Now president and chief executive officer of the sustainability consulting company Natural Logic, Friend was a founding board member of an Internet breakthrough, the Institute for Global Communications. He also played key or founding roles in seminal environmental enterprises like the EcoNet, GreenLine, the California Office of Appropriate Technology and Buckminster Fuller’s “World Game.”
Friend’s lecture at Humboldt State, sponsored by the School of Business, is titled “The State of Sustainability.” He will deliver the “good news, bad news and critical news” about how well the marriage of business and sustainability is really doing. Among other things, he will discuss whether the “tipping point” has been reached when companies of all kinds—“some that you’d least expect”—are embracing sustainability and competing to set more aggressive objectives.
“Capital is flooding into clean technology; Europe, and even China, is ratcheting up performance standards,” he says. “The landscape has shifted pretty dramatically in the last year and a half. That’s in response to climate change and in response to large companies, like Wal-Mart and General Electric, putting sustainability in focus for their suppliers, which gets more attention than any stack of EPA regulations.”
Of students’ role in sustainability, Friend claims they are on the right path simply by asking, “What does it mean to be sustainable?” California State University students are at a particular advantage, he notes, because the state has leapfrogged the rest of the country and adopted the European Union’s approach to opening up the market for carbon emissions. “The AB-32 climate change regulation coming this year will affect every aspect of business,” he predicts.
The Chung-Watson Lecture Series takes its name from HSU alumnus Po-Yang Chung (’68), co-founder of DHL International Limited, the express and logistics company. He credited Professor Frank Watson, who taught business at Humboldt State from 1965 to 1972, with “giving me some of the deepest intellectual and ethics insights . . . that I still use today, truths I’ve applied in all my pursuits.”
Chung was named in 2005 to the honor roll of Distinguished Alumni maintained by the University’s Alumni Association. For more information about the lecture, dial the School of Business at 826-3224.