新編大學英語第三冊unit10 Text A: Business Lessons from the Rain Fores
UNIT 10 IN-CLASS READING; New College English (III)
Business Lessons from the Rain Forest
Takashi Kiuchi
1 The environment and the emerging information economy are two issues most vital to the future of my business, and perhaps the world. To me, these topics seem intimately linked. Perhaps this is partly because I work for Mitsubishi Electric, an electronics company, and I see our impacts on the environment. But my most important lessons about the link among business, the environment, and the economy did not come from my company. I learned them in the forest.
2 On my trip to Asia, I visited the Malaysian rain forest. What I learned changed my life as a corporate executive.
3 I learned that saving the rain forests in fact, saving the environment is more than an environmental necessity. It is a business opportunity. In our case, it is an opportunity to pursue business opportunities that use creativity and technology to substitute for trees, for resources of any kind.
4 I learned something else in the rain forest, too, something more profound. I learned how we might operate our company not just to save the rain forest, but to be more like the rain forest.
5 To be agile and creative, we must structure our company so that we are a learning organization. Not top-down, but bottom-up. Not centralized, but decentralized. Not limited by rules, but motivated by objectives. Not structured like a machine which cannot learn but like a living system, which can.
6 When I visited the rain forest, I realized that it was a model of the perfect learning organization, a place that excels by learning to adapt to what it doesn't have. A rain forest has almost no resources. The soil is thin. There are few nutrients. It consumes almost nothing. Wastes are food. Design is capital. So my model for Mitsubishi Electric is an organization that is like a rain forest in those respects.
7 Rain forests have no productive assets, yet they are incredibly productive. They are home to millions of types of plants and animals more than two-thirds of all biodiversity in the world. Those plants and animals are so perfectly mixed that the system is more efficient, and more creative, than any business in the world.
8 If we ran our companies like the rain forest, imagine how creative, how productive, how ecologically benign we could be. We can begin by operating less like a machine and more like a living system. At Mitsubishi Electric, we have begun to adopt an environmental management system founded on principles of industrial ecology. For us, this means two things: First, we must have our eyes wide open and see the environmental costs and benefits of our business. Second, based on what we see, we must take action:
See costs and reduce them. See benefits and increase them. See needs and fill them.
9 When I visited the rain forest, I realized that, as business people, we have been looking at the rain forest all wrong. What is valuable about the rain forest is not the trees, which we can take out. What is valuable is the design, the relationships, from which comes the real value of the forest. When we take trees from the forest, we can ruin its design. But when we take lessons from the forest, we further its purpose. We can develop the human ecosystem into as intricate and creative a system as we find in the rain forest. We can do more with less; grow without shrinking.
10 While the rain forest has many design principles, let's discuss three:
11 Differentiate. Be yourself, be unique. In the rain forest, conformity leads to extinction. If two organisms have the same niche, only one survives. The other adapts or dies. 12 The same thing happens in today's economy. If two businesses have the same niche, making exactly the same product, only one survives. The other adapts or dies. Most companies today are trying to be the one that survives by cutting costs, radically downsizing, desperately seeking the lowest cost.
13 It's smarter to differentiate. Create unique products, different from any others. Fill unique niches. Don't kill our competitors or be killed by them sidestep them instead. Only then is it time to reduce costs and grow more efficient.
14 Cooperate. Today, many people think competitiveness is the key to business success, but such thinking is out of date. Today, as we grow different, we learn that none of us is whole. We need each other to fill in our gaps. For example, at my company, we no longer look to grow bigger simply by acquiring more and more companies as subsidiaries. Instead, we are engaging in cooperative joint ventures with many others. Each company retains its independence, its specialty, and its core competence. Together we benefit from our diversity.
15 Be a good fit. We used to say only the fittest survives; only one can be the winner. But the rain forest has many winners.
16 The same can be true in our economy. In this new, diverse, rain-forest economy, it is not a question of who is most fit. It is a question of where we best fit. If we fit if we solve a social problem, fulfill a social need we will survive and excel. If we only create problems, we will not.
17 I am often asked whether the needs of the corporation and the needs of the environment are in conflict. I do not believe they are. In the long run, they cannot be.
18 Conventional wisdom is that the highest mission of a corporation is to maximize profits and return to shareholders. That is a myth. It has never been true. Profit is just money a medium of exchange. You always trade it for something else. So profits are not an end; they are a means to an end.
19 My philosophy is this: We don't run our business to earn profits. We earn profits to run our business. Our business has meaning and purpose a reason to be here.
20 People talk today about business needing to be socially responsible, as if this is something new we need to do, on top of everything else we do. But social responsibility is not something that one should do as an extra benefit of the business. The whole essence of the business should be social responsibility. It must live for a purpose. Otherwise, why should it live at all?
21 What I learned from the rain forest is easy to understand. We can use less and have more. It is the only way, for the interests of business and the interests of the environment are not incompatible.
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