Journal
Friday, June 20, 2008
Away Day 2
Day 2 of our Volans team retreat continued in the spirit - and at the pace - of Day 1. The sense of team and organisational identity, purpose and action priorities is building apace. Another example of serenedipity today when we met someone else in the building who had come across our work from a very different angle, had decided to get in touch, but had no idea we were now neighbours. Rather more pictures of me today than is normal - or perhaps desirable - because Sam got hold of my camera. In the evening, we invited Will Rosenzweig of Physic Ventures to join us for dinner.
Martin and I
Endangered strawberry
Pamela and Charmian 1
Pamela and Charmian 2
Sam - if she had three hands would it be three phones?
Martina and Elaine - by Sam, who was under the table
Decompression 1
Decompression 2
Decompression 3
Decompression so deep that 'the bends' become a distinct possibility
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Our Magic Garden
A dozen of us (Charmian Love, Sam Gray, Martin Hartigan, Pamela Hartigan, Sam Lakha, Mark Lee, Geoff Lye, Astrid Sandoval, Kevin Teo, Sophia Tickell, Elaine and I) spent the day at 2 Bloomsbury Place, our new Volans office, the first of two Away Days. Part way through, Elaine spoke to someone from the Prospect office on the floor below - and discovered that, in addition to the building's own garden, we have access to a quite extraordinary magic garden at the back, which - among many other delights - contains two elephant sculptures, presumably left by the people who were in our space before us, The Elephant Family.
Among many other memorable aspects of the day, and part from the Magic Garden, three stand out for me: the beautiful 'stained glass' version of our flying fish that Kim (Russell) had made for me; the one-candle birthday cake that emerged out of a cupboard late in the day, celebrating my imminent 59th and (in my mind) the birth of Volans Ventures; and the small granddaughter of the people upstairs coming down dressed as Ginger Rogers, one of my all-time favourite screen goddesses. (Flying Down to Rio being one of my Top 16 'Desert Island Discs'.)
Oh and then, as Elaine and I walked back home by Barnes Pond, in a setting sun that turned the trees and grass into a a form of sensuround stained glass, a heron (my totemic bird) flew in and and landed in the reed-beds. Apart from one piece of bad family news for one of our number during the day, this was virtual perfection.
Still life
Sam, Astrid, Martin
Kim's flying fish
Flying fish 2
Flying fish 3
Elaine
Garden
Further in
Elephants - with Sophia, Charmian and Sam
Trunk fondling
Sam in the belly of the beast
Lock
Wildflowers
Martin emerges
Kevin demonstrates
Martin, me, Pamela
Blowing out the candle
Unused to cameras as I am ...
Thursday, June 12, 2008
ENDS & Beginnings
Deep, vexing irony today in that I was meant to attend (as a co-founder) a 30th anniversary celebration at the House of Lords this evening for Environmental Data Services (ENDS), hosted by Michael Heseltine, whose company bought ENDS a while back. But because we are in the midst of setting up a new venture, Volans, we have been hugely distracted - and found late today that we have been running parallel calendars, so I was double-booked.
Everyone had left ENDS by the time we discovered the problem, so I had to decide which fork in the road to take. Unusually, I took the family fork, for dinner at Livebait in Covent Garden with Elaine, Gaia, Hania and Elaine's sister Christine. G and H had invited us to share some quite extraordinary news about their collaborative film script-writing. More anon, when it's public.
In the meantime, even if remotely, my very best wishes to the ENDS team, particularly David Layton, the late great Max Nicholson and Georgina McAughtry - and in memory of the late, magnificent Marek Mayer.
Towering visions
Wonderful day spent at Ernst & Young's South Bank offices, cheek-by-jowl with the GLA head-shaped haunt of London's new Mayor, Boris Johnson, and overlooking both HMS Belfast, the forbiddingTraitor's Gate entrance to the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. Could watch the changing moods of the water and skies all day, alongside the constant shuttle of vessels of all sizes and purposes, but we were intensively involved in the World Energy Council project as the ongoing story of the inner London Thames unfurled around us.
Monday, June 09, 2008
Sarah Dodds
A heavenly cycle ride in to the office this morning, with open blue skies and the traffic moderately well behaved, but then heard the news about Sarah Dodds, Director of UnLtd Ventures, who has died after falling into a coma following a cycle accident in northern France. A wonderful tribute by Rod Schwartz can be found on the Catalyst Social Business Blog. I last saw Sarah at the Skoll World Forum, then later on the day the Forum closed at an Ashoka event in London, where she went out of her way to introduce me to an American she felt could help us with Volans. She and I were due to meet in the next couple of weeks, something I looked forward to hugely. Her energy and generosity of spirit were remarkable. A truism to say she will be sorely missed, but true nonetheless.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Skyscapes
There's no question that contrails are implicated in climate change, in various ways, but sometimes the skyscapes they create are wondrous things. Watched the male contrails unfurl across female clouds this weekend - and felt at peace with the world.
Friday, June 06, 2008
Homo volans 1
Now that I'm once again thinking of things taking flight, thanks to the derivation of the first part of our still-evolving Volans Ventures, I am tending to see flight-linkages everywhere I go. Today, as I cycled alongside the Serpentine, I came across the preparations for the second Red Bull Flugtag. Chatted to a couple of the teams, including those sticking a load of white feathers onto their swanmobile.
Subsequent note: The Cullinan Bird, designed and built by a team of engineers and architects from London, wowed the crowd with the longest flight of the day, soaring for over 39m before landing in the Serpentine. No idea where the swan placed. But the Red Bull Flugtag competition isn’t all about distance and the Cullinan Bird team apparently failed to impress the judges with their pre-flight performance, resulting in a 5th place finish. Intriguingly, given my interest in the potential of Homo volans in all sorts of areas of innovation and enterprise, the competition was judged both on distance flown and on the level of creativity.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
People, Planet, Profit
I still find it strange to see terms I have coined out there in the wider world, living their own lives. Green consumer and triple bottom line still pop fairly regularly, whereas today it was the People, Planet, Profit formulation I came up with in 1995 as a more populist version of the TBL. It pops up again as the refrain of the Financial Times Sustainable Banking Awards. The awards are a joint initiative between the FT and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the latter of which we have worked with on several occasions, most recently on SustainAbility's Market Movers study.
A couple of the banks we have worked with over the years also pop up as winner and runner-up for the Sustainable Bank of the Year award. These are Banco Real in Brazil and Rabobank in The Netherlands. Sustainable Asset Management (SAM) in Switzerland, where I continue to serve on the Advisory Board of SAM's Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, also appears as runner-up for the Sustainable Investor of the Year Award, after E+Co. Given that the awardees and runners-up were selected from a record 182 entries from 129 institutions in 54 countries, they are doing pretty well.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Hania's fish
Hania, who came back from Greece just before I arrived back from Brazil, took this picture for me while there - in the spirit of my CounterCurrent symbolism. Wish I had taken it!
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