John Elkington

Saturday, June 30, 2007

DINOSAURS ON WHEELS

Surprisingly, given the climate change focus of many of the Tallberg Forum sessions, we were surprised – and weirdly delighted – to see a seemingly endless parade of vintage gas-guzzlers, mainly American, passing through the village. Many of the drivers were heavily tattoed. Didn’t seem quite Swedish.

Friday, June 29, 2007

HOW ON EARTH CAN WE LIVE TOGETHER?

Elaine and I arrived at Arlanda airport on Wednesday, 27 June, expecting to find a bus. People who had been to the Tallberg Forum before saw no evidence of a reception committee or of a bus, so we raced across to catch a train – and rode two hours standing up in the corridor of a speeding train with hordes of young people headed towards the Swedish version of Glastonbury. Met a bunch of semi-familiar faces on the next train, to Tallberg itself, and arrived in wonderful evening sunshine. Borne away to hotel Akerblats by biofuel-powered Saab, then later walked down to the shore of Lake Siljan before collapsing into bed. Nice chat on the jetty with young man who had been swimming in the lake with his large black dog. Evening wonderfully fragrant of hay meadows and mock orange. Everything wildly picturesque.

The big themes this year were climate change and sustainability. I was mainly involved in Track 1, where the question was: As the present path is not sustainable, what is? Sessions were subject to Chatham House Rule and no cameras injunction. Among those I was in harness with: Tariq Banuri of SEI, Nayan Chanda of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Ruud Lubbers of the Netherlands Energy Research Centre, Jonathon Porritt of Forum for the Future, Peter Senge of the Society for Organizational Learning and Achim Steiner of UNEP. The process was so jam-packed that I ended up doing a very brief introductory session with Tariq and Alan AtKisson, and then handing over to the participants to ponder the question: What is sustainability? The session took off like a rocket.

For some reason, I felt frustrated and displaced through many of the sessions. Overall, a sense that there was more interest in talking about the issues than there was in hunkering down and thinking about solutions. Davos may have its faults, but it’s better organised and is enormously energised by the presence of large numbers of social and environmental entrepreneurs. Worth having gone, but the most interesting conversations flowed from accidental, serendipitous encounters walking to and fro from sessions – or, right at the end, when escaping from an overblown session in the Big Tent and chatting with a number of fellow refuseniks. Couldn’t help thinking that the Tallberg Forum is uncomfortably caught between its origins (since 1981) as a small, select and convivial gathering and its rapidly growing size and ambitions in recent years.

One of the most striking features of the event, for me, was the block of ice brought in from Greenland, and allowed to stand in the sun as the Forum proceeded. As it melted away, my sense of frustration grew. Then, weirdly, probably as a reaction, a thought train on some of the things I want to do over the next 2-3 years began to crystallise. More anon.

Sunday, June 24, 2007

WETLANDS WITH REED WARBLER

Had a wonderful walk with Hein and Elaine, in fitful rain, around the Barnes Wetlands Centre. Hein hugely moved to see a reed warbler in the reed-beds, something he has only heard before. We also saw the most amazing duck, with powder-blue beak and seemingly stitched together from different birds. Frogs croaking in the drizzle, including some we could see at fairly close quarters: brilliant green and quite rapt with each other, ignoring us entirely. Meadowsweet out in great froths and masses of orchids, too. Several herons and a stunning tern, airborne sculpture.

Hein and Elaine

Me

Us

Reflections

From a hide

Saturday, June 23, 2007

FIFTY-EIGHTED

Began my 58th birthday by opening a surprisingly large number of cards, including a wonderful one from the SustainAbility team, assuring me – with the aid of a white-coated scientist and graph on the font of the card – that research shows that birthdays are good for you, because we are now discovering that the more birthdays you have, the longer you live.

But one of the nicest images I have been sent in recent days came from my father, Tim, who sent this photograph of my mother, Pat, taken by my sister Caroline. It catches her essence, at least to my mind. She says that it is unduly flattering and reflects the fact that she was looking at Tim …

In the evening, Hein Sas – an old Dutch friend and colleague – arrived, as did Gaia and Hania, Doug and Margot Miller, and Ian and Tina Bruce, and we had a quite wonderful evening. One highlight: Hein brought me the most thunderous silver bicycle bell from Amsterdam, which I think would probably register on the Richter scale.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

CRASH

Had meant to work on the final version of the book at home today, but crashed into bed – mixture of effects of long-term travel, the Brazilian virus and, I’m told, generally doing too much. Could have slept for a week, easily.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

IMPACT EVENT IN WINDERMERE

Spent the past couple of days on the edge of Lake Windermere, kicking off a very interesting conference held by Impact (http://www.impact-dtg.com/) on sustainable enterprise. Arrived very late on the Tuesday evening, in time to see rabbits scurrying around the country hotel’s lawns. Then the heavens opened, with great crashes of thunder and flashes of lightning. A mixture of Beatrix Potter and Bram Stoker. Fascinated to listen to (Lord) Michael Hastings, who did the session after mine. Explored the social and political dimensions of all of this is a very moving way. And bumped into Ray Anderson and his wife, of Interface, in the grounds, which was fun. He spoke at the same event. Still wrestling with the virus, though, and travelling by train is a bit of a nightmare – not just for me.

Monday, June 18, 2007

TOMORROW’S GLOBAL COMPANY LAUNCH

Spoke at the launch of the Tomorrow’s Global Company Inquiry report today, held at Reuters in Canary Wharf. For more details, see http://www.tomorrowscompany.com/global/news.aspx#newsitem19. My Brazilian virus was at work, though, and I had to chew throat pastilles constantly to keep from choking. Probably looked like a Chicago gangster.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

 
Across early to Editora Globo, the media group, with Cynthia Rosenburg (http://www.empresaverde.globolog.com.br/) – who Jodie (Thorpe) and I work with on our regular column for the new Brazilian business magazine Epoca Negocios (http://epocanegocios.globo.com/). Took part in a panel discussion, followed by photographic session for an interview for the magazine, then wonderful lunch some way away with Cynthia, Editorial Director Nelson Blecher and Ivan Martins, Executive Editor.

Then back to Hotel Transamerica with Cynthia, to do interview, after which I am called down from my room for photography session with long-haired Japanese photographer for a piece that is due to go in Revista Inevestimentos, then work on editing one of the chapters for our book (The Power of Unreasonable People), then into a taxi for dinner with Jodie at an excellent restaurant at the Casa da Fazenda do Morumbi. Wonderful old building, great food, then a walk under the stars among the jaboticaba, mangrove, avocado, magnolia and rosewood trees. The home of the Brazilian Academy of Art, Culture and History, the building houses some of the worst paintings I have seen in my entire life.

Illegal photo taken in lobby of Editora Globo building

Rupert

Ivan Martins and Cynthia Rosenburg

Blinkered

Mall roof on way out

Cats at the Casa da Fazenda do Morumbi

Gate in the gardens

Grill

Thursday, June 14, 2007

FUNBIO

Jodie and I were sped across Sao Paulo this morning to a conference at the British Centre organised by Funbio (http://www.funbio.org.br/publique/web/cgi/cgilua.exe/sys/start.htm?tpl=home&UserActiveTemplate=funbio_english), where I appeared as part of a panel of speakers for three hours or so – in front over 100 people from business, government, NGOs and the media. Funbio (the Brazilian Biodiversity Fund) is a non-profit organisation which received a $20 million grant from the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) some years back. I spoke about our experience with stakeholder engagement, both internally and during processes organised for clients. One of the questions we were asked by one of the discussants turned out to be a concealed question about Alcoa’s recent mishaps in relation to stakeholder processes in Amazonia, though I didn’t realise that till later. After lunch, we spent a couple of hours with Pedro Leitao, Funbio’s Secretary General, and his team, discussing how they might evolve in future. Partly sparked by the work SustainAbility did some years back in preparing the report The 21st Century NGO (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/research-article.asp?id=51).

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

HELICOPTERING AROUND SAO PAULO

Fascinating meeting of the International Advisory Board of Institute Ethos in Sao Paulo, Brazil (http://www.ethos.org.br/DesktopDefault.aspx?Alias=Ethos&Lang=pt-BR), yesterday and today. Then, this afternoon, Joao Gilberto Azevedo Santos of Ethos and I were helicoptered across to the HQ of Banco Bradesco for meetings with the Presidents and senior executives. Welcomed off the roof by Jean Philippe Leroy, who runs the market relations department, which combines investor relations with corporate social responsibility. One thing he told me during the visit: the bank offsets all its helicoptering via tree planting. Hmmm. But was impressed with the way the top brass handled my questions, from the work of their foundation and the climate impacts of air-conditioning, through efforts to control money laundering and invasions of privacy, to the number of people affected by bank robberies each year. One slightly odd observation: have only heard one distant siren of a police car here, in what is meant to be quite a violent city, whereas in London it’s every five minutes at times.

Then three of us were helicoptered back to the Hotel Transamerica for the opening of the Ethos annual conference, where Jodie (Thorpe) gave an excellent presentation on our new report, Raising Our Game, and I took part in the subsequent panel discussion chaired by Aron Cramer of BSR and featuring such folk as Ernst Lichteringen of GRI, Alice Tepper Marlin of Social Accountability International, Ricardo Young of Ethos and Simon Zadek of AccountAbility. One nice, seredipitous touch: Jodie noted that today, the 12th, is the Brazilian equivalent of St Valentine’s Day, which keyed in nicely with our favoured ‘Hearts’ scenario in the report.

Ricardo Young in full flow

NEW BUSINESS & HUMAN RIGHTS WEBSITE

One of my favourite social entrepreneurs is Chris Avery, the man responsible for developing the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre and related website, initially inside Amnesty International UK, and then as a spun-out, independent entity. Declaring a very real interest, I sit on the Centre’s Board of Trustees – and congratulate the team on their revamped website, which has been launched today at http://www.business-humanrights.org/Home

The new design makes it easier to:

· Search for a company and check its human rights record – with over 3600 companies covered

· Stay up-to-date with ‘News’ and ‘Feature of the week’ on the homepage

· Check how companies are responding to concerns raised about their conduct

· Explore the archive of news & reports on over 160 sectors; 180 countries; 160 issues

· Access ‘Special resources’, including all materials by UN Special Representative John Ruggie

· Sign up for free Weekly Updates.

Monday, June 11, 2007

20 YEARS ON FROM BRUNDTLAND

Given that 2007 is the twentieth anniversary of the Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future, which helped put the concept of sustainable development on the international agenda, it is hardly surprising that SustainAbility has found itself involved in a growing number of events and projects designed to look back, assess progress and then look forward. One of these has been our Raising Our Game project, whose report is now downloadable from our website (http://www.sustainability.com/raising%2Dour%2Dgame/). Separately, a two-part SocialFunds.com article on the theme can be found at http://www.socialfunds.com/news/article.cgi/2308.html

Sunday, June 10, 2007

THE ROAD

I picked it up in the Shaman Drum bookshop in Ann Arbor recently, because I had heard such good things about it. Then I picked it up again as I left home yesterday for the airport – and read it on the flight to Brazil. And I can’t rememember when a book hit me as hard as The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. One that did, which I read back in the late 1960s, was Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. The theme of both books is post-apocalytpic, but McCarthy’s book reads like the very best poetry. Unputdownable. It’s one of the most powerful love stories I have come across, in this case between man and son.

If it is often easier to explain unsustainability than sustainability, this is a treatise in the bleakest unsustainability. A personal journey through the civilizational disintegrations painted on a bigger canvas by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse. And yet the final paragraph of The Road, which in a way twists the knife, is one of the most beautiful distillations of sustainability I have come across – reminding me of afternoons alongside streams like the Windrush in Gloucestershire and rivers like the Stour in Dorset.

Friday, June 08, 2007

SURREAL

Elaine

Elaine and I went to the ‘Surreal Things’ exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum today. Had fun with the distorting mirrors, but the thing that stuck in my mind was the wheelbarrow cushioned in pink satin by Oscar Rodriguez. Was it a wheelbarrow or a richly upholstered couch? And that put me in mind of the article in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review by Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto – who I know via his membership of the Skoll Foundation board. His forthcoming book, The Opposable Mind, argues that – like the human opposable thumb – the mind of a great leader can hold opposing ideas in tension at the same time, seeking a better synthesis. That’s a skill we need at SustainAbility, for example, as we try to balance the imperatives of growth with those of influence.

Then we head across to see the new Whole Foods store in the old Barkers building in High Street Kensington, a block from where SustainAbility had an office before we moved to Hyde Park Corner and then on to Holborn. The Whole Foods Market approach is quite impressive (American version of quite) – see http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com//UK/pressroom/pr_06-06-07.html.

Egghead

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

DIRECTOR COLUMNS

Some of the columns I have written for Director magazine can be found at http://www.director.co.uk/INDEXES/Comments/John_Elkington.html.

Monday, June 04, 2007

UN GLOBAL 500

One of the highlights of the last twenty years was when Julia Hailes and I were elected to the UN Global 500 Roll of Honour, in 1989. Received a note today to say that it is celebrating its twentieth anniversary, like SustainAbility. More at http://www.global500.org/

Friday, June 01, 2007

LOW CARBON JUDGEMENT DAY

Spent much of the day chairing the judging panel for the CARS NOT CARBON competition for advertising and marketing campaigns designed to promote ‘greener motoring.’ Organised by the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership (http:/www.lowcvp.org.uk). My camera battery died part-way through, because I failed to charge it last night after the launch of our Raising Our Game report, which truncated my visual record. Still, Simon Baines of Satellite Marketing took a bunch of photos, so may post some of those when they come throught.

The judges came from such organisations as BP, DEFRA, Ford, The Guardian, Leo Burnett, McCann Erickson, Toyota and Transport 2000. The categories included: Smarter Driving; Low Carbon Fuels; Responsible Vehicle Use; Responsible Low Carbon Business Transport; Low Carbon Passenger Cars; and Low Carbon Vans. We judged as our barge cruised around the Grand Union Canal. T he results will be announced at a conference at the DTI Conference Centre on 28 June.

STICKING YOUR FINGER IN A POWER PLUG

Well, delightfully, I get top billing in the latest issue of Skoll eNews (http://www.skollfoundation.org/newsletter/053107.htm). An exerpt:

Long before “corporate responsibility” was considered de rigueur, SustainAbility was telling corporations they needed to consider the economic, social and environmental impacts of their products. In fact, John Elkington, founder and chief entrepreneur of SustainAbility coined the term “triple bottom line” back in 1994.

Today, as the London-based consulting firm celebrates its 20th anniversary, it has moved to a powerful new agenda. Working with the Skoll Foundation, it is probing the ways that social entrepreneurs reframe seemingly impossible challenges such as health care and climate change as opportunities, shaking up entrenched systems and offering innovative new models. The report that SustainAbility released at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in March 2007, “Growing Oppportunity: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Insoluble Problems,” is the first in a series of annual surveys, papers and workshops about social entrepreneurship funded with a $1 million, three-year field-building grant from Skoll.

The partnership seeks to accelerate the development of the field of social entrepreneurship by building bridges between social enterprises, businesses and financial markets. It will explore and address the challenges social entrepreneurs face, identify best practices and help build awareness of social entrepreneurship among business and financial communities, where connections can help advance the work of social entrepreneurs.

“People want to see creative, innovative, scalable solutions to problems. That’s why we are delighted to be involved with social entrepreneurs,” explains Elkington. Interacting with these energetic individuals is, he says, “like sticking your finger in a power plug.”

To subscribe to the newsletter, go to www.skollfoundation.org and enter your address in the Skoll eNews box at the bottom of the page.

Thursday, May 31, 2007

RAISING OUR GAME

Back late from the launch of SustainAbility’s latest report, Raising Our Game: Can We Sustain Globalization? (http://www.sustainability.com/raising-our-game/), at an event co-hosted by Anglo-American at their HQ in Carlton House Terrace. I introduced the report and Sophia (Tickell) chaired the discussion panel that followed, which featured folk like Doug Miller of GlobeScan and Charles Secrett, previously head of Friends of the Earth and now an advisor to London Mayor Ken Livingstone.

Gave special thanks to Ritu Khanna for keeping the project on the tracks – and to Mark Lee, our CEO, for keeping the orgnaisation on its own tracks during the somewhat protracted process. But I’m really pleased with the end result. There was an extraordinary buzz at the reception that followed. These are three pictures that Sam (Lakha) took as she circled Chris Marsden, Jonathon Porritt and I. Our latest recruit, Ori Chandler, who it was announced only today was joining the team, took photos throughout the session, so may post some of those, too, later.

Chris, Jonathon, me

Me, Chris, Jonathon, Mark (Lee)

RAISING OUR GAME

Our second report as part of our Skoll Program was launched in London today. It is now posted on our website (http://www.sustainability.com/raising%2Dour%2Dgame/). Raising Our Game: Can We Sustain Globalization? looks out to 2027 to examine future scenarios for sustainable development, and proposes a new set of rules which could help business rise to the unprecedented challenges ahead. The report looks at the trade-offs involved in future choices over environmental and social value, and at the role to be played by innovation, entrepreneurship and the emerging economies of the South. There will be winners and losers, but no more business as usual. For more information or to register your seat at one of our launch events, please contact Ritu Khanna at raisingourgame@sustainability.com

Friday, May 25, 2007

BUSINESS & HUMAN RIGHTS RESOURCE CENTRE

Spent much of the day with the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre in Charlotte Street. Their website, which is a treasure trove of material on business and human rights – as the label on the tin might suggest, is in the process of being revamped. The new version, which launches shortly, will be a major step forward.

Then back to the office for a call to Brazil, ahead of my trip there next month, followed by a meeting with Henry Saint-Bris of Suez. Also get to leaf through a print copy of our twentieth anniversary report, Raising Our Game: Can We Sustain Globalisation?, which has just arrived from the printers. Much of the weekend will be spent doing slides for the launch on 31 May, hosted by Anglo-American.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

CHELSEA PHYSIC GARDENS

Glorious, fascinating day at the Chelsea Physic Gardens, for a session of the Avdisory Board of Physic Ventures (http://www.physicventures.com/) – during which I did a joint presentation with Sophia (Tickell). The weather was wonderful, although there were moments in the morning when it felt as if we were in Kuala Lumpur. Then in the evening, across to Cafe Fish, near Piccadilly Circus, for dinner with Elaine, Jed Emerson and Jason and Kippy Scott, he of Generation Investment Management.

Monday, May 21, 2007

LOW CARBON, HIGH ADRENALINE

Slightly scrambled day, part of which involved being stranded in a Piccadilly Line train outside Hammersmith for an unconscionable time en route to a meeting on biofuels at Clarence House, chaired by Prince Charles. Got there just as the group was convening – and more or less got over my “low carbon, high adrenaline” experience by the time I was called on to speak. Then back to the office to be filmed for a BBC World series on, of all things, Formula 1 racing. Then out to dinner with Elaine, Will Rosenzweig and his wife Carla. Slightly tired by the time we got home.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

THE SPITTING IMAGE

A couple of days ago, Geoff Lye, Sophia Tickell and I had an interesting lunch with John Gummer and the Quality of Life Challenge team. Geoff has prepared a statement on the need for the UK to become ‘carbon positive,’ which is now posted on the SustainAbility website (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article_open.asp?id=953) and on the Quality of Life Challenge website (http://www.qualityoflifechallenge.com/). As we convened upstairs, waiting to head downstairs to lunch, I couldn’t resist taking a picture of John’s ‘Spitting Image’ dummy in its glass case …

Thursday, May 17, 2007

SOCIAL EDGE DEBATE

I’m facilitating a debate on social entrepreneurship on Social Edge this week. If you’re interested in taking a peek – or, even better, inputting – here’s the link:

http://www.socialedge.org/discussions/social-entrepreneurship/survey-of-social-and-environmental-entrepreneurs

Thursday, May 10, 2007

A BOARD’S-EYE VIEW

Ready for inhalation of the vapours

Flew in to JFK late last night and was up early today in New York’s Marriott Financial Center to take part in the CRO Conference, sub-titled ‘A Board’s-Eye View of Corporate Responsibility.’ In this case CRO stands for Chief Responsibility Officer, with the event organised by CRO magazine (http://www.thecro.com/). Was part of an early panel session on where the whole agenda is headed, alongside the CERES Director of Governance Programs, Anne Kelly, and two companies: Interface and Neenah Paper. The photograph shows the bank of chairs we were asked to sit on. They reminded me of the tripod that the Oracle of Delphi used to sit on while inhaling the vapours – methane, ethane and ethylene predominantly, as I have been reading in a fascinating book on the subject as I flew around the country. This is The Oracle: Ancient Delphi and the Science Behind Its Lost Secrets, by William J. Broad (Penguin, 2006).

The Oracle of Delphi at work

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

IDEO

Last night, Maggie and I had dinner with Bob Adams of designers IDEO (http://www.ideo.com) at a fantastic Greek cuisine restaurant in Emerson Street, Kokkari (http://www/kokkari.com). Then this morning we made our way across to IDEO at Pier 28 on the Embarcadero, for a session with members of their San Francisco team. We are plotting a possible joint project. Wonderfully bright bunch of people – and an environment that reminds me strongly of the world we worked in when SustainAbility first moved out of our house in Barnes and slotted in alongside Brand New Product Development in Holland Park. Then out to the airport for flight to NYC.

IDEO 1

IDEO 2

IDEO 3

IDEO 4

IDEO 5

IDEO 6: Maggie and Bob

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

SKOLL AND THE FUTURE OF GREEN

After our meeting with Mitch Kapor, Maggie and I are forced to take a town car out to Palo Alto to get to the Skoll Foundation in time. The shame, the guilt, the footprint! And, to make matters worse, we are supplied in the luxurious back seat with elegant bottles of Norwegian mineral water. Sally (Osberg), the Foundation’s President, beats me up on that pretty much the moment we arrive. But then we then have two wonderful sessions, one with Sally and her immediate team, then a wider one, over lunch, with most of her colleagues. A great opportunity to report back on our work so far as part of our ongoing 3-year program with the Foundation. As we travel across the States, Maggie and I are liberally dispensing copies of our first Skoll report, Growing Opportunity: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Insoluble Problems (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/skoll_article.asp?id=937).

The WEF session itself was held out at HP’s HQ, where we were kindly driven by Laura Vais of the Skoll Foundation. The event, which I facilitated, was off-the-record, but one of the thing that always impresses me about their workshops like this is the instant charting done by their artists. One of the charts for my session appears below.

Our waves hit the big time, again

MITCH, WANDA & US

Day started with a magical session with Mitch Kapor (http://www.kapor.com/: see, too, my February 24 blog). What a startlingly rich city San Francisco is in terms of its human capital and diversity. Maggie and I made our way across to Mitch’s extraordinary building, where dogs were everywhere in evidence, from the moment we were ushered in to the moment we left. In his own office, we also met Wanda, who gave the entire proceedings a slightly surreal, Starwarsish effect.

Talking about the sustainability agenda, and my impending session on ‘The Future of Green’ with the World Economic Forum out at HP, Mitch noted that it is “a done deal,” “game over,” and that the last place any self-respecting company wants to be is “on the trailing edge.” We also talk about his wife Freada’s new book, Giving Notice: Why the Best and Brightest are Leaving the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay, which explores why bright young people are leaving the business mainstream (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/002-9400800-1657641?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Giving+Notice). If there were more people like Mitch, the tide would become a tsunami. I’d join – just for the shirts.

Warm welcome for Maggie

Dog

Dogs

How’d a porcupine get in?

Color-coded: Mitch and Wanda

Monday, May 07, 2007

PHYSIC VENTURES

After an early, fascinating visit with Nan Stone of Bridgespan (http://www.bridgespangroup.org/), Maggie and I make our way across to see Will Rosenzweig and his team at Physic Ventures, particularly Phil Giesler, Director of Innovation at Unilever Corporate Ventures – and now deeply engaged in Physic. This is a venture capital firm that “works closely with entrepreneurial teams and invests in technology-enabled, consumer-driven businesses in North America, primarily early to mid-stage.” Key areas are health, wellbeing and sustainable lifestyles. I’m on their strategic advisory board (http://www.physicventures.com/leadership.html). It’s their first day in their new offices on California Street. Sense that things are on a roll.

Then an interview with Cheryl Dahl, who I first came across through Fast Company, and who is now working on a fascinating web-based venture aimed at green consumers – particularly people who don’t really consider themselves as such. In the evening, Will and his wife Carla take Maggie and I to a wonderful Basque restaurant along Battery Street, Piperade (http://www.piperade.com). Really had no idea that Basque food – and particularly Basque wine – could be so good. I could live here.

A shape that imprinted itself on my brain when I first came to Frisco in the early 1970s

HURRAH, I’M 2,589,000TH …!

While in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a couple of days ago, I met Keith Schneider of the Michigan Land Use Institute. We were talking about websites and blogs with Jonathan Halperin, from SustainAbility’s Washington, D.C. office, when Keith asked how many people visited my personal website. I said I had never asked – and, to a degree, didn’t want to know. But after further discussion he offered to take a look at the site’s performance according to Technorati, which rates sites by number of links rather than visitors.

His feedback TODAY is that this site ranked “778,427 out of 71 million blogs tracked by Technorati.com, the best blog search engine.” Then he took a look at this site and SustainAbility’s via www.Alexa.com. In the interests of transparency, he reported that “Your personal site is ranked 2,589,000. And sustainability.com is ranked 559,024.” He went on to say that “SustainAbility.com is doing very well,” whereas I am beginning to oscillate between a wish that I hadn’t shown an interest and, on the other hand, a mildly competitive need to boost my numbers!

Sunday, May 06, 2007

CALIFORNIAN MEALS AND WHEELS

First full day in San Francisco started with breakfast with Maggie (Brenneke), following which I took the BART train out to San Bruno and a truly weird yellow cab (at least as far as the driver was concerned, but at least with Duke Ellington playing on his fading in-and-out radio) onward to San Mateo for lunch with Debra Dunn, ex-HP and now a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty. Then mainline train back to the city and fairly soon afterwards, with Maggie, across to see Denise Caruso of the Hybrid Vigor Institute (http://hybridvigor.org/), also a member of our Faculty. She recently published an extraordinary book on risk, Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet (hvpress, 2006).

After dinner at a Thai restaurant, Denise drove us back into the city in her open-topped car, with The Beatles booming out Come Together as we crested the rise from her home – and gazed out over that astounding cityscape of lights. The stars were amazingly clear, as was Venus, I think. Given that I have described her part of the city as very much like an aircraft carrier, giving you the sense that you are about to take off over the city and Bay, and that aircraft carriers are sometimes called flattops, it was slightly spooky that the line playing as we crested the ridge was “Here come ol’ flattop, he come groovin’ up slowly” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Together).

San Mateo station

Denise’s stairwell

Saturday, May 05, 2007

LETTER OF SUPPORT FOR JOHN BROWNE

Signed a letter of support for Lord Browne of BP while in the US. It appeared today in the Financial Times (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/7a2ddd32-faa7-11db-8bd0-000b5df10621.html) and The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2072999,00.html).

WHAT DO NGOS WANT?

In to San Francisco, after a couple of days in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with Jonathan Halperin of our D.C. team. We took part in a conference at Michigan University’s Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise (http://www.erb.umich.edu/) on the theme of ‘What Do NGOs Want?’ Professor Tom Lyon, the Institute’s Director, is developing a book on the theme. Our report The 21st Century NGO will make up one chapter. Groups like Environmental Defense, Greenpeace, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and WWF who took part quipped that they felt like “lab rats” or “beetles on a pin,” but the event turned into a very interesting exercise. Great to see old friends like (Professor) Tom Gladwin and Marty Zimmerman, who was a key figure at Ford when SustainAbility first started working with the company.

Magical moment when Erb Institute Associate Director Andy Hoffman asks me how we calculated the height and variation of the waves of societal pressure since 1960 that I have been tracking at SustainAbility since 1994. The answer is that the process has often been a bit like that scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Richard Dreyfuss frantically models Devil’s Tower out of mud. I have grabbed at any data and stray information I could get my hands on. But then Andy opened several pages from his thoroughly studious book From Heresy to Dogma: An Institutional History of Corporate Environmentalism (Stanford Business Books, 2001), and a winner of the Rachel Carson Prize. The trends and the patterns were remarkably similar, even though these maps were data-driven and mine have been somewhat more intuitive.

At one point, Jonathan and I strolled around the town and stumbled across a wonderful shop, The Shaman Drum Bookstore. Couldn’t help myself, as usual. Came away with books like William Broad’s book The Oracle, Gary Snyder’s Back on Fire, Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains (which Jane Nelson has been encouraging me to read for ages), A Billion Bootstraps: Microcredit, Barefoot Banking, and the Business Solution for Ending Poverty by Phil Smith and Eric Thurman, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Just as well we’re driving a truck …

Jonathan asked for a hybrid – and instead we got …

I’m vertically challenged

Marty Zimmerman (centre) asserts, while Dow Chemical and BP reflect

Jonathan does social service

Thursday, May 03, 2007

BEDFORD ROW TREES

Don’t know what species they are, but the trees in Bedford Row make this my favourite time of year there. The fragrance from their blossoms is heady – though it competes at the moment with the smell of solvents and hot, drilled materials in the London office, where a bunch of new desks and cupboards are being installed at the moment, together with what look like several entry ramps to the fabled information superhighway.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

BOBBY “BORIS’ PICKETT

Associated Press: Johan Huibers’ Ark

SustainAbility’s London offices are being rewired and redesked this week, so have been working mainly at home, though with regular excursions into central London for meetings – today with James Cameron, Monica Araya and Tanja Havemann of Climate Change Capital in Grosvenor Street. Have also been working on the book and the final stages of our globalization study, the latter due out on 31 May. Plus preparing slide presentations for Ann Arbor and San Francisco later in the week.

And climate is the unlikely link to the obituary this week (Independent, 28 April) of Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett. One of my least favourite tracks on my least favourite Beach Boys album, which I nonetheless bought while at school in 1964, was ‘Monster Mash’ on Beach Boys Concert. But once heard, the words – by Pickett – were difficult to flush out of one’s mind:

I was working in the lab late one night,
When my eyes beheld an eerie sight,
For my monster from his slab began to rise,
And suddenly to my surprise …
He did the mash,
He did the monster mash,
The monster mash,
It was a graveyard smash.

And the link? Well, in 2004 Pickett took his song, originally released in 1962 and which he also later morphed into such forgettable songs as ‘Transylvania Twist’ and ‘The Werewolf Watusi’, and updated it to produce ‘Climate Mash’, designed to help turn up the heat under the Bush Administration.

Any the picture at the top of this entry? It’s an AP image of the half-size Ark built by Johan Huibers in The Netherlands (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6604879.stm). If you can’t win the politics on climate, and you can’t sell enough humorous records to buy yourself a hilltop retreat, the next big thing is to built a monster version of an upended Airstream trailer/caravan and take to the waves.

Saturday, April 28, 2007

HANIA MAKES ME WANT TO PAINT

Hania Elkington 2007

Hania arrived for the weekend just before lunchtime, drawing me away from my computers. She took us through her photographs of her time in Istanbul this past week, and left me wanting to take up painting.

Hania Elkington 2007

Friday, April 27, 2007

PHOTOGRAPHS

Spent much of this week finishing off SustainAbility’s new report on the future of globalization – and the implications for the future of corporate responsibility and sustainable development. One of the more convoluted studies we have undertaken, long overdue, but I think coming together very powerfully now.

Then home by taxi, because I had to transport back the three huge photograph albums I compiled over the years of the first ten years or so of SustainAbility’s history, which Sam and Kim have been using to scan in photographs for the twentieth anniversary section of the website (http://www.sustainability.com/twenty/). A sample can be found at http://www.sustainability.com/twenty/gallery.asp.

As the taxi unloaded me in Barnes, Julia (Hailes) was just arriving for dinner and to stay the night, ahead of doing a speech on green funerals tomorrow. She brought a copy of her new book, The New Green Consumer Guide (http://www.juliahailes.com/Flyer-NGCG-jun06.pdf). After supper, we all sit through till late going through the albums, recalling old adventures and filling in some of the missing names against age-old photographs. Had somehow missed the mention of her in the Financial Times, despite reading the paper semi-religiously every day, on 30 March (http://search.ft.com/iab?queryText=Julia%20Hailes&y=7&aje=true&x=8&id=070330000595&location=http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.ft.com%2FftArticle%3FqueryText%3DJulia+Hailes%26y%3D7%26aje%3Dtrue%26x%3D8%26id%3D070330000595&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.ft.com%2Fsearch%3FqueryText%3DJulia+Hailes). The item was on her recent work for McDonald’s (http://johnelkington.com/time-wave2.htm), a company we had a major run-in with after the publication of the orginal Green Consumer Guide.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

ALWAYS WANTED TO PLAY THE ALBERT HALL

Rory Stear of Freeplay Energy noted – as we all waited to go on stage there today – that he had always wanted to play the Albert Hall. Other panellists for the debate on what it takes to be a ‘Good Director’ were Penny Newman of cafedirect and Philippa Foster Back of the Institute of Business Ethics. The transcript can be found at http://www.iod.com/intershoproot/eCS/Store/en/pdfs/ac07_transcript_panel.pdf.

I continue to contribute a column to Director magazine, the latest of which can be found at http://www.director.co.uk/MAGAZINE/2006/12%20Dec/elkington_60_5.html.

The IoD also launched a new climate change microsite on its website today: http://www.iod.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/GBP/IODContentManager-Start;sid=xQsRsteuGQgLbZGdp3AbJH9uV3tiFITovqY=?ChannelID=2&MenuID=20&TemplateName=policy%2fcontent%2ftransport%2fpol_transport_climate_change%2eisml.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

DOUGHTY CENTRE FOR CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY

Across to Pall Mall for a small dinner hosted by Nigel Doughty, co-founder of Doughty & Hanson Co., the private equity firm. Tube proved to be having some sort of conniption, so I walked there from Holborn, remarkably quickly. Spotlight of the evening was on David Grayson, recently appointed as the Director of the newly established Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility. This has been possible by a £3 million commitment by Nigel to fully fund the Centre for the next five years and to set up a Trust Fund to provide funding for subsequent years.

Friday, April 20, 2007

THE CRETAN TSUNAMIS

Thera today (source: Landsat)

Weird, given that Elaine dreamed of a tsunami on our first night in Aghios Nikolaos last week, during a rainstorm, that this evening we stumble across the BBC Timewatch programme ‘The Wave That Destroyed Atlantis,’ exploring possible links between the Thera/Santorini eruption and the extinction of the Minoan civilization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thera_eruption). Although we were told in Crete that the ultimate collapse of the civilization came some time after the eruption, the evidence of widespread tsunamis triggered by the collapse of the Theran caldera and vast inrushing of seawater atop the incandescently hot magma seemed fairly persuasive, with the coast-based Minoans likely to have been overwhelmed. And the archaeological evidence of the cannibalization of young people during the post-tsunami period added a new wrinkle to the Minotaur myth.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

LAKKI MEMORIAL AND AFTER

As Georgios drives us back down the serpentine road towards the coast, Elaine asks me to catch a shot of a sign to Hania (a coincidence in naming, since Hania’s name came from the world of the Hopi Indians) as we roar around yet another a hairpin bend. I ask Roland if we can stop off for a moment to see the memorial to Cretan resistance in the mountain village of Lakki. It works out – and the sculpture is impressive. A reminder of just how hard-won the island’s independence has been. Later we stop for wonderful Cretan yoghurt and honey by a river, before having a final wander around Iraklion/Heraklion, where we encounter evidence that at least some aspects of the bull cult still flourish.

Despite early concerns about the difficulty of achieving a hat-trick with Syria, Cyprus and now Crete, ACE have pulled it off once again. As a result, if the Fates allow, we hope to head back to this extraordinary island under our own steam. But a parallel challenge will be to work out what the fourth ACE in our hand might be, though if we allow the current tempo to continue that wouldn’t be until 2009.

Lakki memorial

The general direction of Hania

The cult of the bull continues

Monday, April 16, 2007

SAMARIA GORGE

As we prospect for wildflowers on the Omalos Plateau, old tyres are everwhere, often strewn in circles like mushroom rings. When I go across to one circle, their use becomes obvious from a solitary colony: they are stands for mobile beehives. Sadly, the Samaria Groge is closed until next month, so six of us content ourselves by climbing up to its westernmost end, with fairly hard going at some points – though our oldest member, she’s over 80, is pretty much like a mountain goat. As we go higher, a cuckoo – or cuckoos – call back and forth far below.

After we get onto the top of the mountain, and within sight of the Gorge’s end, Elaine and I unhook and scramble up to sit in the bowl of a giant, gnarled cypress tree, where the droppings suggest that various forms of wildlife seem to watch life go by when humans aren’t about. We watch vultures circle overhead and engage in roiling mobbings with ravens and choughs. A perfect ending to an extraordinary visit – though the true end comes tomorrow, with the trip back to Iraklion/Heraklion.

Tyrehenge

One reason why the bees are here

Tools, ancient and modern: shepherd’s crook, branch for a new one, and Toyota truck

Goats create a weird topiary

The climb begins

Clearly, goats aren’t the only natural forces these trees must contend with

An easy patch

Sunday, April 15, 2007

SELINARI GORGE AND RETHYMNON

On our way west, we stop off at the Selinari Gorge, to watch griffon vultures and other birds soaring in the building thermals. Didn’t much like the monastery, or what we saw of it, which felt jerry-built, but maybe it’ll settle in by 2100? Then on to Rethymno/Rethymnon, where Elaine and I hoofed it over the the Venetian fortress that dominates the harbour. Circumnavigated at speed, but well worth the effort. Then on to watch birds at Agia Lake, where the orange trees were in glorious blosson, the fragrance heady – and the orange juice served in the nearby cafe my idea of the sort of libation I would expect in the Elysian Fields. Still kicking myself, though, because I failed to get to the bottom of the frog-croaking sound from within a rubbish bag by the lake.

As we drove west, my mind was on the plight of the Allied troops faced with the German paratroop invasion in 1941. Another woeful tale, at least in part, of British incompetence in the early stages of the war. Had meant to bring Anthony Beevor’s excellent book Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (Penguin, 1992), but couldn’t find it at home before we left. Will read it when I get back. But as we begin the long drive up the winding route to the Omalos Plateau, where our visit will end, many of us are acutely aware of the grim plight of the Allied troops who struggled over the same route after the German invasion, of the heroism of the Cretans who both helped them and fought fiercely to prevent the para-landings, and of the terrible reprisals exacted in the aftermath of the battle and later.

Not at Selinari, but had to get it in

Kevin with an eye on higher things, vultures mainly

Snaking hose

Rethimno/Rethimnion harbour

Vista from fortress

All along the watchtower

Given the Cretan love of cement, this could be a modern shrine with votive instruments

KNOSSOS COLOSSUS

Spent this morning at Knossos, starting with a moment of reflection in the shadow of that great man, a colossus of archaeology, Sir Arthur Evans. Though much criticised by future generations of archaeologists, his was an extraordinary genius. Scooting ahead of the group, I had much of the site to myself for periods and its scale was palpable. During the so-called Second Palace Period (1700-1350 BC), the palace covered 22,000 square metres and had over 1500 rooms. It’s not hard to see where the Greek notion of the labyrinth came from, nor – when you hear of the tribute levied on the expansive Minoan colonies – where the myth of an all-consuming Minotaur might have come from.

I was greatly struck by the abstract beauty of the bull horn sculptures, by the relief frescoes and by the melting alabaster blocks that one encounters all over the site. People may not like the Evans affection for concrete reconstructions, but they presumably have served to protect some of the site from the elements.

As we have travelled, I have been reading the latest episode in the Dune series, Hunters of Dune, by Frank Herbert’s son Brian and Kevin Anderson (Hodder & Stoughton, 2006). Herbert was also a genius, of a different sort to Evans, but one whose mind was also able to roam over centures and millennia in a quite extraordinary way. After years of trying to track him down, I finally met him and his wife Beverly either in 1981 or 1983, ironically just as he was heading back to Seattle from London and I was just returning to London from Seattle. My original essay based on the session can be found at http://johnelkington.com/inf-people-herbert.htm. Although qualitatively different, Hunters turns out to be an excellent read – and worthy successor. Indeed, I can’t wait to read the concluding volume in the series.

Knossos Colossus

Welcoming blooms

North entrance

And again

Nest

My reflection, leaning on a wall

If only stones could speak

Even monumental alabaster melts over time

The Royal Road

Saturday, April 14, 2007

CHOUGHED AT MONASTIRAKI GORGE

Across to visit the gorge mouth that we can see from our hotel on the other side of the Gulf or Mirabelle. As promised, a colony of choughs to aerobatics for us along the way. Then I drag Elaine off down the gorge and up along a levada, or irrigation canal, leading to a set of ruined watermills on the other side. Fascinating design, with the wheel turned by the water below the wheels that ground the grain. When I tried to find a way back across the gorge lower down, it proved fruitless and we had to double back – though, mercifully, a small group of stragglers were still poring over flowers part-way back, so our tracks were covered.

Mouth of Monastiraki Gorge

Chapel 1

Chapel 2

Choughs

Part of one of the watermills

GOURNIA AND ENVIRONS

Pleasure heaped on pleasure. Any concerns we may have had about scoring a hat-trick with ACE study tours have long-since been banished. This morning we visited Gournia, the best-preserved of all Minoan towns. It enjoyed a massive strategic advantage, controlling the narrow isthmus which enabled traders and others to send goods overland to the south rather than relying on the much more dangerous sail around the eastern cape. The site was discovered by an American, Harriet Boyd-Hawes, who started digging in 1901. A wonderful site, and fascinating to see how the coastline has shifted since, a process you can see continuing as you watch. Here I found myself chewing on juniper berries – various others followed my lead, but I’m not sure they were quite as impressed, with at least one saying she preferred to get her juniper infusions via gin.

After a walk along the coast, plant-spotting, we had a glorious lunch in Pakia Ammos, with Elaine, Kevin, Roland and I eating in the open, under a bright blue sky. Several of the party went swimming before lunch, though the wind was quite cold and the waves seemed full of plastic sacks and other assorted detritus. Retsina, small pastry packages of spinach and cheese, calamare, octopus, sardines, and other seafood delights. Heaven.

Wild gladiolus at site entrance

Gournia wildflowers

The journey commences

Kevin instructs

Roland is a man of the book

Nests of the processionary caterpillar

Nest in my juniper snackery

Yesterday’s rain is adding to the sedimentary fan

Vista in blue

Prostrate plants speak to wind’s power

Spiny centaury again?

Pakia Ammos

THE PALACE OF MALIA

Spent the morning at the excavated Palace of Malia, first discovered by Joseph Hatzidakis in the early twentieth century – and a site showing evidence of extensive earthquake damage at various points in its history. Two extraordinary finds we only saw in the form of photographs were the famous gold pendant showing two bees and the extraordinary leopard’s-head axe, both of which are in the Museum of Iraklion/Heraklion – currently under refurbishment, and therefore inaccessible.

After the visit, I found myself snacking on the shoots of an Aleppo pine near the museum, which were delicious. Then we walked along the coast, in my case alongside the crashing waves. One of the plants I was most struck by here was spiny centaury, whose structure of thorns reminded me of Tim Smit’s biomes at The Eden Project. But when I looked up the name via Google, the images that appeared looked nothing like the plant we had seen. Any suggestions?

As we were leaving, a beautiful purple heron came winging by from the nearby marshes – a wonderful sight. But my overall reaction to the coast here was one of profound sadness: the amount of rubbish and litter dumped everywhere defies the imagination. And, sadly too, I very much doubt much of what we saw as we walked the coastline will ever be of much interest or use to future archaeologists. But some entrepreneurial rival to ACE might think of doing a spotting tour of mineral water bottles, beer cans, condoms and the like. When we got back to the hotel in the early afternoon, I crashed – sleeping for three hours solid.

Even with tyres scattered around the landscape, this was something different – but what?

The colour of clay

Malia plants 1

Malia plants 2

Malia coastline

Spiny centaury?

Windswept Elaine

Friday, April 13, 2007

ZEUS AND THE LASSITHI PLATEAU

Friday 13th. Inland to the Lassithi Plateau, past some of the surviving traditional windmills on the lip of the plateau. Then a walk through farmland, past rubbish tips and with a distant view of what may be an abattoir with a ram’s head affixed to its central window. We are looking for birds – and find them a-plenty. Some people also see frogs in the river, though my eyes are on the snow-covered peaks in the distance. Then off to the Dhiktean Cave in which Zeus is reputed to have been born. Climbing up towards the cave affords wonderful panoramas of the landscape. A wren sings at the mouth to the cave and three Griffon vultures do a glorious fly-past.

Windmills 1

Windmills 2

On one side of the path …

… and on the other …

Another sometime scourge

Mouth of the Dhiktean Cave

Cave 2

Cave 3

Cave 3 – and isn’t that Zeus in the middle?

Coins at the bottom of the Cave

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

VENETIAN LION AND LEPERS

By boat later this afternoon to the long-impregnable Venetian island fortress of Spinalonga, which was only handed over to the Turks some 50 years after they had taken over the rest of Crete. More recently, for the first 50 years of the twentieth century, the island was a leper colony, Europe’s last. Lepers were sent there even when drugs had become available that would have made such suffering and incarceration needless. But it was hard to recall those dark days when walking around in the sun, admiring everything from Roman nettles to the colour of the waters surrounding the fortress’s walls. Reminded us of the Venetian castles we prowled around in Greece in 1970, with their extraordinary cisterns. Later, we headed back by boat to Plaka for an excellent fish supper, ending with raki.

Spinalonga looks innocent today

Feeling tyred, presumably after a second life buffering boats

In range

Door 1

Door 2

Flowers

Turret

‘Prow’

Carved graffito on a prickly pear leaf

Kevin and Roland

And there’s the lion various people had been looking for

Elaine 1

Elaine 2

Nets in Plaka

Corner of Plaka fish restaurant where we sat above the harbour

FARMING THE WIND

After lunch, we went up onto the mountains above Elounda, looking back over Spinalonga. Spying a vulture circling over a distant windfarm, I took off among the olive groves and made for the ‘Temple of Vestas’ – a Danish windpower company I have long admired.

There had been a degree of disagreement in the group when we had first espied the machines, with a fair amount of distaste expressed by some, whereas I find well-designed aerogenerators things of great beauty. Indeed, spent a fair amount of time during the early 1980s trekking around windfarms worldwide while writing Sun Traps for Penguin. Elaine finally tracked me down among the white giants and we walked back along the ridge to rejoin the group, who were poring over every wildflower encountered along the way – or springing back to loft their binoculars and watch some bird passing overhead.

Spinalonga from above 1

Spinalonga from above 2

Goatsbeard – like a huge dandelion head

An even larger dandelion head

Courtesy of Vestas

Windfarm 1

Windfarm 2

End of a cable drum

Grove 1

Grove 2

SALT PANS AND SUNKEN CITY

A morning spent in and around Elounda, particularly the former Venetian saltpans – which apparently attract waders, though there are few about today. On our way to Elounda, we stop off on a high point and take in our surroundings, for me the high point here being a huge carpenter bee. Once down by the saltpans, we pass by a number of disused windmills and the waters under which lie the ruins of the sunken city of Olous, on our way out to the Spinalonga peninsula. I amuse myself by eating a fair amount of salty samphire, which is genuinely delicious.

Everything here is under construction

She doesn’t look as though she’s going willingly …

View across the saltpans

Windmill

Elaine shows the way

Underneath the lampost

Windmill 2

Windmill 3

Blues

AGHIOS NIKOLAOS

Arrived yesterday afternoon in Heraklion, en route to Aghios Nikolaos and the Hotel Miramare – the beginning of a week-long study tour on ‘Crete: Birds, Flowers and Minoans.’ Organised by ACE Study Tours (http://www.acestudytours.co.uk), with whom we have previously travelled to Syria and Northern Cyprus. Those trips were so spectacular that I confess we are somewhat uneasy that Lady Luck is unlikely to strike three times in a row. But early conversations with the tour leaders – Kevin Hand and Roland Randall – suggest that our chances are way better than even.

It had rained last night and the steps of the hotel this morning were squiriming with long black millipedes, so the wildlife element of the trip has already begun … and, as usual, I’m finding it hard to shake off the BlackBerry habit, though try to indulge surreptitiously.

Vista from our balcony

Graffito

Nearby cemetery

Sunday, April 08, 2007

KITES

Gaia, Haia and John (Jencks) just passed through to collect the car and head west, to Little Rissington. As we drove through the Chilterns last weekend, to the same end, the sky was busy with red kites, a glorious sight. And they seem to be spreading west from their site of reintroduction.

Then, last night, I picked up a copy of the 1986-1995 Indypendium, a celebration of 20 years of journalism in The Independent, and stumbled across Richard Mabey’s ‘The Kite Flies Again,’ the last piece in the collection. He notes that the red kite was once a common bird across the whole of Britain, but was exterminated by the English landed gentry and their gamekeepers. In the early 15th century the bird made such a contribution to public health in London by virtue of its scavenging that it was a capital offence to kill one.

Later still, I stumbled on a TV programme on Douglas Bader’s downing in 1941, his ‘kite’ at the time being a Spitfire. Programme dragged at times, as the archaeological team dug up one aircraft wreck after another, but the final conclusion was that Bader had been the victim of ‘friendly fire,’ rather than colliding with an Me 109, which put a different spin on things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Bader). Watching the excavations was significantly more interesting in the light of the stream of items that the archaeological team that dug up my father’s Huricane sent us over the years. Extraordinary, too, to see how many planes came down in such a small area of France.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

THREE AMBULANCES

Back late this afternoon from Little Rissington, after a couple of wonderful days with my parents at Hill House. On current trends, the ambulances will soon be finding their way there with their eyes closed. In the past three months, several ambulances have come to collect or return family casualties. First, my youngest sister had some sort of stroke when Elaine and I were in Davos, which brought an ambulance to her London home; then my painterly sister collided with her easel and damaged her leg very severely indeed, necessitating another ambulance, this time to Hill House; and now, a few days back, my mother effectively died in the kitchen – and had to be brought back to life by my youngest sister, now fully recovered and, mercifully, originally a hospital sister. Another ambulance.

The three of them joke that they are competing for attention – and even tries to tie my collision with last year’s Mongolian woman (see 23 August, 2006 entry) into the general pattern of mayhem, but I’m beginning to think that cycling in London is safe by comparison with living the rural idyll. On ambulances, I have no complaints, but the Little Rissington casualties, while full of praise for the crews, say Gloucestershire ambulances have a ride akin to Sherman tanks.

Saturday, March 31, 2007

BULLRUSHES

The plantings of bullrushes and reeds around Barnes Pond are beginning to get into their stride – the sun was setting behind one clump as we walked back from a trip into central London today, largely to pick up the laptop I stupidly forgot to bring back after last night’s celebration. As we sat alone in the office and I did a message to the team, it brought home how much of SustainAbility’s undoubted achievements of the past 20 years have depended on other people. Then, this evening, having bought DVDs of the latest Bond film Casino Royale and of The Queen, we watched the former. Wonderfully distracting, doubly welcome since the peer reviews have just come in for the new book – but I think I’ll leave that until Monday. Have always expected this next stage to be complicated.

Friday, March 30, 2007

SUSTAINABILITY IS 20

Today we marked SustainAbility’s twentieth anniversary, kicking off a process of celebrating the organisation’s twenty-first year and pushing forward our ongoing transformation. A special 20-years-on section of the SustainAbility website will be launched next week.

In this first event, which coincided with a Board meeting today, we mainly invited the UK team and alumni from over the years – including Fiona Byrne, our first-ever employee. Sadly, co-founder Julia Hailes couldn’t make it, but will be involved in later stages. The US team also couldn’t make it, though their latest recruit – Jonathan Halperin – was with us. We used his presence to celebrate the extraordinary success of our US colleagues since that defining early setback, when we were based in New York, of our team watching the planes fly into the World Trade Center. Also from the US, Debra Dunn, a member of the Skoll Foundation Board, joined us – having spent much of the week at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford (see earlier postings).

A deeply moving gathering of the tribes, with every face telling a story. I recall, for example, when Geoff Lye joined us in the early 1990s and he and I couldn’t pay ourselves for several months – something he helped us put right by getting the organisation onto a much sounder financial footing. He now splits his time between us and the Oxford-based Environmental Change Institute, where he focuses on climate change. And among those present was Jonathan Shopley, now CEO of the CarbonNeutral Company, but a colleague on the consultancy side of my life when we were launching SustainAbility. He jokingly complained that when people Google his name today, a blog entry of mine comes up No. 1, describing how Gaia amd Hania embraced him on our doorstep after his long ride north from South Africa. Can’t see what he’s complaining about: when I Googled him, the blog came up No. 4 …

More seriously, our continuing friendships and relationships with such people underscore one of the more delightful aspects of SustainAbility. Unlike an oceanic wave, which maintains its form in passing but leaves individual water molecules that once formed it behind in its wake – our organisation may have involved 80-90 people in its Core Team over the years, but those who have moved on have tended to stay as part of our extended family, in some cases as members of our Council, which ran for ten years, and now our Faculty.

Gaia and Hania brought me a ‘birthday’ card, celebrating 20 years of their third “sister,” SustainAbility, which shared our family home for several years before it flew the nest. Now it is more or less grown up and over the next few years will increasingly be in the business of establishing nests elsewhere in the world, including – we hope – India. Twenty years on from the launch of the Brundtland Report, which began the process of mainstreaming the concept of sustainable development, the idea of intergenerational equity has gained a fair amount of traction – and, in my mind at least, that was symbolised by the presence of Norah Lee, daughter of our CEO Mark Lee, who pops up in a couple of the photos below. My thanks to Tell Muenzing, who took many of them.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

SKOLL WORLD FORUM 2007

Bumped into Geoff (Lye) at Oxford Station, while waiting for a train back to London. Railways, as usual, in turmoil, with our train cancelled because of missing guard. But nothing could drown out the astonishing experience of the past few days at the Skoll World Forum.

From the music of Salman Ahmad and the gentle wisdom of Charles Handy through to the thoughts of David Galenson on the different forms of creativity and Larry Brilliant (of Google.org) on reasons for optimism, this was an unbelievably rich banquet of ideas and – in line with this year’s theme of ‘Innovators in Action’ – there was a regular jolt of electricity from social and environmental entrepreneurs from, by Jeff Skoll’s count, 40 countries on six continents.

We launched our first Skoll Report, Growing Opportunity: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Insoluble Problems, co-sponsored by Allianz and DuPont (http://www.sustainability.com/news-media/news-resource.asp?id=938). And the four of us (Sophia, Maggie, Ritu and I) were involved in three separate sessions.

One, ‘Partnering with Business,’ ran on Wednesday, was chaired by Sophia, and featured Maggie, social entrepreneurs Blaise Judja-Sato (VillageReach) and Chris Elias (PATH), and leading speakers from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GE Asset Management and GSK.

The second, chaired by Jan Piercy of Shorebank, focused on the challenge of accessing capital for social enterprise, and I was on the panel alongside folk like Penny Newman of Cafe Direct, Michele Giddens of Bridges Community Ventures, Tim Reith of Community Innovation UK and Arthur Wood of Ashoka.

And the third, as the event moved towards its conclusion, came earlier today. I chaired a discussion with Bill Drayton of Ashoka and Ed Miliband, Minister for the Third Sector, with whom a number of us had dinner last night at the Said Business School. First time I’d met him, but was impressed by his grasp of the subject and the clarity of his delivery. Still, Larry Brilliant was a tough act to follow, particularly with his astonishing swooping in and out of the Indian sub-continent via Google Earth, or similar, in the process of demonstrating how horrendous the risk of climate change is to low-lying countries like Bangladesh.

To view the Forum sessions online, go to http://www.skollfoundation.org/skollcentre/skoll_forum.asp

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

THOMAS CRANMER REMEMBERED

In the olden days, Oxford saw the burning of people whose thinking was outside the bounds of orthodoxy. Last night Geoff Mulgan noted that the Skoll World Forum was being held just around the corner from where Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was burned in 1556 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cranmer). Passed the spot today.

RISING TO THE TYPO CHALLENGE

The Guardian devotes a full page today to my piece on ‘Rising to the Challenge’ (http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2044046,00.html) – and you have to admire their consistency in ensuring that their random typo generator is always switched on. Somehow they managed to convert the acronym for the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers into KPBM, twice. I take my hate off to them.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

ONE PLANET BUSINESS, SLAVERY AND SKOLL WORLD FORUM

Began the day with WWF at Westminster Central Hall, helping launch the new One Planet Business report that SustainAbility has developed with WWF and a range of other partners (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/research-article.asp?id=941), including the Global Footprint Network – one of the winners in this year’s Skoll Awards (see below). Clive Anderson moderated and made a particularly pointed comment about Sky TV being both carbon-neutral and tax-neutral, an issue that SustainAbility has been covering in its work on the tax agenda for business (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/research-article.asp?id=450).

As I left, I passed a demonstration calling for reparations for the slavery era – and, in Parliament Square, the brooding statue of Lincoln. Then by train to Oxford, where I snapped the always moving statue of the WWI Tommy reading mail from home, to take part in the Skoll World Forum (http://www.skollfoundation.org/skollcentre/skoll_forum.asp). The opening ceremeony was held in the Sheldonian Theatre, an exquisite building – but its seating also provides exquisite torture for the lower anatomy.

Staying at The Randolph Hotel, which a troubled friend signed into some 30 years ago planning to burn the place down. They guessed: he signed in as Lucifer. My brother had to go and bail him out.

Fuzzily from the Sheldonian Gods: Sally Osberg, Peter Gabriel, Muhammad Yunus and Jeff Skoll

Monday, March 26, 2007

CHATHAM HOUSE AND HARRY POTTER

Spoke at a rather dreary Chatham House conference, ‘Sense & Sustainability,’ before heading down to Oxford for a Skoll Foundation dinner to celebrate the 2007 crop of social entrepreneurs. Held in the dining hall of Exeter College, where – Jeff Skoll said – Tolkien came up with the basic idea for Lord of the Rings and, more recently, sundry parts of Harry Potter were filmed.

Barry Coleman (Riders for Health) and Susan Burns (Global Footprint Network), Exeter College

Sunday, March 25, 2007

DIVERSION EN ROUTE HOME

Have never come across more roadworks than on our trip to Fowey and back, taking the ‘fast’ route via Bristol westward, then coming back on the A30 and A303, and dropping off to see Julia Hailes and her family for lunch. The Google Earth time estimates turned out to be pretty much spot on, though, despite some quite extraordinary diversions, which probably means I wasn’t driving at the most fuel-efficient speed. Still while they may have blurred by, I relished the burial mounds and tumuli around Stonehenge as we headed east.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

A PERFECT DAY WITH TIM SMIT

Having driven down to Fowey from London last night, Elaine and I headed across to the Eden Project (http://www.edenproject.com) for 11.00 this morning, to meet up with Tim Smit – and he gave us the Grand Tour. Some images below. Wonderful to see where ‘Seed,’ by Peter Randall-Page (http://www.peterrandall-page.com/) will stand from June. We talked on after a late lunch and then Tim, the epitome of hospitality, led us across to the Lost Gardens of Heligan, which we managed to get around before the sun went down. Just. One of the most extraordinary days of my life, with the skies blue horizon-to-horizon from the moment the sun came up to the moment it disappeared. As the three of us took stock back at the Hotel Marina, over a bottle of Framingham Pinot Noir, I couldn’t get Lou Reed’s voice out of my mind.

Waterboatman

Dome from dome: Tim and Pamela talk geodesics

Fishbones?

Heavenly glass

Heavenly roof

Enough said

X marks the spot where Peter Randall-Page’s ‘Seed’ will stand

Testing the acoustic

WEEE Man

Saurian scales

A different drum

Cassanova and the Marquis de Sade

What are they hatching?

Tim’s steed

Eden flowerpots

Heligan flowerpots

Not quite up to his eyeballs

Brassica seem unafrighted

Cooler: Pamela (wearing rug from our car) and Elaine

Exits

Sun begins to set

But it still lights up the trees when we get back to Fowey

And then the lights come on

Monday, March 19, 2007

INVASION OF THE FROGS

Gaia and Hania were over yesterday and, after we talked about the frogs that have taken over Gaia’s garden in North London, she emailed me some photographs she had taken. Some of the amphibians are unlike anything I have seen in this country before, except – perhaps – for one orange fog I saw in a welter of the beasts on a Cumbrian moor behind Eskdale Green maybe 30 years ago. Maybe I haven’t been looking in the right places. But maybe encouraging when frogs seem to be in such precipitous decline in so many places.

Who’s the alien?

Saturday, March 17, 2007

JACK, THE DEBATE IS OVER

I had thought it progress when Jack and Suzy Welch had concluded that it was time for business to act on climate change even if the science wasn’t yet proven, in their ‘The Welch Way’ column in the February 26 issue of BusinessWeek. Given how much Welch has resisted this whole agenda, this seemed like the dikes beginning to break. But the March 19 issue now carries a very prominent letter from an Ian Keay in Palo Alto, arguing that “Jack, the debate is over, and the scientists have won …. There is no more time for fence-sitting.” I only know one Ian Keay in Palo Alto: he was our Best Man in 1973.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

WEAK SIGNALS, LSD AND KPMG

Stopped off briefly in St Bride’s Church, off Fleet Street (http://www.stbrides.com/), as I walked across to a meeting of the Tomorrow’s Global Company Inquiry Team this afternoon. A place of worship for 2000 years, the site is a wonderful island of calm. The extraordinary Wren church has been the “the spiritual home of printing & the media” for 500 years. According to the Church’s website, something that would have seemed a miracle even a few decades ago, the church stood empty for seventeen years, after “a wartime bomb had left the church a smouldering shell.” An extraordinary sense, despite the ecxesses of today’s media, that this has been an axial point around which successive battles have been fought for freedom of speech.

Then on to KPMG’s HQ, just around the corner, for the meeting. At the dinner afterwards we were considering the key skills and attributes of tomorrow’s CEO and other business leaders. I scribbled down four in my little blue Moleskine notebook before the tour de table began, and when it was my turn to speak – after around 15 contributions – none of mine had been mentioned.

One was a Superman-like ability to see way back down complex supply chains, a form of X-ray vision. Another was the capacity to pick up early on weak signals of new risks and opportunities. The problem here, I noted, was that if you become too sensitive to weak signals it’s a bit like being on LSD, where everything seems significant. Someone I had earlier challenged on his Neanderthal positioning on climate change fired back that it seemed as if I had taken LSD – to which I replied that, as usual, I knew of what I spake. Laughter followed, but the point stands: and it’s a rare mind that can do this.

A third item on my shortlist was a sense of humour, which often signals an ability to play with ideas and see things from odd angles. Not as powerful as LSD, perhaps, but in the longer term likely to leave more of the brain intact.

Maybe it’s the Sixties, and all that went with them, but in these various conversations around the future of globalisation – including SustainAbility’s own 20th anniversary report on the theme, which I am working on at the moment – there is too often a comfortable, dangerous assumption that the processes of globalisation will run on rails. That seventeen year hiatus at St Bride’s should be a reminder that History rarely runs on rails, and neither will current forms of globalisation.

GREEN ALLIANCE BROWN

The news hoardings were full of Gordon Brown’s greening as I headed across to the Café Royal last night for the Green Alliance (http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/) event showcasing the Chancellor. Apparently he was invited last year, but the invitation was turned down. Then when David Cameron was invited instead, the Treasury called to demand why Brown hadn’t been invited? Hey-ho, but here we go, it seems: climate change and carbon budgeting have become the stuff of the political steeplechase.

I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised by Brown, though can’t say I trust his instincts after his action in areas like pensions and the ill-fated Operating & Financial Review (OFR). He noted that when he commissioned Sir Nicholas Stern’s report on the economics of climate change, he had no idea about the scale of the challenge the world faces. His ideas for upgrading the United Nations Environment programme, for greening the World Bank and for ensuring that future Chancellors of the Exchequer have to count – and account for – carbon were welcome. Indeed carbon budgeting (and the implications for the Treasury) is an area where Geoff Lye – who now straddles SustainAbility and Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/) – has been investing a great deal of effort in recently.

Brown also reported that he is going to ensure that all homes eventually have energy efficiency ratings, like white goods such as fridges, which is welcome, and he is writing to the European Commission to ask that member states be allowed to reduce or remove the VAT on green products. All good stuff, as far as it goes, but I thought his prediction that climate change would radically transform global governance over the next 5 years a little far-fetched, though much stranger things have happened.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

FROG SPAWN

Glorious walk in Richmond Park today, with jackdaws, rooks and parakeets in joyous Spring-time mood. Had a sudden hunch that the frogs would be spawning and we walked over to the Secret Pond, to find several clumps of spawn already afloat. Uneasy feeling that they may be too early.

Friday, March 09, 2007

ONE PLANET BUSINESS INTERVIEW

Did a filmed interview today for the launch of the WWF One Planet Business report and programme later this month – a project which SustainAbility has been helping with. As we filmed, Sam (Lakha) flitted around with the diminutive Canon camera and these are some of the results.

Venetian blind and three echoing glasses

A touch of green

Eye off the ball

Q&A

Q side of the equation

Almost done, Sam?

The killer question

(All photos: Sam Lakha)

SUSTAINABILITY JOINS USCAP

Jeffrey Immelt (Chairman and C.E.O., General Electric) and Jonathan
Lash (President, World Resources Institute) at the launch of the USCAP
Call to Action [Photo credit: Reggie Lipscomb, NPS Photography]

SustainAbility has signed up as a supporter of the US Climate Action Partnership. The USCAP (http://www.us-cap.org) is a group of businesses and leading environmental organizations that have come together to call on the Federal government to quickly enact strong national legislation to require significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. USCAP has issued a landmark set of principles and recommendations to underscore the urgent need for a policy framework on climate change.

The statement we provided to USCAP along with our endorsement reads as follows: “As SustainAbility enters its 21st year working with businesses to address society’s greatest challenges, we are encouraged by the leadership and courage demonstrated by the members of the USCAP. We share their sense of urgency regarding the global need to dramatically and rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and we join them in their call for national climate change legislation in the US.”

The six principles that are core to the USCAP Call for Action (http://www.us-cap.org/ClimateReport.pdf) are:

(1) Account for the global dimensions of climate change;
(2) Create incentives for technology innovation;
(3) Be environmentally effective;
(4) Create economic opportunity and advantage;
(5) Be fair to sectors disproportionately impacted; and
(6) Reward early action.

THE ROBERT DAVIES BLOG

Someone I have known for many a year, Robert Davies (CEO of the International Business Leaders Forum, http://www.iblf.org/), has started a blog which affords a very different – and very interesting – window on the linked fields of corporate responsibility and sustainable development.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

IMPERIAL PINK – AND BLUE

Always enjoy doing sessions with the Business & Environment MSc students at Imperial College, the course run by Andrew Blaza, which I did again this morning. Highly diverse and engaged group. Back to a bunch of writing tasks, but particularly the report we are racing to finish in time for the Skoll World Forum at the end of the month. One theme of my Imperial session was the need for more creativity in this space – and this week, so far, we have had visits from creative folk like Bob Adams of IDEO (http://www.ideo.com/) and a number of his UK colleagues, from Kris Murrin of ?What If! (http://www.whatifinnovation.com/), and from Sara Olsen of SVT Consulting (http://svtconsulting.com/about/team.html).

Imperial blue

Imperial pink

Sunday, March 04, 2007

THE MASON PEARSON HAIRBRUSH

In between blogging and doing catch-up work for the office, I have been wading through piles of The Times, Financial Times, and other assorted newspapers that have accumulated at home while I was away, including today The Observer and The Sunday Times. Yesterday’s FT included a nice column from Carolyn Lyons on the Mason Pearson hairbrush, “the brush that really brushes.” Its design roots go back to 1885, apparently.

All I know is that it was always the standard brush in my family – and Elaine’s – and still is. But the story that sticks in my mind is my mother’s, who used to use these redoubtable brushes to tan our hides when we were small. At one point, the handle of a brush broke off. So she sent it back to Mason Pearson, with a polite note saying that she had used their brushes to beat her children for many a year. Not sure that would square with human rights rules these days, but, obligingly, they sent her a new one.

BAPU KUTI

One of the wonderful things about the Bangalore visit was the generosity of spirit of the people who I met around the city. Rohini Nilekani, for example, not only introduced me to the work of Arghyam (http://www.arghyam.org; motto: ‘safe, sustainable water for all’), but put me in touch with Rajni Bakshi, who is deeply knowledgable about the deep history of civil society movements in India, particularly those based on the thinking of Mahatma Gandhi. Though Rajni lives in Mumbai, she and I had two long telephone conversations while I was in Bangalore and then, as I was packing to leave, the door bell went – and Rohini had sent over a copy of Rajni’s book Bapu Kuti: Journeys in Rediscovery of Gandhi, published by Penguin Books, India, in 1998 (http://www.amazon.com/Bapu-Kuti-Rajni-Bakshi/dp/0140278389).

Read most of the book on the flight back, aided by the fact that it was delayed by a couple of hours, and was soon scribbling reams of notes. A wonderful, threaded series of twelve stories of activists who have taken forward Gandhi’s thinking – all linking back to Bapu Kuti, the simple, elegant ‘mud hut’ originally designed by and built for Madeleine Slade, or ‘Miraben’, an extraordinary aristocratic Briton who had sailed to India in 1925, aged 33, and adopted Gandhi as her spiritual father. After a major attack of malaria, he lived in what became known as Bapu Kuti for many years and it subsequently became a shrine.

Among the things that struck me about the stories Rajni tells are the impact of the thinking and work of Joseph Cornellius Kumarappa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._Kumarappa), whose “economics of permanence” anticipated sustainable development by several decades, and the unbelievable courage of people like the founders of Ganga Mukti Andolan (GMA), which fought to reclaim the Ganges from those pillaging it.

Got a comforting look from an air hostess when she passed and saw my eyes brimming with tears as I read the words of Shanti Devi, a 55-year-old widow who had been active in the GMA since its beginning: “We will fight, no matter what happens. If I die fighting then like a daughter I will go to sleep in the lap of Mother Ganga.” What made the words even more powerful was the knowledge that the GMA insisted on non-violence, while their often extremely violent opponents resorted to techniques like slashing those who resisted their power and then immersing them in the river, to bleed to death.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

BANGALORE TRAFFIC

Bangalore’s traffic seems to run on just two principles: first, drive as fast as you can, as close to the vehicle in front as possible, with no thought for lane discipline; and, second, put your hand hard on your horn at every possible opportunity. You get used to it surprisngly quickly, though I wouldn’t want to try it on a cycle – except if I was shielded on either side, like one cyclist I saw today, by what looked like milk churns. Some of the tuk-tuks were laying down smoke-screens worthy of WWI destroyers – though I only managed to snap one that was fuming in a relatively modest way.

Friday, March 02, 2007

DRAGONFLY SPIES

During a working session alongside the swimming pool on the future of tracking, monitoring and sensing, I noted that it would be useful to have a robotic dragonfly to flit acrosss to a nearby working group – and see what they were doing. (Would have been useful, since they were the ones who won the subsequent future business competition.) The idea had surfaced after we had been passing around a set of RFID and other tracking devices. Then, weirdly, a giant dragonfly came and hovered over our group as it was disassembling. I tried to photograph it – and it almost seemed to know what I was trying to do, and played with me. Then it got a little too clever, trying a different flight-path – and, click, it was in frame.

The agenda

Tracking technologies

Fly past

Got you

Thursday, March 01, 2007

ABSTRACTIONS

Apparently, the discussions in Bangalore are proving to be more abstract, more strategic than those in the earlier session in Egham, Surrey. Not surprised, given how abstract some of my traffic pictures turned out.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

TECHNOLOGY FUTURES 2007

Tremendously interesting discussions of the future of sustainable mobility and related subjects as the Shell event gets into its stride. Some photos of some of the sessions and between-session-moment shown below.

A day on the tiles – and they look like Julian’s sandals

Sunil reports back

Screens 1

Screen 2 – at end of an introduction to Bangalore-based Infosys

THE PIRATE

The Times today carries an obituary of Lothar-Günther Buchheim, known as ‘The Pirate,’ and whose work formed the basis of one of my favourite TV series of all time, Das Boot, the engaging but periodically hellish story of a U-boat crew (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Boot). Not sure why I have my BlackBerry alarm set to ‘Sonar’ – should freak me out, but it was the least offensive of the electronic cacophony provided.

The other German TV series I found totally compelling was Heimat, though in large part that was because by the time it got to the 1960s and 1970s it was portraying a world – in Germany – that I had some experience of. Buchheim – who once said “I don’t have a mobile phone. I photograph with old fashioned cameras. I don’t have a radio and I burnt my television 20 years ago” – presumably had more time to let his mind run riot. He created a ‘Museum of the Imagination’ in Bavaria (http://www.buchheimmuseum.de/english/museum.htm).

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

GAMECHANGING IN BANGALORE

Boxfish as model for car

In full flow

“Most people go through life playing by rules other people wrote,” say the Shell GameChanger team (http://www.shell/com/home/Framework?siteId=gamechanger-en). “We believe some people can’t stop dreaming about how things could be better under a different set of rules. Once in a while, a dreamer succeeds against difficult odds to truly change the rules of the game on her own. However, often it takes a few things the dreamer doesn’t have to show that the idea will work. For lack of money, a few connections, and perhaps a bit of guidance, many great ideas never get off the ground. Shell GameChanger is designed to provide funds, introduce you to the right people, and perhaps provide some useful advice. We invest in radically novel, early stage ideas in the ‘energy and mobility’ industry to help you get them from your mind to ‘proof of concept.'”

Over the next three days, after a reception and dinner earlier this evening, I will be taking part in the the Shell ‘Technology Futures 2007’ process, organised by the GameChangers team and Innovaro (http://www.innovaro.com/), at the Park Hotel, Bangalore. Because it is subject to the Chatham House Rule, the following postings will be on issues and themes, not what specific people said.

OH, TO BE A BEE

Having spent the day driving back and forth across the city, watching kites circle in the thick smog and averting my eyes from the odd greasy, grey river that looked as lifeless as the Thames in the 1940s, it was a relief to be able to turn my focus to the flowers around the hotel. Sometimes I almost wish I were a bee, cross-pollinating blooms rather than brains.

INFOSYS AND ORB ENERGY

Had a driver take me out to Infosys in Electronics City this morning, then on to Orb Energy, way back across Bangalore. You get used to the jams fairly quickly, though guessing how long any given journey is likely to take is something left to professional drivers – and even then we got it wrong with Orb.

Met Kris Gopalakrishnan at the Infosys campus (http://www.infosys.com), who is Chief Operating Officer and was one of the founders. (Nandan Nilekani, CEO, President and Managing Director, co-chairs the Tomorrow’s Global Company Inquiry, in which I’m involved.) A fascinating conversation about the company’s history, values and future ambitions.

As N. R. Narayana Murthy, Chairman and Chief Mentor, put it when the company – founded in 1981 – celebrated its 25th anniversary last year: “A great corporation must live for hundreds of years. Hence, we are still babies. Even these initial baby-years have taught us several lessons. These lessons are valuable not just for our future journey but for other corporations in the country and, perhaps, the world.” He stressed, among other factors in the company’s success, “An enduring value system based on openness, honesty, integrity, meritocracy, fairness, transparency and excellence.” I came away very impressed.

Then across to Orb Energy, which I had heard of via Samer Salty of venture capitalists zouk ventures, where I sit on an advisory board. Orb represents a large slice of a renewable energy unit that used to be run by Shell India, but spun out (http://www.orbenergy.com/). Again, very impressed – though this really is a baby company. Interested to hear their plans for franchising, which will be useful background for the survey report we are just completing for The Skoll Foundation.

My distant reflection in the Infosys front doors

Flanked by N.P. Ramesh (COO) and Damian Miller (CEO) of Orb

Monday, February 26, 2007

RED SILK ON GREEN

Bangalore is known for its silk – and one of the first things that caught my eye in my hotel bedroom was this silk cushion, with a Mars-like silk button transiting a green silk heaven.

BAGPIPER IN BENGALURU

Bangalore skyline

View from my bedroom

Melons

State Parliament, a building almost worthy of Ceaucescu …

Arrived in Bangalore at around 04.45 this morning and was picked up and whisked away to the Park Hotel. The boom town status is soon clear, with a building site and marble sawing site right outside my bedroom window. A couple of hours sleep before setting off for first round of meetings. They include sessions with a professor of corporate strategy, with Rohini Nilekani of the Arghyam Trust (http://www.indiawaterportal.org/arghyam/) and her team, with Svati Bhogle (CEO) and Mr Rajagopolan (Chairman) of TIDE (Technology Informatics Design Endeavour) and then with the President and Chairman of United Breweries – where some of the brands still have a distinctly colonial feel.

White Mischief

Bagpiper

Saturday, February 24, 2007

MITCH KAPOR PODCAST

Second Life avatars

My latest podcast, featuring Mitch Kapor, who chairs Linden Lab (the organisation behind ‘Second Life’, http://secondlife.com/) and the Mozilla Foundation (http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/), can be heard at http://www.sustainability.com/insight/skoll_article.asp?id=756. One of the most interesting people I have met in ages.

GROWING PAINS AND THE GUARDS MUSEUM

Spent much of the week working on our first survey report for The Skoll Foundation (http://www.skollfoundation.org), called Growing Pains. But it was a fairly fractured week, with a bunch of other things cross-cutting. Among them an enjoyable session with the Forum for the Future scholars on the 20th, a session with Landrover on the 21st (sparked by the Today programme interview I did from Davos on the car industry, biofuels, etc), a dinner with The Company Agency and Acciona that evening, a session with Nick Hurd and Clare Kerr of the Quality of Life Commission (http://www.qualityoflifechallenge.com/) on 22nd, then a meeting with Gib Bulloch of Accenture, plus ongoing preparations for my impending trip to Bangalore.

Was meant to be travelling to India with Kavita (Prakash-Mani), but she has just come down with chickenpox. When I had it, it was just before my O Levels, I had it monstrously, and ended up in the school sanitorium with the wretched pustules everywhere, including behind my eyes. But it did mean that I – in the midst of it all – did a fair amount of reading, including Gone With The Wind. Which stood me in good stead when it came to the History exams, where both the American and British history papers, if memory serves, had questions on the US Civil War and blockade. I got top marks in both, which put me on track for an A in History at A Level, plus an S Level. Given that I got Ds in eveything else but General Knowledge (another A), you could even say chickenpox got me into university.

The dinner on Wednesday was very interesting. Hosted by The Company Agency (http://www.thecompanyagency.com/site.swf) for the Spanish company Acciona (http://www.acciona.es/), who are up to their eyeballs in sustainability (http://www.sostenibilidad.com/). Sat next to – and had a great conversation with – Acciona Chairman Jose Manuel Entrecanales Domecq. Sam had researched the other guests earlier in the day, and I made a bee-line towards Alexandra Henderson, Executive Producer at Endemol. I wanted to say thank you for their extraordinary TV series in celbration of the 700th birthday of Ibn Battutah, Travels with a Tangerine (http://www.endemoluk.com/?q=node/239&tid=7) – which we have been enjoying immensely. Based on the book by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, which I read some years back.

On my other side was Tristan Garel Jones, now of UBS, and facing me, Nicholas Soames. A different world. And the whole thing held in The Guards Museum, a celebration in scarlet and gold of glory, mud and blood. My mind kept flashing back and forth between the conversations at table and the implications of the exhibits all around – including the fact that on Sunday 18 June 1944, the Guards Chapel was hit by a flying bomb and 121 worshippers were killed. And what it must be like for people in Baghdad, where such devastation and casualties are now an everyday occurrence.

DOCKLANDS

A day spent largely in Docklands, apart from writing a regular column early in the morning for Nikkei Ecology, based on a draft supplied by one of our team members, Ivana Gazibara (http://www.sustainability.com/about/profile.asp?id=11180). Then off to ECGD in Canary Wharf, to chair a meeting of the Advisory Council, preceded by an induction session for three new members. Then on to Clifford Chance’s offices nearby for an event featuring Professor John Ruggie, and happily a number of us mentioned his portal at the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (where I am a Trustee) during the discussion period, including Ruggie himself (http://www.business-humanrights.org/Gettingstarted/UNSpecialRepresentative).

Then raced across London to a restaurant called Bumpkin (http://www.bumpkinuk.com/) in Westbourne Grove, for a dinner hosted by Gary Hirshberg, self-styled CE-YO of Stonyfield Farm, Inc (http://www.stonyfield.com/). Good group of people, good food, but the acoustic of the restaurant meant that – with my bat’s ears – I heard everything and nothing. Homeward late, in a light drizzle, still suffering effects of ‘flu and the displaced back, probably caused by sitting four days in a row with a laptop when finishing off the book.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

AN ECO-WAR-CRIMES TRIBUNAL?

A series of articles in today’s Observer fused together in my mind to raise the question whether – and how – President Bush the Younger and companies like ExxonMobil might eventually be arraigned before a global War Crimes Tribunal? It has been tried with industrial polluters of rivers like the Rhine, but never on a global scale. That may well change, however, if – and when – global warming really gets into its stride.

The first story noted that the Hubble space telescope has captured a star very much like our own Sun blowing up in a cataclysmic explosion. Happily, Robin McKie notes, NGC 2440 is more than 4,000 light years away. Our Sun may have a few billion years left in it yet, but will eventually suffer the same fate, as will any remaining life on Earth.

The second story, by Tom Kington, reported that Italian scientists had been using sea-bed antennae in the Mediterranean to try to capture incoming neutrino particles as they plunge into the sea from outer space, travelling at something like the speed of light. These neutrinos may have travelled hundreds of millions of light years, some presumably even coming from stellar casualties like NGC 2440. Unexpectedly, the scientists kept picking up a cacophony of sonar clicks and other sounds, that proved to come from surprisingly large groups of sperm whales – that appear to have been stealthily living there, having been thought virtually extinct in the Med.

That was the good local news. The bad local news is that climate-driven ecosystem disruptions are causing massive wildlife die-backs off South America and Africa, and on the Pacific coast of America. In 2005, a nutrient-rich current which normally turns up off California in the spring was a month late, causing huge numbers of seabird deaths, and then in 2006 the current cameback in such a form that produced an exaggerated phytoplankton bloom, turning the sea to “green-brown soup”. As the plankton died and oxygen was stripped from the waters, dead zones began to form where little or nothing could live.

Just imagine that these trends worsen significantly. True, such zones have been seen before, but these were three times worse than anything previously recorded in the area. The winds were seen to be the proximate cause, but climate trends loom as the likely fundamental driver. And behind them loom the human and industrial factors spotlighted recently by the IPCC and Sir Nicholas Stern’s review of the economic implications of climate change.

If the global ecosystem does start to unravel, it is in the nature of human beings that we will want to hold someone responsible. Now that the gods are less likely to be blamed, we will need human agents to hold accountable. And who – or what – better than the Bush-Saudi-ExxonMobil axis of evil? True, we are all responsible to a degree, but there are those who, it will likely be concluded, turned closed (or, even worse, partisan) minds on the evidence as it came in. Such sins of omission may not be hanging crimes, yet, but behind them will be many sins of commission. Lawyers who have grown fat on prosecuting cases around asbestos, tobacco and now obesity are likely to be sharpening their knives before long.

No, it’s true, the international community doesn’t have the legal mechanisms to pursue such cases successfully, yet, but if the pressures grow the political momentum will materialise. The fact that people die in the end doesn’t make those who maim or kill them innocent, and the fact that the Earth will eventually be devoured by the Sun doesn’t mean that those who aid and abet ecocide should be allowed to get away scot-free.

THE STARGAZER AND THE DROWNING MAN

It really is the most extraordinary story. A 34-year-old man swept off his cycle and out to sea by a freak wave; battling for several hours to stay afloat as the tide washed him steadily out to sea; and then, miracle of miracles, a local stargazer serendipitously moved his telescope (borrowed from a friend that very afternoon) from the night sky and saw the drowning man. A dash to the sea wall, a thrown lifebuoy, and William Murtha was hauled to safety, suffering from hypothermia but alive.

And, as sometimes happens, his life was transformed by the experience. Everything changed, he changed. He gave up his career, sold the family home and created the ‘Visionaries for the 21st Century’ project, to bring together 500 “inspirers” from around the world. Each has been asked to pen 100 words by way of their own vision statement. Somehow I seem to have crept onto the list and did my 100 words earlier this morning, before getting on with the Skoll survey report we are racing to complete. The result of Murtha’s own survey will be a book and a website, to be launched later in 2007. Most of the proceeds will be used to establish ‘The Imagination Project,’ a non-profit institute for creative writing.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

LIVE EARTH

July 7 will see a series of concerts dramatising climate change, Live Earth. The prime mover: Al Gore. According to today’s Guardian, on Thursday he told an audience in Los Angeles, “We have to get the message of urgency out. In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to reach billions of people. The climate crisis will only be stopped by an unprecedented and sustainable global movement.” Great, but having found myself watching pretty much all of the Live 8 concert, I sometimes wonder about the real catalytic effect of such jamborees in terms of mobilising global movements. Just as Jeff Skoll has been trying to work out how to mobilise parallel campaigns to his socially and environmentally-messaged films, made via Participant Productions (http://www.participantproductions.com/), we will have to work on many fronts simultaneously to ensure that not only does the message of urgency get out but that people – all of us – actually do enough of the right things in response.

PROWLING WOLF

A week in which, with the book sent off on time – on Valentine’s Day – to Harvard Business School Press, my immune system finally gave in to the flu that had been stalking it for well over a month. Elaine has it, too. Then an odd thing last night. Gaia and Hania had been staying overnight in order to catch a very early flight to Prague. I had an extraordinary dream of a wolf turning up, threateningly, in the environs. Preying on cats, which is something the local foxes sometimes do. Then read in The Times this morning that a wolf had just been recaptured after having escaped from Dartmoor Wildlife Park. Given the number of connections in our everyday lives – and the fact that the human brain is a pattern-recognition machine – it is hardly surprising that such coincidences arise almost as a matter of routine, but it’s still strange at times.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

REVOLUTION THROUGH COMPETITION

Maggie (Brenneke) and I has a fascinating session this morning with Mark Goldstein and Cristin Lindsay of The X Prize Foundation’s Automotive Prize project. I have always been fascinated by the impact of prizes on the evolution of technology – like the Schneider Trophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Trophy). And a few years ago was rivetted by the race to win the Ansari X Prize, eventually won in 1994 by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen, with their SpaceShipOne, shown above in the Washington Air & Space Museum – slung between The Spirit of St Louis and, in orange, the X1 experimental plane.

As the X Prize Foundation notes, “Between 1905 and 1935, hundreds of aviation prizes stimulated the advancement of aircraft technology. One of the best-known prizes was The Orteig Prize, a $25,000 purse offered by hotel magnate Raymond Orteig to the first person to fly non-stop between New York and Paris. In 1927, with the whole world watching, Charles Lindbergh won the prize, becoming the most famous person on Earth. Where no government filled the need and no immediate profit could pay the bill, the Orteig Prize stimulated not one, but nine different attempts to cross the Atlantic. These nine teams cumulatively spent $400,000 to win the $25,000 purse – and spawned today’s $250 billion aviation industry.

“By taking a smaller, faster approach to aviation, Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis Organization showed that a small professional team could outperform large, government-style efforts. Prior to his flight, the press of the day characterized him as a daredevil and an amateur – ‘the flying fool.’ But Lindbergh’s meticulously planned single-engine/single-pilot strategy was a radical departure from the conventional thinking of the day, and his innovative thinking and careful preparation won the full support of the Spirit of St. Louis Organization. A quarter of all Americans personally saw Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis within a year of his flight – and the world changed with their excitement.”

Key metrics of the change, the Foundation recalls:

– Applications for pilot’s licenses in the U.S. increased by 300% in 1927.
– The number of licensed aircraft in the U.S. increased by 400% in 1927.
– US airline passengers increased 30-fold increase between 1926 and 1929.

“The cause of the tremendous growth in aviation experienced after 1927 was not due to a technology breakthrough,” the Foundation stresses. “Lindbergh employed technology that was available years earlier. The growth was a direct result of a monumental change in the public’s expectation about flight. Lindbergh’s flight created the expectation that anyone could fly.”

The X PRIZE Foundation, the brainchild of Dr Peter H Diamandis, has the motto: ‘Revolution Through Competition.’ It was founded to create a similar change in the public’s expectation of space flight, and now exists to create similar shifts in the public’s perception in future X PRIZE areas. In addition to geneomics and automotive sector, they are also thinking of future prizes in such areas as education and povert alleviation.

A complete shot in the arm – despite the flu which forced me home later in the day.

Monday, February 12, 2007

THE ANTIPRENEURS

I pulled out the article ‘The Antipreneurs’ from the Times Magazine on 3 February, but failed to notice the reference to the triple bottom line, Cannibals with Forks and me on the front page of the piece. Was pointed out to me by Maddy (Rooke-Ley) in the office. Anna Shepherd notes that “the triple bottom line – people, planet, profit – has become a standard part of the MBA syllabus.” Then: “As a model it has proved to be successful: making money and reducing employee turnover, as people like working for a company with strong ethics,” says Craig Smith, senior fellow in marketing and ethics at the London Business School. A key Smith text is 1998’s Cannibals with Forks, in which John Elkington, from consultancy SustainAbility, argued that balance sheets would not be sufficient to judge a company’s performance in future – social justice and environmental responsibility would be weighed up, too.”

“They don’t wear suits,” the Times Magazine noted, “they respect the planet and they still make money – meet the new caring, sharing entrepreneurs.” Among the social enterprises mentioned in the article were REN Cosmetics, Tyrrells Potato Chips, Worn Again, Abel & Cole, and Today was Fun (http://www.todaywasfun.com).

Sunday, February 11, 2007

BRANSON’S $25M SAFE FOR A WHILE

God, Branson’s a creature of the zeitgeist. Today was mainly spent finishing off the final chapter for the book, which went off to Pamela early this afternoon. In the first draft, a couple of days back, I had talked about the danger that social and environmental entrepreneurs might be treated as some for of superhero. Then today’s papers had Richard Branson on the same theme, but from a very different angle. “We have no super-hero,” he said when launching his $25 million (£13 million) Virgin Earth Challenge. “We have only our own ingenuity to fall back on.” He was inspired to launch the Virgin prize by the example of past prizes like the Ansari X Prize, which resulted in the first private manned space flight in 2004, and the eighteenth century prize that spurred the pursuit for a device that would measure longitude.

Branson is looking for a commercially viable technology that will result in “the net removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases each year for at least 10 years without countervailing harmful effects.” But a condition that could keep Branson’s money in the bank for a while is that the technology will have to remove at least one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.

Interestingly, The X Prize Foundation had already announced its second major prize—the Archon X prize for Genomics—and has been working on others in the social domain, among them contests designed to spur innovative thinking about poverty, hyperefficient cars and health care. But even if it achieves its aim of awarding $200 million or more in 10 to 15 new prize categories over the next five years, there is a bigger challenge still: finding the capitla to scale up any resulting technologies to an appropriate level. For more details, see Fiona Harvey, ‘Branson offers $25m prize for solution to climate change,’ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/e2067f90-b867-11db-be2e-0000779e2340.html, or Matt Richtel, ‘Awarder of Space Prize to Add Others,’ New York Times, January 31, 2007.

Once the book had gone off, Elaine and I took a walk across the Common in balmy weather, then came back to greet Svenja Geissmar and Francesca van Dijk-Dixon and her family. It seems a lifetime since Fran joined SustainAbility, back when we were still in The People’s Hall. I recall that a key thing that attracted me to her thesis was that she had taken the 5-step model of reporting Nick Robins and I had developed and done a graphic (or perhaps it was her husband Ken) showing a ladder propped against the five steps, with an angel lounging on the topmost rung. As we talked, their daughter Freya was drawing a picture of an Aztec stepped pyramid with a striking figure atop it. More than a slight sense of deja vu.

Friday, February 09, 2007

THE DAVOS GRIST

Our latest Grist column, this time on the latest World Economic Forum summit in Davos, can be found at http://grist.org/biz/fd/2007/02/09/davos/

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

SNOW A-COMING

Or so they say. Heavy frost this morning as I set off, but a totally glorious morning by the time I was cycling through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. Pretty sure I was cycling alongside the drummer from one of the bands at Ronnie Scott’s the other night as I rocketed down Brook Street – but he rocketed even faster. Frenetic day, with the office bursting at the seams. Among those through today were Steve Viederman, previously President of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, and Monica Araya, who organised my ‘state visit’ to Yale a while back. Also uplifted in reading the manuscript of Paul Hawken’s impending new book, on the global civil society movement: beautifully written.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

THROUGH THE PALACE RAILINGS

Every morning that I cycle into Holborn, I dutifully – grudgingly – walk past the gates of Kensington Palace, where cycling is verboten. But at least it gives me a chance to stare through the railings. They’ve just filled in a small pond I quite liked to think might harbour amphibians of some variety. There was a public notice explaining why, but I can’t remember what it said. Excuses of some sort. Glorious sunshine this morning, but cold. Fourth day of a migraine that won’t shift, still uplifting to see a pair of swans processing across the water like ice-carved galleons.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

RICHMOND PARK

Something very Ramsay Gibbs-like (a painter we like) about some of the landscapes in Richmond Park today, particularly the one with the rutted tracks. Astoundingly summery weather, despite muddiness in places – and parakeets now established part of the scenery. Most of the day spent working on last chapter of the book.

Saturday, February 03, 2007

WEF CITIES SESSION

And here are some of the photos of the World Economic Forum session I facilitated on cities, with thanks to the Forum.

Hands up

Eddy in the conversation

Google’s Larry Page and flipchart referencing his horizontal lift notion

Part of one of the break-out groups: Xia Deren (Mayor of Dalian),interpreter, Amory Lovins, Yann Arthus-Bertrand

SCHWAB AND DAVOS SUMMITS, 2007

Climate change, trade and social entrepreneurship were the three big themes at Davos 2007, for me at least. True, others may have had a different priority list and it has taken me rather longer than in previous years to work out what was really going on during the 2007 World Economic Forum—or at least what struck me as most significant. This was partly because I plunged straight back into work on my return to London, but also because my sense was that this year really did mark a watershed year for the Forum—whether or not those attending Davos this year really grasped what is going on.

So here is a personal download of both the Davos event and of the Schwab summit, which proceeded it—and this year focused on the business case both for social entrepreneurship and for mainstream business to get involved in the field. Please also see earlier postings below, and postings for openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-climate_change_debate/fixes_4311.jsp) and Grist (in press).

But first, yes, the agenda (http://www.weforum.org/en/events/annualmeeting2007/index.htm) was extraordinarily packed again this year, and the top two issues for the mainstream participants were clear. Climate change was ubiquitous, with 17 sessions devoted to the subject, while the other dominant theme was the need to reinvigorate the Doha Round of trade negotiations. But it struck me that something else was going on this year—and it felt a bit like a hand-over between generations. Alongside the efforts of the Young Global Leaders (http://www.younggloballeaders.org/), my sense was that this was the year that social entrepreneurs really got into their stride in Davos.

And one of the clearest trends this year, again, was the growing focus on private sector, business and financial market solutions to the world’s great social, environmental and governance challenges. Multinationals are seen to have a key role to play in upholding and advancing principles on human rights, labour, environmental and anti-corruption practices in countries with weak regulatory capacity. For more on WEF initiatives in these fields, see http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/index.htm

Very much in the spirit of this year’s summit, British Prime Minister Tony Blair sounded an optimistic note in his closing remarks. He said that the three key issues that for him dominated the annual meeting—world trade, climate change and Africa—still hang in the balance, but added that there had been progress on each that would have seemed unimaginable even a short time back. In two radical suggestions, Blair recommended merging the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and dramatically expanding the UN Security Council. “A UN Security Council without Germany, Japan, Brazil or India, to say nothing of any African or Muslim nation,” he said, “will, in time, not merely lose legitimacy in the eyes of the world, but seriously inhibit effective action.”

In what follows, I will try to sketch out come of the highlights and headlines before zeroing in the social entrepreneurs—who convened for the 2007 Schwab Foundation Annual Summit at Swiss Re’s Rüschlikon centre in Zurich before heading on to Davos. I attended both events, chairing a plenary session on the business case for social entrepreneurship at the Schwab summit and was involved in a number of related events in Davos—including a fascinating session I facilitated on ‘Designing Sustainable Cities.’

Schwab Summit

This was the seventh Schwab Summit (http://www.schwabfound.org/the.htm?p=102) I have intended, the sense now being fairly widespread that the notion of social entrepreneurship “has had a meteoric rise,” as the Schwab team put it, “particularly in the industrialised world, but increasingly in emerging markets.” It is clear that we are seeing the very early stages of a great convergence between the worlds of mainstream business and social and environmental entrepreneurship—an area SustainAbility is looking at in its series of annual surveys of the state of social entrepreneurship for The Skoll Foundation (http://www.skollfoundation.org/).

One of the key indications of the growing mainstream support came when Jacques Aigrain, CEO of Swiss Re, announced that in addition to hosting the Schwab Summit this year at their Rüschlikon centre (http://www.ruschlikon.net/), they would also host it there in future years.

Among key sessions were those focusing on how foundations and other investors decide which social entrepreneurs to support, the change-making agendas of key entrepreneurs, the business case as developed by social entrepreneurs, the mainstream business case for social entrepreneurship, how such change agents can best work in government and the public sector, and—based on a discussion about the process by which Ethos Water (http://www.ethoswater.com/) sold out to Starbucks—what happens when a social entrepreneur “sells out.” For some of the story of how the founders got to this point, see http://www.ethoswater.com/index.cfm?objectid=6FA93E4F-F1F6-6035-B91D178EA0C1ED59

Overall, the Schwab Summit was even higher energy than in previous years—and excellent preparation for those social entrepreneurs who were going on to Davos. And this is an area I personally am increasingly determined to invest a growing part of my time in—as with my role with the newly announced DHL Young Entrepreneurs for Sustainability Awards, (http://www.dhl.com/publish/g0/en/about/sustainability/yes_awards.high.html) now being piloted in five Asian countries.

A Schizophrenic Davos

“Shit is serious business,” is the motto of one of those entrepreneurs, Isaac Durojaiye, founder of DMT Mobile Toilets (http://www.dmttoilet.com/), in whose delightful company Elaine and I took the train from the Schwab Summit to Davos. He is one of the Schwab entrepreneurs (http://www.schwabfound.org/schwabentrepreneurs.htm?schwabid=3725). And it’s truly extraordinary to see these people moving between the worlds of sanitation in Nigeria, for example, and the world of Davos—this being the sixth time I have attended the WEF event. Their presence is one more sign that the world of Davos Man is experiencing seismic changes.

“We are faced by a world which is increasingly schizophrenic,” said WEF Founder and Executive Chair early on in the proceedings. On the surface, the economic indicators might look fairly optimistic, but underneath a range trends are moving in less encouraging directions. “Our world is rapidly changing and power is shifting geopolitically, in business terms and even in the virtual world,” he noted. “Power, wealth and well-being are spread in ever more complex ways, leading to a world which is harder and harder to understand and which often seems alien to us.”

In her plenary speech early on in the summit, Angela Merkel, Federal Chancellor of Germany, and due to take over as G8 President this year, announced efforts for “new forms of dialogue” between G8 leading industrial nations and the emerging economies such as Brazil, India and China (BIC)—along with a closer Atlantic partnership between Europe and the United States. But apart from Senators John Kerry and John McCain, US political leaders were less evidently present this year.

The theme was ‘The Shifting Power Equation.’ Over the course of the five-day meeting, 2,400 participants from 90 countries convened, including 24 heads of state or government, 85 cabinet ministers, along with religious leaders, media leaders and heads of non-governmental organizations. Around 50% of the participants were business leaders drawn principally from the Forum’s members—1,000 of the foremost companies from around the world and across all economic sectors.

A new survey of WEF participants found that a majority of leaders questioned think the next generation will live in a more economically prosperous world. Two-thirds (65%) say that it will be a lot more or a little more prosperous. But the same respondents also indicated that the next generation will live in a less safe world, with 61% believing it would be a little or a lot less safe. Both these figures are broadly in line with the same findings last year. But one finding that has shown a remarkable change is the doubling of those who rank environmental protection as a priority for world leaders. Warnings of the effects of climate change appear to be hitting home with protecting the environment a concern that one in five (20%) think leaders should concentrate on—a considerable increase since last year’s survey, when only 9% rated this as a priority.

One of the key publications launched during the event was the Global Risks 2007 report (http://www.weforum.org/pdf/CSI/Global_Risks_2007.pdf), which highlighted a growing disconnect between the power of global risks to cause major systemic disruption, and our ability to mitigate them. The annual Global Risks report—published by WEF in cooperation with Citigroup, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Swiss Re and the Wharton School Risk Center—suggested that many of the 23 core global risks explored in the report have worsened over the last 12 months, despite growing awareness of their potential impacts.

Among the recommendations:

1. Link energy security considerations with climate change;

2. Urgently begin work on a successor to the Kyoto agreement with three central principles: ensure involvement of the US and major developing countries (particularly China and India); and recognize differential responsibilities for future emissions’ reduction dependent upon past emissions and stage of economic development—alongside and common overall responsibility for climate change
3. Renew terrorism insurance schemes scheduled to sunset in 2007; improve framework for public-private arrangements in other countries, and

4. Prepare for a pandemic, requiring governments to increase research into the identification of critical choke-points in the supply/value chain where skill sets are rare, interdependencies are greatest and the risk of triggering systemic failure is highest.

Opening up

The number of NGOs seemed to have been cut back substantially this year—and the voice of those NGOs that did appear were more muted than in previous years—though I may simply have been in the wrong sessions. That said, the Forum is more open to the wider universe of stakeholders than it was even a few years back. And it experimented this year with a number of new Web applications designed to extend the discussions to a much wider audience. The major debates and discussions were open to the general public via traditional broadcast channels, but also via webcasts, podcasts and for the first time, vodcasts. Some 50 of 220 sessions were webcast.

Internet users were encouraged to field questions to participants via blogs and videoblogs and selected participants were interviewed live in the virtual world of Second Life. Intriguingly, Reuters had a special Second Life correspondent in Davos (http://secondlife.reuters.com/) and—having had a session back in London with Mitch Kapor, Chairman of Linder Labs (http://lindenlab.com/), the organization behind Second Life, SustainAbility is now pondering how to make our own entry into this new world. A podcast featuring Mitch Kapor will be posted on the Skoll Program area of our website (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/skoll_article.asp?id=669) within days.

In terms of opening up the wider world, one of the most interesting people I met during this year’s Davos was Nick Negroponte, who is the main driver behind the One Laptop Per Child initiative—designed to provide $100 laptops to young people around the world (http://www.laptop.org/).

The climate imperative

Although climate change was voted onto the WEF agenda in 1999 or 2000, and has routinely surfaced since then, this year the subject was centre-stage—owing much to Al Gore’s move An Inconvenient Truth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth), the Sir Nicholas Stern’s review on the economic implications of climate change, and the impending report of the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (http://www.ipcc.ch/).

The Forum announced the formation of a new international partnership of seven organizations to establish a generally accepted framework for climate risk-related reporting by corporations. Founding members of the institutional consortium, the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB), include the California Climate Action Registry, Carbon Disclosure Project, Ceres, The Climate Group, International Emissions Trading Association, World Economic Forum Global Greenhouse Gas Register and World Resources Institute.

CDSB member organizations have agreed to align their core requests for information from companies in order to ensure that they report climate change-related information in a standardized way that facilitates easier comparative analysis by investors, managers and the public. The focus will be on the disclosure of the following key climate issues in company annual reports: total emissions; assessment of the physical risks of climate change; assessment of the regulatory risks of climate change; and strategic analysis of climate risk and emissions management.

Although in recent years there has been much progress in raising awareness of the importance of climate-related disclosure among corporations and their boards and shareholders, reporting of comparable information in annual reports remains the exception rather than the rule. “Consistent and comprehensive disclosure frameworks are important to the incentives shareholders provide to corporate managers to deploy capital efficiently,” said Richard Samans, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum. Speaking of the initiative, Carbon Disclosure Project Chairman James Cameron said, “We feel it is well timed and can leverage the standardized voluntary carbon disclosure the Carbon Disclosure Project has achieved—most recently on behalf of 225 institutional investors with US$ 31 trillion of assets who engaged with 2,100 corporations—in a formalized, disclosure process”.

An advisory committee is being formed that will include industrial, financial services and accounting firms as well as other key stakeholders. In preparation, CDSB members met in Davos with representatives of Alcan; American International Group; Capital Group; Duke Energy Corporation; Ernst and Young; Royal Dutch/Shell; JP Morgan Chase; PricewaterhouseCoopers; SUN Group; Swiss Re and Tokyo Electric Power as well as UK Environment Minister Milliband; California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez; and United Nations Environment Programme Director General Achim Steiner.

Resuscitating Doha

During the summit, World Trade Organization (WTO) Director-General Pascal Lamy announced that the stalled Doha Round trade negotiations had been given a new impetus by talks between ministers from 30 countries. Kamal Nath, Minister of Commerce and Industry of India, declared: “Despite the cold outside in Davos, we have been able to defreeze the talks that were frozen.” Both were speaking at a session on trade just a few hours after the ministers had agreed to relaunch negotiations suspended last July because of strong disagreements between developed and developing countries, and between the European Union and the United States, on how far agricultural subsidies and tariffs on industrial goods should be cut.

“Today’s ministerial meeting has put quite a lot of energy into the notion that the landing zone is in sight,” said Lamy. He added that he will return to Geneva to oversee fresh Round discussions at negotiator level and call ministers together again when enough progress has been made. But he will only do that if and when the right moment has come. “It won’t be tomorrow,” he said.

Much will depend, however, on how the developed countries move forward. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil called on the international business community to lobby leaders of rich countries to make concessions in the Doha Round of negotiations for a world trade agreement. “If we want to give a signal to the poorest countries that they will have a chance in the 21st century, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany must make concessions,” he said. “The United States must reduce its agricultural subsidies, and Europe must ease access for agricultural products.”

Other Priorities

Among other priorities that are very much part of SustainAbility’s agenda were human rights (which I address through my role on the Board of Trustees of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, though this didn’t get quite the profile this year) and bribery corruption (which I encounter as an issue in my role as Chairman of the Advisory Council of the UK Export Credits Guarantee Department). This year, the heads of the Big Four Accounting firms (Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers) agreed to work with the WEF Partnering Against Corruption Initiative (PACI) to support the global fight against corruption. Together, PACI and the accounting firms will explore the development of a framework for companies to benefit from independent reviews of their anti-bribery programmes.

In parallel, the Presidents of the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Executive Director of the international Finance Corporation reaffirmed their support of the PACI and recognized the important role the private sector plays in guiding policy and assisting governments in reducing corruption. They have agreed to jointly pilot an country-specific anti-corruption implementation programme, and a sector-specific structural reform that will promote fair competition and transparency.

With China increasingly active in Africa, there was some discussion of what could be done to rein in such countries as they become more influential—and potentially undermine international and regional transparency initiatives. But one of the most upbeat set of conversations I had was with various people from the Indian software company Infosys (http://www.infosys.com/), which I am hoping to visit in Bangalore in February, around a futures session I am due to do for Shell there. Infosys aims to “win in a flat world,” but do so in ethically acceptable ways. Am very much looking forward to visiting them and some of the social entrepreneurs and NGOs in the area.

Whatever Shell concludes in its session on the prospects for technology out to 2030, the 2007 Schwab and World Economic Forum Summits have underscored the fact that new actors are surging into the playing-field—and, in the process, the game we are changing is very likely to change profoundly.

Friday, February 02, 2007

THE CLIMATE FIX

Following my ‘Today’ (BBC Radio 4) interview during the Davos summit, I was asked to do a piece for openDemocracy on biofuels and other ‘technical fixes’ for climate change. The article, co-authored with Geoff Lye, can be found at http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-climate_change_debate/fixes_4311.jsp

ATCA POSTING ON BLAIR, DAVOS ETC

One of the networks I take part in is ATCA, or Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance run by D.K Matai (http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/dkm_profile.pdf). Yesterday they sent out a short piece I did in response to their earlier posting of Tony Blair’s speech from the concluding session of this year’s World Economic Forum summit in Davos.

This was my note:

Dear DK and Colleagues,

Asymmetrical Solutions in Davos

One of the more interesting rumours that made its giddy rounds at this year’s World Economic Forum [Theme: ‘The Shifting Power Equation’] was the one insisting that WEF Executive Chairman Professor Klaus Schwab’s session with The Right Honourable Tony Blair [ATCA, 27 January] was in effect a 360-degree interview of Blair for the role of WEF Chairman once the he stands down — or is dislodged. In the event, this turned out to be an expired rumour, squashed by Professor Schwab a few weeks ago, but having found new infectivity in a new and previously unexposed audience. An indication of just how easy it is to be distracted from what even such powerful speakers are saying in plenary session when so much is going on around you, and behind the scenes.

But, whatever the truth of the rumour, and however distracting the shifting power equation may be in Westminster, the Prime Minister’s focus on global issues like poverty and climate chaos is unquestionably the new ‘Spirit of Davos,’ coupled with a deep sense of the developed world’s growing vulnerability to a growing range of asymmetric threats, which have been at the heart of ATCA since its inception in 2001 post 9/11.

Luckily, my own WEF journey began with asymmetry. I count myself hugely lucky to have attended my first WEF summit in New York, the year the whole jamboree decamped to that wounded city as an act of solidarity in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — prototypical examples of asymmetry in action. This was January 2002. Pretty much everyone was off balance and the wave of incoming NGOs and other would-be changemakers found it somewhat easier to penetrate the well-honed defences that had kept them at bay for so long.

But even though issues like those the Prime Minister would raise in Davos six years on were in the air even then, they were still seen as peripheral, speculative. That was also true last year. But 2007 was somehow different: Davos Man and Davos Woman could hardly stop talking about climate chaos. So much hot air, critics will say, but Sir Nicholas Stern was among the climate champions crunching through the snow, pushing the conclusions of his review of the economic implications of climate chaos in a number of Forum sessions — and busily building the case for urgent action. There was also much talk of the impending report of the International Panel on Climate Change, just leaked by the Americans — presumably to give climate sceptics enough time to prepare their defences.

But what struck a number of us was that, while NGO voices seemed somewhat muted this year, the real heroes of Davos 2007 were the people you might describe as providers of ‘asymmetric solutions,’ the social and environmental entrepreneurs who aim to develop scalable solutions to the world’s great social and environmental challenges. They have been groomed by organisations like Ashoka, The Schwab Foundation and The Skoll Foundation to carry their agenda and their business case ever-deeper into the heart of the system. And it’s working. Given the energy of these people, I even found myself wondering whether they shouldn’t be setting the agenda for next year’s Davos?

It’s an unlikely prospect, clearly, but I am just finishing off a book for Harvard Business School Press under the title of ‘The Power of Unreasonable People.’ My co-author is Pamela Hartigan, who runs The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and many of the social entrepreneurs she and her colleagues support report that they have often been described as “crazy,” by colleagues, friends and even family. But, as George Bernard Shaw sagely noted, real progress tends not to come from reasonable people, who attend to adapt themselves to the world as it is, but instead from ‘unreasonable’ people — who imagine a different world and work against all odds to create it.

While top table discussions this year focused on the ways in which emergent superpowers like China and India are morphing power relationships worldwide, something else appears to be happening on and around the Magic Mountain. Something that gives me more hope than the economic indicators that most CEOs still focus upon. If the first societal pressure wave of the late 1960s pushed us to regulate business, the second (from the late 1980s) pushed us into new forms of ethical competition and corporate citizenship, and the third (from the late 1990s) drove new agendas around global and corporate governance, the emerging wave — which feels more like a rising tide — looks set to drive a raft of new entrepreneurial solutions to the political, economic, social and environmental threats to which so much air-time has been devoted in Davos.

As I mentioned in a previous posting to ATCA, I believe a new generation of entrepreneurs is modelling the way forward. In ongoing work for The Skoll Foundation — founded by eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll — we are contrasting the challenges facing entrepreneurs in the health and energy sectors, to get a sense of where the greatest market failures are to be found. The results will be reported at the Skoll World Forum at the Said Business School, Oxford, at the end of March, and I hope to be able to share at least headline results with the distinguished members of ATCA at that time. But I will be very surprised if they don’t underscore the growing importance of entrepreneurial ‘asymmetrical solutions’ to sustainability challenges.

Best wishes

John Elkington

RONNIE SCOTT’S

Gaia, Hania, John Jencks, Elaine and I had a glorious time at Ronnie Scott’s last night (http://www.ronniescotts.co.uk/), celebrating Elaine’s sixtieth birthday – and listening to Ronnie Scott’s Allstars and then Martin Taylor, an astounding jazz guitarist. We had heard him play with Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings a couple of years back, and Wyman was at the next table last night. Described as “Europe’s finest guitarist” by Jazz Times Magazine, Taylor is considered to be the world’s foremost exponent of solo jazz guitar playing. His new group, ‘FRETERNITY’, is a collaboration with long time friends Guy Barker (trumpet) and David Newton (drums). I have never been a great fan of jazz, but will be buying any CD of his I can get my hands on.

Martin Taylor and John Jencks’ shoes

Thursday, February 01, 2007

6 = 9 CARTOON PUZZLE RESOLVED

One of my favourite cartoons of all time – and one I have used for two decades in various ways – was the 6 = 9 image shown here. For years, I have had a query on this website about where the image came from. Today I got the answer – from Russia.

Thanks Andrey! And here’s what he says:

Dear John,

It was a real delight to visit your very interesting site. But one particular thing caught my attention: you were wondering who was the author of the “9 = 6” cartoon.

Being a professional cartoonist I am certainly familiar with this work. The original cartoon was made by Russian cartoonist Igor Vorobyev (maybe Vorob’ev). This drawing brought the author the Silver Prize at the International Cartoon Contest in former Yugoslavia in 1972. So the work was quite recognized internationally.

The work you have used is probably a later copy or rather plagiarism of this original:
http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/1782/vorobmp3.jpg

Sorry, I was not able to identify the author of the later copy. If it is interesting for you, I could try to find more details about Igor Vorobyev. Here is a link to one more of his work:
http://img361.imageshack.us/img361/8131/vorobyev1hx3.jpg

My very best wishes,

Andrey Feldshteyn
http://www.cartoonblues.com

(It happened that I am also an Administrator of the International Cartoon Club, uniting mostly cartoonists from the former USSR.)

P.S. You are welcome to visit a virtual exhibition that we have organized recently:
http://www.cartoon-expo.com/introduction_english.html

DHL YOUNG ENTREPRENEURS FOR SUSTAINABILITY (YES) AWARDS

As one of the international judges, I am delighted to see that the DHL Young Entrepreneurs for Sustainability (YES) Awards program has launched today – in 5 pilot countries in Asia. The inaugural Awards in 2007 will cover: Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, with plans to expand the programme to other countries in the future.

Ads for the awards will likely show on CNN in the week commencing 12th February. The Awards website is live at www.dhl.com/yesawards, where the application kit and further useful information related to the awards can be found.

DHL notes that 2007 marks the half-way point in the bid to realise the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education by 2015 – and comments that this is “a good time to re-energise efforts towards realising the UN MDGs and to celebrate the many successes that have already been achieved.”