When you're managing a large number of people, you learn that incentives matter tremendously. You really want people to be rewarded for doing the right thing for the customers and the organization.

Doom yourself to horrific climate change by burning all that carbon and releasing all that CO2. Or power down society, reducing total energy usage around the planet. One leads to ecological collapse. The other is a reversion, in many ways, to poverty.

I decided five years ago that I wanted to truly understand, for myself, what the state of the planet was, and when I dug into it, what I found was quite different than I'd imagined.

Agriculture is the #1 source of deforestation. By some estimates it accounts for 80% of the forests chopped down in the tropics.

TNC was once limited by the resources it could directly marshal to buy land. But teaching people a new idea is incredibly more scalable.

The more widely you can spread this notion of achieving ROI by preserving and improving ecosystems, the better.

You have to be willing to spend an awful lot in that R&D phase before you see the benefits. When you look at the companies that have really won customers over in technology - say, Apple and Google - you find that they spend billions of dollars on R&D each year, often spending that much on a product before they ever make a dime back in profits.