John Elkington

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

SPOUTING IN BRUSSELS

Doesn’t often happen, but have more or less lost my voice. Partly a result of something I picked up on the flights to or from New York, partly a function of speaking for a couple of hours at a European Institute for Industrial Leadership (EIIL) conference in Brussels on Monday evening, then for another three hours the following morning. But, though I missed the funeral in Edinburgh of a family friend (oddly, his brother organised the EIIL event), it was worth it. The focus of the two sessions in Brussels was on sustainability and engineering – and engineers are prime targets for conversion, alongside chief financial officers (CFOs), brand managers, line managers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

Sunday, June 27, 2004

BETWEEN THE LINES

Struck me this morning, in re-reading previous blogs, how much one leaves out.

So, for example, there have been ups. Hania arrived back from Los Angeles on Thursday, where she had been invited to see the screening of a short film based on her first script. This was co-authored with a close friend, who is studying film-making there. They then drove north along the coast. She brought me back an interesting CD by a group called ‘Iron & Wine’.

And there have been severe downs. The last couple of months saw disaster for our best friends, with one of their sons breaking his back in China and having to be airlifted to Hong Kong for surgery. We heard the news before his parents, who were away for the weekend. He is now back in the country, has had further surgery and the saga continues, though the latest news sounds a bit better.

Both stories, though, illustrate just how dependent many of us have become on air travel. Indeed, while I was in New York, Malcolm McIntosh told me that the ‘CSR Blokes’ network recently circulated an e-mail suggesting members look at this site and calculate how many Air Miles I had accumulated. However many, the poetic justice element is always there: the air traffic streaming in towards Heathrow and, today, various helicopters buzzing around, presumably for Wimbledon.

Saturday, June 26, 2004

AND THE GLOBAL COMPACT IS 5

The UN Global Compact (www.unglobalcompact.org), catalysed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1999, is 5. The idea has been to give a “human face to global markets”. The ‘Leaders Summit’ at the UN HQ in New York was designed to attract CEOs of companies that have signed the Global Compact. It triggered a counter-summit by NGOs, on 23 June, which seems to have concluded that the Compact is a giant corporate monster that has taken over the UN. It’s great that the civil society world keeps the UN under pressure on this, but the view from inside was rather different. In fact, so many participants wanted to attend the formal Global Compact session on 24 June that the UN had to remove the wall between the conference area and the delegates’ dining area.

The recurrent theme: the need to move from talk to action. The most convincing inputs came from the likes of President Lula of Brazil (focusing on poverty) and Lord John Browne of BP (focusing on climate change), both of whom are trying to drive change in the real world. Oded Grajew of Instituto Ethos (www.ethos.org), one of the organisations we work with in Brazil, built on Lula’s line of argument by saying that we ought to pay at least as much attention to the 30,000 children who die every day as we do to the victims of terrorism – or, I reflected, the victims of terrorism of our own nationality.

One of the announcements that attracted most attention was that Brazil’s leading samba school is adopting the Global Compact principles as its theme for its contributions to next year’s Carnival in Rio. Great. The sexier we can make all this, the better, but I was more interested in the work that the Global Compact team is now doing to convert the world’s stock exchanges. And they seem to be making a measure of progress.

Kofi Annan also announced the launch of a tenth Global Compact principle, on anti-corruption. We were told that corruption costs the global economy something like a trillion dollars a year, “a cancer”, “a hidden tax”. A great tribute to the work of people like Transparency International (www.transparency.org).

Much of the day involved roundtable discussions. In one, designed to envision what might have happened by 2015, I got our table to work up an idea based on Brazil, South Africa, India and China launching a 21st century, global version of the 1940s Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of Europe and Japan. The result: a shamed rich world queues up to join. The EU, the US and also – this bit wasn’t my idea – the Arab-Israeli Economic Union. One can but dream! Given that the table started out thinking about whether sending a diverse team of astronauts to Mars would unite the world, I thought this was progress of a sort.

Met masses of people, some of whom I knew, others – like Mary Robinson, now of the Ethical Globalization Initiative (www.eginitiative.org) – I didn’t. At one point, Jane Nelson and I strolled along one of the corridors to look at a sculpture given to the UN by Nigeria. Encouraging, perhaps, that something of such beauty can come out of such a radically corrupt country. Later, on my way out, I came across a glass case containing a gift from Mauritius, this a gilded dodo. I confess that I wondered whether changing global conditions might not consign the Global Compact – and perhaps even the UN itself, like the League of Nations before it – to such museum cases during the coming century. If either is to survive, the level of change likely to be required will be be profound.

Four themes where I think action is needed are these:

(1) Legitimacy: Voluntary initiatives – and particularly the Global Compact – are likely to come under growing pressure from civil society organizations. The appetite to go ‘wider’ (e.g. recruiting more corporate members to such initiatives) instead of going ‘deeper’ (e.g. encouraging members to expose their boards to some form of the Challenge we proposed on page 37 of SustainAbility’s new report, Gearing Up: see www.sustainability.com) raises real concerns about potential longer term risk to the UN’s reputation. At least that was the point I was pushing in the corridors.

(2) Scale: This was the theme of the main morning session at the Global Compact event. How do we take good experiments and pilot projects and grow them to the scale that will be needed in a world of 7-9 billion people? Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that most companies’ CSR departments currently have little idea about market creation, business models or other areas that are becoming increasingly relevant.

(3) Governments: To ensure scalability, governments will need to take a much more active role, e.g. through fiscal and financial instruments, shaping markets with rewards and disincentives. A point we address in Gearing Up – and Francis Fukuyama tackles in his latest book, on state building.

(4) Corporate lobbying: And if governments – which currently lean over backwards to protect the interests of business – are to become more courageous, more attention will need to be paid to the extent to which corporate lobbying by companies (including Global Compact signatories) aligns, or doesn’t, with their stated commitment to the goals of such voluntary initiatives. Also covered in Gearing Up.

Several speakers at the NY event – among them Kofi Annan and Harvard’s Professor John Ruggie, one of the Compact’s original architects – argued that the Compact was a sign that the UN can re-invent itself. An experiment that could have wider implications for the entire institution. Perhaps, but if it is to play that role my sense is that the Compact will need to develop some teeth. The announcement of new ‘integrity measures’, to ensure that fewer companies can use their Compact membership as an alibi for inaction on other fronts, is a welcome step in the right direction.

Kofi Annan in the General Assembly Hall, John Ruggie on left (©JE)

A Nigerian gift to UN (©JE)

A gift from Mauritius (©JE)

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

NOW I’M 55

Wonderful flurry of birthday cards this morning as I gird my loins for New York. En route to UN Global Compact’s fifth anniversary event. 2004 is my 55th year and, it hits me, marks my 30th year of professional work in this field, whatever that may be. It’s amazing how much has changed since 1974 – and how much will need to change over the next couple of decades.

Saturday, June 19, 2004

PRUNES THE MULBERRY

Today’s papers full of the news of another beheading in Iraq and the agreement yesterday that promises to move the EU towards a new constitution. Having been a member of the European Commission’s Consultative Forum on Sustainable Development for seven years, I take more than a passing interest in the evolution of the Union. Among other changes in prospect – though member states will need to ratify, with 6 (including the UK) now pledged to hold referenda – are a full-time President (an ex-PM), double majority voting (which will mean that new policies will be approved if voted for by at least 15 of the 25 member states, and by more than 65% of the EU population) and, by 2014, a pruning of the 30-member Commission to just 18 members.

Pruning was also on our minds in Barnes today. Less ‘Dances With Wolves’, more ‘Prunes The Mulberry’ this afternoon as Gaia, Elaine and I cut back the mulberry, apple, crab apple and bay trees that were threatening to cut our small London garden off from the fitful sun. In the background, aircraft rumbling into Heathrow (see photos: at least Concorde has gone) and Hank Williams. Gaia had brought back a double CD and we were amazed how many well-known songs he wrote. Among them: Cold, Cold Heart, covered by Norah Jones (among my Top 16), Hey, Good Lookin’, Your Cheatin’ Heart and Jambalaya.

Also listening to a CD by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, sent to me via Amazon a few days back by John Manoochehri in Nepal. Reading this website, he had noted my encounter with Bocklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead in Berlin earlier in the year – and sent the CD because it contains a rendering of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Op. 29, The Isle of the Dead. Thanks, John.

Gaia 1 (©JE)

Gaia 2 (©JE)

Gaia 3 (©JE)

Friday, June 18, 2004

GLOBAL REPORTERS TASTING SESSION

Cornis samples a report (©JE)

Nice colours … (©JE)

In the past, I often used to describe sessions where we sampled the latest corporate environmental, social or sustainability reports as akin to wine tastings. Today, Nick Robinson hosted the judges panel for our forthcoming Global Reporters 04 report benchmark survey at SustainAbility. The judges included Jon Hanks, who I first met years back in South Africa and who has done a great deal of work with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Cornis van der Lugt of UNEP, Nick Robins of Henderson Global Investors (who co-wrote our second reporting on reporting with me, Company Environmental Reporting, way back in 1994) and Stanilas Dupre of Paris-based Utopies. The team included Judy Kuszewski, who used to run the Global Reporting Initiative when it was still at CERES, and a number of interns.

Some photos of the session are posted above and below. Among other things, they include a picture of a coffee cup – a tongue-in-cheek reference to the story we used to tell ten years ago that some of our reporting ideas, a number of which swept around the world, were created over a cup of tea. German academics were incensed that we hadn’t taken many years and hundreds of thousands of deutschmarks to do the work. Well, we have spent many hundreds of thousands of pounds over the past decade in developing our report evaluation methodology, but the cups of tea and coffee still play a vital role.

Coffee-fuelled … (©JE)

Jon reflects among hundreds of reports … (©JE)

Nick, Daniel, Cornis, Stanislas (©JE)

Stanislas, Cornis and Nick (©JE)

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

ECGD AND SD

Today’s Financial Times argues that UK exporters and their customers are suffering because of ongoing uncertainties around the future of the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD), where for several years I have been a member of the Advisory Council. It certainly is hugely frustrating. But the FT also notes that the House of Commons inquiry which has spotlighted these concerns also calls for a “clearer statement of the ECGD’s policy in support of sustainable development.” Rather than being a ringing endorsement of the inclusion of SD in ECGD’s policies, however, this reflects exporter concerns about the effects of requiring the ECGD to take non-financial objectives – including environmental impacts – into account.

LIVINGSTONE, I PRESUMED

Ken Livingstone is back as Mayor of London. I filed a postal ballot for him before leaving for the US – the first time I have voted Labour. Not that I like Labour at the moment, but Livingstone has shown remarkable courage for a politician, particularly with his congestion charge system for central London. Even though his majority this time is slimmer than in 2000, his re-election is a significant victory in the ongoing political battles around sustainable mobility.

AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHT DAYS

Having left for US on 7 June, I got back last night from Tokyo, having flown round the world in eight days. Series of visits with NGOs and companies. Both mornings I was in Japan, I did breakfast interviews with newspapers, the Asahi Shimbun and Nikkei (Nihon Keizai Shimbun). They’re interested because there has been a huge growth in activity in Japan in the area of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Big controversy in the papers currently is the cover-up at Mitsubishi Fuso, which has admitted that it has concealed defects in its trucks for eight years. The company recalled 220,000 trucks in March and another 180,000 in May. Now it says it will recall a further 450,000.

Monday, June 14, 2004

GRI JAPAN

Arrived at Narita airport from JFK and, after some hiccups, made my way to Le Meridien Pacific Hotel in Shinigawa. I had a delightful dinner with Goto-san, who runs the Japanese end of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and a couple of his colleagues, Sugimoto Hiroko (GRI: wwww.gri-fj.org) and Ayako Sonoda Ecotainment Group: www.cre-en.co.jp).

Ecotainment have just done an interesting short sustainability report, which features a lot of people smiling – something you wouldn’t have seen in Japanese reporting a few years back. Indeed, one of the things we called for in one of our reports on reporting was more smiles – not as ‘aren’t-we-friendly’ PR, but to end the era during which Japanese executives in almost all environmental and sustainability reports looked as if they were having teeth pulled.

One thing that struck me about Japan today, compared with the last time I was there, seven or eight years ago, is how the cell phone craze has spread – and the way that people use them to take photos these days.

Sugimoto Hiroko, Ayako Sonoda and Goto-san

The photographer

And now let’s try a mobile

Thank you and goodnight

Friday, June 11, 2004

REAGAN SNAKES HOME

Walked up Park Avenue to Borders, the bookshop, to browse. Weird and wonderful selection of magazines, though I return with a somewhat pedestrian foursome: The Economist, which praises Reagan for defeating Communism; MITs Technology; Scientific American, which is frothing with nanotech and stem cells; and Strategy & Business, which has an article (not yet read) on the art of scaling up business ventures, one of the themes I developed in my summing up earlier today.

On the way back, around 20.30, the western sky, glimpsed down skyscraper corridors, was a rather delightful gold-flecked tangerine. Glimpsed on several wide-screen TVs in a store window: without sound, I assume this is the snaking cavalcade of vehicles returning Ronald Reagans body for burial.

Passed the Waldorf-Astoria, only a block from The Barclay, recalling when Elaine and I stayed there during the extraordinary 2002 World Economic Forum event. At the time, the area was surrounded by mounted policemen and rumbling white-painted trucks filled with sand, designed to prevent suicide bombers.

The trauma of 9/11 is still powerfully shaping events here. Several people at the conference yesterday were wondering what would happen if something similar happened on US soil ahead of the impending Presidential elections: the consensus was that it would guarantee a third term for the current regime.

MARS ORBITS VENUS

On Wednesday morning, I took part in SustainAbilitys roundtable with companies (including American Honda, Dow Chemical, IBM, Procter & Gamble and Shell US), hosted by ChevronTexaco in their DC offices, on the question whether the Atlantic is getting bigger as the US and EU takes on issues like security, human rights and CSR diverge. A very interesting discussion, with a sense that the divide is growing, and a clear appetite among the companies for further sessions.

Those present were at pains to distinguish between reactions to President Bush, the US Government and America generally. One of my points, though, was that while the reactions to date have mainly focused on the President, the collateral damage of what he has been doing is progressively undermining Americas position in the world particularly when we now have lawyers saying that Bush would be within his rights to authorise torture.

Late on Wednesday, I flew from Reagan National Airport (a couple of hours before the late Presidents body arrived in DC) to New York, and have since been at The (Intercontinental) Barclay. Did the summing up keynote today for the Conference Boards 2-day event on Business and Sustainability, which was held here. Tongue in cheek, I equated the Business of the conferences title with Mars and Sustainability with Venus. Started with the photo of Venus against the Sun earlier in the week and went on from there.

Very positive reactions. This website, though, bit back to a degree when Katherine Reed (3Ms Staff Vice President, Environmental Health and safety Operations), as part of her introduction, not only mentioned Douglas Adams and the Babelfish but also said that she had seen that my early travels had exposed me to world music and then, of all the tracks discussed on the site, noted that I had been influenced (see Influences) by the Davy Crockett song I had heard in 1950s Northern Ireland!

True, but only in that later I realised that the song was akin to a perpetrator-eyes-view of one of the greatest tragedies of recent centuries: the extinction of North American Indian culture and peoples.

Last night, finally, while preparing my slides for today, I had an urgent e-mail from the London office, asking what had happened to the riposte I was meant to have done to an article on CSR and philanthropy by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer. This was for European Business Forum. The two pieces to run in parallel. When I get back from Tokyo, where I fly tomorrow, I must try to get permission to post both pieces here and also update the articles section of the site.

Thursday, June 10, 2004

SUSHI AND WWII IN DC

Having arrived in Washington, D.C. yesterday afternoon, I was delighted to see the statue of Gandhi striding purposefully along outside my hotel bedroom. ‘My life is my message.’ Awoke at around 04.00 with head full of ideas for conference presentations and possible book, then just after 06.00 – as I typed away on my ThinkPad – the sun popped above the horizon, and there was Venus in transit across the reddened orb. Had known it was due to happen, but it was complete serendipity that I actually got to see it.

According to NASA, transits of Venus across the disk of the Sun are among the rarest of planetary alignments. Only six have occurred since the invention of the telescope (1631, 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874, 1882). The next two will occur on 2004 June 08 and 2012 June 06. See http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/transit/venus0412.html

Venus mini-eclipse of Sun (©JE)

Spent the day with the US team: Jeff, Katie, Mark, Philippa and Rebecca. Very energetic and fruitful session. Then, after lunch, four of us took time out to visit the new WWII monument that was dedicated on 29 May. While the site, between the Lincoln and Washington memorials, is very striking, and the fountains add verve to the scene, I found the design of the WWII memorial leaden, uninspired. A bit like part of the Atlantic Wall in places.

Indeed, the most interesting aspect of the thing was the scatter of personal tributes stacked here and there, with photos of the dead or of veterans, and stories of what they had had to endure. One commentator is quoted in today’s USA Today as saying that this generation didn’t want to talk about their exploits, so their families are now doing it for them.

But there has been something of a squabble, with the National Park Service saying the memorial wasn’t designed to include all these other tributes, which are collected at the end of every day and will be stored in a Maryland warehouse. A shame: the thing should have been designed from the outset to attract, spotlight and build on popular memories of the 16 million Americans who served in WWII – and the 400,000 who died. There are some 4000 stars, each representing 100 American dead.

The monument dates WWII 1941-1945, which while accepting the scale of the US contribution slightly overlooks the fact that other parts of the world had been at it since 1939. And the top name on the credits is President George W. Bush, which we found slightly peculiar. His father may have fought in the war, but George Bush II’s personal war record could scarcely be described as glorious. Overall, a mixed experience, but there’s no doubt that the US contribution in the 1940s did save the world as we know it.

Stars (©JE)

Lincoln memorial (©JE)

Stars and Stripes (and Missing in Action flag) at half-mast, in honour of Ronald Reagan (©JE)

Poring over memorabilia (©JE)

Washington Monument through the ‘teeth’ of WWII memorial (©JE)

Germany’s wreath in tribute, near Atlantic War memorial (©JE)

In the evening, we went out and had a sushi dinner. Though the waitresses were Asian, some of the music seemed to have a distinctly American military feel to it, I thought. But it struck me that the US taste for sushi must have had at least soimething to do with the US occupation of Japan post-WWII.

And Gandhi was still striding along when I got back to the hotel. His extraordinary wrong-footing of the British Empire, by choosing to attack it via the salt tax and his walk to the sea to boil seawater to produce salt, was a contributory factor to my brainstorm at 04.00 this morning.

Gandhi on the march (©JE)

Sunday, June 06, 2004

METAL FATIGUE

Weird. While in Wiltshire, I finished Nevil Shute’s book No Highway, which is all about metal fatigue. Something I had read in my teens and wanted to revisit. Then working away this afternoon, my chair collapsed under me. Metal fatigue. Made by Verco, it has done excellent service. Indeed, I think I’ve written 16 books seated in it. And Julia (Hailes) worked from it for a couple of years, too. Now, some 24 years on, it has decided it has had enough. A portent, perhaps? Maybe next time I should get one with an ejection module?

The chair it was that died (©JE)

THE GREATEST GENERATION

Working on our report for the UN late last night, I heard that Ronald Reagan had died. Odd, since I had found myself wondering what had happened to him 3-4 days back. The further we get away from him, from Margaret Thatcher and from the collateral damage they caused, the better they look. Visted Reagan’s website (www.reaganfoundation.org) this morning and was struck by just how fast we are moving away from the world of the ‘Greatest Generation’, a sense that has been reinforced by reading the McCulloch biography of President Truman – and by today’s ceremenies marking the 60th anniversay of the D-Day landings.

One quote of Reagan’s which has always struck me was this one, from 1982:

“…I know it’s hard when you’re up to your armpits in alligators to remember you came here to drain the swamp.”

Reading the accounts of what it was like to be pinned down on Omaha Beach, this resonated, but it must also resonate with those pinned down in Iraq. Longer term, though, I’m pretty sure that Bush II will not look better with the passage of time. Indeed, I suspect that much of what the Bush nexus got up to with the Saudis and others will begin to look like the swamp that had to be drained for the good of all.

Saturday, June 05, 2004

WHITE SHEET DOWN

A psychotic peacock, a neolithic hill fort and a herd of wapiti: highlights of the last couple of days, which we spent with Gaia near Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire. The peacock had appeared out of nowhere to terrorise The Spread Eagle inn, where we wandered the Stourhead grounds literally across the road shortly after arriving on Thursday evening. That night we were periodically woken up by the peacock, which seemed quite close by. When we went out in the morning, it turned out that the wretched thing was roosting on the inn’s roof, not much more than a dozen feet from our bedroom window. And the racket was much worse the next night.

One of the women in the inn said that no previous peacock has behaved this way, making a ferocious racket from the early hours (Elaine says 03.30 onwards). But the woman also said that the bird has taken to attacking the paintwork of her car, presumably seeing its own reflection as a potential rival.

Floral lava plunges into Stourhead lake (©JE)

Psychotic peacock, Spread Eagle (©JE)

Today, we went back to Gaia’s cottage – the lane to which is awash with pheasants, partridge, the scattiest hares and, last night, what I think was a muntjac deer – and walked up onto nearby White Sheet Down. Through flocks of several different types of sheep, one of which, though otherwise white, looked as if all its members had put their heads into a bag of soot – and thence along the ridge to the spectacular neolithic causeway camp.

Overhead, a little tug plane puttered as it hauled gliders up into the sky, while unseen larks poured a cascade of song upon our heads. Something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before was the white footprints and trails left by the rabbits emerging from their burrows, dug deep into the underlying chalk. As we walked, the hill sides were aflutter with Chalk Hill Blues. On our way back to London, Gaia took us to Bush Farm (www.bisonfarm.co.uk), near West Knoyle, where they have a herd of bison – and another of elk (wapiti).

They had a strangely pin-head look viewed face-on, but then their heads looked extruded when viewed sideways on. No doubt we looked strange to them, too. Looked up the word wapiti when I got home: Shawnee word for ‘white deer’ (wap being white), to distinguish them from moose. Bought a pair of red deer antlers for Gaia: they suited her.

Glider and tug over White Sheet Down (©JE)

Wapiti at the bison farm, West Knoyle (©JE)

Wednesday, June 02, 2004

CROWS AND ANGEL

Winged sculpture in Montreux station (©JE)

The crows that had provided such a raucous wake-up service at the hotel seem to spend their days picking over the platforms and rails of the nearby station. Their black bodies, beaks and eyes almost disappear against the oiled sleepers and rain-darkened rails. Imagine myself lying on a battlefield, my armour plate already rusting in the drizzle, their beady eyes on the joints and cracks. I love to watch them them doing aerobatics and playing ‘chicken’ with one another, but have no illusions about their omnivorous tendencies.

Nor should they have about ours: in the Truman book I was reading a section in which journalists who made the wrong call on the 1948 US presidential election offered to “eat crow” while Truman, who had semi-miraculously won, “ate turkey”. Truman’s response spoke volumes about the man, but if push comes to shove most of us would eat crow as readily as they would eat us. Even as a 30-year non-carnivorous omnivore I’m sure even I would succumb.

And while on the subject of winged entities, most people seem to walk beneath it without an upward glance, but we rather liked the spectral angel hanging from the roof of the station as we waited for the train to Geneva airport.

Rhone (vessel) heading counter-current to Rhone (river) (©JE)

 

Sunday, May 30, 2004

Wild Art

Part of poster for L’Art Brut Museum, Lausanne (©JE)

Across to Lausanne, mainly to see La Musee de l’Art Brut, put together by the artist Jean Dubuffet and opened in 1976. The word brut denotes raw, crude or rough, and – as The Lonely Planet Guide to Switzerland notes, “that’s exactly what you get.” None of the artists whose work is featured is or was properly trained, indeed many were held in prisons or asylums. There are paintings, posters, sculptures made out of broken plates or discarded rags, and – the only thing we would like to have hauled away – a life-sized horse made out of branches, twigs and others bits of wood that was surprisingly life-like. I remember saying that when I started reading Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast some 30 years ago, I felt as though I had taken opium after less than 20 pages. At the museum I felt I was on something darker, something that wouldn’t just have you up in the attics, which is where a lot of thesee exhibits are displayed, but hanging from the beams.

Speaking of hallucinogens, though, when we came down the slopes from Caux the other day, we came across a little shop selling marijuana plants and everything to do with their cultivation and use. When we asked the delightful young man who was minding the store whether it was legal, he said it neither was nor wasn’t. Although I profoundly disapprove of the black market drugs industry, I still wish we had been able to find a way of absorbing hallucinogens into our culture in the way that people Aldous Huxley had in mind. The relatively few times I used them in the Sixties led to the opening of channels in my brain that might otherwise have stayed closed. Maybe that’s why I feel touched by the wing of madness when reading Peake or confronting the outpourings of these artistic obsessives.

La Feuille d’Or (©JE)

Saturday, May 29, 2004

Byron and other Wildlife

Chateau de Chillon (©JE)

Inside the Chateau (©JE)

A long walk, via the Chateau de Chillon, which we last visited many years ago on our way back from Italy with the girls. Did Byron carve his name in the column of the dungeon, which was meant to have housed the Prisoner of Chillon, or did someone else? Not sure I really care: he was there at some point and the place, from its fragmentary murals to its scaffold, is full of the echoes of romance and horror.

After the castle, we went on around the lake, to Les Grangettes, an area of woodland and reed marsh towards the point where the Rhone enters the lake. Saw a fair amount of wildlife, including a woodpecker, some fairly large frogs of variegated colours, a grebe which popped up in a pool almost at our feet, and a beautiful slowworm – the golden-brown, tiger’s eye colour of a humbug, with chocolate brown stripes along its flanks. Wonderful greens and dappled light.

Les Gagnettes (©JE)

Mossy stump (©JE)

Thursday, May 27, 2004

Geneva Brainstorm

Brainstorm with a view (©JE)

Across by train to Geneva and the World Economic Forum, for brainstorm with Pamela Hartigan (far right in photo) and her colleagues at the Schwab Foundation on a conference for social entrepreneurs they are planning to hold in Brazil in November. Process facilitated by Katherine Fulton of the Monitor Institute and Global Business Network (GBN), third from left in photo. Ged Davis (ex-Shell scenarios unit) was also involved for most of the day. Very stimulating, good fun. Also read David Bornstein’s book How to Change the World as I travelled to and fro, to review for Resurgence magazine. Excellent – and particularly illuminating about Florence Nightingale!

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Marmottes Paradis, Not

Elaine walking down from Caux (©JE)

We took the rack-and-pinion train up to the Rochers de Nayes today, widely advertised hereabouts as a ‘Paradise for Marmots’. What we found, apart from spectacular views, was a set of marmot concentration camps, with electrified fences and the animals, not surprisingly, sulking undergound. We took the train back down to Caux, had a hot chocolate, then walked the rest of the way down vertiginous footpaths.

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Pathology, Poppies and Mint Tea

Poppies along Montreux foreshore (©JE)

Interior of just-painted boat (©JE)

Mint tea at Le Palais Oriental (©JE)

Elaine and I flew in to Geneva yesterday, then by train to Montreux, for a week’s holiday. Weather is delightful and we are enjoying wonderful walks along the lake. Am now back to reading David McCulloch’s stunning biography of President Truman, having read Joel Bakan’s The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power on the way across. The most relaxing thing of all is mint tea in the Moroccan ambience of Le Palais Oriental, just along from our hotel, Eden au Lac.

Saturday, May 22, 2004

Captain Corageous

Have always had something of an immune response to the Daily Telegraph, but we buy three copies this evening because Gaia appears, in a couple of photos, on the front page of the paper’s gardening section today. The piece is a full-page profile of Jonny Norton (the ‘Captain Courageous’ of the article’s headline), founder of the mail-order gardening firm Plantstuff (www.plantstuff.com).

Titanic Melting Away

My eye was caught by the photo in today’s Guardian of the mini-submersible Alvin, whose deck we stood on last year (see first posting, 30 September 2003). Robert Ballard, who found the wreck of The Titanic in the Alvin, is heading back nearly 20 years later to see what has happened to the ship. Not good news, apparently. “The ship is definitely dissolving,” says one lawyer who has worked for the salvage operators. “It’s melting like a candle from the top down.” But, while most of the damage is thought to be natural, there is also a growing sense that the process has been accelerated by treasure-hunters, including a 2002 operation which tried to smash through into the first-class cargo hold that contained a cargo of diamondThursday, May 20, 2004

Missionaries in Porsches?

To Cambridge again, for the entrepreneurs awards ceremony. I give a kick-off speech, introducing the 3P Awards, which now join the £50K and £1K Awards as an annual offering. Open the envelope for the not-for-profit 3P (People, Planet, Productivity) Award, which goes to Aidworld (www.aidworld.org), an IT group that helps NGOs in less developed parts of the word boost the speed of their Internet connections some 30-fold. Suggest that people give their acceptance speeches in tears, but no-one obliges.

Interesting that one of the speakers, from the chip company ARM, starts with a slide showing what he thinks motivates normal entrepreneurs: high-end Porsches and yachts. Before the ceremony, we had a joint session with the judges of the £50K and £1K Awards, which was like being alongside a bunch of CFOs. One or two were fairly dismissive of the 3P idea, describing them as “missionary” and saying that the 3P business plans they had seen they would have “flushed”. But it was also clear that the social entrepreneurs who tended to scoop the 3P awards were motivated by other concerns and interests.

The whole event was built around surprise, but the laptop that held the series of presentations and announcements seemed to be infected with a genie determined to give advance clues as to who had won the next award. With one exception, the organisers managed to cut it off at the pass, however. Even so, once these business plans are out in the real world, the element of surprise will be back with a vengeance. I hope a few years from now we can point to 3P concepts that have gone ballistic, whether or not the innovators are then driving around in Porsches.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

2009 Visions

Fascinating session this morning, in which 13 of the SustainAbility team – most of the London office – shared their visions for time-scales extending variously to 2009, at the nearest, and 2014 at the farthest. The congruence of some of the visions was extraordinary.

Yasmin (Crowther) had also asked us to bring something significant, so I brought a Japanese-made ‘Global’ transistor radio which I used to listen to under my pillow at Bryanston, in the early 1960s. I explained what it was like to listen to Radio Luxembourg, and made the twin points that one felt connected to a wider world and that the thing you remembered was the tunes.

The implication, I said, was that we should not simply collect information but develop the ‘tunes’ that would ensure our thinking lives on in people’s memories. We had done that with phrases like ‘green consumer’ and ‘triple bottom line’ (Geoff Lye, who was in Rio last week, chipped in that at the conference he spoke at there the triple bottom line was just coming into fashion there, 10 years after I coined the term), and with the name ‘SustainAbility’, a word which had little meaning when we adopted it 17 years ago. Now we needed to develop the next generation of melodies.

Then Yasmin asked who would go next and Nick (Robinson) said he had to. It turned out that he had also been thinking in terms of music – indeed, he held up a bit of score by Bach. Amazing case of parallel invention. And by the end of the session, we had an enormously rich set of ideas to play with. In the afternoon, a different group of us got together to plan the revamp of the SustainAbility website, with a couple of folk from Saltmine.

Nick knows the score

Francesca (Muller), too

Yasmin (Crowther) conducts

Geoff (Lye) shares his 2014 vision

Kavita (Prakash-Mani) muses

Hair piece: Judy (Kuszewski) and Peter (Zollinger)

A reflective Tell (Muenzing)

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Cambridge Entrepreneurs

Afternoon spent in Cambridge with CU Entrepreneurs, a Cambridge University initiative (www.enterprise.cam.ac.uk) to spur entrepreneurial activity – and, specifically, to encourage students to develop business plans and business models based on the 3Ps of ‘People, Planet & Productivity’. Part of judging panel with Professor Charles Ainger, Mary Archer, Anne Cotton, Polly Courtice and Helen Haugh. Ended up with two short-lists of three business plans, one for for-profits and one for not-for-profits. Impressive field made it tough to choose. Results to be announced next Thursday.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

The Day After Tomorrow

Just back from chairing a panel discussion that topped and tailed the preview of the new film The Day After Tomorrow at the 20th Century Fox building in Soho Square. The panel included people from the Energy Savings Trust, Future Forests, Greenpeace, the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University and the Tyndall Centre on responses to climate change at the University of East Anglia, plus Michael Molitor, who acted as science advisor on the film.

Probably the best special effects I have seen to date and one of the best science fiction films, but science fiction it is. Several of the journalists and a couple of the science people present were horrified by the liberties taken with science at some points, one even arguing that this would set back the debate years, but I disagree. Just as Jurassic Park got people talking about cloning, so this film will get us talking about climate change. And that in the US presidential election year has to be a good thing.

One point I made was that I wrote my first report on climate change, for the Hudson Institute, in 1978. I have spent a good deal of time on the issue, but it has only been in the last couple of years that the notion of abrupt climate change has started to surface in my world. That’s why I visited the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution last year (see entry for 30 September 2004). If the film does nothing else, it will ensure that the abruptness of some past climate shifts gets onto the agenda.

For more information, see www.thedayaftertomorrow.com

Monday, May 10, 2004

Human Rights

Human rights session at SustainAbility, with about 7-8 of our people, plus Chris Avery of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, Chris Marsden (who chairs the Amnesty International UK Business Group) and John O’Reilly, who works with Amnesty but used to be with BP in countries like Colombia and Indonesia. Fascinating and instructive, with growing interest across the team.

Sunday, May 09, 2004

Hill House

Lovely, rainy stay with parents in Cotswolds. Vegetation looking radiant, especially things like cowslips and rainbow chard. Interesting to see the walnut tree that a squirrel regularly strips of its nuts: apparently they puncture the walnuts to ensure that, when buried, they don’t sprout. Malevolent little buggers. Good to see cousin Toby (Adamson) after a long time and to go through some of his photographs (www.tobyadamson.co.uk). Caroline has also been doing some wonderful, large-scale paintings – Toby’s brother-in-law, Don, is working on a website for her. Then Elaine, Hania and I drove back to London, listening among other things to Jools Holland, The Shadows and The Pink Panther theme music. Nothing too serious, though with radio news breaking through periodically to tell us unplesant things about Iraq torture and sexual abuse scandals and the assassination of the Chechen president.

Once back, I got on with working through the business plans for the Cambridge University 3P(‘People, Planet & Productivity’ – slightly mutated from my original ‘People, Planet & Profit’ back in 1995) enterprise competition, the final judging for which is later this week.

Thursday, May 06, 2004

Eagle Squadrons

Cycling home this evening through Grosvenor Square, I stopped off at the memorial to the US Eagle squadrons, which fought alongside the RAF in WWII. Reminded of their role when watching Pearl Harbor on TV the other evening. The Americans may be screwing up royally in Iraq at the moment, but this was a welcome reminder of the best of America.

Eagles in flight (US Air Force Museum)

Wednesday, May 05, 2004

Accidents

Letter from RSA invited me to join their Council. Cycled to work for first time in what seems like ages. Glorious, though almost came to grief when a foolhardy cyclist cut across me in Hyde Park. Am more than usually conscious of the dangers of travel: Heather Brigstocke, High Mistress when Gaia and Hania were at St Paul’s School, was killed earlier in the week when crossing a road late at night outside Athens. The same day The Times carried her obituary, yesterday, it also carried – literally cheek by jowl – the news that Hania’s friend John Jenck’s step-sister Martha Lane Fox, previously with lastminute.com, has been involved in a terrible road accident in Morocco.

During the day, hail storms thumped down and thunder rolled across London. I wonder how many people today had the problem Seb (Beloe) and his family had recently: during a London storm his kitchen filled with three feet of water. They have had to move out. As the rain fell, I worked first on the Global Compact report, then on the media report Seb, Francesca (Muller) and Frances (Scott) have been putting together with WWF. When I cycled back through Hyde Park, some of Rotten Row’s sand had washed out in mini-Mississippi banks and the riding surface was deeply puddled. But this evening when I went out into the garden, the Big Dipper was crystal clear overhead. Waiting to bail us out after the next storm?

Sunday, May 02, 2004

25 Nation EU

Extraordinary weekend, with the EU expanding yesterday to 25 nations, 450 million people and 20 languages. I’m pretty miserable about the Greek Cypriots, though, who managed to spoil Kofi Annan’s attempt to reunite Cyprus. Looks as if any plans to visit the island to see childhood haunts from the late 1950s will have to be shelved for the moment. Someone was quoted in the press yesterday as saying that it was like being trapped in a womb with a stillborn twin. Can’t remember whether it was a Greek talking about Turks or vice versa.

Glorious birdsong over the past few days, with a pair of robins streaking around the garden and swifts quartering the evening skies. Liquid song of a blackbird broken by the squawking of a passing parakeet. Such a delightful day that I took a whole stream of pictures, several of which appear below. Elaine’s handiwork evident all around our small garden. Otherwise, have been working on the Global Compact project.

Clematis (©JE)

Parrot tulip (©JE)

Top of invitation card in kitchen window (©JE)

 

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Dubai

Small ship passed in the night (©JE)

Back from Dubai late last night, having spoken at the First Middle East Conference on Corporate Social Responsibility. Yesterday morning, before leaving for the airport, visited the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture, with Joppe Cramwinckel, sustainability advisor at Shell. He has been part of the team we work with at Shell – and has also been very active in building up the Center’s work. Although I went with my brain full of images of salt deserts and salt-polluted aquifers, I was most impressed by the quality of the Center’s staff (we met Drs Abdullah Dakheel, Bassam Hasbini and John Stenhouse, and Jugu Abraham and Sandra Childs) – and by the way that sustainability principles are built into the DNA of the operation. More details from www.biosaline.org.

On the flight out to Dubai, which involved touching down for a couple of hours in Gatwick, I read What Might Have Been, imaginary histories by twelve historians, edited by Andrew Roberts. Some interesting hypotheticals, including one in which Stalin flees Moscow in 1941 and another in which the IRA succeed in killing Mrs Thatcher with the Brighton bombing. One of my bags (with my library) went AWOL, somewhere between Atlanta and Dubai, but came in on a later flight. Am now reading Truman, David McCullough’s astounding profile of President Truman. At least as good as his biography of John Adams, which I adored.

International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (©JE)

Window on Islam (©JE)

Joppe Cramwinckel (©JE)

Quality of the ‘soil’ (©JE)

Test plot of Atriplex halophile plants (©JE)

Thursday, April 22, 2004

Speciality Coffee

Arrived in Atlanta, Georgia, midday, having taken an earlier plane than planned. Nice weather, easy taxi ride into the city – only to find that there had been a driver waiting for me at the airport. Last time I was here was some years back, after a Ben & Jerry’s board meeting, held on an island off the coast, but disrupted by the untimely arrival of Hurricane Floyd. This time it’s the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA), whose 16th annual conference I am giving a keynote to tomorrow evening. This evening, went out and watched children playing in fountains in front of the hotel.

Boy in fountain (©JE)

Small fraction of SCAA exhibition (©JE)

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

New York Buzz

Start the day with keynote to the National Environmental Performance Track annual conference, again with lots of people from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) world. Nice to catch up with Gill Friend of Natural Logic and Paul Tebo of DuPont. Later, Katie and I take the train from Baltimore to New York. Headed for a meeting of the New York Buzz, a group of people who advise SustainAbility US, dating back to the time when we established our first US toehold with a New York office.

As usual, we meet in the wonderful Old Carriage House, East 38th Street. Those attending include Dorothy Bowers (ex-Merck), Barbara Fiorito (chair, Oxfam US), Leslie Hoffman (Earth Pledge, and Nurture New York’s Nature), Jean Horstman (now of Citizen Schools), Tzipora Lubarr (who used to work in our NY office, now with Green Order), Gavin Power (Global Compact) and professor Peter Sandman (an expert on ‘outrage’). Wonderful, delicious, sustainable cuisine, courtesy of Earth Pledge (www.earthpledge.org).

Evening is a mix of catch-up and testing of some of the thinking in our draft Global Compact report, though because those attending had so much to report we did less of the latter than we had intended. Amazing what people have been doing. Peter, for example, has been working for WHO on how to help the world handle future pandemics like SARS. Details on his website: www.psandman.com. Virginia (Terry), one of the two SustainAbility directors who founded our New York office was meant to be there, but had hurt her back kayaking.

Gavin Power (©JE)

Barbara (accidental shot, but quite like it) and Peter (©JE)

Tzipora (©JE)

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

We’re Here to Help You!

National Aquarium, Baltimore, and USS Torsk (©JE)

Second day in Baltimore, giving a keynote to the National Environmental Assistance Summit. These people are here to help business and others tackle environmental issues. Use a photo I took yesterday of a shark-jawed sub moored outside the National Aquarium to introduce our NGO typology, which I relabel the NGO Aquarium. In passing, the submarine, USS Torsk, apparently dived more than any other sub in history: 11,884 times. Doesn’t look bad considering, though the birds roosting in the holes between its teeth give the bow a slightly odorous look.

Interesting attempt to break down the silos in the field of environmental assistance. Fascinating opportunity to talk to people I wouldn’t normally come across, from the worlds of environmental governance, regulation and enforcement. In the evening, take a cab out of the city to have dinner with Katie Fry Hester and her husband Bill. Interesting journey back afterwards, with a taxi driver who has only been driving for a month and doesn’t even know his way to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. In the end, my sense of direction is better than his: I get out and walk.

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Aracruz

Up early yesterday to take what proved to be a badly delayed flight to Vitoria in Espirito Santo, with Jodie, Peter (Zollinger: just in – via Sao Paolo – from Zurich) and Carlos Roxo of Aracruz Celulose, then we are driven an hour north to Aracruz, with colleagues from Atitude. Visit the company’s eucalyptus nurseries, some growing and cleared plantations, a watershed project and the Aracruz pulp mill. Then did a 60-minute presentation to senior managers. Then, today, we did a 4-hour session with the Aracruz Executive Board.

Then flew back to Rio in the evening. Rio is in the news at the moment because the state government is threatening to build walls around the favelas, or slums, in an attempt to control drug-controlled vioence. More than 1,600 police officers occupied two slums yesterday: recent days have seen a wave of violence between rival gangs, with at least nine dead, including gang members, police and civilians.

Bonsai eucalypts – less than 12″ high – that produce clones (©JE)

Cloning nursery (©JE)

Driving through the plantations (©JE)

Termite nest (©JE)

Monday, April 12, 2004

Sugar Loaf

Jodie atop the Sugar Loaf (©JE)

Read much of The Da Vinci Code on the flight, which I enjoyed tremendously. Travelled with Jodie (Thorpe), who has been leading our work with Aracruz. We are staying in the Caesar Park Hotel on Ipanema Beach. The Girl from Ipanema playing wherever we go. Happily, though, Jodie and I sit on the beachfront and are regaled by a series of Stones tracks, among them Paint It Black, Get Of My Cloud and The Last Time. She and I are taken up the Sugar Loaf, with spectacular views of the city and an array of frigate birds and vultures wheeling overhead, then around the historic core of Rio de Janeiro and to the funicular railway which heads up to the Christo figure that overlooks the city, past the most extraordinary spider webs – with the most extraordinary spiders. Appropriately, given that the artist Christo is known for shrouding things, the statue was wreathed in cloud. You could only see up to the giant statue’s knees even when standing by its ankles. But the cloud did part for a moment, which allowed me to take a fleeting shot.

Christo clouded (©JE)

Friday, April 09, 2004

Flying Down to Rio

Getting ready for the flight to Rio this evening. Watched a cat making its way around the garden this morning, rubbing itself against the potted box trees in fitful early morning sun. Then read in The Times that archaeologists have found a grave containing a cat at Shillourokambos in Cyprus. The interesting thing was that the animal seems to have been a pet and its skeleton dates back 9,500 years, more than 4,000 years before the pet cats bred by the Egyptians. It is thought that wild cats first started associating themselves with humans when we began farming.

And those time scales put into perspective the similar time-frames now being discussed in terms of climate change. Our entire history of civilisation will almost certainly prove to have flowered in an interglacial period, book-ended by ice ages. Earlier today, I proofed an edited version of an invited mini-profile I have done for Time magazine on BP’s Lord John Browne. Spotlighted his role in raising the climate change issue way ahead of his competitors.

Meanwhile, the oil-lubricated war in iraq has shifted into a higher gear, with a widespread insurgency. As coalition troops fight street-to-street in places like Fallujah, some brains turn back to the siege of Hue during the Vietnam War. Mine turns to Cyprus, where I grew up in the midst of the EOKA-B campaign to oust the British. Old hatreds and antipathies consider to simmer there, undermining Kofi Annan’s efforts to get a peace settlement. I had imaginedthat the Turks would be the problem, but yesterday Tassos Papadopoulos, the Greek Cypriot president, rejected the latest plan as “unworkable”.

If things continue to unravel in Iraq, however, Shia/Sunni tensions could dwarf the Greek/Turkish Cypriot problems. Cyprus may have a painfully strategic location, but it doesn’t sit on huge reserves of oil which, I suspect, the world will continue to want to burn even if, as many of us suspect, climate change turns out to be the central 21st century challenge.

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

We Have Lift Off

SustainAbility Board meeting most of the day, with Sophia Tickell (now of Just Pensions, previously of Oxfam) joining as our second non-executive director, alongside Tom Delfgaauw. Fascinating to feel the organisation beginning to lift off, with our new governance processes being a bit like the fly-by-wire systems introduced a while back in commercial jets. Very different from the early days, when you almost had to crawl out onto the wings to adjust the flaps – and your face had great white oil-ringed circles around the eyes when you took your goggles off at night.

Some photos taken during and after the board meeting:

Geoff Lye, who chairs the Board meetings (©JE)

Sophia Tickell, our new non-executive director (©JE)

Peter Zollinger, SustainAbility’s executive director (©JE)

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

Slipping and Sliding

Working on four separate slide presentations today – for Rio, Baltimore, Atlanta and Dubai – I managed to give myself my first migraine of the year. Slip in and out of coherence. Peter (Zollinger), who is staying with us in Barnes, had to put up with me being partially sighted on the way back by Tube this evening. But it could have been very much worse. The Government announced this evening that it thinks it has foiled a plot to put a chemical bomb in “a crowded place”: you don’t have to be an Einstein to read “Tube” between the lines.

Thursday, April 01, 2004

Skoll Foundation

First day cycling for a while. Once in the office, Jodie (Thorpe) and I race to get the Global Compact report text in a fit state to send through to the UN. Last two days spent at the Skoll Foundation World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at the Saïd Business School in Oxford. Travelled with Tell Muenzing from SustainAbility, which was fascinating, not least because he has just come back from Germany, working among other things on our project with DeutschePost. Germany seems in a flat spin at the moment, with the political class unable to turn things around.

A rather happier story at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship (www.skollfoundation.org). It was founded at the Saïd BS late last year with £4.44 million provided by the Skoll Foundation, in turn founded by Jeff Skoll, the first employee and first president of eBay. The Centre connects social entrepreneurs through its online community, at www.socialedge.org. Great fun catching up with people from the social enterprise world, among them Simone Amber (SEED, part of Schlumberger), Jeroo Billimoria (Child Helpline International), Jed Emerson, Pamela Hartigan, Mel Young (Big Issue, Scotland) and Roshaneh Zafar (Kashf Foundation).

Saïd Business School, Oxford (©JE)

 

Monday, March 29, 2004

London’s Living Room

City Hall (©JE)

Odd to think that Norman Foster’s City Hall will one day look dated, as my sepia portrait suggests. Chaired a debate on the top floor, The London Living Room, this afternoon on the CSR agenda for the advertising industry. Launching Opportunity Space, the report we did on the sustainability agenda for advertisers for the European Association of Communication Agencies (EACA: see www.eaca.be). Organised by Soli Townsend of FUTERRA and backed by the likes of the Institute of Public Relations, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, St Luke’s Communications and UNEP. Panel included Nicky Gavron (candidate for Deputy Mayor), Mike Longhurst of McCann Erickson, Peter O’Donaghue of BT and John Sauven, Greenpeace UK’s Campaigns Director.

Erotic Gherkin from top of City Hall (©JE)

Afterwards, we wandered out onto the balcony, and Nicky gave a group of us a guided tour of the building – which is extraordinary. One intriguing sight: the carpet on the ground floor which shows more or less all of London. Everyone promptly went looking for their patch. I found Barnes, with Nicky’s boots straddling the Thames. Walking back by the river to Blackfriars, I was bowled over once again by how beautiful Thamesside London now is.

Nicky Gavron’s boots over Barnes (©JE)

Thursday, March 25, 2004

Prius Armada

Westminster Abbey’s bells were sounding an extraordinary carillon, and silver Toyota Priuses (hybrid-powered) whisking back and forth, as I emerged after a day at the ‘Business & Society’ conference organised by The Guardian and The Observer at Church House. On my way there this morning, I walked past Abbey Orchard Street, site of our first office for Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978. Amazing how much has changed since then.

At the conference I was part of a panel discussing a case study put together by Roger Cowe on a high-end tropical fruit importer facing a whole raft of commercial, governance, human rights and environmental problems. Others on the panel were Alison Austin of Sainsbury’s, Chris Marsden of Amnesty and Jules Peck of WWF.

The Prius fleet was in promotion mode, silently ferrying people to various stations for their trips home. I walked, enjoying the sound of the bells.

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Void of Memory

Inside the Holocaust Tower (©JE)

This afternoon, before leaving for the airport, I visited the Jewish Museum (www.jmberlin.de), designed by Daniel Libeskind. Weird that the zinc-covered building, slashed and gashed with razor-thin windows that slice through the structure at odd angles, has no obvious entrance or exit. You have to go in through the old Baroque-style Berlin Museum, then descend underground.

Libeskind has done an extraordinary job. The Axes of the Holocaust, of Exile and of Continuity are literally stunning. The exhibits of wallets and packages thrown from the transports as people were shipped off to the concentration camps connect viscerally. I stood for some time in the dark concrete entrails of the Holocaust Tower. But the most traumatic experience was the ‘Void of Memory’, where the floor was covered in layers of round face-like metal cut-outs. Like Spielberg’s girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List, the eye searches among the endless faces and figures for one that stands out. As you walk on the faces, they clink, like the points in the railways as the heavy-laden cattle wagons passed.

Outside, racing around the Garden of Exile, were a bunch of young teenagers, mindless, aggressive, the sort who when all this starts to happen again will be wearing the smart uniforms and loading the transports. As I walked past a Boss store this afternoon, I recalled that Hugo Boss designed uniforms for the SS. And a strange fact about the Jewish Museum in Prague, where I spoke at the previous VW AutoUni event: the wealth of items displayed there survived because Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, had his men collect all the Jewish memorabilia they could find for a museum he planned to open after the war on how the Jews were exterminated.

‘Fallen Leaves’ (Shalechet), by Menashe Kadishmen (©JE)

Bugati and Isle of the Dead

How much is that Bugati in the window? (©JE)

Did my 90-minute session with the Volkswagen AutoUni this morning. Took place in VW’s AutoMobility Forum, a veritable temple to cars. In the front windows were a Bugati and two extreme Bentleys. Spent the afternoon in museums – and found myself wondering what archaeologists in the 25th century AD would make of our fixation with cars, autobahns and the like? Are billionaires buried with their Bugatis as Pharaohs or Bronze Age chieftains were with their chariots? Perhaps it’s only a matter of time. In the Alte Nationalgalerie, I came around a corner to find Böcklin’s ‘Isle of the Dead’, one of my favourite paintings – and the first time I had seen the original.

Isle of the Dead (©JE)

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Newton’s Naked Wives

Romeo & Juliet, Berlin-style (©JE)

Berlin. Arrived at Tegel airport around 18.30 and took a taxi into the city. Had been sitting alongside a screaming baby in the plane, which I considered a form of torture, until I got talking to the taxi driver. Iranian, in Berlin for 15 years, spent seven years in an Iranian prison – out of a sentence of 10 years as a “spy” for the “Russians and Americans” (sic). Babies pale into insignificance.

A self-confessed Communist, he apparently never belonged to the Party. Made it up in his head as a teacher. His brother, who lives in the UK, basically bought him out, paying smugglers $5000 to get him across the Iranian border. We had a ‘wide-ranging discussion’, as politicians tend to say, extending from the reactions of different European societies to ethnic minorities to the philosophy of the likes of Bertrand Russell, Hegel and Spinoza. He said that Berlin has 800 Iranian taxi drivers – and 700 Iranian doctors!

On arrival at the Berlin Hilton, in the old East Berlin, I walked around the Under den Linden area. Extraordinary buildings. Hearing American accents in the streets, though, I couldn’t help but wonder what the American and British bomber pilots who flew overhead in the 1940s would have made of the city now. Strange feeling of walking on shattered glass, broken bones. Walking past the Maxim Gorki Theater, light-washed in lime green, I took some photos of their illuminated hoardings of plays they are doing or have done. An extraordinarily German version of Romeo and Juliet, and another picture of half a dozen men being hung on a gallows, but with at least two smiling. Not sure I’ll include that one – but I will drop in below the one of Frederick the Great throwing a big shadow: Magic Moment.

Bumped into Dr Stefan Wolf of Volkswagen when I got back to the hotel, together with a number of his colleagues. We repaired to the Newton bar a block or so away. I had walked past it ten minutes or so earlier, thinking Isaac. Helmut. I sat in front of a massive, wall-sized photograph of the man’s wives, all naked. But it was a nice Cabernet Sauvignon.

Frederick the Great’s statue on Unter den Linden (©JE)

Thursday, March 18, 2004

Wine & Cheese

Tell Muenzing, Katie Fry Hester, Kavita Prakash-Mani, Nick Robinson (©JE)

Meetings with advertising industry, Greater London Authority and an American ‘green’ author – Karen Christensen – who we have known for years, in parallel with a major meeting in the office with half a dozen companies on the reporting agenda, followed by a celebration of our first anniversary in the Holborn office. After I took it, it struck me that the photo, taken during the celebration (which included a blind tasting of half a dozen wines and a selection of cheeses from Neal’s Yard), illustrates SustainAbility’s diversity: Tell is German, Katie American, Kavita Indian and Nick from New Zealand.

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

ECGD

Day spent working flat out on the Global Compact study, except for a trip across to Canary Wharf for a meeting of the Export Credits Guarantee Department’s advisory council, where we went through the issues surrounding the extraordinary Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, which runs from the Caspian to the Mediterranean.

Monday, March 15, 2004

Spanish Government Falls

Spanish election throws up a major surprise: government out, opposition under Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in, promising to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq by 1 July. One reason commentators think the reverse happened is that the government had defaulted to blaming ETA, criticising those who suggested that this was 3/11, another Al-Qa’ida extravanganza.

Sunday, March 14, 2004

The Social in CSR

Evidence starts to point towards Al-Qa’ida. A new tape claims responsibility on behalf of the group and the Spanish authorities have arrested a number of people whose nationalities point away from ETA.

Today’s Observer notes that the Government will shortly publish draft regulations requiring over 1,000 top UK companies to publish their social and environmental performance. And The Sunday Times contains a Business in the Community supplement entitled ‘Companies That Count’. Subtitle: ‘Measuring, Managing and Reporting Responsible Business Practice’. My op-ed appears. The original text, which may have changed slightly in the published version, ran as follows:

Begins:

What a difference a single word can make, particularly if it happens to be social. In the wake of the Enron, Andersen and Global Crossing scandals, the US economy rocked on its heels as the Bush Administration and the New York Stock Exchange scrambled to bolt a series of stable doors after a stampeding herd of corporate horses. Under roiling political dust-clouds, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was whipped through to rein in corporate boards and their financial auditors. And the mantra on the lips of most American politicians and business leaders was corporate responsibility (CR).

Across the Atlantic, the language and thinking seem very different. Even in the wake of the Ahold, Equitable Life and Parmalat scandals, most Europeans still prefer to use the phrase corporate social responsibility (CSR). But, while it may seem that there is an ocean of difference between these two terms, recent marketplace controversies suggest that the difference may be more apparent than real. Lets look at just three.

First, the access to medicines issue. With some four billion ill-served people worldwide, there is growing interest in how they can be provided with things like clean water, affordable energy and drugs for diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. As a result, pharmaceutical companies like GSK, Novartis and Pfizer are under intense pressure to supply their products at or below cost to developing countries. The threat to conventional business models in the pharma sector is alarming.

Second, closer to home, we have obesity. Companies like Coca-Cola, Kraft and McDonalds have come under mounting pressure as the fat issue caught fire. Even companies likely to benefit mightily from obesity-related disease are worried. Take Denmarks highly ethical Novo Nordisk, which makes drugs for diabetes. On the face of it, obesity should be great for Novos business model, since overweight people are more likely to develop diabetes. But the longer term implications for health care systems are so dramatic that Novo has linked up with the World Health Organisation and Oxford University to find ways to slim down the problem to a manageable size by 2020.

Third, there is the geography of jobs crisis. As globalisation spurs major western companies to export jobs to places like Eastern Europe or to developing countries like Mexico, Vietnam or China, the flame of public indignation has ignited under companies like BT (with its call centres in India), Nike (with its habit of continuously shifting garment and shoe production to lower-cost countries) and Wal-Mart (accused of single-handedly hollowing out the US economy).

Whereas BT and Nike are now working energetically to engage their stakeholders on such issues, some companies will find it almost impossible to persuade the wider world that they are socially responsible. Think of Microsoft or the sheer aggression of the Wal-Mart business model, with some critics dubbing the worlds largest corporation a retail cancer. But whatever their motivations, businesses that ignore or fail to understand – hardening demands for responsibility, accountability and real sustainability risk paying a hefty price. Ask Monsanto.

Ends.

Saturday, March 13, 2004

The Great Drain Robbery

A weird globalisation story in The Times, entitled ‘Police look into Great Drain Robbery’. Apparently the effects of the economic boom in southern China can be felt in the streets of towns and cities as diverse as Gloucester, Grantham, Moldova and Shanghai. Holes are appearing in the said streets as manhole covers are stolen to feed China’s growing appetite for scrap metal. What started out as a manhole cover will probably end up being re-exported to Europe or wherever as a car, refrigerator or cooker. The problem is worst in China itself, where 1,826 covers were apparently stolen in the space of 45 days in Shanghai alone, and eight people who fell into the resulting holes drowned.

When I first came to London, I noticed that even if the streets were not paved with gold the pavements were festooned with manhole covers sporting the name ‘Elkington’. Ironically, it was shortly after I had been working in Egypt, trying to help protect some of the Nile Delta’s major wetlands, that I learned that the firm that makes the covers was started by a relative. Apparently he got his start when he rammed a metal rod one day through the puddled clay bottom of a flooded piece of land, which promptly drained. Given the appetite for productive farmland, his drainage business boomed – and the total area of wetlands shrank in lock-step.

Contribution, 1970

And the news also stirred the memory vaults, reminding me of a track by Shawn Phillips (see under Influences, ‘Other People‘), called Manhole Covered Wagon. Not my favourite song off his 1970 album Contribution, which was Withered Roses. All can be heard, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, at www.shawnphillips.com. Amazing to think that it’s now 34 years since we met him in Positano, on our way to Greece.

Baying for Shell’s Blood

Shell’s travails continue to attract much media attention. The Financial Times reports that the ousting of Sir Philip Watts hasn’t stopped the baying for blood. Other top executives, including Jeroen van der Veer, the new chairman, and Judy Boynton, the company’s chief financial officer, are also said to be vulnerable. It will be interesting to see what impact all of this will eventually have on the corporate social responsibility and sustainable development agendas, which Shell had embraced so wholeheartedly in the wake of its Brent Spar and Nigerian travails from 1995 on.

However close in you get to a company, and SustainAbility has been working with Shell since 1997, it’s impossible to know everything that’s going on. Another example of that uncomfortable fact turns up elsewhere in today’s FT, with commentary on the just-published Penrose inquiry report on Equitable Life, the pensions provider Elaine and I were with before it hit the wall.

John Chapman notes that in its heyday, which is when we joined, Equitable Life was very different from the rest of a highly exploitative industry, riddled with malpractice. In particular, he says, it was marked out by its “super efficiency, low charges, honest surrender values and avoidance of commission-hungry IFAs” [independent financial advisers]. Stupidly, we ignored the advice of our previous IFA, who warned against putting all our pension eggs in one basket.

Perhaps Equitable could have been saved if the Government had had a broader vison, Chapman suggests, being merged with the Post Office or a building society to break the hold of the current commision-hungry culture that dominates the UK pensions industry.

Milky Way

Part of The Creation of the Milky Way, 1637

Extraordinary painting in The Times Weekend Review today, showing The Creation of the Milky Way, painted in 1637 by Rubens. The immediate reason why it took my eye was that three streams of milk are shooting out from Juno’s breast past the head of a rather middle-aged looking infant Hercules, sitting on her lap. The milk curves through a dark night sky to become the star-fields of the Milky Way.

And those streams, in turn, caught my eye because of the conversation Hania and I had as we walked to the Yatra restraurant in Dover Street on Thursday evening, with Elaine and Peter Kinder of KLD. I was recalling what happened at an Oxford University Press reception at Ely House, in Dover Street, in 1977 – shortly after Gaia was born. Elaine was still breast-feeding at the time, but Gaia was at home with me. As Elaine stood talking with a man she had once worked with at OUP, she noticed to her horror that a jet of milk was arcing through her blouse and splashing off the man’s suit. She turned away before the damage was too great – or perhaps before he noticed!

As the four of us walked along, I was carrying a bag of books I had bought at Waterstone’s, including Felipe Fernadez-Armesto’s new book (incidentally published by OUP), So You Think You’re Human? An interesting question when the newspapers are awash with words and images on man’s inhumanity to man. I first met Felipe in New York at the 2002 World Economic Forum, held there in solidarity with a city rocked by the 9/11 attacks. Now today’s Guardian wonders whether the Madrid attacks represent Europe’s 9/11? Or perhaps 3/11?

But today’s Guardian also also runs a story purporting to show a far bigger disaster even than 9/11, with Manhattan being inundated by a tsunami – a still from a new film, The Day After Tomorrow, which is designed (but not necessarily destined) to make global warming an election issue this year in the US. It’s a tough sell in the US.

Had e-mail exchanges during the week with Peter Goldmark, a new member of SustainAbility’s Council who also recently joined Environmental Defense to run their climate change campaign. He has just written a play, which I’m reading, on what might happen if Osama bin Laden were to be captured. At the dinner on Thursday, someone mentioned a rumour that bin Laden had been captured nine days previously in Pakistan and was being held incommunicado. The news suggests otherwise, but who really knows? If it were true, though, it would put the Madrid bombings in a somewhat different light.

Strange times, strange rumours, strange calculations – will Madrid help or hurt the Bush re-election campaign? Whatever, we have to be optimistic that we can change American hearts and minds, but one of yesterday’s papers noted that Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s Governor, owns no less than seven Hummers. presumably each one needs its own oilfield. Schwarzenegger, at least in his Terminator role, has the wherewithal to fight for his oil, but it’s worth asking where our appetite for fossil fuels and the gathering processes of climate change will take us.

The Guardian piece on The Day After Tomorrow mentions the Global Business Network (www.gbn.org) scenario on climate change, which got headlines recently largely because it was prepared for the Pentagon. And the Pentagon, it was reported, is increasingly alarmed by the security implications of climate change. I use a slide drawing on the GBN scenario in some of my presentations at the moment, as an indication of just how far climate change could push us in the coming century.

Friday, March 12, 2004

Madrid

Two minute silence today in the middle of my speech to MBA students at London Business School, in memory of the nearly 200 people who died and the many injured in the Madrid rail bombings.

When the news first began to come through yesterday, my reaction was that this wasn’t ETA but Al Qa’ida, partly because of the scale and partly because of the multiple, simultaneous attacks. Spain’s involvement in what Al-Qa’ida not surprisingly see as a repeat of the Crusades makes the country an obvious target. But there’s a deeper, longer history of antipathy between the Spanish and the Arabs (or ‘Moors’), who it’s easy to forget occupied much of Spain for close on 800 years.

When in Barcelona recently, I talked to people who thought the ETA threat very much under control: my reaction then was that it’s almost impossible to exitinguish such movements, but this just feels different to anything ETA have done before.

And my next thought was how vulnerable many western cities now are: three of our offices are in cities with subway-like systems: London (Tube, and probably the likeliest target), San Francisco (BART) and Washington, DC (M).

In the taxi across to LBS (I had to carry a good deal of propaganda), I chatted to the driver about his time working on the Tube, years ago. He told hair-raising stories about how drivers and other colleagues consumed Gargantuan quantities of alcohol and drugs, one taking flagons of cider with him in the cab as he drove. Once when he couldn’t drive a train, the supervisor told him to go off to the pub until a train was available. When he said he hadn’t any money, the supervisor apparently gave him £10, a lot of money in those days. When the time came to drive, he was totally, incoherently drunk and couldn’t even make it out of the pub. He said the King’s Cross disaster tightened things up a lot, with spot tests for alcohol at least.

Arguing that the Tube system was wide open to attack, and even telling me how it might be done, he then commented that at times it seemed that the Underground staff didn’t need the IRA or Al Qa’ida to cause mayhem: it was a DIY job. And as for terrorists boarding overland trains, he said they would probably be scared off by how dangerous the trains are these days!

Monday, March 08, 2004

Good Migrations

Spent the day in Den Haag. Had planned to interview Pieter Winsemius for the Global Compact study before an ING advisory board meeting, but BA flight was delayed due to de-icing at Schiphol airport. Luckily, Pieter offered to drive me back to the airport and we did the interview on the road, driving along under the leading edge of a massive storm front. He was the Dutch environment minister, then led the McKinsey environment practice. Now, among other things, he chairs the advisory board for ING’s sustainability fund.

Got back to London to find excellent article in the Financial Times on SustainAbility’s just-launched report on responsible offshoring, carried out for BT and posted on their website (www.btplc.com/societyandenvironment/index.htm). Title of Alison Maitland’s article: ‘Offshoring: How BT achieved good migrations‘.

Sunday, March 07, 2004

Jet Lag and Bondage

Lovely piece in today’s New York Times on jet lag, by Pico Iyer. I quote: “I often think that I have traveled into a deeply foreign country under jet lag, somewhere more mysterious in its way than India or Morocco. A place that no human had ever been until 40 or so years ago and yet, now, a place where more and more of us spend more and more of our lives. It’s not quite a dream state, but it’s certainly not wakefulness, and though it seems as if we’re visiting another continent, there are no maps or guidebooks to this other world. There are not even any clocks.” Somewhere that emotions run riot.

Maybe jet lag (which I always say I don’t experience) is why I enjoyed two bouts of TV last night so hugely: Status Anxiety on Channel 4, by Alain de Botton, explored the fragility of self-worth based on the opinions of others, while 1999’s 007 film The World Is Not Enough, I confess, was the most enjoyable Bondage I have seen in over 20 years.

Jet lag also features in a stunning novel I’m reading at the moment, William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Have always loved his books, but this one is particularly engaging. The main protagonist, a ‘coolhunter’, has just arrived in London from New York, Gibson noting that “her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of feet over the Atlantic.”

Gibson later has one of his characters, Bigend, say that our notion of the future is very different from that enjoyed by our parents, let alone our grandparents. It’s almost as if we are suffering from a cultural form of jet-lag. “For us,” Bigend says, “things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.”

For me, one form of Hell would be a world with no future, another one with no books. Trawling around the Harvard Book Store and nearby Co-op, I came back with a case-full, among them: 1968, by Mark Kurlansky (whose Cod I adored); Emotional Design, by Donald Norman (sub-title: ‘Why we love – or hate – everyday things’); In Defense of Globalization, by Jagdish Bhagwati; Our Final Hour by Britain’s Astronomer Royal Martin Rees; Truman, by David McCulloch (whose biography of a previous US President, John Adams, was given to me some years back by Peter Kinder); The Change Makers, by Maury Klein; What Ifs? of American History, edited by Robert Cowley; and Wheels for the World, a huge book on Henry Ford and his company by Douglas Brinkley.

The last of these I largely bought because of Ford’s spectacular $5 a day offer to workers, made in 1914. One of those totally counter-intuitive steps from which an entire world then spooled, which I plan to reference in the Global Compact report we are working on.

And, finally, someone else who has been experiencing culture shock has been Gaia, after her move to Wiltshire last weekend. Alone for several days in the house, she writes of the “uninterrupted silence”, except for “the cow barn opposite, which sounds like a crate-load of tetchy brachiosaurs at dawn and dusk.” She also mentions colliding with celebrity cook Jamie Oliver and family in the gardens of nearby Babington House, “goslinged by about twenty uniformed ex-unemployed youths”. Maybe it’s jet-lag again, but I find the imagery ‘pops’ like corn in my simmering brain.

Saturday, March 06, 2004

Cambridge, MA

Memorial to ‘The Great Hunger’, Boston (©JE)

Arrived back this morning from Boston/Cambridge, where I have spent the past few days. Mainly there for the launch of the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The Faculty Chair for the CSRI is Professor John Ruggie, the Director Jane Nelson (a long-standing friend and member of SustainAbility’s Council). The project pulls together four existing KSG centres: The Center for Business and Government, The Center for Public Leadership, The Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Given the nature of university politics, which tend not to favour interdisciplinary ventures, this is quite an achievement. More details from the CSRI website (www.ksg.harvard.edu/cbg/csri.htm).

On the flight across, I read The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running the World, by Ann Florini. As I told her when I found myself sitting next to her at the CSRI launch, I took the book intending simply to skim it – and found myself absolutely gripped. A rare occasion when the adulatory blurbs on a book’s cover are more than mutual back-scratching between colleagues!

I stayed with Peter Kinder, co-founder and President of socially responsible investment firm KLD (www.kld.com). On the first evening, he suddenly said that Robert McNamara was talking at the Kennedy School, so off we went – to find an absolutely brimming-over audience in KSG’s John F. Kennedy, Jr. Forum, tier upon tier, to hear a man who both Peter and I loathed during the Vietnam War. As Secretary of Defense for Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, McNamara was a key architect of the Vietnam War. Even though he left government in 1967 to head the World Bank, his reputation among Baby Boomers has always been Darth Vaderish, to say the least. But he turned in a stellar performance on Wednesday evening, drawing on Errol Morris’s film The Fog of War, that has just won an Academy Award (www.errolmorris.com).

Among the things he talked about was the Cuban missile crisis, which he described as the “most dangerous moment in human history”. When he explained how far Cuba had actually got with stockpiling nuclear warheads, the case scarcely needed arguing further. President Castro, he said, admitted to McNamara himself many years later that he knew the missiles were there, that he had advised the Russians to use them, and that he knew (but accepted) the fact that much of Cuba would be wiped off the map as a result. No wonder McNamara warned the KSG students present about the deadly risks in having 7,500 strategic nuclear warheads in US hands alone, with one man’s finger potentially between us and Armageddon.

McNamara also noted that a key factor behind the US misreading of the Vietnamese situation was a total lack (at least among the US top brass) of understanding of – and empathy with – the Vietnamese themselves. He warned that the same issues are now surfacing in relations with the worlds of Islam. He asked the audience how many Arabic degrees we thought had been awarded in a recent year by all US universities. The answer: eight!

Given that I am currently reading, among many other books, Frederick Taylor’s insightful new book on the fire-bombing of Dresden on 13 February 1945, I was particularly interested in McNamara’s description of what it had been like to be involved in the B29 fire-bombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities in WWII. The first fire-raid on Tokyo alone, he recalled, burned alive an estimated 83,000 people. If we had lost WWII, he said, he and many others would have been branded war criminals.

But perhaps the most thought-provoking point McNamara made in the entire evening, pretty much as a coda to the discussion, was that the key thing that those present could do in their later careers would be to “surface the divisive issues”. Looking at the man, and listening to the sheer power of his delivery, I have to confess I wondered how much quarter he would have given to dissidents in his heyday?

Given the family histories of people like the Kennedys and (possibly also) McNamara, my eye was even more taken than usual by the memorials around Boston and Cambridge to ‘The Great Hunger’. Even the fire-raid tolls in the US pale in comparison. Reading the plaques around the memorial outside a Borders bookshop in Boston (see above), I was reminded that one million Irish people died and two million were driven into exile. The memorial recalled the ‘Coffin Ships’ that bore them (or at least the lucky ones) across the ‘Bowl of Tears’, their name for the Atlantic. The memorial attributed the disaster to crop failures, absentee landordism, colonialism and weak political leadership. It looked forward to the day when “history finally ceases to repeat itself”.

On the basis of what I had heard about the nuclear game of ‘Chicken’ between Castro, Kruschev and Kennedy, I can’t say I left Logan airport last night confident that we would break the cycles of human history, short of removing humanity from the scene entirely. But the sheer intellectual firepower of the CSRI event gave me some hope that we might be able to make at least some progress.

On the Thursday, for example, we had a high-energy debate between Gro Harlem Brundtland (former Director-General of WHO and Prime Minister of Norway), Conference Board President and CEO Richard Cavanagh, Accenture International Chairman Vernon Ellis, Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School and David Gergen, Director of KSG’s Center for Public Leadership.

And before leaving for the airport, I had lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club with Paul Hodge, who directs the Harvard Generations Policy project – and is founding editor of the new Harvard Generations Policy Journal, which can be downloaded at http://www.genpolicy.com/. Jane (Nelson) had put us in touch. Although Paul’s main current concern is the financial shockwaves that will be created as the Baby Boomers get to retirement age – with the first cohort turning 60 in two years – we got into all sorts of other areas of generational policy. One of his ideas: governments, and ideally companies too, should carry out generational impact assessments before taking major decisions.

Idle thought: Where would that have left British politicians during what we prefer to call ‘The Irish Potato Famine’ in the 1840s, let alone President Castro in the 1960s?

 

Sunday, February 29, 2004

Grand Theft Parsons

Sense of achievement, with major progress on the speeches, after huge brain-ache earlier in the week. Day spent getting Gaia off to her new home in Wiltshire, with two vans (one medium-sized, one tiny) heading west in convoy. Real sense of a watershed, with Hania also starting her new job at a film and TV agency tomorrow. Weirdly, the agency represents Gollum (see 21 February entry).

Yesterday, Hania showed me an advance video of a new film on the life – or rather death – of country-rock star Gram Parsons, Grand Theft Parsons. Though he disliked the term country-rock, that genre was pretty much of his making. The only time I saw The Byrds live, in 1969 in Covent Garden’s Middle Earth club, Gram was playing – this was the time of the vastly underrated Sweetheart of the Rodeo album. Also loved his later work with The Flying Burrito Brothers and with Emmylou Harris. The new film is a delightful tribute not only to Parsons but to the people behind the scenes who have helped keep the whole rockn’roll show on the road. A somewhat elaborated storyline, but a lovely vignette at the end.

Saturday, February 28, 2004

Corporate Predators

The last few days have involved preparing speeches for Atlanta, Baltimore, Berlin and Dubai, on a range of issues, including corporate social responsibility, pollution prevention and sustainable coffee production. Have been struggling to simplify the messages, given the need not just to entertain people but to inspire action.

My other big project at the moment, working closely with Seb Beloe and Jodie Thorpe, is for the UN Global Compact. We are looking at what needs to be done to take business-led voluntary initiatives ‘to scale’. The project also looks at the future responsibilities and roles of governments in this respect. And one of the things I set in train a few days back was a poll of fellow members of the Commission on Globalisation, operated by the State of the World Forum (www.worldforum.org). The replies have started to come in – they’re hugely interesting and provocative. Yesterday, for example, I heard from David Korten (www.davidkorten.org), who has written books like When Corporations Rule the World and The Post-Capitalist Future. He sees corporations, by their very nature and design, as predatory.

And today’s Finanical Times provides eloquent evidence of the continuing fall-out from predatory business like Equitable Life (the pension fund to which Elaine and I once belonged) and Enron. In the latter case, the UK Government – via its Export Credit Guarantees Department, whose Advisory Council I sit on – is now the subject of the largest suit in ECGD’s 30-year-plus history. Standard Chartered, ABN Amro and ANZ are seeking $60 million in relation to losses incurred with the Enron-backed (but ultimately mothballed) Dabhol power project in India. The $2.9 billion project, near Mumbai, was the largest single foreign investment in India. Enron managed to negotiate extremely high power tariffs and was accused of profiteering. The Corner House (www.thecornerhouse.org.uk), one of the most effective NGOs pressuring ECGD and other organs of government on such issues, noted that while non-one was accusing the banks or ECGD of wrong-doing, the project had long been dogged by allegations of corruption and human rights abuses.

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

The Afterlife of Brian

The Afterlife of Brian (©JE)

Just back from the Royal Festival Hall and, thanks to an invitation from Gray (brother), one of the musical highs of my life: Brian Wilson’s Smile concert. It was like witnessing a latter day rising from the almost-dead.

It’s no accident that the musical element of the Influences section of this website contains both the front cover of the Beach Boys’ Surfing USA and, in my ‘Desert Island Discs‘, Good Vibrations. Surfing USA was the first album I ever bought, in 1963 or 64, Good Vibrations remains my favorite pop song, and the Beach Boys feature massively in my music collection.

But this concert was really something else: Brian’s band was staggeringly good, the lost masterwork way beyond my expectations. Interesting, given the sunken wrecks theme of Sunday’s Journal entry, that Brian Wilson once said that reviving Smile would be like raising The Titanic. The Financial Times, no less, had given the opening concert in the series ***** and The Independent went so far as to compare the “perfect mosaic” of Smile to Bach. Gershwin or Cole Porter might be a bit more apt, but to hear songs like Good Vibrations, Heroes and Villains and Surf’s Up in the matrix Wilson had intended was pure magic. Wonderful, too, that the extraordinary lyricist Van Dyke Parks was invited back into the game – and got his own ovation on the first night.

And to have Brian Wilson resurrect first himself and then Smile 37 years after the whole thing disassembled in 1967 was little short of miraculous. But just as striking was the way the band played classics like Surfing USA, California Girls, Dance, Dance, Dance, Help Me Rhonda and Barbara Ann. The music was extraordinary both in terms of how close it was to the originals and of how wierdly 21st century it sounded.

Thank you Gray, thank you Brian.

Sunday, February 22, 2004

HMS Hood

HMS Hood (US Naval Historical Center)

Wonderful white blossom erupting as we walk around the reservoir this afternoon. High wind, with a heron on an island holding itself like a submarine on legs, to minimise wind resistance. Talking to Pat (mother) this evening about recent TV programs on the Dunkirk evacuations; she recalled going down to Chatham shortly before Dunkirk. Remembers the cherry blossom. Whistled aboard HMS Keith, on which her brother Paul’s godfather was serving at the time. Shortly afterwards, the Keith went to Dunkirk, where she was sunk by enemy aircraft: a bomb went straight down her smokestack, apparently. And shortly after that, a friend came by Coalbrookdale and told Pat, Paul and their family what had happened. But it’s alright, he said, Paul’s godfather had been posted before the Keith was sunk. Where? To HMS Hood. She was sunk less than a year later, in May 1941, by the Bismarck (her wreck discovered by Robert Ballard, see ‘Journal’ entry for 30 September 2003). Only three men out of over 1400 survived. Paul’s godfather wasn’t among them. The wreck of the Hood was found 60 years later, in 2001, 2800 metres down in the Denmark Strait (http://hmshood.com).

Saturday, February 21, 2004

Gollum and Dunkirk

Gollum (© New Line Productions)

Finally saw The Return of the King last night with Elaine and Hania: unbelievable. Gollum must be one of the most perfectly realised characters in film history. And, sadly, there seems to be a Gollum-like character at work nearby. A large black Samsonite trolley suitcase that washed up not far away in Barnes, and was first reported when I was in Barcelona, turned out to contain the remains of a Pakastani woman, Mrs Ahmed, 27, who was a check-in clerk at Heathrow and had vanished on her way to a hairdresser’s on Valentine’s Day. Walked past the spot this evening and the police appeal for witnesses and information: she looked a lovely young woman. Behind, the curving river looked like hammered, blued steel in the dark, a long launch with a brilliant stern light giving the scene a John Buchan touch.

At least she was found. What will palaeontologists millions of years from now, perhaps descended from rats or coatimundi, make of the compacted fossil layers of 20th and 21st century flotsam and jetsam?

On a happier note, Julia (Hailes) stayed with us on Thursday night, en route to speak at an Economist conference, and yesterday afternoon Fran(cesca) van Dijk – who used to work with SustainAbility – dropped in for tea at SustainAbility, with her husband Ken and children Freya and Finn. At a time when I seem to spend much of my life hauling trolley suitcases through airports, it’s tremendous to renew long-standing friendships. And that’s what I feel with The Lord of the Rings. Reading the 3-volume series in the late 1960s was one of the most powerful experiences of the era – and Peter Jackson has more than done Tolkien justice.

This evening, we watch the Battle of France program, featuring No. 1 squadron and the excavation of Billy Drake’s Hurricane (see 6 February entry). Reminiscent of the excavation of Tim’s own Hurricane (see Influences/Family/The True Battle of Britain). Very moving, as was the following BBC2 program on Dunkirk, featuring extraordinary archive footage and interviews of veterans. Julia’s father Jack was captured during this period and spent the war as a prisoner of war.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Barcelona

Just in from Barcelona, having seen a quite spectacular aerial view of what can only have been Beachy Head, its chalk cliffs brilliantly lit by the early morning sun. Last night I gave a lecture to several hundred people at a leading business school, ESADE (Escuela Superior de Administracion y Direccion de Empresas). When I arrived, I unexpectedly found myself pitched into a TV interview and then back-to-back interviews with two major newspapers. One issue that came up repeatedly, both in the interviews and in discussion with ESADE Faculty members over lunch and dinner, was what they called “the sustainability of employment”. I was asked by one professor whether we had worked in this area and initially answered no, then recalled the fairly extensive piece of work we have just done with BT on the “geography of jobs“. That will be published imminently.

The immediacy of the issue in Spain was brought home forcefully this morning when I picked up a copy of The International Herald Tribune. ‘Spanish labor clashes at dockyards leave 60 hurt’ was the caption of a photograph showing damage from a violent confrontation between dock workers and police in Seville, which left 38 workers and 12 policemen hurt. Another 10 officers were injured in a related battle in Cadiz. From our US office, Philippa (Moore) sent me a listing of US companies today that are being pilloried for exporting jobs by a CNN program hosted by Lou Dobbs (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight/).

The US presidential election is certainly turning the heat up under this one – and the rest of the world is going to get an idea of just how committed the US is to globalisation on anyone’s terms but their own. A semi-sore point with me, having been stopped a couple of times when entering the States, particularly in Detroit, and asked by aggressive immigration officals why Americans can’t do the work we’re doing?

Sunday, February 15, 2004

Up A Tree

Gaia, with para boots, chainsaw and family heirloom

Last night, Elaine, Hania and I watched the New Zealand film Whale Rider, the story of a Maori girl who has to fight her grandfather to become chief of her tribe. The dramatic tension flows from the fact that women are not allowed to be chiefs, or to take part in the training of chiefs. The high point is when she rides a right whale after a mass stranding of a pod of right whales, which she appears to have caused.

The story put me in mind of a picture of Gaia (see above) which I couldn’t use in the main body of this website because its dimensions didn’t fit Rupert’s design. After her time with the anti-road-campaigners, she got her teeth into the arboreal world and went off to Merrist Wood to train to be a tree surgeon. The only female student on the course. She succeeded and then went back to Edinburgh to set up The Lumberjills, to do tree work in the city and its surroundings. This picture was taken for a profile of her in The Glasgow Herald. Wearing an old family heirloom: I think because the journalist wanted to cover both her forestry antics and her exploits in the field of fashion. It all comes to mind, I suspect, because she is folding her tent in Edinburgh and moving south in a week or two.

As to Gaia and Hania’s surviving grandparents, I spoke to Pat and Tim today. Pat talked of the attrition rate in the group of pilots in the photos I had sent them (see 6 February entry). Only two of the pilots in the group shot survived, Tim and Pat Hancock (in Mae West jacket) – who died last year. One of the group with the Hurricane, F/Lt Demozay, wearing a dark French uniform, was a French pilot who had been flown out of France sitting in the lap of a Spitfire pilot. He, too, was killed.

Tim said he had just been to have an X-ray for his knees. Apart from the arthritis, the doctors were surprised to find his knees splattered with dark spots. It’s shrapnel from when he was shot down in the Battle of Britain. Asked whether he wasn’t worried about contamination, he said it had all been pretty well cauterised when the Hurricane’s fuel tank blew up.

Friday, February 13, 2004

Great Whites Et Al

Great white shark (www.animalyawns.com/sharksleft.htm)

Started yesterday with my mouth open wide, in the arms of the dentist. Then, last night, I gave the second in a new series of Linacre Lectures at Oxford University on the subject of NGO accountability, following on from the first lecture last week by Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth. Nice welcome from Paul Hannam and Dr Paul Jepson of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI), then on to tea with Professor Paul Slack, Linacre College’s Principal, and a number of his colleagues, including Professor Diana Liverman, who now runs ECI (www.eci.ox.ac.uk).

To get things off to a lively start, my second slide was of a great white shark, as a trailer for our NGO typology of Sharks, Killer Whales (Orca), Sealions and Dolphins. This resulted from a project we did for BP’s board in 1996, but also featured in our recent report The 21st Century NGO. The original idea was suggested by the thinking of Max Nicholson, who argued that NGOs could be broken down into polarisers and integrators on one axis, and discriminators and non-discriminators on the other. We took that idea and dropped marine creatures into each of the resulting four cells, as follows:

Shark (non-discriminating polarizers): Acts on instinct, tactical at best, attacks any target in distress, often attacks in packs, and happiest in feeding frenzies; not particularly receptive to new information once there is blood in the water.

Orca (discriminating polarizers): Highly intelligent, strategic, hunts over long distances, operates in ‘resident’ and ‘transient’ modes (‘residents’ hunt salmon, therefore keep their dorsal fins above water and make a good deal of noise, since their prey – salmon – can’t hear and doesn’t spend much time looking about above water; while ‘transients’ hunt marine mammals which can both see and hear, so run deep and silent), and attacks not only seals and sealions but also, sometimes, dolphins.

Sealion (non-discriminating integrators): Keen to please, attractive to mass audiences, ‘performs tricks for whoever has the bucket of fish’, often professional and well trained, prefers inshore waters, and gets anxious if separated from the group.

Dolphin (discriminating integrators): Great capacity to learn, adapts strategies and behaviours to context, creative, playful, can fend off sharks.

Happily, the debate with the capacity audience took off, with a forest of hands when the open forum was announced. And it’s interesting how well the 1996 work has stood the test of time. When we did the original research for BP, we found a great many NGOs heading, or wanting to head, into the ‘Dolphin’ space. Hence the title of the resulting report: Strange Attractor.

Last night I was asked, once again, where I would place SustainAbility in the matrix? At the time of the original research, a fair number of people saw us operating in – even defining – the Dolphin space. But as a number of us walked back from the lecture last night, I wondered – tongue very firmly in cheek – whether we aren’t sometimes a bit like a Portuguese Man’o’War, drifting in from outside the frame, stinging everything in sight and then drifting off into the blue? In reality, though, we have always been very much pro-NGO, are often taken for an NGO ourselves (we have been described variously as a ‘for-profit NGO’ and a ‘campaigning company’), and are determined to help NGOs wake up and adapt in good time to the emerging accountability challenge.

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Cannes

‘Eagle owl’ in Second Port, Cannes (©JE)

Having signed a confidentiality agreement, probably all I can say is that I was in Cannes on Monday and Tuesday, speaking at a conference organised in the Inter-Continental Carlton Hotel by a major pharmaceutical company. One key issue we discussed was the sustainability of their business model.

In the morning, I walked east along the Boulevard de la Croisette, hard by the Mediterranean. The sky was brilliant blue, the pavement recently washed, roller-bladers scooting by. The thin strip of sand between the boulevard and the Baie de Cannes was densely pock-marked by footprints and caterpillar tracks. Everywhere the sound of motors: cranes, bulldozers, jackhammers, scooters, cars, buses, trucks, motor-boats. As I walked around the Second Port and Port Canto, marvelling at the size of the yachts, and at the number of ‘For Sale’ notices they sported, my eye was caught by one boat whose brilliant paintwork was protected by a large model eagle owl. Odd, end-of-the-world feeling.

Saturday, February 07, 2004

Angels

Covent Garden 07-02-04 (©JE)

Bridges and angels’ wings seemed to be everywhere today. The bridges corkscrewed aerially between buildings in Covent Garden, in the show Anything Goes (with the SS American as a floating bridge between the New World and Old), to which Hania took us as a birthday present for Elaine, and then again in Angels in America (with angels bridging this world and the next by crashing through ceilings), which ran on Channel 4 from 21.00 to after midnight. Extraordinary television.

I remember being blown away by Cole Porter’s Anything Goes (dating from 1934) when it was covered by Harper’s Bizarre in 1967 (still have the LP, one of the first I bought on going to university), but this afternoon I was particularly taken by ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow’, the mock-spiritual belted out by Reno and the Angels.

So maybe, on reflection, it was angels that were ubiquitous? This evening, Tim (father) e-mailed photos of a new painting Caroline (sister) has just done of Gaia (daughter) dressed as Amelia Earhart (who disappeared in the Pacific in 1937), complete with aviator’s goggles (see sample, 30 November 2003). And that reminded me of when Gaia used to go to school (St Paul’s) wearing a huge pair of home-made angel’s wings, which she would sit and quietly flap during morning assembly.

My memory is that the High Mistress decided that the wings should be banned. Unfortunately for the authorities, there was nothing in the school’s rules allowing wings to be banned – so they were redefined as a hat and banned as such. That sparked something of a rebellion, with students and staff divided on whether this wasn’t a bit dictatorial? Gaia was summoned and asked whether the wings were being worn with seditious intent? She replied that she wore them because they made her – and others – happy. So the ban was removed. Contrary creature that she is, Gaia promptly shed the wings.

Friday, February 06, 2004

Sgts Berry and Albonico

Sgts Berry and Albonico

Pilots of No 1 squadron, with Tim (my father) third from right

Fascinating unsolicited e-mail from John Hayes-Fisher today, linked to the Battle of Britain story told elsewhere on this site (see under Influences/Family, then click on Battle of Britain).

Dear John

I have come across your name on many occasions, probably initially through my degree (Environmental Studies) and in the New Scientist and almost certainly when I made a programme over 10 years ago on sustainability for BBC2’s Nature Series, when Michael Buerk was the presenter.

However the reason why I’m writing is completely unrelated. I am making a programme about the RAF’s No 1 Squadron in the Battle of France and I was searching the web for references to armour plating being fitted to Hurricanes. I think it was with this search that I came across the article you had written in the Guardian about your father’s time with the Squadron and noticed reference to Sgt Berry who was one of the pilots with No 1 Squadron in France – and as you say was later killed in the Battle of Britain.

I believe that Berry was instrumental in saving your father’s life and I thought you might be interested in seeing a photo of Berry taken outside the town hall at Neuville, where the Squadron were billeted for the Autumn of ’39 and first part of 1940. I am also sending a copy of another photo I have found in the No 1 Squadron scrapbook which we are borrowing for the programme. Needless to say, you will probably recognise the man third from the right.

Our programme is probably going out on BBC2 at 8pm on Saturday 21st February and is called Billy and the Fighter Boys. As I say, it’s about No 1 Squadron’s time in the Battle of France and in it we follow aviation archaeologists as they discover the remains of Billy Drake’s Hurricane, which he bailed out of in May 1940, and excavate it while he is present. Maybe your father might be interested in watching? Being in Billy’s company has left with a deep sense of humility and admiration for the pilots of 1940, one which I hope comes out in the programme.

Regards

John

Thursday, February 05, 2004

Nike

Statue in Hotel Lucia symbolises multidimensional stakeholder process – at least in my mind.

Just in from supper with Elaine and Mark Lee, who is joining SustainAbility from BSR. Arrived back in London earlier today from Portland, via San Francisco (which, coincidentally, is where Mark is based). Had gone to take part in what was billed as Nike’s first major multistakeholder event, on Tuesday and Wednesday. Nike, to be fair, have already done a fair amount of stakeholder engagement – indeed, I took part in one interesting session they hosted in Portland a few years back. This time, though. the event was on a much larger scale and was held in the Tiger Woods building on the Nike campus. Stakeholders were broadly very positive – and keen that other companies should do similar sessions.

The three key themes focused on what Nike should do in relation to: the imminent ending of the multi-fibre arrangement (MFA); gender issues in the supply chain; and China. A fascinating learning experience on all fronts – and remarkably well run by Nike. Facilitated by David Sibbett of The Grove Consultants International (www.grove.com), who charted the evolving debate on vast sheets of paper. So quick and accurate was he that one person said it was almost as if he was “chaneling”.

The MFA issues were almost all news to me. I had read about the planned ending of the MFA quota system for textiles and clothing around the time of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting in Doha, when most developing countries were gung-ho about ending what they then saw as an unfair trade system. At the time, Sri Lanka claimed that the end of the MFA would boost its share of trade in these areas, while the Bangladeshis actively lobbied for a quicker phase-out of the MFA. Today, by contrast, as the International Textile Garment & Leather Workers’ Federation (ITGLWF) puts it, “panic is the order of the day in most textiles and clothing exporting nations as governments contemplate industrial meltdown.”

A key reason for the shift in opinion is that other developing countries have only recently woken up to the degree to which China is likely to win in the new game. And the likely impact on their own economies – reflecting huge dependency on exports of textiles and clothing – is illustrated by the fact that for many least developed and small developing countries the sector now accounts for more than 90% of industrial exports and more than 50% of total employment. On current evidence, the impact on employment in countries like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka could be profound. The question for Nike and the other stakeholders present: What can be done to at least moderate the negative impacts?

On the flights out, I read Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons, which Geoffrey Chandler gave me recently. Published in 1932, the book is delightful, funny and very much a work of its period: it talks of a “Jew-shop” and looks forward into a near-future in which there have been modest little wars (there is mention, I recall, of an Anglo-Nicaraguan war of ’46). Weird that people couldn’t sense the disturbance in the force-field caused by the impending WWII. What are we missing in the same way today? On the flights back, I read most of Steve Kemper’s book Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Dean Kamen’s Quest to Invent a New World. Kamen (www.dekaresearch.com) was the man behind the Segway Human Transporter, launched a while back after a period of intense secrecy and hype. His interest in technologies like the Stirling engine and water treatment technologies for the developing world potentially make him someone to try to talk to for the social entrepreneurs book.

Sunday, February 01, 2004

It’s the System Stupid

A WEF piece I wrote today. Edited version posted on http://www.opendemocracy.net on 5 February.

‘IT’S THE SYSTEM, STUPID!’

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jose Maria Figueres (©WEF)

Even when jet-lagged, Bill Clinton knows how to hold Davos Man and Woman in the palm of his hand. Count me more or less in their number. Kicking off this years World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org) on 21 January, he used language which was to resonate through the rest of that high-octane, high testosterone week. Nothing new there: Google the phrase Its the Economy, Stupid! – the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign slogan – and youll find its echoes everywhere. But now, it seems, Clintons implicit message when on the broad range of economic, social and environmental challenges we face is, Its the System, Stupid!

Instead of making flying visits to people like the Grameen Banks Muhammad Yunus, he suggested, we should bring Yunus and folk like the property-rights-for-the-poor campaigner Hernando de Soto in from the cold. Mainstream them. No doubt some corporate bottoms shifted uneasily in their seats at this call for some sort of Third Way revolution, but what exactly was Clinton prescribing, exactly? Sadly, at least in my memory, he was long on concept and short on detail.

He was, he said, all for systematic change, but the scale of the challenges we now face requires systemic change. Well, fine, and no doubt he would have won nods from many of those across the road at the Public Eye on Davos (www.evb.ch) and, indeed, at the anti-WEF World Social Forum, held this year in Mumbai, India (www.wsfindia.org). But most of these people, I suspect, would have soon parted company with the Davos crowd even with Clinton – in terms of how much, how far, how fast and at whose expense.

Thinking back, though, it strikes me that it would be easy to over-dramatise the chasm between Davos and Mumbai. The divides are there, of course, but, willingly or not, both sides are in the process of adjusting their mindsets. In fact, this was the third time I had attended the World Economic Forums annual summit and I was forcefully struck by just how far both the nature and content of the debate have shifted over the past three years.

At WEF, many once forceful globalizers are now off balance, some even taking part in sessions on corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. Its not yet a question of Globalizers Anonymous, but the agenda is a lot more nuanced than it was just a few years back. And, for the most part still in a parallel universe, a growing number of former anti-globalizers are trying on labels like alter-mondialiste and talking in terms of responsible globalisation.

Several swallows never did make a summer, but the basis for some form of convergence is clearly there. That really wasnt the case a few years back. The first time I got the call, in 2002, the WEF event was held in New York, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The following year, 2003, most of the caravan returned happily to snowy Davos, in Switzerland. This time, though, there were bitter recriminations between America and its allies – who were actively planning for war and those who opposed invasion, with or without UN sanction. One of the sessions I remember best was the one where General Wesley Clark pointed energetically to places on the map of Iraq where the coalition forces expected to be attacked with anthrax and other weapons of mass destruction.

What a difference twelve months can make. This year, by contrast, US Vice-President Dick Cheney was in conciliatory mood. And my overall impression, while British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw drew no cheers for his lacklustre defence of the Iraqi venture, was that most participants were much more interested in what would happen to the US recovery and to the dollar. Most seemed to have little appetite for major changes in the economic architecture.

And something else had changed too, it seemed to me. Looking back, 2002 saw the WEF summit in New York invaded by a fairly considerable number of NGOs and fellow travellers, myself included. The trend evolved further in 2003. On both occasions, demonstrations in the streets outside helped keep the political pot bubbling. You could almost feel the steam percolating up through the floorboards into some of the sessions. This year, by contrast, the security forces choked off most of the protests in and around Davos, and whether it was a related trend or not the NGO voices seemed muted.

Behind the scenes, true, there were clashes between WEF officials and some NGOs on the best ways forward. Afterwards, the head of one highly reputable NGO told me that he they – would not be coming back. I could understand the frustration. A couple of the parallel sessions I attended were surprisingly glib and ill-informed, although in my experience they were the exception. While you hear some of their research partners seethe that the relationship with WEF is pretty one sided, with the Forum claiming most of the credits, it has positioned itself as the most coherent global platform for integrated debate in this area.

When I challenged WEF co-CEO Jose Maria Figueres, a former president of Costa Rica, on the issue of whether the Forum would ever take a stand position on a major policy issue, he stressed that it is essentially neutral in what it does. But, however you judge that claim, it really is leaning into the debate a bit more these days.

This year, for example, the WEF Global Governance Initiative launched its first annual report . And it is surprisingly critical of current efforts to tackle the priority issues identified at the 2000 UN Millennium Summit, in the form of the Millennium Development Goals. Scoring each of seven areas of activity out of a maximum of 10 for 2003, WEF set the numbers such that a 0 means retrogression, whereas a 10 means that the world that is, national governments, businesses, civil society and international organizations taken together – essentially did everything needed to be on track to reach the goals.

The report came up with the following results: peace and security (3), poverty (4), hunger (3), education (3), health (4), environment (3) and human rights (3). Reading the numbers, it struck me that the world really deserves a school report I got some time late in the 1950s: Sets himself low standards and consistently fails to achieve them.

Whatever you think of WEF, this is an important contribution. Nor is this the only initiative WEF is helping drive forward in this area. Indeed, one of the reasons the NGOs probably seemed a bit muted to me this year was that the voices of the social entrepreneurs in Davos had been wound up several notches. Convened by the Schwab Foundation (www.schwabfound.org), also founded by WEF founder Klaus Schwab and his wife Hilde, the entrepreneurs came together for the first time at the WEF summit in New York. After a slightly wobbly start, more of them hit the ground running in Davos in 2003 and most really got into their stride this year.

Most social entrepreneurs today are unknown to the general public. Some, like Muhammad Yunus or Bunker Roy of the Barefoot College, may be well known to Bill Clinton and be covered fairly regularly in the international media, but for most of us most of what they do tends to disappear into the background noise. Nor are they guaranteed to succeed. Many of them will fail, some more than once. Such is the life of entrepreneurs, perhaps even more so of social entrepreneurs. But these people have the potential to transform the way in which hundreds of millions of people live, learn and work.

A huge and growing variety of social entrepreneurs are tackling such issues as environmental protection, family planning, the empowerment of women, fair trade, food security, the homeless, HIV/AIDS orphans and youth development. Where markets fail, as they do in relation to many of these issues, social entrepreneurs are working on leapfrog thinking, technology and business models to do the previously undoable. They are not primarily motivated by profit although many are more than happy to make a profit.

In short, the phrase The impossible takes a little longer could have been coined for them. It has been my great good fortune to be in the passenger seat as they began their WEF breakthrough. In 2002, I sat in on the first WEF social entrepreneur session in New York. In 2003, I facilitated the first Davos social entrepreneurs session. And this year, with Pamela Hartigan, who runs the Schwab Foundation, I had the extraordinary privilege of interviewing 15 or so social entrepreneurs for a book we are planning. Thats around a quarter of the Schwab Foundations current network – and I emerged supercharged.

No wonder Clinton name-checks these people in his speeches. Both he and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan have every excuse for pleading exhaustion in the wake of their continuous efforts to get these issues onto the political agenda. But an hour with any of these entrepreneurs is like the shot of monkey gland extract that some rich people apparently used to come to Switzerland for. (And, who knows, perhaps some of the Davos crowd still do?)

Whatever, the real question right now is how we can initiate the necessary top-down changes to the market system to help social entrepreneurs bring their bottom-up activities to scale. Maybe it will help if we adopt the Its the System, Stupid! mantra, even sticking it on our fridge doors. But we can all be sure of one thing: only if we are prepared to throw our collective weight behind these extraordinary pioneers can we hope to see evidence of real progress in future Global Governance Initiative scorecards.