In May, one of my business partners asked me to rescue a bit of software development that was a joint venture between a prominent politician’s environmental activism foundation, a very large software company, and one of our smaller businesses.
It took me until July to weed through two years of chaos and deception to understand that we were losing millions on the effort, that neither customer was being honest with us, or even with each other, and that the entire effort was a financial and political catastrophe. Besides that the software was unusable. Not for want of technical talent. It’s was because the politicians mistakenly believed that they could be product managers – skills that are incompatible.
I’ve spent the late spring and most of the summer building a new business and attempting to right the many wrongs done by these people, to our company and others, in particular, to a global organization named ICLEI, which consists of local governments working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, I am not a climate activist, and I’m actually a skeptic. It’s not that I don’t want to reduce emissions. I do.
But the reason I got involved was because I simply cannot morally tolerate myself, my business partners, and some very good, and hard working environmental activists, who are simply trying to make the world into a better place, get walked on by denizens of the evil empire whose only real purpose seems to be giving capitalism a bad name, while in the mean time, harming their company’s brand, and all for personal ambitions.
So, my work on Capitalism 3.0 has been delayed because I’ve had to launch a new business, and right what I feel are injustices by doing so. It seems that it’s acceptable to the Green movement to have a skeptical capitalist involved as long as he’s on their side. A marriage of convenience so to speak.
All I know is that I haven’t met anyone involved in the climate issue that isn’t a good person. And I can’t say that for the people who caused me to get involved by their errant and greedy behavior – masked as activism. I find them insufferable.
So those political activists both left and right, who look at me askance when I tell them I am a major stockholder in a Green business, should understand that you have your religions and I have mine: I don’t like to see people abused, and especially under the cloak of public service.
