Cultural and ethical obstacles on the road to sustainable development in the globalization era

Purpose After the Second World War, important initiatives were taken to avoid the risk of mankind self-destruction. The creation of the United Nations generated high hopes. Unfortunately, after 70 years marked by the great technological progress, humanity seems to be ready to repeat the same mistakes; with the aggravating circumstance that the technological advances will greatly increase the risks of self-destruction. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to generate awareness and then contrast such risks, by going to the deep roots of the problems, which are cultural and ethics, and by analyzing them from the systems thinking and quality thinking perspectives. Design/methodology/approach The paper is the synthesis of many years of experience in managing as well as advising large, complex organizations and parallel research on the viability of – and conditions for – merging systems thinking and quality thinking. In front of the evidence that systems’ sustainable development can be reached only through internal cooperation, the above research expanded to the study of natural evolution, which apparently can give a lead to direct man-driven evolution toward a healthy worldwide system. Findings First, with the increase of the organizational size, analytical thinking must give way to systems thinking. Education in systems thinking is then becoming the main critical factor. Second, world sustainable development is challenged by an uncontrolled man-driven evolution, where technology is often used for violence and wars (win-lose relations). Ethics, which is part of quality since it aims at win-win relations, should be at the foundations of sustainable development, where cooperation should be one of the sustaining pillars. Originality/value What the author wrote in the last 12 years on the above subjects, culminating in this last paper, has broken new ground in the field of managing for quality, bringing it to the highest levels of human organizations. As far as value is concerned, what kind of value can be considered higher than taking care of the future of humanity – and the whole ecosystem?