My undergraduate field of study is business administration with a minor in entrepreneurship. The recent experience I would like to reflect upon is a management consultancy project with a global client which is exploiting Indonesian natural resources.

In the era where the world is driven by financial capital, business practitioners tend to have planetary management view of natural capital as an input for production and to drive high-throughput economies. This apply even for a natural resource-intensive industry such as gold and copper mining. My interaction with some of their C-level executives confirm that shareholders would be satisfied once operational excellence is achieved. The client believes that their human capital capabilities, coupled with latest technology, can manage the nature to fulfill their wants.

Based on an analysis that my consulting team conducted, it is also evident that the client concentrates its continuous improvement initiatives more into labor productivity than resource productivity. Technically, they are keener to leverage the produced ore tonnage per man-hour rather than reducing the amount of wasted ore per hour of production. Business leaders in this area seemed to be driven to avoid the discounted rate that may reduce optimization of profits in the future.

Such managerial decisions have led to rapid economic growth, yet environmentally unsustainable economic development as it not only release waste and pollution, but sometimes delay the preservation and conservation of natural environment, health, and safety for the sake of capital efficiency. In 2014, some of these resulted in fatal disasters which claimed employees? lives and damaged infrastructure.

Despite being the opposite of environmental wisdom, this planetary management worldview might lead to advancement of technicalities, as one of prerequisite to efficiency. And yet recently, in the early 2015 the client has started to conduct cost and waste efficiency initiatives which is partially focused on eliminating unnecessary materials and processes that are non-value added and could potentially damage the environment in the long-run.