John Elkington

We had our first joint meeting of SustainAbility and Volans yesterday, in which Charmian (Love), our new Volans COO, expained the progress we have been making on our visual identity (very exciting), organisational structure (clarity can be a wonderful thing) and Advisory Board (some stunning developments there, too).  We are working on a range of changes in anticiaption of the Volans ‘soft’ launch early in September, follower by a ‘hard’ launch in November. 

One of Charmian’s slides noted that SustainAbility and Volans are ‘sister’ organisations.  True, but I almost commented that they are step-sisters: same father, different mothers — Julia Hailes with SustainAbility, Pamela Hartrigan with Volans.  But thought better of it. Still, I find myself increasingly thinking with real interest about how the two organisations can best work together in the coming years.

A wonderful week for cycling, with sun most mornings as I biked across to Holborn, starting the days either at Volans or SustainAbility.  The new office is really starting to come together now that the new desking is in, so people have migrated from the boardroom table in the front room to the large room, overlooking the gardens at the back.  And the place is starting to take on the salon-like feel Sam and I always had in mind, and which is so nicely captured in the book The Medici Effect, by Frans Johansson, which I read recently – and several other members of the team consider some sort of bible. 

An example was Wednesday, when Jodie (Thorpe) of SustainAbility came over with Kelly Michel, founder and executive director of Artemesia International (http://www.artemesiafoundation.org), to talk about their work with social entrepreneurs in Brazil, France and Senegal.  Part-way through the session, Pamela invited to rest of the Volans London team in and the Medicis came readily to mind.

Spent a good deal of time on the World Energy Council White Paper I have been drafting – but the highlight of the working week was a session yesterday with Rupert Bassett on the design of the new Volans visual identity, which we will launch in September.  Again, as the photos show, something of a team effort.

Have spent much of today, when not reading through the usual heap of newspapers or musing in the sun, in drafting new sections of the Volans website, also due to launch in early September.  The thing is really starting to come together. 

Red seated    Ale Hoovering – with one of our two Henry machines   Ale’s birthday cake – with match instead of candles   Cake 2   Design 1: Astrid and Rupert   Design 2: Rupert and Astrid   Design 3   Design 4: Astrid, Pamela, Charmian, Sam   Design 5: Smita, Rupert, Astrid, Charmian, Pamela, Sam   In a meeting at SustainAbility (taken by Sam)

‘A winged fish of extraordinary beauty’ is the translation of the sub-title above, which appears on a card from the Museo del Oro in Colombia, showing a stunning gold flying fish, which Tell (Münzing) and Ulrike brought with them when they came to lunch today.  He’s just come back from Latin America – and when he saw this flying fish there he thought of Volans.  They also brought a dazzling array of cheeses and two wonderful wines, both from Marta’s Vinyard (sic) in Mendoza, Argentina, one a 1999 Malbec, the other a 2003 Chardonnay.

A great way to end a two-week break, largely spent at home, though we did also spend a couple of days earlier this week at Hill House, Little Rissington, with a side trip across to see the Palmers in Icomb.   We have also been seeing a number of other people as and when, among them a favourite artist, Paul Slater and his wife Sophie, and, separately, Clare Kerr.

In the meantime, have been reading a fair amount, including Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect (which sums up what I’d like to achieve with Volans, in terms of the hybrid vigour that comes from the intersection of ideas, concepts and cultures), The Reserve by Russell Banks (which reminded me hugely of our long-dead cousin Hollister T. Sprague – first cousin to my grandmother Isabel – and his extraordinary house, Forestledge, overlooking Puget Sound) and The Balloon Factory, by Alexander Frater, the story of the men who built Britain’s first flying machines.  

Loved the story of Geoffrey de Havilland pacing out his prospective take-off path to check for larks’ nests before he opened his throttle and wobbled into the skies.  And the extraordinary saga of Sam Cody, who I only knew previously via his work with manned kites.  Had enormously enjoyed Frater’s Beyond the Blue Horizon some years ago, the story of his quest in search of the last traces of the old flying boats of Imperial Airways.

When I mentioned The Balloon Factory to Pat today, she recalled that her mother and my other full grandmother, Marjorie, had been on the south coast in 1909 and had seen Blériot’s plane.  Shortly afterwards, I came across the relevant section in Frater’s book: “On 25 July 1909, shortly after five o’clock in the morning, a tiny aircraft came heavily to earth near Dover Castle.  The pilot, weary and oil-smeared, gave his name as Blériot, Louis.  Britain’s aloof status had ended forever, at the War Office there was profound shock.  The role of the aeroplane in the defence of the realm might, after all, need to be reconsidered.”  Given the stout resistance put up by the bureaucrats of Whitehall to anything that smacked of the future, it’s astonishing we ever managed to get things together in time for WWI.  

Which cross-linked to something I was reading earlier in the week in one of my father’s mother’s diaries, from 1916.  She was working as a draughtswoman at the Admiralty, drawing up various secret things – and downloading her hectic social life into a series of Admiralty notebooks at the same time.  Isabel was my favourite grandparent, out of quite a few, thanks to a series of divorces on both sides of the family, and her style of confiding to her diaries gives an odd impression that she is speaking directly to tone, which is quite moving.  

In any event, at one point she describes a boyfriend who is in the Navy taking her out into nearby gardens to watch the Zeppelins flying overhead, at which point he makes love to her.  “What could you expect?” she asks. “Most unreasonable – time – place – everything.  But then when was love reasonable?” Later, less romantically, she notes that one of the airships had been brought down, but also that various bombed buildings had quickly been overrun by looters.  Which loops back in my mind to that golden flying fish – and the story it could tell of the looting of the Aztec and Inca cultures by the ancestors of the people who now run museums dedicated to celebrating the best (alongside guttering buckets of bad) that those earlier cultures left to posterity to pick over.

We will probably never know what it would have been like to have had Al Gore as President, but his speech yesterday – ‘A Generational Challenge to Repower America’ – suggests that his vision could still help us rebuild from the rubble of the Bush years. And it chimes in very powerfully with some of my reading these two weeks that I have been on ‘holiday’ at home. 

One of the books I bought a few days ago at the Borzoi bookshop in Stow-on-the-Wold was The Marshall Plan – and the Reconstruction of Post-War Europe, by Greg Behrman (Aurum Press, 2007).  Have long felt that the vision of George C. Marshall is exactly what we need again today – and if we were able to stretch Gore’s vision for America to the wider world, that is exactly what we would have.

Some highlights of the Gore speech follow, though it really is worth reading it in its entirety.  More from WeCanSolveIt.org.
 

“There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment. The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more – if more should be required – the future of human civilization is at stake.

“I don’t remember a time in our country when so many things seemed to be going so wrong simultaneously. Our economy is in terrible shape and getting worse, gasoline prices are increasing dramatically, and so are electricity rates. Jobs are being outsourced. Home mortgages are in trouble. Banks, automobile companies and other institutions we depend upon are under growing pressure. Distinguished senior business leaders are telling us that this is just the beginning unless we find the courage to make some major changes quickly.

“The climate crisis, in particular, is getting a lot worse – much more quickly than predicted. Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing underneath the North polar ice cap have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months. This will further increase the melting pressure on Greenland. According to experts, the Jakobshavn glacier, one of Greenland’s largest, is moving at a faster rate than ever before, losing 20 million tons of ice every day, equivalent to the amount of water used every year by the residents of New York City.

“Two major studies from military intelligence experts have warned our leaders about the dangerous national security implications of the climate crisis, including the possibility of hundreds of millions of climate refugees destabilizing nations around the world.

“Just two days ago, 27 senior statesmen and retired military leaders warned of the national security threat from an “energy tsunami” that would be triggered by a loss of our access to foreign oil. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq continues, and now the war in Afghanistan appears to be getting worse.

“And by the way, our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory, longer droughts, bigger downpours and record floods. Unprecedented fires are burning in California and elsewhere in the American West. Higher temperatures lead to drier vegetation that makes kindling for mega-fires of the kind that have been raging in Canada, Greece, Russia, China, South America, Australia and Africa. Scientists in the Department of Geophysics and Planetary Science at Tel Aviv University tell us that for every one degree increase in temperature, lightning strikes will go up another 10 percent. And it is lightning, after all, that is principally responsible for igniting the conflagration in California today.

“Like a lot of people, it seems to me that all these problems are bigger than any of the solutions that have thus far been proposed for them, and that’s been worrying me.  I’m convinced that one reason we’ve seemed paralyzed in the face of these crises is our tendency to offer old solutions to each crisis separately – without taking the others into account. And these outdated proposals have not only been ineffective – they almost always make the other crises even worse.

“Yet when we look at all three of these seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges – the economic, environmental and national security crises.

“We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change.”

[…..]

“That’s why I’m proposing today a strategic initiative designed to free us from the crises that are holding us down and to regain control of our own destiny. It’s not the only thing we need to do. But this strategic challenge is the lynchpin of a bold new strategy needed to re-power America.
Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.

“This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative. It represents a challenge to all Americans – in every walk of life: to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.”

[…..]

“Some of our greatest accomplishments as a nation have resulted from commitments to reach a goal that fell well beyond the next election: the Marshall Plan, Social Security, the interstate highway system. But a political promise to do something 40 years from now is universally ignored because everyone knows that it’s meaningless. Ten years is about the maximum time that we as a nation can hold a steady aim and hit our target.

“When President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we could accomplish that goal. But 8 years and 2 months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon. 

“To be sure, reaching the goal of 100 percent renewable and truly clean electricity within 10 years will require us to overcome many obstacles. At present, for example, we do not have a unified national grid that is sufficiently advanced to link the areas where the sun shines and the wind blows to the cities in the East and the West that need the electricity. Our national electric grid is critical infrastructure, as vital to the health and security of our economy as our highways and telecommunication networks. Today, our grids are antiquated, fragile, and vulnerable to cascading failure. Power outages and defects in the current grid system cost US businesses more than $120 billion dollars a year. It has to be upgraded anyway.

“We could further increase the value and efficiency of a Unified National Grid by helping our struggling auto giants switch to the manufacture of plug-in electric cars. An electric vehicle fleet would sharply reduce the cost of driving a car, reduce pollution, and increase the flexibility of our electricity grid.”

[…..]

“Of course the greatest obstacle to meeting the challenge of 100 percent renewable electricity in 10 years may be the deep dysfunction of our politics and our self-governing system as it exists today. In recent years, our politics has tended toward incremental proposals made up of small policies designed to avoid offending special interests, alternating with occasional baby steps in the right direction. Our democracy has become sclerotic at a time when these crises require boldness.”

[…..]

“So I ask you to join with me to call on every candidate, at every level, to accept this challenge – for America to be running on 100 percent zero-carbon electricity in 10 years. It’s time for us to move beyond empty rhetoric. We need to act now.

“This is a generational moment. A moment when we decide our own path and our collective fate. I’m asking you – each of you – to join me and build this future. Please join the WE campaign at wecansolveit.org.We need you. And we need you now. We’re committed to changing not just light bulbs, but laws. And laws will only change with leadership.

“On July 16, 1969, the United States of America was finally ready to meet President Kennedy’s challenge of landing Americans on the moon. I will never forget standing beside my father a few miles from the launch site, waiting for the giant Saturn 5 rocket to lift Apollo 11 into the sky. I was a young man, 21 years old, who had graduated from college a month before and was enlisting in the United States Army three weeks later.

“I will never forget the inspiration of those minutes. The power and the vibration of the giant rocket’s engines shook my entire body. As I watched the rocket rise, slowly at first and then with great speed, the sound was deafening. We craned our necks to follow its path until we were looking straight up into the air. And then four days later, I watched along with hundreds of millions of others around the world as Neil Armstrong took one small step to the surface of the moon and changed the history of the human race.

“We must now lift our nation to reach another goal that will change history. Our entire civilization depends upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to complete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind.”

 

CRO Magazine has introduced a new award for social entrepreneurship, focused on CEOs, based on the three categories of social enterprise introduced in The Power of Unreasonable People.