Otto Scharmer

Meet today’s guest blogger, Cristiana Fragola, a student who first crossed our paths when we went to check out Presence coauthor Otto Scharmer’s class at MIT.

Yesterday I finally met a remarkable man who talked about system change and the importance of looking at a company’s ability to generate value and be productive 3 to 10 years from now, not just in the next 11 months. The auditorium was packed, students seemed moved and were frantically taking notes. Yet today, during the business and environment class I am taking at the Harvard business school, many students commented that what Gore says is not practical and we should not even bother to live a carbon neutral life because individual actions cannot make a difference.

I asked those students what would they do if they were in a leadership position, heading a fortune 500 company, and then they said that maybe they would reconsider their position. A few others though quietly followed me at the end of the class to thank me for having taken Gore’s side and articulated that macrocosmos are made up by microcosmos. They even asked me they could use the argument again. There is hope.

It was my great pleasure last week to welcome Otto Scharmer to our office. Otto co-authored the book Presence with Peter Senge and he brought his students from MIT to our office to explore Seventh Generation and to ask questions about any and all aspects of the company.

They were a great group and a handful of people from various departments spent five hours with them talking about what seemed like everything under the sun in a conversation that was as profound as it was probing. As worthwhile as the time was for Otto and his students, it was a tremendous experience for us as well, and I wanted to share Otto’s e-mail to me about the day

Duke (the Chief Trim Tab Officer at Seventh Gen) and I spent 3 days in the SoL Executive Champions Workshop at the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont. There were 20 exec types from all walks of life delving into the idea of creating (presencing) pragmatic global change...Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer authors of the book Presence led the workshop.