• Sustainable Development
• Global Goals
• Social Enterprise
• Digital Transformation
• Resource Management

Going through these global-scale challenges, we learned that sustainable development is the key to a better world. People need to have common goals in a more connected world so that collaborative efforts towards achieving global goals that bring good to all the stakeholders can be formed and synchronized. Clarity leads to power.

Social enterprise model, a balance between legacy business and charity can be a way to achieve sustainability. One for all, and all for one. For instance, rather than simply recycling with traditional take-make-waste processes, consider a circular economy. A change in business model from initial to endpoint can lead to effective and optimized use of resources.

Digital transformation will be the essential tool to achieve the targets. Through building Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven, Blockchain based Cognitive resources management systems powered by Data, Ethically, overall social, economic, environmental development will become much better. We can make it into an ABCDE The World movement. Everybody plays their respective role in building a more transparent, fair and resilient future.

Underpinning all these is the practice of sustainable development. People, process, technology. People and environment come first, technology being the enabler.

Sustainable Social, Economic, and Environment Development

There has never been a problem with the resources. The problems lie within distribution. While this may sound contradictory to what many would choose to believe, there is some truth in it. We don’t need rocket science to illustrate the situation. Simply look around and you will find that in certain areas of any big city, there are people and businesses who are wasting tonnes of food on a daily basis while at the other part of the same city, many could be still starving or trying hard just to make ends meet.

We only have one planet to live on and if it’s not in our good hands to secure the future for our children and generations to come, then in whose custody and responsibilities shall this be?

A Sense of Urgency

We are the first generation to end poverty and may be the last generation to solve the climate challenge. While poverty is man-made, as most people started to realize by now, success is the only option for handling climate issues. The good news is, with more awareness and capability in handling environmental and social challenges, we can now do far more better with advancement and assistance of emerging technologies. Yet the question remains, are we willing to do that, without further ado, wholeheartedly? In what condition of our one and only planet Earth that we want our future generations to inherit?

How Do You Define Sustainability?

People may have their own definition when it comes to different things, mainly due to personal belief or experience, i.e. where they come from. It’s a matter of perspective. If we were to look from the business point of view, sustainability is none other than how long a business can survive without any revenue stream. From the environment perspective, it would be the avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance. How would the 3 dimensions of sustainable development bring good to personal, community, and the world as a whole? How can the triple bottom line be fine tuned to ensure sustainability?

Circular Economy and Resilient Cities

Have you ever wondered that instead of the take, make, consume and waste model, we can actually do better with the circular model when it comes to production, especially those that consume our natural resources? How would a twist in the mindset and way of doing things make a huge difference in contributing to the impactful development of our society, economy and environment? What are the cutting-edge best practices that we could learn from success cases that ensure the livelihood of a city? What are the options for innovative green infrastructure?

East Meet West

At the time of writing, two global powers are leading the world towards a better future. Though the lead organization, direction and strategies might seem different, the end goal is the same, as they both cover the People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and Partnership, obviously stated or not. Ironically, one of the causes was initiated by the United Nations in 2015, started from the West, and the other one was initiated by the Chinese government of the People’s Republic of China, which happened to be a nation from the East. Though originated from different parts of the world, both great causes should be pursued as they are for the common good.  

Sustainable Development Goals

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was introduced by the United Nations  in 2015 to transform our world into a better place. There are currently 17 goals which are interrelated. The goals focused on solving most of the great challenges faced by human beings, all living creatures and the planet at the moment. The purpose of the goals is to provide a guided and meaningful direction for the world to move towards 2030, as we strive our best to solve global challenges through our collaborative efforts by aligning our activities and businesses to achieve the goals while contributing to social, economic, and environment development in a positive way.

Belt Road Initiatives

Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), formerly known as One Belt One Road (OBOR), is the short form for the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road. The Chinese adopted this global development strategy in 2013, which involves development and investment of infrastructure across 70 countries and global organizations in Asia, Europe, and Africa. The project set a targeted completion date of 2049, which coincides with the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. It is a government led initiative in forging new partnerships characterized by win-win cooperation and building a community of shared future.

What Is Social Enterprise?

Social Enterprises are organizations that address a basic unmet need or solve a social or environmental problem through a market-driven approach. By comparison, social enterprise takes the approach of getting the best of both worlds from conventional business models and conventional charitable organizations models. It takes a balance stance between those two models. By aligning business to United Nations SDGs leveraging the social enterprise model, it brings business to not only sustainable profitability but with better purposes and real impact to Social, Economy, and Environment development.

Why Social Enterprise?

While it seems like there are rooms of improvement to both the conventional business models and those of charitable organizations, social enterprise is filling the gap to make things work better. By taking care of social, economic and environmental impact at the same time while not losing the ability to self sustain, social enterprise can strike the balance between business model that goes after only maximum profit and charity model that goes after only maximum social impact. Social enterprise promotes, encourages, and makes social change alongside its daily business activities, which ensure sustainability by itself, A walk the talk approach. 

Sustainable Business Models

How long can our business sustain? Can our business sustain without any income for 3 months consecutively? What are the best ways or models to ensure business profitability, if not at least sustainability? These are just some of the very important questions to be considered before venturing into any business. This has been more alarming with the global pandemic outbreak in 2020, when none of the business has ever experienced such a long period of lock down in most countries, which is not under a physical war condition. The awareness towards business sustainability had been brought up through a hard reality hit. Businesses were tested with extreme cruelty.

Digital Future: What Is In It For Everybody?

We can’t avoid all the tech jargons if we were to talk about and discuss further on the digital future.Things like Gig Economy, Slashers, or even new terms that had yet to be coined alongside invention of new technologies and new ways of living or doing business. How would anyone foresee terms like Youtuber, Instagramer, Tik-toker, datanomics, predictive analytics etc prior to these tech achievements and real world application? What would the future of jobs look like? No matter how things progress and develop, it is going to touch us or affect us in a way or another.

Digitization: Catch Up or Left Out

Like it or not, it is not up to us to decide whether to embrace digital technology or not. Digitization has become a necessity, especially for businesses. It’s a must and it must be embraced now. Almost everything that concerns our economy is being digitized. Things as small as our daily routine reminders to nation state level decision making. Things as simple as measuring our heart beat to monitoring pandemic data on a global scale. The only choices left to us are to either catch up or be left out in this unstoppable wave of digitization.

Going Digital: What It Takes and What We Get

Going digital is not merely putting your business on the internet, nor is it simply setting up a social media page or channel and hope for automatic crowd pulling. It takes more than what it seems, far more than what most people think it is all about. While leveraging digital technology to make life easier makes sense to a certain level, there is still lots of hard work and effort to be put into it. For instance, resource investment such as time and money, learning curve, opportunity costs etc. Either you pay with money or something else, such as time and data. You make your own choice and take full responsibility to it.  

ABCDE The World?

Emerging tech plays a vital role in shaping our future. Each and every single technology has its niche to assist us in building a better world. No single tech works alone and only by knitting relevant and related technologies together properly that we are able to augment the future we ought to have. Nonetheless, to make things simpler and easier to be comprehended by the masses, four key technology clusters supported by a single element have been identified and should be made into a collective global movement – ABCDE The World.

True Wealth: Shelter, Healthcare, Energy, Food, Education, Entertainment

Livelihood of human beings are centered around six core categories. We need a place to shelter so we can keep living and moving forward with our progress. Proper work and rest routine to keep us afresh. Food is the non-negotiable survival needs as defined by our Creator. Without health, everything else is meaningless. Energy powers up most of the utilities we need. Education makes us literate and enables legacy. For continual survival of human beings as a species on this planet. Last but not least, entertainment puts a balance onto our life. Taking the first letter from each category, we got S.H.E.F.E.E. to produce true wealth.

Future Cities: People. Process. Technology.

It is not about the technology. Technologies are just the enabler. It is people that matters. Progress and development that are people centric make more sense than simply focus on how advanced a technology can be. After all, we create things to make our life better and to make the world a better place to live. The process in which we create and manage these creations, which include but are not limited to technologies, is what ensures our species’ progress and survival on this planet, and most likely our voyage into outer space in the near future. No matter how far we go, our grounded reality would be a sustainable development of this single planet we have.

• 5 Petals of Hibiscus – Malaysia’s National Flower (Bunga Raya)
• 5 Rukun Negara
• 5 Pillars of Sustainable Development
• 5 Key Positions
• 5 Feng Shui elements

And anyone who are interested to explore further on the 5 Pillars of Sustainable Development: People, Planet, Partnership, Peace, and Prosperity.

Embrace Change. Ensure Continuity.
Start something somewhere, somehow. Making sustainability a daily practice.