I don't normally write messages to you all, but I felt the need on this Earth Day. I'm mostly thinking about the French Presidential election this coming Sunday and what it could mean for the progress that we've been making as a global community on ESG (environment, social, and governance) priorities. There is a very strong nationalistic opposition to the current President and it could erase our current pace of progress. As a businessman, I'm also concerned about our ongoing business in France after our award of France's Global Founders 100 and the commitments to implement InclusionScore in the city of Marseille to incentivize more corporate inclusion across a growingly diverse region.
I'm reminded of why I do this work. Of course, there is a revenue opportunity to sell software and services over time, but our mission is to facilitate inclusion across the corporate world. Corporate institutions make up our society. That is a fact.
In my latest book, my editors and I, along with a world-renowned group of international relations academics discuss a new lens of cultural integration that I coined, Inclusionism. We have authors ranging from the US Air Force Academy to the academics studying the aftermath of rebuilding in Kosovo, to Taiwanese reporters covering the Uyghur genocide in China. Our core objective of this text is to add to the academic lexicon an ethic of distributing individual agency. We see it as a preemptive solution to the lethal conflict we are witnessing in places like Ukraine today. This matters to all of our businesses.
The ethos of Inclusionism holds that:
Individuals are at their best when they identify with a community and communities are only at their best when they identify all of their individuals.
When we consider organizational inclusion as a process of corporate change management, it is important to remember why we are doing this. We are aiming to include more people in the normal economy. That's it. The more individuals we identify in our community of working citizens, the more goods (products & services) we identify that they'll need to support their quality of life. The book Ethics of Personal Data Collection in International Relations: Inclusionism in the Time of COVID-19 is available wherever you buy books or in any library.
This Earth Day, I want to urge you to invest more time and thought on the process of incentivizing more inclusion of more people in the normal economy around you. In my opinion, every global crisis from Climate Change to War is an economic problem of how we distribute incentives to people to play well in the sandbox of life. And we need all hands on deck to identify the incentives.
Thanks for reading.
Happy Friday,