We are happy to announce that early this morning TerraShift hit the $8,000 mark in this year’s Unreasonable Marketplace. We secured sponsorship from 247 people around the world, in 29 days. We look forward to an incredible summer of mentorship and acceleration at the Unreasonable Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
We would like to express our most heartfelt thanks to everyone who supported us, financially and otherwise. We’re especially thankful to our Pittsburgh networks and supporters that stepped up to show the world that Pittsburgh is a city on the forefront of social innovation.
TerraShift will be represented at the Institute by Nathaniel Koloc, our Managing Partner of Strategy and Development.
Specialization will require reflection and focus...
One of the most important elements of an education in sustainability – especially at the graduate level – is the career applicability of perspectives and tools learned. In short, can those who understand sustainability go on to assume positions of influence? Is their knowledge actionable?
The MSLS program equips its grads with a broad range of arrows for their change-making quivers – from concepts like organizational learning, non-hierarchacal leadership, and deep listening, to familiarity with tools from lifecycle assessments to the Genuine Progress Indicator. We’ve learned a lot in the last seven months.
I’ve been asking a lot of questions about how what we’re learning here can help us get traction with a career of meaning and impact. And this is the advice that is coming from everywhere – MSLS grads, professors, visiting lecturers – so for anyone out there planning a career in sustainability, tune in:
It’s not enough to just understand sustainability. It’s not enough to be a generalist. What the world needs now is people who can see the big picture (in vivid detail) and also apply it in a certain industry, organizational setting, or core competency. This doesn’t just mean technical specifics and engineering (though certainly that’s a lot of it). There is an opportunity for every existing specialization (from accounting to supply chain, product development to government relations) to understand how sustainability can inform the traditional perspective in that arena.
This is good news. It means that people can take what they love and are good at, infuse it with sustainability, and start bringing the sort of next-level thinking that we need in all organizations, not just the flashy innovators and current sustainability forerunners.
But this insight is especially relevant for young professionals who (like me) had envisioned a comfortable lifestyle of generalist sustainability consulting: it’s not gonna happen. Or at least, not for much longer. As in-house sustainability roles proliferate and the entire field lurches forward through innovation, competition, and discovery, the just-generalists will be left in the dust, shocked at how quickly their whole-systems perspective went mainstream.
The future belongs to those who are the best at what they do, by virtue of whatever-that-may-be being informed by a robust understanding of sustainability. Extra points will go to people who can quickly and articulately explain sustainability to others (not an easy thing to do), but it’ll be nothing more than extra credit.
So, it’s time to specialize.
