Umair Hague did it again. He just published the Great to Good Manifesto.

He starts with “Pepsi‘s great at producing something that’s bad for you (sugar water)”. And goes on by stating that “Do no evil”  “Don’t do evil” is not the same as “Doing Good”.

Umair’s blog is in essence about an Ethical Re-Boot. We all feel that we cannot go on with the greed-economy. We cannot go on with killing our earth. We cannot go on with hurting other people.

It is about a new value kit for the 21st century. About old game vs. new game.

In the table below, you’ll find some other examples.

I made this table about 2 years ago during my Leading by Being adventure. In fact it even started before that. The trigger was the book “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things” by by William McDonough (Author), Michael Braungart (Author)

The book is from 2003 (almost 10 years old !), and i bought it after seeing a BBC documentary on the work of William McDonough. The key insight that opened my eyes was when McDonough explained that

reducing waste

was not good enough

There is a better alternative, and that is producing products that do not generate (less) waste, but that add value, that add goodness.

This is the essence of Great to Good. The difference between “Do no evil” “Don’t do evil” and “Doing good”.

In that sense, also the famous TED one-liner “Ideas Worth Spreading” is not good-enough anymore. Better is “Ideas Worth Executing”.

This must become a huge PR issue for Google, who have surfed the wave of “do no evil” “Don’t do evil” for 10 years now. They are also more and more seen as the “Beast of Mountain View”. If you read the wave of protest following the release of Buzz and the resulting privacy issues, you’ll get a good feel why

“don’t do evil”

does not work anymore

Umair Hague proposes a number of new corporate principles:

• First how, then who: “Do our people have the capacity to judge right and wrong, no matter how great they are?”
• The Yoda/Hedgehog concept: “companies should only do what they can be great at, what makes tons of money, and what they’re passionate about.”
• Ethical accelerators: “”transparency, openness, rules, and accountability. Most companies have not a single one of these”
• A culture of meaning: “Production and consumption are meaningful when they actually yield durable, tangible benefits to people, communities, and society”
• Confront reality:” Banks, for instance, confronted the “brutal fact” that selling toxic financial instruments was great for their bottom line. But they never confronted the simple reality that a classic asset bubble in housing was failing to do good.”

Umair asks the right questions:

• How many of the principles are at work in your company, industry, or sector?
• What would your company, country, or life look like if each of the principles was applied to it?
• How would applying each principle disrupt “business as usual”?

Defining, building, evangelizing, and nurturing this

new value kit

for the next 10-20 years

is all what our Think Tank on Long Term Future is about.