"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Thursday, September 6, 2007

What Corporate Executives Believe

I just got an unsolicited invitation in my email. I contacted them to see if it was spam, and they told me I was invited as an "influential blogger". Shucks. Flattery will get you somewhere, but I am way behind on this proposal I need to get out, so I'll pass.

A global shipping insurance concern is basically doing a global change for executives event. My sense is that this is for real. I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to tell my six billion closest friends more about the event or not, so I'll just quote the interesting bit from the invitation:
To address the major disconnect surrounding future risks for businesses, Marsh, the world’s largest insurance broker and strategic risk advisor, has created the Center for Risk Insights to help businesses better understand the risks they face today and to identify and explain threats looming on the horizon. As part of this effort, the Marsh Center recently surveyed over one hundred board level executives of Fortune 1000 companies to gauge their perceptions on the greatest business risks. Highlights of the findings include:[...]

An astounding half of executives surveyed do not believe that global climate change resulting in long-term environmental and economic impacts is likely to occur.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

These are probably the executives who haven't got round to reading this enlightening tome:
http://www.lloyds.com/News_Centre/360_risk_project/360_risk_project.htm

:)

Unknown said...

Why does this item on corporate execs focus on the glass as half empty, not half full? I'm not now reading your exact words, but I think you said 1/2 or more of CEOs surveyed still don't believe in GCC as a threat. Doesn't this mean nearly 50% do? Maybe we should see this as a sign of progress - and an incentive to keep working.

Michael Tobis said...

John,

It hardly seems like good news if half the world's most powerful people are out of touch with reality.

It was almost twenty years ago that I started taking it seriously enough to think about making it my career. This isn't news. The biggest thing that's changed is that some of the maybes have become probablies and some of the probablies have become already happenings.

We've been running the faucet for twenty years and the glass is hafl full already! Oh callooh! Callay!