Mark Shayler’s You Can’t Make Money From a Dead Planet looks at how to run a sustainable business. He talks about how sustainable businesses can make money and do better for the world. There are various pieces of advice and useful ideas. A key idea he emphasizes is that you must design for sustainability.
Always Look In The Trash
Where are you failing in sustainability? Shayler has a good place to look.
Always start in the trash.
Shayler, 2023, page 192
There are good reasons to do this and often looking in the trash creates benefits both environmental and economic. If you are manufacturing something and throwing away a lot of materials that is obviously terrible environmentally. Critically, it also isn’t smart economically. At the risk of sounding like a business professor, I would say buying stuff and then throwing it away isn’t the sound business strategy that some might think but companies do it all the time.
Design For Sustainability
Shayler’s makes the point that sustainability involves thinking through the entire process.
In essence developing an appropriate eco-design or design for sustainability strategy necessitates understanding the largest impact of your product through its life cycle and focusing on this.
Shayler, 2023, page 184
When producing a product design for sustainability careful thought about the impacts can make a real difference.
Good design delivers more the earlier you start. It is much better to focus on sustainability at an early stage — rather than try and retrofit for sustainability later. This is an advantage in working towards sustainability that countries getting richer now have over many already developed economies. For example, Britain’s old housing stock is a bit of a nightmare to improve. Building from scratch gives much more opportunities akin to leapfrogging.
Is Marketing Just Lying?
Where Shayler lost me was describing what different business disciplines should do. Some disciplines received nuanced ideas about how they could improve. There was one big exception.
My message for marketing is really clear: stop lying.
Shayler, 2023, page 244
I wasn’t a fan of his dismissal of marketing. Sure, plenty of current marketing is challenging and plenty of marketers are imperfect people but the idea that marketing only needs to stop lying is silly.
All disciplines have their problems. Who is designing all the unsustainable products that marketing is apparently just lying about. Who is creating accounts that don’t highlight social impact? Don’t HR people hire all the marketers, why are they hiring for ‘not liars’?
Marketers can do so much more than just stop lying. Yes, lying is bad but marketers do customer research that allows for good design. Marketers price and get the products to the customers. Without effective marketing the sustainable businesses would be bankrupt in a couple of weeks.
All business needs to do better, marketers included but advice to them needs to be better than Shayler’s simple exhortation to cut out the lies. It was a cheap, tacky jibe and it lost Shayler credibility in my eyes.
For more sustainable business advice see Bad Businesses Can Get Better, Net Positive Business, and Certification And Better Business
Read: Mark Shayler (2023) You Can’t Make Money From a Dead Planet, Kogan Page
