The ability to wonder about our future, to see it and to plan to achieve that vision, gives us the energy and focus to make it happen. Therefore, our actions reflect our will to achieve that vision; to bring the future into the present. I'd like to offer one vision for the green workplace.

It’s Monday morning, 6 or 7 a.m., your solar systems at home detect the presence of the sun and automatically opens the windows and shifts your energy source at home to use the energy from the great star. By the way, the energy company installed the all solar equipment at your house for free (via the tax credits it got from the government), and you get an additional credit—money back if you use the energy company’s “black box” that manages your house’s electricity usage, making sure you use energy when it’s most needed, for the best price and coming from the cleanest sources. Your energy plans are now like the mobile bills—you get the most of what is best for you.

Today you need to go to the office, because you to have meet with your client in person. You wake up the kids and ask them to get ready for school.

You go downstairs and the sensors at your house detect the effectiveness of the sunlight and turn the lights on if necessary. While the kids are in the shower, you grab your wireless reading device and read some of news for the day—that’s right: there is no newspaper, only “newsdigital.” The kids come downstairs, eat breakfast, say “Bye, daddy” and go to the bus station to wait for the electric bus. The school bus now makes almost no noise and does not release smoke any more.

You get dressed, pack your thin notebook and your pen drive and get to your car. You unplug it from the electric grid (you plugged your car into the electric grid last night to charge its batteries). You get to work and park your car. You can plug your car back into the energy grid to refuel.

You swipe your smart card on the building entrance, placing your index finger on a reader for identity recognition. You get to your desk, where you power up your thin notebook and connect it to the wireless network. This notebook does not have a hard disk, and is thus 40 percent lighter than the notebooks we have today. Powering up and connecting the notebook, as well as loading the simple embedded operating system on the flash drive takes only five seconds.

You open your browser and connect to your company’s extranet. By inserting the same smart card into the notebook and providing a password, you connect to your virtual desktop—it is just like you are using Windows, Linux or whatever operating system with a local hard drive. But you are using your company’s virtual servers to provide you your virtual desktop, anywhere, anytime. Because your power processing comes from the virtual servers, your computer lifetime is now five to six years, instead of the usual three to four. You get more from the notebook and since it has fewer parts, it gets easier to recycle, reuse.

After wrapping up the material for the team meeting, you meet with your client. Your client requests a copy of the material at the end of the meeting. The company has a policy of few printers—management established that one printer for 40 users is enough! Therefore, you send the print request to the only multi-device at your floor. Depending on what you print, the system will automatically bill your departmental budget. The system will also publish monthly on the intranet the people/departments that use the printers the most. This information is fed into the quarterly budget reviews.

After the meeting, you go to the cafeteria. There are no plastic or paper coups. Using a cup brought from home, you get some coffee. Your wife calls and asks you to pick up the kids at school and take them to the doctor. Since you can meet with your team later in the day, you set up a live meeting with your team at 4 p.m. and go to pick up the kids. You unplug the car from the grid, pick up the kids, take them to the doctor and go home.

At home, you turn on your notebook and connect to your virtual desktop. At 4 p.m. you launch the meeting with your team. With five participants on the meeting, you all activate your Web cams and log into the collaboration site. However, after 20 minutes, your connection goes down. You get your pen drive, plug into your notebook and re-start the notebook. The pen drive has an encrypted version of an operating system, which requires your smart card and password to launch. You insert the card, and type the password—and hey presto, you are back with an operating environment. You dial the meeting number on your mobile phone and you are able to talk with the team. You connect your phone to the notebook and ask one person on the team to send you some material via e-mail. Via your phone, you copy the file to your computer and the meeting goes on normally.

The meeting ends and you save some information on your pen drive. Your connection is back. You remove the pen-drive and restart your computer. After connecting to your virtual desktop, you synchronize the data with your virtual desktop.

Sounds like something we might be able to do in the future, right? Wrong. We have the ability to make these changes today; we have the technology to bring this workplace vision to life now. We need to push toward this vision; we need to ask our governments and law-makers to give tax credits and incentives to companies to start investing in smarter grids, better cars. Our leaders need to change laws to allow acceptance of more electronic material and demand less paper. We need to change the way we behave and do things. To me, it looks like you could still be able to do everything you need by using the technology I described, and yet do it greener.

Not only change the way you work; change the way you live. Bring green to your life and business and you will get two greens back: money, and a better environment.