We will need to add three ingredients to this recipe: the experience that will help us; the people who will form the team that will make it possible; and the attitude, the enthusiasm we put into it, a basic structural intangible.

Let's begin. Recent experience shows that we humans and our organizations are capable of adapting very rapidly to any circumstance, mobilize assets and resources like never before, and accelerate changes exponentially. The most recent proof of this was with COVID. We changed our habits, mobilized resources and accelerated the solution in the form of vaccines. The lesson we can learn from all that is that we can overcome any aprioristic limit, if we put our minds to it.

A mission. As a generation and as organizations, we need a mission. Mariana Mazzucato explains how President Kennedy fixed a specific mission for the USA around which hinged the country's principal actions and its organizations: to set foot on the Moon. And that objective is still today transforming our reality in the form of technology that is derived from that which enabled an American to get to the Moon. Now our mission is to save the planet in order to save humanity, as it was a few months ago.

The goals. We have to aim to save the planet and do it well. And that means decarbonizing the world, that is, the cities, and the economy, and seize the opportunity to generate a sustainable development in keeping with the finite resources available, instead of thinking of them as infinite, as humanity has been doing since its beginnings. And secondly, we have to do so following the path of diminishing inequalities. The great lesson we learned from the 20th century—selling cars, coping with the Crash of 29 and suffering two world wars (and some a civil war)—was that reducing inequalities is the key to guaranteeing peace, to improving the quality of life on our planet.

The lesson should be well learned by both public and private organizations, and we should be clear about what our mission and our goals are. I'm a Marxist, more along the lines of Groucho than of Karl, so this is my proposal, but there are bound to be others. The lesson is that where there's a will there's a way. The mission is urgent. In fact, we have no time, just as we had none in 2021. And the goals have to be a roadmap to achieve the mission fully. And that goes for any organization. Including BIMSA.

Ricard Font is Director General of BIMSA.