Visionary leaders tackle great challenges with grand consequences over long timespans. How long? Well, the current crises in the global economy and the consequent reshaping of capitalism will work themselves out over a decade or two. But the threats posed by the potentially inexorable ecological meltdown of our planet will play out over centuries.
That meltdown has direct implications for business leaders. The vast majority of industrial platforms, designs, chemicals and other habits of commerce were developed blind to their ecological impacts. The discipline that reveals these impacts is but a decade or two old: industrial ecology, which measures the manifold consequences of any product with an engineer's precision. The main method, life cycle assessment, renders values for the environmental, health (and, more lately, social) impacts of an item over the course of its entire life cycle.
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