star Goldie Hawn in the food lines. If nothing else, TED is a trip. The veteran conference (this reporter has been to six of them) has gone through many permutations. Under curator Chris Anderson, TED is still full of technology, entertainment, and design, but it has really lived up to the change-the-world rhetoric that was always a bit more under the surface during Richard Saul Wurman’s ace stewardship. One high-profile example: Al Gore’s warning about global warming turned into An Inconvenient Truth after a movie producer saw him deliver the talk at TED. Last year E.O. Wilson debuted here the first iteration of his Encyclopedia of Life, funded by a TED grant.

The change-the-world attitude gets a bit out of hand: there’s plenty of talk about how for the past two years the gift bags, by Rickshaw Bagworks, have been constructed from 100-percent post-consumer recycled beverage bottles, but hardly anyone points out that the bags are overstuffed with non-essential items that have a much greater impact on the environment. Indeed, TED is a place for conspicuous consumption, even if it’s relatively sustainable consumption; it’s the only conference I’ve been to in which I’ve seen anyone drive up in a Tesla. (I’ve seen two today here as well as an even more cutting-edge vehicle.) Those with similar ambitions to TED’s, but a more limited budget, may wish to consider attending the alt-TED BIL, which is also in Long Beach this week (and which I hope to visit while I’m here).

For many years, TED was held in Monterey, Calif., but success has brought it to a larger venue farther south, in Long Beach (there’s a smaller, parallel, event being held east of here, in Palm Springs). At Monterey, most of the conference took place in one area. Here, with banners everywhere and events more spread out, it feels like the event has taken over the town, like Sundance does in Park City, South by Southwest does in Austin, and Davos (aka the World Economic Forum) does in, well, Davos. We’ll see how that works.

Indeed, just like last year, TED is coming right after Davos, which was a downer and inspired anger from even sober-minded management thinkers. Last year, TED presenter Craig Venter contrasted the optimism of TED with the pessimism of Davos. This year, especially, we could use a little optimism.

Especially if that optimism is realistic. Except for its entertainers, TED is an irony-free zone, a place where earnest speakers talk about fixing the world as if it is not merely possible, but mandatory. As we’ll see during the conference, the speakers here have a pretty good track record at improving one or another part of the world. The theme for this year’s event is “The Great Unveiling,” which refers in part to the conference’s new location, but also to new ideas due to be debuted here.

So why should managers care what’s happening here? Because the best new ideas helps make good managers better. The joke among TEDsters (an annoying term, yes, but it has stuck) is that attending the conference is an endurance sport. It’s one thing to be in a room listening to spectacular insights for a few hours. It’s another to be doing so for half a week. Nonetheless, part of the experience you get from being at events like TED is that feeling of being overwhelmed: someone just said what feels like the smartest thing you ever heard — and then the next speaker says what feels like the smartest thing you ever heard — and then … well, you get the idea. It’s intellectually exhausting, but it’s also thrilling. And, during the best talks, you can’t help thinking: How can I act on this?

The MIT Sloan School of Management has launched a new website offering free teaching materials for business education. Much as the university’s popular MIT OpenCourseWare initiative has shared MIT course materials with the public, the new MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR) site contains cases and other teaching resources from the MIT Sloan School.

The MSTIR collection focuses on several cutting-edge subject areas where teaching materials are not as widely available as they are for more traditional areas of management study: global entrepreneurship, sustainability, and industry evolution.

A recently posted video features Robert Malone, chairman and president of BP America, Inc., speaking during an October visit to the MIT Sloan School about the need for a comprehensive national energy policy for the United States. Interestingly, Malone, who covered many topics, included in his talk a discussion of the benefits of placing some type of price on carbon dioxide emissions.

Noted Malone: “Until every producer and every consumer knows the cost of carbon, then the uncertainty with planning and investing in all kinds of energy projects is going to remain high. Pricing carbon will make energy conservation a lot more attractive, and it’s going to attract dollars into the renewables….It’s also going to allow informed decisions about investments in fossil fuels — and it’s going to make us look hard at the technology that we use, because the ultimate goal will be to reduce the carbon impact of those fuels.”

Here’s Malone’s speech (the section on climate change and pricing carbon begins about 27 minutes into the video) :