When I travel with my wife and in-laws to India, we stay in a small townhouse in Nashik, Maharashtra. Load shedding is as much a part of our daily planning as what we need to get at market. It effects shower schedules (water is heated by an individual, portable “geyser” that runs on electricity), which cascades into breakfast schedules, which cascades into when we can leave the house, which cascades into when we’ll be able to meet with a visiting relative, which cascades into where we need to be for lunch (the main meal of the day), which inevitably bumps into the next scheduled load shedding.

The system is such that these rolling blackouts are fairly predictable. But not always. And I can’t help but think of the amount of drain this causes a society, particularly its business. Not that the people in these places are somehow disadvantaged, or can’t manage it. They aren’t, can, and do. But it’s impossible not to conclude that it distracts people from the general getting on with things.

I sat in a darkened coffee shop in Denver, Colorado as I wrote this. The power was out for blocks. Word was that a semi truck hit a power pole down the street. Predictably, this caused consternation among the shop owner and we, the entitled patrons. As if it was intentional. Like the truck driver wasn’t put out as well.

Coincidentally, I had Seth Godin’s blog post cached. A call to arms, of sorts, for the kind of “pro business” policies we should demand of our politicians in the 21st century. What government and politicians are talking about are actually “pro factory,” and that today’s policies should instead facilitate innovation, invest in solid infrastructure, and put an end to the race toward a cost-cutting bottom.

Godin’s thoughts aren’t necessarily new (here’s but one guy that’s been at this for a while). They’re well articulated, succinct, and (as always) thought engaging. It’s sustainable development Godinized – the balance of economic prosperity with environmental integrity and social justice. And yes business needs forward-thinking infrastructure, clearly (my friend the coffee shop owner can probably feel the dollars tick away with every moment the power is out.)

All of us in the coffee shop will survive this outage I’m quite sure. But I sit here listening to the rants and complaints around me, thinking of Nashik, and how we take our infrastructure for granted here in the U.S. You rarely hear a complaint about load shedding in India. You just work with it. But here, reliable power is expected.

I’m asking myself: when will sustainable development be that to business? When will it be the ticket to play? How much longer do we need to talk about it?

Seems to me that what we really need is momentum with the kind of thinking Godin writes about. Turning these thoughts into action. We have, it seems, a kind of intellectual load shedding in business, among our leaders, and within each and every one of us.

You can almost predict when factory thinking and sustainable-change thinking flow and when they ebb. Earnings reports are due (we cut costs with layoffs); someone is up for election (it’s the economy stupid); I need to please my new boss (that’s an unsustainable approach but I’ll wait to challenge it until I’m well ensconced in the senior team); I’ll propose the safe idea to land the client (sure, I can help you brand yourself as Green despite no Green initiatives in sight).

You might say Godin’s ideas aren’t innovative. They’re necessary. And just like energy-challenged places like India need to develop solutions to the burden put on their infrastructure, the U.S. needs our sustainable development discussions to migrate into the mainstream and into action for actual change.

And as Jim Collins will tell you, change isn’t an event. It’s a slow, deliberate process that involves real people making decisions, choices, and putting their shoulder to the flywheel for the long haul.

So what can we everyday dilettantes do? I’m not sure. But some thoughts:

Use our talents for good. Choose clients that align with non-factory thinking. Challenge our existing ones to move in that direction, despite the risks to our own bottom line. We make choices about who we share our value with every day. Will they pay me? Can I add value? Will they recommend me? Is it in service toward my business goals?

So why not: Is this client making the world a sustainable place? Do they care about what they’re doing to our community: developing the talent in it, the state of the environment around it, and the long-term economic viability of it?

Find inspiration in – and celebrate – those who do it now. I don’t know about you, but I’m weary of the executive who found a conscience after pulling bags of money from a corrupt system. We all know unsung people who have always worked for good. Followed their values. And do it every day. Seems to me that people like my interfaith dude Tim, my musician hero Rudresh, and everybody’s favorite film maker Erik can offer us more guidance toward a sustained approach to business than someone who never did it until they felt financially comfortable.

Be bold and challenge the status quo. You read Seth. The middle isn’t safe for our careers. It’s soul-sapping and we won’t make a mark anyway. Take a stand. If our sense of upward mobility doesn’t convince us, it’s time our sense of ethics does. Just like we won’t sit quiet if someone makes a racist or misogynistic comment in the workplace, isn’t it our job to say something when we see factory thinking infecting business? Isn’t our future worthy of a top priority in the moral mix?

There’s another ethical issue here. It’s our professional duty to help our employers or clients stay competitive in today’s landscape. In the end, it’s what they’re paying us for. Let’s give them a Whole Foods case study. Point them to Newmont Mining. Hip them to the bona fide, numbers-crunching reasons why they need to kill factory thinking.

Cut your cable T.V., remove the satellite. Honestly. We know CNN does not represent the future way by which we as citizens will be informed. It’s almost uncontroversial. So cut it. Go to the local movie house again. Watch YouTube. Comment on blogs: call out the bullshit, share the good stuff. Start being a part of the new right now – it’s an ever-changing environment that you can take part in shaping – and unplug from the toxic matrix that Big Media is a part of.

Reuse stuff. It’s almost as if recycling has become our “out,” a cleanser for our guilty consumer souls. It helps us blissfully ignore what we know to be true: it isn’t enough. The theories of obsolescence are as irrelevant today as Victor LeBow himself. I’m always surprised at how much longer something lasts compared to my desire to have a new thing. And when we skip a few iterations – like when I finally traded in my first generation 4 GB iPhone for the iPhone 4 – it’s actually more satisfying. Damn this thing is nice.

It’s time to step off the consumption merry-go-round. Let’s close that ride. It isn’t sustainable.

What else can we, as professionals who make decisions and act, do to move us from load-shedding thought into actual change?

PR blunders are almost always due to a bad decision upstream, not the reaction to them. You could say DPS’s recent decision to offer a southern style lunch of fried chicken and collard greens in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a bad decision. You could say a lot worse.

They said it was well intentioned so let’s give them that. Looking at this with a light most favorable, how do you think it possibly could have gone down? Maybe I’m naive, but I’m having a hard time imagining there wasn’t at least one person who raised a concern.

Don’t you think that someone – anyone – just had to have wondered aloud “I wonder if this might come across as stereotyping?” Why didn’t anyone listen to this voice?

The mother who brought the menu to our attention called this “a teaching moment.” Indeed. As a starting place, before DPS tackles cultural sensitivity issues which at this point seem depressingly out of their reach, I suggest DPS should learn a basic public relations principle:

When in doubt – when there’s a sliver of a doubt – don’t do it. Just don’t.

Did DPS even weigh an alternative? If they did, what were they afraid of? Bad press as a result of not offering a special menu in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?

Jay’s running late, so we wait. And I think of Amanda Pollock. She’s with the other group of students who just left Ahafo and heading to Akyem—where our group just was.

Amanda’s rare. She’s one of the strategic brains behind the class but also the person who makes it go. Relationship purveyor. Hotel booker. Curriculum advisor. Fixer.

She’s also well travelled in Africa. She studied it in grad school and married a South African. She’s been all over the continent.

This is my first trip to Africa, but I’ve been to other international locales that are similarly challenging to get around and do things. Its a shared perspective that I think is bringing Amanda and I closer on this trip. Places like Ghana can seem capricious. Seemingly random problems with seemingly easy solutions that you are totally unqualified to help solve, even if you’re convinced you are. Patience is vital. Adaptability primal.

Amanda introduced me to a term: T.A.B.: That’s Africa Baby. I smile about that as I wait for Jay. (Amanda kinda makes you smile like that.)

Jay arrives. It seems that there was a multi vehicle auto accident involving a large goods carrier truck. It happened outside of the fence line, but right in front of the expat village. There might have been a death. Certainly there are serious injuries. Newmont isn’t obligated to help (although their health care and emergency response infrastructure has significantly more resources that the surrounding municipalities). But there were Newmont employees involved. So Randy dispatched some vehicles.

As is the custom in places like Ghana, where police are rare and ineffective and laws are vague points of reference, some of the Ghanaians were taking matters into their own hands. Exacting a bit of justice. The at-fault driver had abandoned his car and fled into the woods. It was a mob scene, and escalating.

Jay tells us about this quickly as if to get it out of the way. I don’t think he noticed the looks on our faces, the degree to which our jaws had dropped.

“Anyway, I think we have the Newmont folks in a safe place. Sorry I’m late. I thought I’d begin the presentation with some photos of the mine site. Is that okay?”

I instinctively look for Amanda. That’s not okay, Jay. But that’s Africa, baby.

If you want some gold today, you don’t settle in a quaint mountain town in the Rockies filled with scrappy boot strappers singing Colorado My Home Sweet Home in hopes of discovering a nice little vein you can claim.

Too many people have done that already.

To get some gold today, you gotta find it and figure out how to do operations in the furthest flung corners of the earth. In the Andes on the Chilean-Argentinean border. In the Kyrgyz Republic just north of the China border. Or maybe North of Cajamarca, Peru.

You blast and scrape gaping pits out of the ground. It leaves a bit of a mark: If your pit is the largest, it’s square footage will be four times the size of Manhattan’s.

After clear cutting and scarring roads through the terrain to get them there, you use those truly uncanny haul trucks that you see in environmental scare documentaries to move the raw earth you dig up. The shoulder of a six-foot man comes to its wheel hub. Your mine pit miniaturizes them like a model scene on the set of a Terminator movie.

You chunk, grind and mash your raw earth into a fine mud using machinery of the kind that could fill an entire chapter in a Robert Kennedy Jr. book.

Then you dump a bunch of cyanide over the mud to get the gold out. And the used cyanide has to go somewhere. Preferably not in the clean water lake behind the dam you’ve created for your grinding and mashing and mud-making operations. So you build another dam and try to convince everyone that pouring cyanide and sulfur dioxide in there —open to the atmosphere—actually makes it inert. That it’ll be okay for generations that come after the mine closes*.

If your mine is really kickin’, you’ll get seven ounces of gold for around every 30 tons of earth you process. More than likely you’ll get one or two ounces. Maybe.

So what on earth was the Daniels College of Business thinking? A world-ranked business school that’s built a reputation on ethics is going to deliver a class that teaches sustainable development by working in partnership with Newmont Mining. Really.

Then again, like other b-schools it could have looked at Honda Hybrid market development. WalMart eco-friendly fleet renovations. Replacing standard light bulbs with fluorescents in Sears stores. Where’s the fun in that? Or, more to the point, where’s the learning in that?

This class will work hands-on and on location in the mud, dust, extravagance, and chemicals that is the gold mining business. With a company that’s had their share of troubles. Not the least of which includes a few employees actually jailed in Indonesia under charges of polluting an area bay.

So what will Newmont teach us? Should we even bother? Can gold mining even be green? I suppose this could all be a PR stunt on Newmont’s part. Maybe partnering in such ways with third party organizations will bring them good press (if I was their PR consultant, that’s exactly what I’d advise they do).

Agree with former CEO Wayne Murdy’s accolades? Think all that glitter is gilded? Think Newmont—and the gold industry in general—is the evil corporate empire writ large?

————
* (This is a communications issue, by the way. This is exactly how to make it inert. Get geeky about cyanide and check out this article.)

We have new relationships, and that changes things. Discussions have shifted from theories about relocation operations to relocating people. People we now know.

Their lives will be turned upside down if the mine opens. For good (residents have high hopes for jobs and some have even higher hopes for big returns on their land), for bad (students reported hearing from mothers that a mine will bring people from totally different cultures to their tight-knit towns), and indifferent (a cook in the Newmont encampment told me that she’d be OK with a mine opening because they’ll finally put a bus route through her town).

A student in a rare moment of doubt tells me “Hard to believe all this is for gold. I mean, its not like it’s a critical resource for human survival.” I immediately thought of gaudy jewelry. Glitter.

Before you posit that gold is a luxury not worthy of the impact it takes to produce it, consider gold’s many uses. And gold (and its value) lasts. It might very well be…well…sustainable.

As one expert puts it: “gold is also nearly indestructible; it does not disappear through corrosion as iron does, does not vanish into smoke in a fire, and is not dissolved or ruined by water, including salt water.”

And as a Newmont exec put it: “Gold is the only thing of value that, for the most part, is still around. Very little gold disappears.” It’s reused and recycled.

I also considered that my knee jerk reaction to gold was ethnocentric. Certainly for many peoples around the world, it’s as central to their culture as food. Marriage ceremonies. Religion.

Plenty of controversy surrounding gold. But one thing’s not controversial: it sure ain’t going anywhere.

Seems to me the real question is, how will we decide to go about getting it?

The task is ungraspable. Items on an endless to-do list: Energy needs. Relocating multiple villages, maybe 10,000 people. Roads and access concerns. NGO buy-in. Still not sure if local Chiefs will give their approval (despite not having de facto governance, politicians and enterprises must have their buy-in). Locations of sustainable farm training facilities. Evaluation of available and competent labor. Evaluation of available and competent ex-pat labor.

Oh — and is there enough gold in the ore samples to be profitable.

What also struck me was the water needs. One Newmont engineer told me he’s struggling with a solution to re-routing rivers and streams for the water supply. You need a lot of water to mine gold. A fresh and plentiful water supply for two lakes: a clean one for the water needs of the processing operations, and another to mix with the used cyanide and sulfur dioxide in the destruction process.

It was time for a beer in Newmont’s temporary encampment. A small little oasis, oddly. Reliable electricity, running water. Air conditioning. A small bar. A far cry from the mud huts and lean-to shanties we toured all day. If this is what Newmont can build temporarily, their fully operational mine must be a wonder. (We’ll see that next week.)

The beer was good. Scott McLagan, the lead professor and the Director of the executive programs at Daniels, had just debriefed the student teams. They were wandering a bit—trying to find focus for their projects. A balance of academic requirements and delivering something of value for Newmont. Measuring sustainable development efforts and the development of a Ghanaian foundation.

Not exactly a multiple choice exam.

“There’s no book for this stuff,” Scott told me. “Newmont is doing completely new things in Africa. Sustainability on this scale, and this integrated, is totally new.”

The African earth isn’t the only ground Newmont’s breaking. They’re working with a model of sustainability similar to what Daniels teaches. A nice alignment with the Newmont approach of juggling multiple systems. But charts and theories are eaten alive by the doing.

“Learning happens at the extremes,” Scott continued. “Think about it: Newmont’s business model is as complex and capital intensive as they come. Most of their workforce is overseas in multiple and remote locations. They arrive in the sticks of Ghana like an alien race. They promise new wealth creation, but a huge environmental impact.

“And they’ll have to move people who have lived here for generations. How do you value sustenance farming land? By the market value? That’d be next to nothing. And what happens when a financial wind fall comes to someone who’s never known financial management?”

I point out that that doesn’t even touch the environmental stuff. Like diverting streams.

“Or government stuff,” he says, practically brushing off green as if it’s the easiest part. “Newmont wants to be invited back. Where do they draw the line between good citizenship—building a public bathroom or a school is a rounding error in their corporate budget. But is that their job? Their duty to the shareholders?”

I look over my beer and around the bar. No students. They’re at work in their teams to tackle just these issues. Trying to find focus to their deliverables.

It’s very real to them. They’re on a deadline. A bit extreme.

Today we visited the Elima Slave castle. Stood in the dungeons. Walked through the gate that led to the ships. This place was only the beginning of the atrocities. It’s futile to describe the emotions. Multilayered, complex, sickening.

A thought struck me on the bus back to the hotel. It isn’t exaggerating to suggest that we find ourselves facing a new world. A world with unexampled challenges, a totally opaque future. But with the same undying hope that we just can’t seem to shake.

As an agent of defining this new world, capitalism is facing the same question that faced settlers of that other new world that was built on the backs of exploited people.

Today, we ask ourselves to learn. We ask ourselves, “now that we can do anything, how will we choose to do it?”

He and I are having an early breakfast in the empty mess hall. He’s patient with my questions.

Of course it’s challenging to work with local NGO’s the way you’re describing but you in the west will never understand the myriad of cultural threads that tangle their agendas… No, I don’t miss the straightforward office work in Accra but there are days when it all seems futile but I’ll never give up because I love my country with a vengeance and the people even more… Ghana can gain more from learning from companies like Newmont so we can do it on our own and that’s far better than the fleeting jobs and income international companies provide… Newmont is saying the right things and they’re acting on it so yes there is trust being built but Ghana has a long history of exploitation from gold mining companies… Yes, I know some good places to hear music in Accra here’s my cell phone number call me when you get back there.

“If Newmont’s approach to sustainability works, and more corporations adopt their practices, would it make you more at ease with western companies doing business in Ghana?”

Big smile.

“Did you know the Africa Cup kicks off in a week and Accra will host several matches? Ghana will be a showcase for African progress. It’s our chance to lead.”

I don’t watch soccer…err, football. I guess I better start.

When you’re anxious to go on a tour of an African mine site, sitting in a florescent lit room listening to presentations makes you a little jumpy and inattentive. Even so, when Jay Bastian started talking about the mowing operations at his mine, my ears perked up.

In a way, Randy Barnes and Jay Bastian’s relationship is a micro-reflection of Newmont Mining. Randy is the External Affairs Manager at Ahafo. Jay Bastian is the General Manager. Randy, citizenship and social affairs. Jay, operations. Randy, keep the peace. Jay, make the profits.

A few years ago, former Newmont CEO Wayne Murdy approached Scott McLagan — lead professor on this trip and director of Daniels’ executive programs — to help him change the culture at Newmont.

“We’re really good at operations,” Scott will tell you Wayne said. “We know what we’re doing behind the fence line. But I need our people to be spending more than half their time thinking outside the fence line.”

Academics call this focusing on your social license to operate. Newmont calls it profitability.

Newmont engaged Daniels to deliver custom corporate programs on team building, ethics, and sustainability. Multi-week programs, delivered multiple times over the course of several years for all management-level employees flown to Denver from around the world.

Daniels will have you believe that these programs contributed to Newmont’s cultural turnaround. A turnaround that resulted in Newmont’s media placements moving from arrests and water contamination in Indonesia to being placed on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (the first and only mining company with such a listing).

As they say in PR, that’s much better ink.

It’s a turnaround that began by placing Newmont’s Environmental and Social Responsibility managers at the decision making table with operations. They’d have to work hard to align values. A risky proposition for a company (in an industry) that’s always been all about operations.

Jump back to Ahafo. Jay tells our group that it would easier and cheaper to not hire so many people at the Ahafo mine. They employ less people, he said, for much larger operations and more production at their Nevada, U.S. site.

“I could do mowing operations cheaper, faster, and at a higher quality with a tractor than I could hiring a dozen guys with machetes.”

Randy interrupts to remind us that it’s a payoff against being a good corporate citizen. A valued member of the community.

Jay looks at Randy as if to say “That’s nice. Can we get back to operations?”

I wonder how many Newmont shareholders, way back in the comfy environs of the west, have had the same sentiment.