A “Think & Do” Tank Ahead of Its Time

In 2007, a group of authors published “Freedom from Mid-East Oil,” a lengthy treatise on energy, national security, and global climate change. The book was strikingly prescient, warning about an impending environmental crisis that would be titanic in scope. Its final chapter predicted that green hydrogen would one day become mainstream form of renewable energy.

The book’s co-authors – Jerry B. Brown and James. A. Cusumano – are Fellows with the World Business Academy, a Santa Barbara nonprofit and think tank that has spent the last three decades proposing solutions to the world’s most complex and pressing social and environmental challenges.

“We have been consistently way ahead of the pack as a think tank,” says the book’s principal author Rinaldo S. Brutoco, who is also the World Business Academy’s founder and CEO. “Fifteen years later, that book is stunningly accurate.”

One of the reasons the World Business Academy is so good at anticipating tectonic shifts in business and social trends is the caliber of its leadership. It starts with Brutoco himself, an accomplished entrepreneur, business executive, author, radio host, and futurist who has carved a reputation as a leading expert on a multitude of issues, including energy policy, renewable energy, and finance.

Brutoco joined forces with other leading global thinkers – the author and alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra and billionaire hedge fund manager and conservationist Paul Tudor Jones II – to establish JUST Capital, an organization that advises business executives to make sustainability a priority in their decision making.

JUST Capital is just one of many Brutoco ideas that reinforces his philosophy of tackling big problems: “I launched the think tank with the central belief that unless you get the business community on board, nothing positive is going to happen,” he says. “Most people understand that we live in a world where business is the most powerful institution on the planet.”

Through a wide array of cutting-edge publications, videos, podcasts and events, the World Business Academy strives to shift the consciousness amongst global business leaders, young people, and the public. The end goal is a more just world that puts values above profits.