Winter 2002

How to Succeed
in Business – and Nature

Guest Essay by Frank Beal

Two years ago I left a 20-year career in business to work on a civic project. I was quickly invited to all manner of events to speak, serve on a panel, or make a few remarks. The event sponsors wanted a businessman or a business point of view. It was my first experience with tokenism.

Photo: Carol Freeman

I always began these events by reminding the audience that, although I came from a business background, business-people come in all shapes, sizes, and varieties. At one end of the spectrum is your worst nightmare, the embodiment of every anti-business stereotype you ever held. At the other end are business-people who genuinely care about their employees, their communities, and the environment, and they conduct themselves accordingly. And, of course, there is everything in between.

It helps to remember, of course, that for most business-people, business is just their day job. They are also school board members, mountain climbers, church deacons, and soccer moms. They don’t all play golf. Further, it is in the nature of businesses that most fail. Small businesses fail at an extremely rapid rate and the big ones merge, downsize, go bankrupt, or just disappear. Running a business is a fragile life style.

I was reminded of all this while reading John Rogner’s essay in the last issue of Chicago WILDERNESS (Fall 2001, pp. 41-42). He makes reference to the diversity of opinion, among those in the environmental community, concerning man’s relationship to wild areas. This range of viewpoint is no doubt healthy, as different interest groups hammer out new laws and new attitudes about the stewardship of nature. So it is with the business community. A monoculture in the business community is dangerous. Business thrives on competition and diversity of opinion.

Photo: Metropolitan Planning Council

Rogner’s essay prompted me to think of other similarities between the business community and the environmental community. I thought of two more.

First it is in the nature of nature not to pay attention to political boundaries. Floodplains, air sheds, prairies, and the habitats of animals or insects follow different rules than those created by local, state, and federal governments. That is why the environmental community often feels disenfranchised – not because they aren’t allowed to vote, but because they can’t vote for candidates that can really represent their sphere of interest. The problem is especially vexing in metropolitan Chicago with more than 1,200 units of local government.

The business community also has little use for arbitrary political boundaries. Political boundaries have little to do with a customer base, an employee catchment area, the location of suppliers, or the communication and transportation infrastructures needed to make businesses work. The Chicago regional economy is a complex web of interactions. Mostly we are buying and selling to each other within a dozen counties centered around the city of Chicago. Businesses “see” this economic landscape. Too often government doesn’t – or can’t – do anything about it because of jurisdictional limitations. Thus, the business community also feels disenfranchised from time to time.

A second similarity is that businesses, or at least healthy businesses, share with the environmental community their own version of a conservation ethic. They understand the need to preserve, protect, and do no harm to the resources they depend on. Thoughtless exploitation of resources, be it people, raw material, or physical plant, is a short-term fix and a sure road to failure. Truly progressive businesses understand the notion of stewardship and act accordingly. Unfortunately, this classic conservation ethic of business has been usurped by some political conservatives who have twisted its meaning.

Photo: Sustain

Chicago’s Traditions
Chicago has a rich history of business involvement in civic affairs. In the early 1900s Chicago was a growing city threatened by dirty streets and open sewers. A walk across the city was a challenge of dodging the congestion and filth of the streets and avoiding the 22 freight lines that crisscrossed downtown. To address these and other issues, the city’s leading business organization, The Commercial Club of Chicago, hired local architect Daniel Burnham to prepare a plan for the region. Burnham envisioned a different place. Instead of a squalid lakefront, he saw an open space that could be preserved for public use. He saw a city that could be connected by green and landscaped boulevards.

That same business organization, The Commercial Club of Chicago, recently created a new initiative, Chicago Metropolis 2020, to revisit the issues of regional planning. Some of the work of Chicago Metropolis 2020 is described on pages 12-16 of this issue of Chicago WILDERNESS. The article describes a regional planning process meant to be a meeting ground for opinions about equity, the economy, and the environment to come together.

A central goal of Chicago Metropolis 2020 is to maintain a robust economy in the region in order to give families an opportunity to earn an income and accumulate assets for the future. We believe that businesses and business investors will be attracted to areas that preserve and protect the region’s resources in the ways outlined by the Chicago Wilderness Biodiversity Recovery Plan.

Photo: Sierra Club of Illinois, Joliet Club

We hear Hewlett Packard express its frustration over the uncontrolled growth of Atlanta, and the Intel Corporation express its pleasure with Portland’s growth boundaries and affordable housing programs. These and similar reactions stem from two sources. The first is that modern businesses rely on hiring a sophisticated workforce that demands a lifestyle that is free of pollution, accessible to recreation, and that offers a host of amenities. The second is that businesses live with enough uncertainty already, so they don’t want to spend millions investing in a plant only to find a few years later that traffic congestion has choked off their employees and their trucks, or that their employees can no longer afford to live anywhere near where they work.

Chicago Metropolis 2020 is confident that the work of Chicago Wilderness will not only preserve our valuable remaining green spaces and reconnect people to nature, but will also make the region more attractive to business investment. We applaud your leadership.

Frank Beal, a former executive with the Inland Steel Corporation, is now Executive Director of Chicago Metropolis 2020. He lives in the Lake Michigan watershed.