from Lift Conference on Vimeo.

This was the Keynote speech at Lift France 09 by Gunter Pauli. The title of his speech was “Changing the Planet”. He’s some inspiring thoughts about entrepreneurship, sustainability, and market insufficiencies.

Here some on-the-go statements I really liked!

If you give a man a fish, you will feed him for a day; if you teach him how to fish, he will overfish.

A business man, who pollutes the environment and claims afterwards that he will pollute less, is given an award. There is a double-morale in business.

Biodegradable soap was not sustanable because it fostered the destruction of the rainforest; collateral damage is always tolerated in business; back to the need for ethics.

Every natural system works with what is locally available.

Nature would teach an MBA under the premise: “invest less to gain more” or “substitute something with nothing”; improve higher material efficiency to do more with less; we should stop accepting inefficiencies.

Nature makes polymeres by aminoacids. The bees, the ants, the spiders, they know how to do that. They’ve been doing it for about 70-80 million years. They have a little bit of experience. We forget that we are a recent arrival on Earth. We still havent figured out well how to do it. That’s why we still make a lot of mistakes.