Daniel Goleman's Blog, page 24

Picking the Right Brain State for the Job

The brain is like an instrument we can tune for the job at hand—something like tuning a guitar to the right key for a song. Reading the fine print in a contract, cognitive scientists tell us, takes a very different state than, say, coming up with a clever name for your business.

Our emotions are the keyboard we play in tuning our brains. Here are some of the ways moods match to tasks at hand:

By allowing the brain to generate a greater fluidity of thoughts, our positive moods make us better at coming up with novel ideas, solving problems, and making decisions.

On the downside, though, upbeat moods make us a bit more gullible, by weakening our ability to detect the weaknesses in an argument someone is making. We are more prone to making snap decisions we might regret later. And we are less careful in paying attention to the details of tasks.

The upside of being down, or at least more somber: we can more easily focus on those details we missed or ignored while we were upbeat—we pay more attention even to boring jobs. The take home: get serious before you read that contract.

Some other benefits to sour moods: we're more skeptical, and so less likely to take someone's word for it—even an expert's. We ask more questions and come to our own independent conclusion.

Then there's anger. Aristotle wrote, "anyone can get angry—that's easy. But to get angry in the right way, for the right reason, at the right time, and with the right person—that's not so easy."

So have an unfair charge on your credit card bill? Get angry—but in the right way. Anger—which can so readily get us to do or say something we regret later—has its virtues. If we can channel the anger, it raises our energy and focuses us on changing things for the better—persisting in complaining until we get that charge removed.

Some downsides of anger are obvious, like the toxicity it puts in the air for those around us. But some costs are more subtle: anger makes us pessimistic, and so more likely to give up rather than keep trying after some setback. We have a built-in negative bias toward everything we see, and so a negative spin in our judgments. And then there's the problem that our emotions are contagious—so if we're cranky at the office, we can not just ruin everyone else's day, but also their effectiveness.

Are Women More Emotionally Intelligent Than Men?

Yes, and Yes and No.

Emotional intelligence has four parts: self-awareness, managing our emotions, empathy, and social skill. There are many tests of emotional intelligence, and most seem to show that women tend to have an edge over men when it comes to these basic skills for a happy and successful life. That edge may matter more than ever in the workplace, as more companies are starting to recognize the advantages of high EI when it comes to positions like sales, teams, and leadership.

On the other hand, it's not that simple. For instance, some measures suggest women are on average better than men at some forms of empathy, and men do better than women when it comes to managing distressing emotions. Whenever you talk about such gender differences in behavior, your are referring to two different Bell Curves, one for men and one for women, that largely overlap. What this means is that any given man might be as good or better as any woman at empathy, and a woman as good as or better than a specific man at handling upsets.

Let's look at empathy. There are three kinds: cognitive empathy, being able to know how the other person sees things; emotional empathy, feeling what the other person feels; and empathic concern, or sympathy—being ready to help someone in need.

Women tend to be better at emotional empathy than men, in general. This kind of empathy fosters rapport and chemistry. People who excel in emotional empathy make good counselors, teachers, and group leaders because of this ability to sense in the moment how others are reacting.

Neuroscientists tell us one key to empathy is a brain region called the insula, which senses signals from our whole body. When we're empathizing with someone, our brain mimics what that person feels, and the insula reads that pattern and tells us what that feeling is.

Here's where women differ from men. If the other person is upset, or the emotions are disturbing, women's brains tend to stay with those feelings. But men's brains do something else: they sense the feelings for a moment, then tune out of the emotions and switch to other brain areas that try to solve the problem that's creating the disturbance.

Thus women's complaint that men are tuned out emotionally, and men's that women are too emotional—it's a brain difference.

Neither is better—both have advantages. The male tune-out works well when there's a need to insulate yourself against distress so you can stay calm while others around you are falling apart—and focus on finding a solution to an urgent problem. And the female tendency to stay tuned in helps enormously to nurture and support others in emotionally trying circumstances. It's part of the "tend-and-befriend" response to stress.

There's another way of looking at male-female differences in EI: Simon Bar-On Cohen at Cambridge University says that there's an extreme "female brain" which is high in emotional empathy—but not so good at systems analysis. By contrast, the extreme "male brain" excels in systems thinking and is poor at emotional empathy (he does not mean that all men have the "male brain," nor all women the "female brain" of course; many women are skilled at systems thinking, and many men at emotional empathy).

Psychologist Ruth Malloy at the HayGroup Boston studies excellence in leaders. She finds when you only look at the stars—leaders in the top ten percent of business performance—gender differences in emotional intelligence abilities wash out: the men are as good as the women, the women as good as the men, across the board.

That echoes a discovery by scientists who study primates. When a chimp sees another chimp who is upset, say from an injury, she mimics the distress, a way of showing empathy. Some chimps will then go over and give some solace to the upset chimp, for example, stroking the other to help it calm down. Female chimps do this more often than male chimps do—with one intriguing exception: the alpha males, the troupe leaders, give solace even more often than do female chimps. In nature's design, leaders, it seems, need a large dose of empathic concern.

Resilience for the Rest of Us

There are two ways to become more resilient: one by talking to yourself, the other by retraining your brain.

If you've suffered a major failure, take the sage advice given by psychologist Martin Seligman in the HBR article "Building Resilience." Talk to yourself. Give yourself a cognitive intervention and counter defeatist thinking with an optimistic attitude. Challenge your downbeat thinking and replace it with a positive outlook.

But, fortunately, major failures come along rarely in life.

What about bouncing back from the more frequent annoying screwups, minor setbacks and irritating upsets that are routine in any leader's life? Resilience is, again, the answer — but with a different flavor. You need to retrain your brain.

The brain has a very different mechanism for bouncing back from the cumulative toll of daily hassles. And with a little effort, you can upgrade its ability to snap back from life's downers.

Whenever we get so upset we say or do something we later regret (and who doesn't now and then?), that's a sure sign that our amygdala — the brain's radar for danger, and the trigger for the fight-or-flight response — has hijacked the brain's executive centers in the prefrontal cortex. The neural key to resilience lies in how quickly we recover from that hijacked state.

The circuitry that brings us back to full energy and focus after an amygdala hijack concentrates in the left side of our prefrontal area, finds Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin. He's also found that when we're distressed, there's heightened activity on the right side of the prefrontal area. Each of us has a characteristic level of left/right activity that predicts our daily mood range — if we're tilted to the right, more upsets; if to the left, quicker recovery from distress of all kinds.

To tackle this in the workplace, Davidson teamed with the CEO of a high-pressure, 24/7, biotech startup and Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn offered the employees at the biotech outfit instruction in mindfulness, an attention-training method that teaches the brain to register anything happening in the present moment with full focus — but without reacting.

The instructions are simple:

Find a quiet, private place where you can be undistracted for a few minutes — for instance, close your office door and mute your phone.
Sit comfortably, with your back straight but relaxed.
Focus your awareness on your breath, staying attentive to the sensations of the inhalation and exhalation, and start again on the next breath.
Do not judge your breathing or try to change it in any way.
See anything else that comes to mind as a distraction — thoughts, sounds, whatever — let them go and return your attention to your breath.

After eight weeks, and an average 30 minutes a day of practicing mindfulness, the employees had shifted their ratio from tilted toward the stressed-out right side to the resilient left side. What's more, they said they remembered what they loved about their work — they got in touch with what had brought them energy in the first place.

To get the full benefit, a daily practice of 20 to 30 minutes works best; think of it like a mental exercise routine. It can be very helpful to have guided instructions, but the key is to find a slot for it in your daily routine. (There are even instructions for using a long drive as your practice session.)

Mindfulness has been steadily gaining credence among hard-nosed executives. There are several centers where mindfulness instruction has been tailored for businesspeople, from tony resorts like Miraval to programs in mindful leadership at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. Google University has been offering a course on mindfulness to employees for years.

Might you benefit from tuning up your brain's resilience circuitry by learning mindfulness? Among high-performing executives, the impacts of stress can be subtle. My colleagues Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee suggest as a rough diagnostic of leadership stress asking yourself, "Do I have a vague sense of unease, restlessness, or the feeling that life is not great (a higher standard than "good enough")?" A bit of mindfulness might put your mind at ease.

Daniel Goleman is Co-Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University, co-author of Primal Leadership: Leading with Emotional Intelligence, and, most recently, author of The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights.

My Newest Book – The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights

My new digital book, The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights, fills a gap between my last books on social intelligence and on leadership, and my next book, which will not be out for a year or two.

The digital format solves a problem for me: how to make available a critical mass of new learning that does not have the full heft of a regular book. This digital book pulls together a wide range of findings into some fascinating aspects of emotional intelligence. This is not an exhaustive, technical review of scientific data – this is a work in progress that focuses on actionable findings, on new insights you can use:

The academic debate on whether such an entity as "emotional intelligence" that differs from personality and from IQ gets a powerful answer from brain research.
Where the brain's ethical radar resides – it's not where you think.
The neural dynamics of creativity tell us why putting an innovative puzzle aside can be part of the solution.
Why the brain circuitry for drive, persistence, and motivation holds the answer to disengagement, a workplace epidemic.
How to enhance the brain states underlying optimal performance.
The simple key to rapport, resonance, and interpersonal chemistry.
Brain 2.0: our brain on the web – and the neural blindspot that we ignore at our own risk.
Why woman are more empathic than men – and when they are not.
The dark side of emotion intelligence: The Bernie Madoff syndrome.
How to make learning in emotional intelligence last.

Enjoy!

Anthropocene Thinking

Do you know the PDF of your shampoo? A 'PDF' refers to a "partially diminished fraction of an ecosystem," and if your shampoo contains palm oil cultivated on clearcut jungle in Borneo, say, that value will be high.

How about your shampoo's DALY? This measure comes from public health: "disability adjusted life years," the amount of one's life that will be lost to a disabling disease because of, say, a liftetime's cumulative exposure to a given industrial chemical. So if your favorite shampoo contains two common ingredients, the carcinogen 1,4 dioxane, or BHA, an endocrine disrupter, its DALY will be higher.

PDFs and DALYs are among myriad metrics for Anthropocene thinking, which views how human systems impact the global systems that sustain life. This way of perceiving interactions between the built and the natural worlds comes from the geological sciences.  If adopted more widely this lens might usefully inform how we find solutions to the singular peril our species faces: the extinction of our ecological niche.

Beginning with cultivation and accelerating with the Industrial Revolution, our planet left the Holocene Age and entered what geologists call the Anthropocene Age, in which human systems erode the natural systems that support life. Through the Anthropocene lens, the daily workings of the energy grid, transportation, industry and commerce inexorably deteriorate global biogeochemical systems like the carbon, phosphorous and water cycles.

The most troubling data suggests that since the 1950s, the human enterprise has led to an explosive acceleration that will reach criticality within the next few decades as different systems reach a point-of-no-return tipping point. For instance, about half the total rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration has occurred in just the last 30 years – and of all the global life-support systems, the carbon cycle is closest to no-return.  While such "inconvenient truths" about the carbon cycle have been the poster child for our species' slow motion suicide, that's just part of a much larger picture, with all the eight global life-support systems under attack by our daily habits.

Anthropocene thinking tells us the problem is not necessarily inherent in the systems like commerce and energy that degrade nature; hopefully these can be modified to become self-sustaining with innovative advances and entrepreneurial energy. The real root of the Anthropocene dilemma lies in our neural architecture.

We approach the Anthropocene threat with brains shaped in evolution to survive the previous geological epoch, the Holocene, when dangers were signaled by growls and rustles in the bushes, and it served one well to reflexively abhor spiders and snakes. Our neural alarm systems still attune to this largely antiquated range of danger.

Add to that misattunement to threats our built-in perceptual blindspot: we have no direct neural register for the dangers of the Anthropocene age, which are too macro or micro for our sensory apparatus. We are oblivious to, say, our body burden, the lifetime build-up of damaging industrial chemicals in our tissues.

To be sure, we have methods for assessing CO2 buildups or blood levels of BHA. But for the vast majority of people those numbers have little to no emotional impact. Our amygdala shrugs.

Finding ways to counter the forces that feed the Anthropocene effect should count high in prioritizing scientific efforts. The earth sciences of course embrace the issue – but do not deal with the root of the problem, human behavior. The sciences that have most to offer have done the least Anthropocene thinking.

The fields that hold keys to solutions include economics, neuroscience, social psychology and cognitive science – and their various hybrids. With a focus on Anthropocene theory and practice they might well contribute species-saving insights. But first they have to engage this challenge, which for the most part has remained off their agenda.

When, for example, will neuroeconomics tackle the brain's perplexing indifference to the news about planetary meltdown, let alone how that neural blindspot might be patched?  Might cognitive neuroscience one day offer some insight that might change our collective decision-making away from a lemmings' march to oblivion? Could any of the computer, behavioral or brain sciences come up with an information prosthetic that might reverse our course?

Paul Crutzen, the Dutch atmospheric chemist who won a Nobel for his work on ozone depletion, coined the term 'Anthropocene' ten years ago. As a meme, 'Anthropocene' has as yet little traction in scientific circles beyond geology and environmental science, let alone the wider culture: A Google check on 'anthropocene' shows 78,700 references (mainly in geoscience), while by contrast 'placebo', a once-esoteric medical term now well-established as a meme, has more than 18 million (and even the freshly coined 'vuvuzela' has 3,650,000).

Published at the Edge foudnations World Question Center 2011

Awake at the Wheel: Mindful Driving

Trying to kick that texting-while-driving habit? Or worried about someone who gambles with fate by indulging somesuch risk?

Here's a just-in-time holiday idea: Awake at the Wheel: Mindful Driving – that helps you hit the road fully alert, calm, and focused.

Given the driving habits most of us have fallen into, that's a much-needed antidote to the mortal dangers of phone calls, texting, and otherwise multi-tasking while hurtling down a highway in two tons of steel at 88 feet per second – a high-risk endeavor in itself.

Mindful driving gives us a way to up the odds of getting there in one piece, first by making us less of a risk to ourselves (and our passengers), and second by making us more alert to the split-second dangers posed by those other drivers bobbing and weaving their way down the road while they are distracted by god-knows-what.

Mindfulness, as you may know, is an ancient attention training method that has been applied to a range of modern malaises — everything from weight loss to living with chronic disease.

Now Awake at the Wheel: Mindful Driving takes on our bad road habits – and about time. About 6,000 people die and more than half a million are injured in a given year because of distracted drivers, the Department of Transportation tells us, and those numbers are climbing year by year.

Using a cell phone – even hands free – delays a driver's reaction as much as having blood alcohol levels at .08 percent, the legal limit.

Research on mindfulness tells us that regular practice:


Speeds up reaction time, that life-saving factor when the unexpected comes along. Dr. Richard Davidson's neuroscience research group at the University of Wisconsin finds that mindfulness practice speeds up reaction time.
Calms us, so that we are more patient and relaxed – the antidote to road rage. Barbara Frederickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, reports that mindfulness enhances "vagal nerve tone," the circuitry that quiets the body again after, say, a near-miss with a gigantic Mack eighteen-wheeler.
Keeps our cool. Mindfulness, Davidson's research finds, strengthens the circuits that quiet emotional hijacks, quelling the impulse to road rage.
Sharpens alertness. Unlike some kinds of meditation that make us spacey, mindfulness amps up focused attention, as many studies have found – including a study by the Davidson group of the impacts of a three-month mindfulness intensive.


There's a kind of psychological judo in using a guided mindfulness session to help a driver pay full attention. Awake at the Wheel takes that impulse to listen to something – anything –  that will distract us from the boredom of the long road home, and flips it around so our entertainment helps us focus smack on what we're doing: just driving.

Michelle McDonald, our guide, keeps it engaging. Instead of our minds wandering off in that state where we crave some distraction, she keeps us rooted on the usually unappreciated details of the task at hand.

We tune into the sensations of gripping the steering wheel, and keep an eye on the passing show of the visual panorama that surrounds us. With these anchoring our attention in the present, McDonald then leads us through exercises that transform a daily drive into an attention workout.

I tried Awake at the Wheel while tooling along a route I've traveled hundreds, maybe thousands of times.  My standard routine to pass the time on that too-well-worn road has been to daydream, flip through the radio dial, go through my playlist, make a call or two – whatever will distract me.

But this time I found the same stretch of Interstate a journey of a wholly different kind. My mind was continually engaged in one or another aspect of my direct experience, from the feel of the wheel to letting go of mental distractions – with not a moment of spacing out.

When I arrived, instead of the usual relief that I had gotten that boring drive over with once again, for once I didn't want to stop.

This may be the one holiday gift that shows you truly care.

Performance Reviews: It's Not Only What You Say, But How You Say It

Performance reviews are the HR ritual that everyone dreads.

And now brain science shows that positive or negative, the way in which that review gets delivered can be a boon or a curse.

If a boss gives even a good review in the wrong way, that message can be a low-grade curse, creating a neural downer.

So I learned while reviewing recent scientific findings for an upcoming webinar that has got me rethinking the concept of emotional intelligence.

The neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has found that when we're in an upbeat, optimistic, I-can-handle-anything frame of mind, energized and enthusiastic about our goals, our brains turn up the activity in an area on the left side, just behind the forehead. That's the brain state where we are at our best.

But when we're feeling down, with low energy and zero motivation, even anxious, our brain has turned up the volume on the right side. That's the zone where we punt.

And performance feedback that focuses on what's wrong with us also puts this downer brain area on overdrive. We're so preoccupied with the bad news (and our fantasies of this meaning we'll lose our job) that we just don't have the energy or can't focus on working at our best.

Even the boss's tone of voice can trigger one or another brain area. In one study, when people got positive performance feedback that was delivered in a negative, cold tone of voice, they came out of the session feeling down–despite the good news.

Amazingly, when negative feedback came in a warm, positive tone of voice, they felt upbeat and energized.

Of course a boss needs to give employees performance feedback. But too many are poor at giving feedback. The problem here takes two forms: being hyper-critical and focusing only on what's wrong without balancing it with what's right, or undermining even positive feedback with a negative tone.

Either way, the messages the boss sends activate the wrong brain zone. Inept manager feedback makes us inept.

The bad news: this is rampant. The really bad news: it hurts business. That's the verdict of Samuel A. Culbert, a psychologist at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. He says annual reviews do more than create more stress for workers. They end up making everybody–those who get them and those who give them–less productive.

In theory, artful performance feedback improves our performance, setting us on the right track. Such feedback is best given on the spot (not months later in a formal review), and with a sense of trust and openness between the giver and receiver. It might take the general form of "When you do X, it does not help get to Y, because of Z." The X and Z here should be a clear and specific–that is, actionable information.

But what happens when such on-the-spot feedback comes in the heat of the moment, when the manager is steamed and not caring the least about imparting X, Y, or Z? Managers have their emotional hijacks, too.

Then there's the nightmare of the formal performance review. UCLA's Culbert argues they are largely a sham–a charade carried out to justify decisions on promotion or pay. And even when they do reflect actual performance, the feedback tends to be hollow rather than giving you a healthy balance of what you do well with what need to improve on–and how. So Culbert suggests instead a performance preview, where a boss outlines how an employee can do even better.

But the neuroscience adds a crucial nuance: even positive news should come with a positive tone. So add to that feedback a dollop of emotional intelligence.

How Market Forces Can Build a Greener World

With climate legislation dead in Congress and the fizzled hopes for a breakthrough in Copenhagen fading into distant memory, the time seems ripe for fresh strategies – especially ones that do not depend on government action.

Here's a modest proposal: radical transparency, the laying bare of a product's ecological impacts for all to see.

Economic theory applied to ecological metrics offers a novel way to ameliorate our collective assault on the global systems that sustain life. There are two fundamental economic principles that, if applied well, might just accelerate the trend toward a more sustainable planet: marketplace transparency about the ecological impacts of consumer goods and their supply chains, and lowering the cost of that information to zero.

First transparency. A maxim in economics holds that transparency makes markets work more efficiently. This rule has long been applied to price, but why not also apply it to the ecological impacts of industry and commerce? At present when it comes to the ecological consequence of the things we buy, we have information asymmetry, where sellers know far more than buyers.

This seems about to change. One big mover is WalMart, which last summer announced it will develop a "sustainability index," a credible rating of the ecological impacts of the products it sells boiled down into a single metric that shoppers can use to compare Brand A and Brand B.  There are signs this is more than marketing hype: WalMart has started to pilot life-cycle analyses of products it carries, and, some say, hopes to make transparent such data on the environmental and social impacts of suppliers four levels deep in the chain of vendors. The key, of course, will be to make sure the cost of quantifying and listing such data is minimal, as price will remain the primary determining factor for consumers.

WalMart is by no means the only player in taking steps to become more ecologically transparent. Companies such as Unilever (brands like Dove Soap and Lipton Tea) and Google (its servers consume enormous amounts of energy) are following their own maps to transparency about the eco-impacts of their operations, to find ways to make operations more sustainable.

Several global companies are forming a "Group of Ten" to develop a supply chain transparency system called Earthster into its newest version, "E2 Turbo." Rather than go to the expense of a full life-cycle analysis (which can cost $50,000 and take months), E2 Turbo asks for data only on the 20 percent or so of a product's life cycle that accounts for around 80 percent of environmental impacts.

Now under development, this supply-chain-tracking software lets companies understand where their largest negative impacts are, and how to find more sustainable alternatives. A built-in recommendations engine, drawing on a Department of Commerce database, suggests suppliers or other players that can help companies improve those impacts. That guides business-to-business decisions, with companies better able to find vendors that will let them keep their eco-impact scores low.

As more and more companies feed data into E2 Turbo – which is open source – they will together build what amounts to an information commons. There has also been discussion about the U.S. government establishing a site for that commons, creating a public database on ecological impacts that amounts to new public resource that any company, small or large, could draw on to improve the impacts of its operations.

A radical transparency about the ecological impacts may yet emerge from these efforts – and many in the business world are paying attention. A recent article in Harvard Business Review proclaims that sustainability has become an essential business strategy and the key driver of innovation. To be sure, there are large numbers of companies who resist – but they may yet join in, if markets shift toward brands that are more transparent about ecological footprints, creating a compelling business case.

That shift will become far more likely with the application of the second economic principle, lowering to zero the "cost" of this information, the cognitive effort we must make to get relevant data. Consumer surveys show that about ten percent of today's shoppers will go out of their way to get information about the ecological impacts of what they buy, while about a third could not care less. The majority in the middle say that if the information were easy to come by, they might use it in deciding what to buy.

That's where the action is: making crucial data easy to get. That was done, for instance, at the Hannaford Brothers grocery chain in Maine, with nutritional ratings of foods. While the ratings were sophisticated – made by nutritionists at institutions like Yale and Dartmouth – they were boiled down into a three-, two-, or one-star rating posted next to the price tag (there was also zero, which about 80 percent of foods received, mainly because of the salt and fats in processed foods).

The result was a significant shift in purchases toward the more nutritious food and away from the less. The shifts in market share were large enough to get the attention of food brand reps who started asking what they needed to do to get higher ratings.

That switch in a company's actions because transparency in the marketplace has driven consumer decisions in a better direction has been called a "virtuous cycle" by Archon Fung at Harvard's JFK School of Government. Fung led a group studying how transparency alters market dynamics and becomes a mechanism for positive change.

Such marketplace transparency about the ecological impacts of consumer goods can be seen today at www.GoodGuide.com, a website that aggregates more than 200 databases on the environmental, health, and social impacts of tens of thousands of consumer goods.  GoodGuide – a free smart phone app — allows shoppers to compare the eco-virtue of products while in the aisles of a store.  Today that comparison requires running your shopping list by the website on your computer or swiping a product's bar code with a cellphone. But the day will come when a daring retailer puts that data next to price tags – thus reducing the information cost to zero, as Hannaford Brothers did with nutritional data.

Another website, www.Skindeep.com, reveals the potential medical risks of the chemicals used in personal care products, and so ranks them from safest to most risky. A project of the Environmental Working Group, Skindeep's ratings are made by searching in medical databases for the biological effects of a given ingredient, and then weighting the health risks accordingly. Skindeep has been consulted more than 100 million times by shoppers wanting to know which skin cream or baby lotion might be a better bet.

These two websites offer ratings that are credible, independent, and transparent themselves – the three criteria proposed by the JFK School of Government group. To be sure, systems like GoodGuide  have yet to obtain fully transparent data about the total eco-impacts of any company or product. These consumer-facing transparency systems are more proof of concept than state-of-the-art. But they offer a hopeful sign we may be headed in that direction.

As the head of product innovation at a global company pointed out to me, ecological transparency would change the business landscape in two ways. First would be a shift in the "value basis" of a product, adding its ecological impacts into the equation.  Second, such transparency would drive intense competition to rethink products to lower those impacts, and so protect a brand's market position.

As non-proprietary data collection systems like Earthster compile numbers on the ecological footprints of industry, that information could well feed into an emerging metric that has been designed to replace GDP. Called the "General Progress Indicator," or GPI, this index of national progress rethinks economic indicators by, for example, rising when the poor receive a larger portion of a nation's income and dropping when they get less.

Among the indicators factored into GPI are resource depletion, pollution, and long-term environmental damage. So while the GDP counts pollution as a double gain for an economy – for the economic activity while it is created and again while being cleaned up – GPI counts the costs of that pollution as a loss. Earthster-type databases could bring more precision and currency to GPI's metrics.

Another movement in economics that might embrace such data is the attempt to "internalize externalities" – that is to make companies bear the costs of, say, cleaning up their pollution rather than governments, by taxing their goods proportionally to their negative eco-impacts. That idea remains a hard sell to business, and so to most governments. But marketplace ecological transparency makes pollution, toxics and the like a reputation cost for a brand or company. This substitutes a market force for government action, which –given political realities – may be both more realistic and quicker.

While many business people are starting to take ecological transparency seriously enough to embed it in their strategic thinking, the question arises: Are economists paying attention?

A few are. But for the most part these potentially disruptive information technologies, and the marketplace transparency they promise, are beneath the field's radar, or entirely off the map.

One exception is James Angresano, a political economist at Albertson College of Idaho, who sees promise in ecological transparency as a tool for sustainability — itself not a topic central to orthodox thinking in economics. "We've got to think differently," Angresano told me.

When Angresano lectured on these ideas recently to students in environmental economics at Peking University, they were so interested they stayed an extra hour. "Of all the theories I covered over several weeks of lecturing, this resonated the best," he commented. "They're depressed just hearing what the problems are. This is a way of making changes; here are some solutions."

Originally published at e360.yale.edu