Leadership Quote by Olympia Snowe

The neat trick in Olympia Snowe's line is how low she sets the bar: "no longer unimaginable". That phrasing is a political icebreaker, not a victory lap. It concedes that for decades, the default assumption in American business culture was that environmental responsibility was, at best, a luxury and, at worst, an economic self-sabotage. Snowe isn't declaring that green capitalism has arrived; she's saying the old disbelief is becoming embarrassing to defend.

As a politician with a reputation for moderation, Snowe is also doing coalition work in real time. "Operate - and even thrive" is calibrated to soothe the people who hear regulation as punishment. The dash functions like a sales pitch inside a sentence, nudging the listener from mere compliance ("operate") toward a more attractive promise ("thrive"). It's a rhetorical bridge between environmentalists who want structural change and executives who want permission to see sustainability as strategy rather than surrender.

The subtext is pragmatic: stop treating environmental policy as a culture-war morality play and start treating it as an innovation agenda. Snowe's "today's world" anchors the claim in shifting realities - rising energy costs, consumer branding pressures, and global competition that rewards efficiency. It's also a gentle rebuke to denialism: the market itself is changing, so the politics has to catch up. In Snowe's hands, "environmentally-friendly" becomes less a virtue signal than a bipartisan vocabulary for risk management and competitiveness.