E-M8 Entrepreneurial Management for Eternal Mission

The other day I was at Alterra on Humboldt and was surprised to see them use heating to keep their outside space usable during winter. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the business reason for it, and if anyone else did that I would not give it a second thought. However, Alterra is very emphatic about being sustainable and environmentally conscious and this just caught me completely off guard.

Maybe it did not register with most of their customers, and frankly it makes little difference to me, since I am only willing to pay coffee shop prices for my chai if I am meeting with someone who wanted to meet there, but just maybe this inconsistency is precisely the sacrifice of the organizational purpose at the altar of the expedient that when done on a massive scale of much larger corporations that causes most of the phenomenon that are frustrating in our world today.

Again, Alterra is one of the strongest local brands, and by all means,  I wish them well. And maybe this was not an oversight, but rather a conscious trade off given the limited resources, they like every organizations must face, but I would love to live in a world transparent enough where we as consumers and investors can know what drives these decisions and have a way to vote with our dollars to occasionally express our displeasure or mild irritation when we see something bothersome in the way particular business decisions are made.

On the other hand, the more practical solution in the short run is for government to stop subsidizing energy and start taxing it in the proportion to the cleanup costs for the pollution we all generate, unfortunately, that too is not politically expedient.