Archive

Monday, December 31, 2007

THE NEXT BIG THING: FROM CSR TO SD?

I was particularly struck by this piece on the ‘Next Big Thing’ in today’s Financial Times:

Goodbye to corporate social ­respons­ibility?

Never mind rising sea levels: the waves of cynicism washing over corporate executives as they push their CSR agendas promise to become life-threatening in 2008. In the inevitable life cycle of management fads CSR is now heading for the exit. Customers are generally unconvinced by the hype. And “social responsibility” was always too flimsy a concept to gain serious traction with business leaders.

That gives us a clue as to the identity of the next Big Thing in management: sustainability. Unlike CSR, this concept has some meat and commercial potential to it. Innovations that make money while helping to reduce carbon emissions are actually worth pursuing. So here’s one further prediction for next year: the urgent rebranding to be carried out by all those CSR consultancies, which will be replacing the old acronym with the more contemporary “sustainability” label.

Stefan Stern.

For more: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/eb14b4b2-b6fe-11dc-aa38-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

POISONED

Thundering rain in the night, continuing as I woke to Christmas 2007. We had decided not to travel, but instead to catch our breath before 2008. Gaia is heading off to Cornwall to make a film, Hania to Transylvania, so we’re on our own – though we had a rare dinner party on the 22nd with the likes of Adam Ford (who was vicar at St Paul’s Girls’ School when G and H were there) and his partner Ros, Ritu Khanna from SustainAbility, Raj Thamotheram of AXA and David Grayson, now of Cranfield University. Joyous evening, then went out to a nearby drinks party on 23rd with Penny Egan (who I first knew when she ran the RSA) and her family.

Otherwise we have been reading and watching films. One of the books I’m reading at the moment is Michael Chabon’s extraordinary The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Had read The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier & Clay when Tom Delfgaauw gave it to me some years ago, but even so have been surprised to be ensnared – though it took me 196 pages to really get into it. Truly an alternate universe.

Meanwhile one of the books Elaine gave me today was Christopher Reid’s collection of the letters of Ted Hughes. Oh dear, couldn’t help myself. Knowing he had written me into a poem that The Times ran in 1987 when he was Poet Laureate, and which subsequently appeared in his Collected Poems (http://johnelkington.com/profile-ted-hughes.htm), I confess that I took a look around to see if I appeared in any of his letters. And yes I do, in a letter to Michael Hamburger dated 12 September 1987 (pages 538-539). Fills in more of the background to his sending Margaret Thatcher a copy of The Poisoned Womb. Weird: it’s a bit like finding your likeness in an underground cave painting from a bygone era. Not sure the typo “Poisonned” was his or his editors at Faber & Faber, but really who cares?

Friday, December 21, 2007 

LIVE MINT

My latest column on India’s LiveMint can be found at http://www.livemint.com/2007/12/19230850/How-to-avoid-a-Jurassic-Park.html

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

RXML – SON OF ROUTEMASTER

If I had to vote on London’s next Mayor in relation to just one issue, I would probably vote for anyone who swore to replace all this city’s wretched ‘bendy buses’ with the proposed successor to my favourite bus of all time, the Routemaster. Entering service in 1956, this was successively replaced by grotesque, gargantuan, totally inhuman constructions that seemed like something from War of the Worlds. Or something soldered together with someone who usually makes rough-and-ready water tanks. By contrast the Routemasters, the last of which was withdrawn in 2005, were warm, feminine and open, in that you could hop on and off with ease.

These days I regularly do battle, sometimes pretty much literally, with all sorts of buses when cycling around London, but with none more than the bendy variety that clog up our urban arteries like so much livid red cholesterol. Ken Livingstone said in 2000 that “only a ghastly, dehumanised moron would want to get rid of” the Routemaster. Hmmm. He did a U-turn four years later. Next year’s Mayoral elections will revolve around many issues, but here’s one around which Londoners could surely come together? What better symbol for the London we want? The new RMXL, which could be in service by 2010 (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article3071104.ece), would bring back that open deck and, in addition, be hydrogen-powered. My pencil’s itching.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

WAS BALI A SUCCESS?

Was asked on short order by openDemocracy to do an appreciation of the outcomes of the climate change conference in Bali – and the result can be found at http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/climate_change/was_bali_a_success.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

DEMOCRACY & SUSTAINABILITY

Across from Heathrow this morning to the Dana Centre (http://www.danacentre.org.uk/) at the Science Museum to meet John Lotherington of the 21st Century Trust and people from the Museum, to discuss the two-part conference we’re planning together for 18 March on the theme of ‘Democracy & Sustainability’. Seems to me that this is one of the great themes of our age, i.e. whether current forms of democracy are constitutionally unable to grapple with the sorts of fundamental challenges that issues like climate change now pose.

For me history is at best equivocal on this. During the Depression, FDR took extraordinary powers and ditto Churchill in WWII. On the other hand, there is the post-WWII Marshall Plan. Interesting to see Al Gore saying that the challenge we now face is equivalent to the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan and the Apollo Program, all rolled into one – and done simultaneously, at scale. And here’s a Dana Centre view, inside out. Seemed to me to sum up the need to turn our own thinking on all of this inside out.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

REINHARD MOHN FELLOWSHIP

View from my bedroom window

Flew today to Berlin, with the plane landing in thick fog: only saw the runway when we were a foot or two above it. The BA pilot had said he was going to let the computers land us. In the city for an evening event hosted by Bertelsmann AG, including their CEO, honouring the Reinhard Mohn Fellowship (http://www.reinhard-mohn-fellowship.com/index.php3). The Fellowship was a gift from the Bertlesmann Executive Board to Reinhard Mohn, who rescued the company in the wake of WWII, to celebrate his eightieth birthday.

Among the speakers, Professor Dr. Dr. (sic) hc. mult. Rita Sussmuth. Charming, but I suspect that only in Germany would one come across such an impresssive honorific! I followed with a keynote – and then got a chance to meet a number of the Fellows, including Dr. Ndidi Nnoli Edozien of Nigeria’s Growing Businesses Foundation, Muhammad Azam Roomi of Pakistan’s Women’s Empowerment Group (who did a great speech) and Ellie Maxwell of Britain’s Firefly Youth Project. A joyous wake, in that the Fellowship is coming to an end. What extraordinary people.

Friday, December 07, 2007

FISH MOVING SLOW IN THE DOURO

Just back from a flying trip – with significant delays both ways – to Porto in Portugal. The conference I was speaking at was held in the giant, converted customs house alongside the River Douro, and focused on the role of small and medium-sized enterprises in Europe’s economy. A key purpose of the event was to launch the latest crop of European Enterprise Awards (http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/entrepreneurship/smes/awards/index_en.htm).

After my session and lunch, it was pouring with rain and the Douro was cloaked in cloud, but I decided to go for a long walk, crossing Gustave Eiffel’s bridge to take a look at the cellars used to store the port wine for which the city and region is famous. Sense of time out of time, with a wonderful moment spent watching large fish moving in the green waters of the Douro.

Rails from the old order disappear under sofa

Fogscape

Fish

Port boats

Port boats 2

Port boats 3

Eiffel’s bridge

Don from behind

Roofscape

Cockburn’s

Bassist – and cat

Don 2

Question-mark goes over my head

Customs House roof (detail)

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

FRONT LINE

Eric Rassman, who worked on our Skoll Program, looks on, spellbound or stupefied

Truly wonderful evening with the European end of SustainAbility – plus John Schaetzl, our new non-executive director – at the Frontline Club, a charity/social enterprise that promotes independent journalism and freedom of expression worldwide (http://www.frontlineclub.com/). I did a celebration of Seb Beloe, our Vice-President of Research & Advocacy, who after around ten years with us is moving across to Henderson as their Head of SRI research.

The photographs below show him at work, rest and play – the first in our conference room, with Mark Lee, the second in a Holland Park pond, shovelling weed on a SustainAbility away day with Virginaia Terry. He and Virginia set up our first U.S. office, in New York, and in my Frontline remarks I recalled how our London team gathered around a phone and computer in our then Knightsbridge office as the U.S. team described to us what they were watching – as two jet airliners flew into the World Trade Center just across the water from them. The third, in happier times, shows Seb relaxing as Jodie (Thorpe) poles an Oxford punt on another away day, while Judy (Kuszewski) sounds of unseen shoals.

Mark and Seb

Virginia and Seb

Jodie, Seb and Judy

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

SIR GEOFFREY CHANDLER SPEAKS OUT

Went to my last Trustees’ meeting at the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre this morning, handing over the role to my colleague Kavita Prakash-Mani – and magically re-emerging as Special Advisor. The Centre has evolved phenomenally since earlier days when the Trustees used to convene in SustainAbility’s offices at a weekend. Founder-Director Chris Avery is a truly remarkable social entrepreneur.

There have been few organisations I have been more excited to be part of and the decision to morph into a different role is driven simply by my sense that I should churn such appointments periodically to keep things fresh.

Then, this evening, many of us went across to SOAS for the launch of the Sir Geoffrey Chandler Speaker Series by Lord Joel Joffe, with the first speech given by Geoffrey. Wonderful event, only slightly marred by theft of my little camera, which I had stupidly left in my coat in an unguarded cloakroom when distracted by people I hadn’t seen for a while. Luckily, I have got an old variant of the same camera – given to me on a trip to Japan some years back by Canon. Video coverage of the proceedings can be found at http://www.business-humanrights.org/Documents/Chandler4Dec2007. Full text at http://www.reports-and-materials.org/Chandler-presentation-4-Dec-2007.doc.

In a key part of his speech, he called on leading NGOs to support Professor John Ruggie’s UN-backed effort to “to identify and clarify standards of corporate responsibility and accountability with regard to human rights”. He argued that:

“Such principles would indeed be norms: it was the right word – what society expects. They would not be enforceable by law, but, applicable to all companies, widely publicised, and with the authority of the UN behind them, they would be enforceable by non-legal influences – market forces, public opinion, NGO scrutiny and pressure, and indeed pressure from a company’s own staff. They would shift market influences from judging only financial results and so begin to move the first deadweight on the boulder.

“We have now spent seven years trying to develop such principles – seven years since the outset of the Norms. Professor Ruggie is in the third year of his mandate. He has engaged in a remarkably open and meticulous exercise of research and consultation to lay the basis for recommendations. But the completion of his mandate is now being delayed, if not opposed, by the human rights NGOs for reasons whose rationality is hard to discern. They apply the experience of dealing with states to companies which are susceptible to wholly different influences. They argue for more research into corporate abuse despite the fact that there is no variety of such abuse for which we do not already have enough evidence to devise preventative policies and principles. Moreover, their approach treats the corporate sector as an adversary rather than a stakeholder whose support, or at least absence of opposition, will be essential to any substantive step forwards. No such arguments were raised during the development of the Norms.

“I cannot sufficiently emphasise the community of interest between responsible governments, good companies and NGOs in seeing this exercise bear fruit. I hope that companies and governments will play a part in keeping it on track and that the NGOs will support a positive outcome. If for whatever reason that outcome is delayed, if we have no idea of how, by whom or by when the process will be continued, then it will be those whom NGOs exist to help who will be the losers.”

Monday, December 03, 2007

FAST COMPANY

Several meetings in the office, then chaired my last session of the ECGD Advisory Council in Docklands, then across to Chelsea for an exhibition of paintings by Brian Johnson, a colleague from IIED and Earthlife days, then dinner with Doug and Margot Miller of GlobeScan. And, above it all, the final announcement of Fast Company’s selection of SustainAbility for one of its 2008 Social Capitalist Awards (http://www.fastcompany.com/social/2008/), developed with Monitor For SustainAbility’s take, please see http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article.asp?id=1263.

Friday, November 30, 2007

PARIS THROUGH X-RAY EYES

Arrived in a riot-shaken Paris late on Wednesday. All a little reminiscent of when I was here in 1973, staying with the late Observer foreign correspondent Gavin Young at the Place des Vosges home of, I seem to recall, a branch of the Rothschilds. The streets were being heavily policed at that time, too, because of a state visit by Golda Meir. At times, it seems that Gavin and I had the streets to ourselves, except for the odd gaggle of Darth-Vader-like SRS police. My main memory of that extraordinary stay is a giant canvas and wood Siamese cat, which looked you directly in the eye, which I would gladly have adopted.

Apart from a lunch earlier today with colleagues at EcoVadis (http://www.ecovadis.com/), where I have just joined the Advisory Board, and in a setting also buzzing with police because it is across the street from the Prime Minister’s under-refurbishment home, Elaine and I kicked up our heels a little and visited a bunch of museums and the like. The Rodin Museum is also just along the street, so we took a stroll around that on our way back.

Bliss. And one of the things that interested me most was the Vélib’ cycle scheme (http://www.velib.paris.fr/), which has disseminated partout, partout, since we were last here. Really should be adopted in London, though the idea of sharing cycle lanes with even more innocents abroad conjures mixed feelings. Interesting to imagine a world in which EcoVadis-like supply chain principles were endemic – and you could look at a line of cycles, for example, through X-ray eyes and know exactly where they were made, by whom and with what social and environmental impact. Maybe one day products will tell you their stories on demand, though I suspect the temptation will be to have them tell fairy-tales and commercially concocted myths rather than unvarnished truths.

Cycles-to-go

Reflection 1, with gold mask in background

Reflection 2

Reflection 3

Reflection 4

Reflection 5

By one of my favourite sculptors

Around the corner from the Place des Vosges

Elaine’s favourite Place des Vosges haunt

Cycles near the Jardin des Plantes

Islamic hospitality

What’s ‘sparrow’ in Arabic? (A quick Googling suggests it mght be ‘Usfoor’ …)


Mint tea

Part of EcoVadis’ front door

Trompe l’oeuil outside EcoVadis’ door

Penseur 1, avec topiary

Penseur 2, avec Tour

Gare du Nord

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

BACK TO CHATEAU DE SUDUIRAUT

Elaine and I took the Eurostar from St Pancras last Sunday first to Paris and then on to Bordeaux, for an AXA Investment Managers event at the Château de Suduiraut (http://www.suduiraut.com/). Both of us still trying to get over ‘flu – which I think I picked up in The Netherlands last week and which has dogged us both through much of this week.

Still, amazing to finally be on the UK side of the Channel in a train that does what a TGV should. Spent part of the trip reading Donald McCaig’s astonishingly engaging sequel to Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler’s People. Since Margaret Mitchell’s orginal book played such a key role in getting me to an excellent ‘O’ Level History result, after I read it while confined to the school sanatorium with chickenpox, have always had a soft spot for the saga – and McCaig has shot a different reality through the weft of Mitchell’s narrative which I found completely convincing.

Weirdly, Elaine, Gaia, Hania and I had been to Château Suduiraut almost 20 years ago, while on a trip around the wineries of Bordeaux. Château d’Yquem had rather sniffily turned us away when we turned up without an appointment, but we were greeted very warmly just down the hill, by the owner of Suduiraut, who took us around his establishment. We bought a number of bottles, one of which we still have, dating back to 1986.

Had tried a tiny bit of Château d’Yquem when we were driving back through France from Cyprus in 1959 and I was around 9 or 10. Pat, my mother, has had a bottle under her bed for decades to drink when the Grim Reaper finally comes calling. Since she died earlier in the year – to be semi-miraculously revived by my youngest sister, Tessa – there has been some dispute as to whether the bottle should have been drunk by now …

We had no idea until told by the taxi-driver on our way across to the Château that it had been bought not long after we went through by AXA – and significantly upgraded and expanded. The AXA event, over three days, focused on ‘Responsible Investment: The Future Agenda for Institutional Investors.’ Had been invited by Raj Thamotheram, AXA’s Director of Responsible Investment. The sessions were fascinating, kicking off with Michael Watkins of Genesis Advisers on what he calls “predictable surprises”. My task was to listen assiduously and pull together the threads on the morning of the third day, as a prelude to projecting where the responsible investment agenda might take us.

View into the courtyard from our room

View from bathroom

Espaliered

Suduiraut 1

Suduiraut 2

Mistletoe

Distant vines

A classic year for SustainAbility, too

Elaine fights flu

Exploring

Misty morning

Tall boy admirer

Illumination

I’m snookered when it comes to table games

Environs 1

Environs 2

Robert mikes Raj up for our session

Elaine, me and Floris Lambrechtsen (Director, Double Dividend), also part of our session

Environs 3

The Road to Château d’Yquem

Shadowed

Danyelle Guyatt (Principal, Responsible Investment Team, Mercer), Elaine, Raj

Me, waiting for taxi to bear us away

Saturday, November 24, 2007

WINTER WONDERLAND CYCLE

Cycling in through Hyde Park yesterday morning, my eye was taken by the new wheel rising near the Serpentine. Apparently, it’s to do with an upcoming Winter Wonderland celebration. It’s rather as if the London Eye had sent spores drifting across west London, with its progeny mushrooming across the landscape. Took photos of the wheel as I cycled home, from far and nearer, and was struck by the way that the capsules they were beginning to hang made the sporulation image even stronger.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

ENERGY DELTA CONVENTION

Up at the outlandish UK-equivalent hour of 03.45 to catch plane from Groningen to Amsterdam, then back to London City Airport. Had flown out on Monday to kick off the 2007 Energy Delta Convention (http://www.energyconvention.nl/). Very much enjoyed the first plenary session, with follow-on keynotes from Gerald Doucet (Secretary General, World Energy Council) and Gertjan Lankhorst (CEO, GasTerra). Also enjoyed the dinner last night at the AA-kerk, the old church in Groningen. I was told that in its heyday as a sacred structure people would be holding funerals at the same time that others were selling live cattle. I think I prefer the format last night, by the light of hundreds of little night-lights arrayed around the walls of the church. Had a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation with Roland Scholz, Chair of Environmental Sciences at ETH in Zurich.

Friday, November 16, 2007

ENGAGING STAKEHOLDERS

Spent last night at Vinopolis with the participants in SustainAbility’s latest ‘Engaging Stakeholders’ workshop, which had been held out earlier in the day out at BP’s Sunbury-on-Thames site. Companies involved included Akzo Nobel, AstraZeneca, BASF, Bayer, BP, Credit Suisee, Deutsche Telekom, Dow, Dr Reddy’s and DSM – which only takes us from A to D.

Joined at my invitation by Ambreen Waheed, founder and Executive Director of RBI, Pakistan, who I met last year at a CII event in India. The evening started with a wine-tasting. Not sure if this was the link, but well over a deacde ago that I used to use the metaphor of wine-tasting when talking and writing about our early work on environmental and sustainability report benchmarking, using the language of crops, vintages, blends and so on. Several of those taking part used to work with SustainAbility, including Christele Delbe, who worked with me for several years some time back and is now Head of Corporate Responsibility at Orange and Nick Robinson, Strategic Advisor at BP.

Today it all moved to BP’s HQ in St James’s Square, where I chaired a panel session with three people from the social enterprise sector: Sabina Khan (Director of Policy and Research at Social Enterprise London, http://www.sel.org.uk/), Reed Paget (Managing Director at Belu Water, http://www.belu.org/) and Wingham Rowan (Project Director, Slivers-of-Time, http://www.sliversoftime.info/). Social Enterprise London is working to to establish the capital as a significant cluster of social enterprise, using the 2012 Oympics and Paralympic Games as a springboard to boost the sector. Belu Water, which I have known pretty much since its inception, was launched in 2003 and invests 100% of its profits in clean water projects in the developing world. Slivers-of-Time, meanwhile, helps working people sell slivers of their time in ways that suit their needs and lifestyles.

Then back to the office to work on a couple of upcoming presentations and to meet Paul Gilding and his son, with Geoff Lye. Quite a week.

Tasting

Ambreen and I

Christele Delbe (left)

Rainbow seating

Sabina and Christele

Footwear

Katie scribes

Reed holds forth

Winding up

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

THE FUTURE OF THE CORPORATION

Spent the past couple of days taking part in ‘The Future of the Corporation’ summit, held in Boston’s deeply historic Faneuil Hall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faneuil_Hall). Orgnaised by the Corporation 20/20 team led by Allen White. Didn’t notice the grasshopper weathervane as I entered the Hall, even though it’s visible in my photo. Always feel I have a grasshopper mind, but hadn’t heard of grasshoppers being used to identify British agents and spies in the War of Independence period …

The session I moderated had a panel consisting of Arie de Geus, David Korten and Henry Mintzberg, and concluded with a discussion facilitated by Peter Senge. Arie noted that corporations are a relatively young species – and argued that evolutionary forces tend to be more important than any attempts to design corporations.

On the second day, Aron Cramer of BSR – moderating a panel including the likes of Bob Monks and Rosabeth Moss Kanter – noted that the challenge is not simply about the future of the corporation, but also about the future of the social contract more broadly. Monks opined that this was one of the most important meetings to have been held in Faneuil Hall, given the increasing asymmetry between the power of business and that of society more generally. Given that much of the work on the Declaration of Independence was done here, it is not surprising that much was made of the need for a Declaration of Interdependence – an early form of which was produced in 1992 for the UN earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (http://www.davidsuzuki.org/About_us/Declaration_of_Interdependence.asp).

In my introductory comments, I mentioned reading Ronald C. White, Jr.’s wonderful book Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural on the flight in to Boston – and noted how much of the future design of the United States Lincoln managed to herald in just 703 words. I also pointed to the bust of Frederick Douglass, behind me and alongside that of John Adams. The book concludes with Lincoln asking Douglass, a sometime critic, what he thought of his just-delivered speech. “Mr. Lincoln,” Douglass replied, ” that was a sacred effort.” My point here was that the impact of a conference like the one we were embarking upon would not be measured by the quantity of words, but by their quality – and the quality of the thought-trains and relationships they catalysed.

One comment that sticks in my mind came from Mark Goyder of Tomorrow’s Company in one of the World Cafe sessions, in relation to our natural tendency to focus on CEOs and companies currently seen as heroic champions of the sustainability agenda: “Today’s peacock,” he said, “is tomorrow’s feather duster.”

For me at least, Charles Handy was the most moving speaker of all, kicking off the meeting and helping draw it to a conclusion. The challenge, he quietly noted, is to do one’s best at what one is best at – in the service of others. Even more moving, though, was the moment when Bob Massie arrived in the Hall with his wife Anne. Though he remains profoundly ill, it was glorious to spend some time in their company. in the end, such company, conversations and relationships are the warp on which the weft of civil society is woven, ultimately determining its ability to constrain and shape corporate behaviour.

Faneuil Hall 1

Faneuil Hall 2 – with grasshopper weathervane

John Adams

Inside the Hall

Peter Senge centre-stage

Design – or evolution?

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

HBSP

It’s Monday, it must be – Boston. Interesting night at the Omni Parker Hotel, where all the alarms went off at 03.30 in the morning, and an urgent woman’s voice roused us all from bed. In the lobby, I had the pleasure of seeing Boston firemen (people) coursing about in all their tackle – and of being unexpectedly hugged by Talia Aharoni of MAALA, based in Israel. Worth getting up for.

Otherwise, today was mainly spent out at Harvard Business School Press’s offices in Waterton, filming interviews about the new book, The Power of Unreasonable People, doing a lunchtime session with much of the HBSP team, and then working with the marketing folk in the afternoon. All very encouraging. Then back to hotel for a pre-conference session with the likes of Allen White, Arie de Geus, Craig Cohon, Deborah Doane and Talia. Am hoping to avoid firemen tonight.

Saturday, November 10, 2007

SHAKEN AND STIRRED

Quite a week, with among other things trips to Frankfurt (for the third annual Horasis China Europe Business meeting, where I spoke at a session on sustainable growth) and, today, an in-and-out trip to Geneva with Sophia Tickell to talk to Pamela Hartigan and her colleagues at the Schwab Foundation. On the flight in, the plane hit wind shear over the lake and began an energetic rocking and rolling – with the result that the pilot rocketed back up into the skies for another 15 minutes or so of turmoil. Can’t remember when I’ve felt so shaky, but effect wore off once we got into our swing with the team.

Have been reading Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, focusing on his second inaugural, as I travel. By Ronald C., White, Jr., it’s an eye-opening introduction to a critical turning point in American history. When everything was shaky. So much packed by Lincoln into just 703 words. And so wonderfully unpacked by White. The book was given to me earlier in the week by a colleague from our D.C. office, Jonathan Halperin. Stirring.

ROBERT DAVIES’ BOOK

A note this morning from David Grayson about the late Robert Davies: “As I was wide awake and have been up since 4am this morning (and am now fortified by too many cups of coffee), here in Boston, I have been going through Robert’s blog:http://www.seeingthepossibilities.com/. I don’t think I had previously understood what he was doing with this blog – in the time remaining to him, to download and share some of the key things he had learnt. I keep hearing that wonderful phrase: “our lives are too short not to share what we know” – and here was the consumate campaigner/social entrepreneur – “and who we know so that the world can profit and the journey to sustainability be a little shorter.” With all the hot-links to other resources and people, it is really Robert’s ‘book.’ Maybe, we can all promote hot-links to the site too?”

Sunday, November 04, 2007

YORK

Up to York yesterday, for sixtieth birthday of Elaine’s longest-standing friend, David Bradbury. Early in the evening, before dinner, we walked around Yorkminster, which was illuminated by a system that responded to sound, including people talking. Synaesthesic.

– posted by John Elkington @ 11:07 PM

Saturday, November 03, 2007

ICH BIN EIN ADOPTIVE FRESTONIAN

Have always struggled with nationality, variously thinking of myself as Terran, European or English, but – probably because I was brought up elsewhere in the waning days of the British Empire – rarely British. Still, if I follow the cascade down, perhaps the most granular form of identity I ever experienced related to being an adoptive Frestonian. For six years in the early 1990s, SustainAbility occupied the top floor of The People’s Hall in what 30 years ago was declared the Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia.

There were Frestonian passports and stamps – all part of a declaration of independence from Britain. Our space was the National Theatre, though it had previously been variously used as a storage space for church organs and a brothel, I seem to recall. All this brought to mind by a piece by Joe Moran in today’s Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2204555,00.html).

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

HENKEL

Back today from a flying visit with Seb (Beloe) to Henkel, in Dusseldorf. They have invested growing effort in the sustainability agenda. We had lunch with senior folk in the area, then did an afternoon session with 30 or so people from the detergents, adhesives and cosmetics business units. Wildly different atmosphere from when I first started visiting chemical plants (Henkel would insist here that they are a fast-moving products company, not in the chemicals sector per se) across Europe, Japan and the US in the 1970s.

Green sign: Persil is a key Henkel product

A Brand Like a …

… Friend

Our Founder

The Henkel icon for sustainability is helped to its feet

Monday, October 29, 2007

HARD RAIN

General delight as we opened a pack of copies of the new book Hard Rain in the office today, though the issues raised are pretty grim. Sub-titled ‘Our Headlong Collision With Nature,’ the book has been put together by an age-old friend, Mark Edwards of Still Pictures. Geoff (Lye) and I have contributed a chapter, titled ‘Beware the Climate Fixers.’ For more on the linked exhibition, go to http://www.hardrainproject.com/exhibition.htm.

Ori (Chandler) and Sam (Lakha) pore over stunning photo cards Mark sent with books

HE’S NOT THERE

Among the first things I saw this morning as I read the Financial Times was the full page on the new ‘Crossing Borders’ endowment fund being launched in memory of Robert Davies, whose memorial service we went to at Wesley’s Chapel, City Road, later this morning. Prince Charles among those honouring Robert. Then on to reception at The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, in Charlotte Road. Next, lunch with Sophia and David Grayson at the suprisingly good Great Eastern Dining Room just around the corner, after which Sophia, Elaine and I headed back to Bedford Row. Worked frantically on a column for a Japanese magazine, then headed across to the Curzon Mayfair, where Gaia and Hania had invited us to see a preview of the new film on Bob Dylan, I’m Not There. Astonishingly good – Cate Blanchett magnificent. Then Todd Haynes, the director, answered questions, the last one from Hania. Then home to prepare for Germany tomorrow.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

ANITA’S ARMY

Made my way to Westminster Central Hall last night for the celebration of Anita Roddick’s life and works. Matthew Fox, the theologian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Fox_(priest)), acted as compere, winning a round of applause when he mentioned that he had once been sacked by the Pope. He wondered aloud how many people there had been to an invitation-only wake where over 2,500 people turned up. Anita’s daughter Sam called us “my Mum’s army.” Worst side of my character soon surfaced, though, when we were all encouraged to become activists: from schooldays on I have found taking orders just a little difficult.

Wonderful to collide with all sorts of people, both at the event and on the march across Westminster Bridge afterwards. Found myself sitting just in front of Reed Paget of Belu, whose water later sustained us on our journey. Then bumped, among others, into age-old friends Steve and Sandar Warshal (he of Greenpeace Business, among other things), Craig Sams and Josephine Fairley (of Green & Black’s, and she told me she had been writing about us and The Green Consumer Guide earlier in the day), Rob and Heather Foster (who I knew aeons ago at the Body Shop), Elisabeth Laville of Paris-based Utopies, and then, as we stood, in front of Shell Centre, with placards waving and drums banging, I found myself introduced twice to a begloved and no doubt quite cold Bianca Jagger. All slightly surreal, particularly alongside the Ogoni peacewagon, but all very much in the spirit of the remarkable woman we had all come to celebrate. And I did wonder how many of those in the crowd had client relationships with Shell, as SustainAbility has had for a fair few years. It’s a complex world.

Elisabeth and placard

John Sauven (with placard), Bianca et al

VENTER MODEL OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

Every so often you come across someone whose view of the future mutates your own. This morning I spent a couple of hours at the Royal Society as part of a small group invited by Demos to listen to Craig Venter, the synthetic biology man, with respondents including Lord Martin Rees, who heads the Royal Society. Mind-bending stuff – and more on the Demos website (http://www.demos.co.uk/blog/thesynthesizer).

Venter has his yacht Sorcerer II cruising the world’s oceans looking for new organisms and new genes (http://www.sorcerer2expedition.org/version1/HTML/main.htm). Pamela Hartigan and I have covered Venter in the environmental chapter of the new book, but I have scarcely started to scratch the surface of his thinking and work (see http://www.jcvi.org/). But if current demographic, resource and environmental trends continue to play out, my sense is that the market pull on some of his technologies will ramp up mightily, posing massive problems to existing, incumbent industries.

Meeting subject to Chatham House Rule, so limit to what can be said, but interesting that Venter spoke of work on the virus for Spanish influenza, which from 1918 killed 20-50 million people, most of them young and fit. I am reading a book on the subject at the moment, which I picked up at Duke University a few weeks back. One of the things scientists are looking at is what made the virus so virulent – and what enabled it to send young people’s immune systems into choking overdrive, with older people much less affected. (At the higher estimates, the book tells me, 8-10% of all young adults alive in 1918 died.) More than twice as many people as died in WWI. That’s one reason why even the optimistic scenario in recent Raising Our Game report included a major global pandemic as a driver of change – for better or worse. Our airports, airlines and mass transit systems make us much more vulnerable than we were in 1918.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

THE BOOK’S GONE

The week started with my session with the clergyfolk out at St George’s House, Windsor Castle. Turned out to be quite engaging – and my suggestion that we can already see all around us the self-assembling building blocks of a 22nd century religion, based on Gaian principles, but with a harder edge, had working groups discussing whether to compete or collaborate. On my way to the gates, I encountered a hawker with his hawk. Just as people look like their dogs …

Among the highlights of the rest of the week was an evening party at the Bankside Gallery organised by Mark Campanale and Nick Robins, old friends, for the socially responsible investment (SRI) world. JP (Renaut), Seb (Beloe) and Sophia (Tickell) also came across from SustainAbility. Among those I talked to were a couple of people I hadn’t seen for over 20 years.

On Thursday, Sam faxed the 65 amended pages of the new book to Harvard Business School Press, pretty much the last step for us in terms of content. Now to prepare for the launch in the New Year. In the evening, Elaine and I had dinner with Gaia and Hania at the French House in Soho, wonderful but extremely noisy – partly because we were sitting by a mirrored wall – where my bat’s ears picked up everything and anything.

On Friday, a couple of my fellow columnists for Director magazine came in, independently, and I spent a fair amount of time preparing for upcoming speeches in Germany, The Netherlands and elsewhere. Also met a couple of people who are developing a fascinating new business build around carbon monitoring, of which more anon – where they want me to join their advisory board. Much of the time, though, at least in evenings and weekends, I am working on a new venture, linked to the book. Today, Ritu (Khanna) came to a late lunch and the three of us we went for a walk around Barnes. Very enjoyable, but am feeling quite tired at the moment.

Monday, October 15, 2007

DRAGON OVERHEAD

Have always considered it a sign of good luck if a heron flies overhead, regardless of direction. As I walked to Bedford Row on Saturday, with the acacia trees already in view, I heard a strangely familiar noise in the sky, slightly to the west. A dragonfly came to mind. And then a Dragon Rapide hove into view, puttering across the sky like a dainty old lady. Unmistakable from the paired elliptical wings. Wonderfuel: cheered me up no end. They should be available on the National Health. When I mentioned it to Tim when we got down to Little Rissington later in the day, he said he had flown them, a long time ago. Pulled out his log book to show a photograph, to find there wasn’t one. So we filled in a little bit of history, too.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

STRADDLING THE CRACK OF DOOM

View from my desk in Bedford Row

That, among other things, was the week that Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize and the debris continued to float down around Gordon Brown.

In terms of The Week That Was, other things that will stick in my mind include a very lively dinner on Tuesday in Green Park with Colin le Duc (Generation Investment Management), Alois Flatz (SRI investor, ex-SAM), Bernard Mercer (New Philanthropy Capital) and Jason Scott (Generation); the annual meeting between the ECGD Export Guarantees Advisory Council and NGOs focusing on the export credit sector, which I chaired, followed by a dinner hosted by Unilever at the Tate Modern, where we got to walk around Doris Salcedo’s stunning Shibboleth (both on Wednesday); then an evening listening to Steven Pinker on language (Thursday); next a dinner with Kavita Prakash-Mani and her family (Friday); an unscheduled trip to the office to collect something I shouldn’t have left there and then a drive across to the Cotswolds to see my parents (yesterday, Saturday). Elaine (who has been helping Hania into her new flat) and I were so zonked when we got there that we collapsed. I slept for twelve hours straight.

Shibboleth 1

Shibboleth 2

Shibboleth 3

Shibboleth 4

Elaine and Shibboleth 5

Shibboleth 6

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

FACING A GLOBAL CHALLENGE

Nice article in today Times on Sam (Lakha) and I in the ‘Working Relationships’ section, see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/career_and_jobs/secretarial/article2575465.ece.

Saturday, September 29, 2007

AFLATOUN AT DUKE

Back earlier today from North Carolina, where I chaired the first meeting of a social impact and metrics group on behalf of Aflatoun (http://www.aflatoun.org/) at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Wonderful to see how much progress Jeroo Billimoria and her team have been making. Among the outsiders taking part were Greg Dees, Sara Olsen and – from SustainAbility’s Washington, D.C. office – Namita Koppa (http://www.sustainability.com/about/profile.asp?id=18667), pictured emerging from the shrubbery in the last of this series of photos. On the last day, I was picked up by an old friend, Jim Salzman (http://www.law.duke.edu/fac/salzman/), had lunch with him and his wife Lisa, and then was driven out to the airport by Jim in his Prius.

Monday, September 24, 2007

ANITA RODDICK – OUTSIDER RULES

My article on some of the business lessons we can draw from the life and work of Anita Roddick appeared this afternoon on the openDemocracy website (http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/globalisation/visions_reflections/outsider_rules).

KEWING FOR MOORE

I never really ‘got’ Henry Moore, except for his drawings of people sleeping in London’s Underground during the Blitz. But, having worked right through the weekend, I took Elaine across to Kew Gardens this afternoon for a late lunch and then we walked around the Henry Moore exhibition in glorious blustery, sunny weather – with great clouds of autumn leaves blowing this way and that. Came away vastly more impressed with Moore’s art, indeed his genius.

A SHIFT IN CLIMATE 2

Some more photographs from the 21st Century Trust event at Merton College.

Asian women flocked through the College in some numbers – some bearing oddities.

One of the dinners

One of the dinners (2)

John Lotherington prowls ahead of group photo

Who’s tallest? is the question as we go into line to select who stands where for the shot

No question, these are the big guys

Overlooked

After the shooting, the stage from my stair

Heron blurs by (in the boat’s wake)

Merton College grounds

Floral display

Who holds the key to climate change?

John Lotherington pulls things together at the last supper

A SHIFT IN CLIMATE

More than 80 heads of state and government meet in New York today to discuss climate change – and tomorrow’s third Clinton Global Initiative conference, also in New York, will inevitably cover many of the same issues. Today’s Financial Times quotes Bill Clinton to the effect that the US needs to unleash”the greatest concentration of economic activity” since the country mobilised for WWII to tackle the challenge.

All of this resonates even more strongly with me after having spent pretty much all of last week as a 21st Century Trust Senior Fellow, co-chairing (with John Lotherington, the Trust’s Director) a conference at Merton College, Oxford, on ‘Climate change: science, politics and the management of uncertainty.’

Speakers included leading people from the Carbon Group, the Carbon Trust, chinadialogue.net, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, IIASA, Oxford’s James Martin 21st Century School (including both Jim Martin himself and the School’s Director, Professor Steve Rayner), Nomura International’s New Energy and Clean Technology Ventures group, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, The Rocket Science Group, and the University of New Hampshire – in the shape of Professor Stacy Vanderveer.

The event was subject to the Chatham House Rule, but it’s worth noting that the successive presentations built up a palpable, plausible, deeply concerning case for accelerated policy and business change, that there was a sense that we are getting much closer in to a series of potentially catastrophic tipping points in the global system and that the Kyoto process – though the best game available – leaves much to be desired. In the wonderful words of one speaker, it has become a “polyvalent symbol” – with multiple interpretatations and expectations laid upon it, depending on the interests and political stance of those concerned.

China was very much in the spotlight, thanks to people like Isabel Hilton of chinadialogue.net, and I came away with a strong sense that I need to be doing a great deal more in this general space. In fact, I returned to London on Thursday evening for a session convened by a venture capitalist on one new business that will be addressing some key dimensions of the agenda, and returned to Oxford invigorated and raring to go.

More anon – and meanwhile here are some images from the various days of the conference.

My wing

View from my stair

Monument

Autumnal 1

Autumnal 2

Still exclusive in parts

Minder 1

Minder 2

Floral display

John Lotherington’s head

Hot air passes above our heads

Saturday, September 15, 2007

PREMATURE AUTUMN

Walking to Barnes station – under a strikingly beautiful sky – I was struck by how great the damage is now to the foliage of the horse chestnuts. A strange, premature autumn. We were off to pick up the car, whose battery had once again died. The garage were shocked to find there is only 27,000 miles on a vehicle we bought with 12,000 miles already on the clock – quite a few years ago. What we really need is one of those green-car-rental services found in places like Switzerland and California, then we could get rid of the thing entirely.

This afternoon Gaia and Hania arrived and we all walked across to the Barnes Wetland Centre for a memorial service for our neighbour Roger Poulet. A capacity crowd as we listened to the ‘Desert Island Discs’ he had chosen in his final days, ranging from Buddy Holly to Beethoven. A wonderful model of how to make such an event a real celebration of a life lived.

Sky

Damaged horse chestnut leaves

Station

Thursday, September 13, 2007

ELEPHANTINE

Cycling alongside the Serpentine on my way to work this morning, and enjoying the sun, I caught sight of a herd of elephants apparently grazing the trees by the water’s edge. Dismounting, agog, I wandered among the 13 wickerwork animals, all life-size (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2007/sep/04/conservation.endangeredhabitats?picture=330676449). An extraordinary demonstration of how art helps us reperceive familar things, familiar landscapes. Ths turned out to be a fund-raising exercise for Elephant Family (http://www.elephantfamily.org/iopen24/index.php). Further along, I passed the ‘Animals at War’ memorial in the middle of Park Lane, a reminder of what we have put animals through, from pack-mules and elephants to messenger pigeons, all carved in relief on the memorial wall.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

WHEN I GROW UP

Went to see Brian Wilson at the Royal Festival Hall this evening, with Elaine, my brother Gray and youngest sister Tessa. Had seen pretty mixed reviews for the first two days, so was slightly dreading it, but the handling of most of the old songs was tremendous – particularly songs (among them ‘Do You Want to Dance’ and ‘When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)’ from Beach Boys Today, an album I remember leaving on the turntable in the sun in the mid-1960s – and coming back to find it turning into something like a flowerpot.

The sun was at the heart of the evening, with a suite of songs built around the song That Lucky Old Sun. For me, that middle section was the weakest part of the show, with the audience reaction muted. It was like watching an absent-minded old man leafing through a son et lumiere version of his scrapbooks. Still, having grown up in the warmth of this man’s music, I’d forgive him virtually anything.

CELEBRATING A DAME

My contribution to the Anita Roddick love-fest was published in The Guardian today (http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2167323,00.html). The first paragraph: “I love her like fury, but it’s like being trapped in a brown paper bag with a bluebottle,” a relative commented of his wife – and that was Anita for me. Like all true entrepreneurs, she fired on all cylinders, all the time. Working close to her would have driven me mad, but working alongside her in an extraordinary nexus of ethical, social, environmental and international development movements has been one of the great privileges of my life.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

ANITA RODDICK: BUSINESS AS UNUSUAL

Woke this morning to a blue sky – and found the papers brimming over with the sad news of Anita Roddick’s death last night, plus urgent requests from CNN and The Guardian to comment. After doing the Guardian piece, I sat down to compose a longer appreciation of the lives of three people who have died recently: Anita, Robert Davies of IBLF and Paul MacCready of AeroVironment. In very different ways, all three have had a significant impact on my thinking and priorities. The article has been posted on SustainAbility’s website (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article2.asp?id=1036).

Monday, September 10, 2007

DALIAN IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR

A day after getting back from China, my thoughts on the World Economic Forum Davos-Dalian event are still processing – but three things are already clear to me.

First, China, Inc. has a long march ahead of it to ensure that its deteriorating reputation for safety, environmental and human rights abuses doesn’t materially dent its rise to economic power – and its ability to generate globally trusted brands of its own. The Mattel saga, with an astonishing series of toy recalls forced on the US company following the discovery of high lead levels in the paint used by Chinese suppliers, hints at the scale of the challenge.

True, as the Financial Times argued last week (Stefan Stern, ‘West must take some blame for tainted Chinese goods,’ September 4), the problems now emerging have a great deal to do with aggressive cost-cutting by western firms. As Professor Mary Teagarden, of the Thunderbird scool of global management, has summarised the problem: “Wal-Mart squeezes Mattel, Mattel squeezes its supplier, that supplier squeezes its supplier, and at the end of the chain you have a remote business far out in the countryside that takes a different approach. They don’t put lead in paint because they’re wicked, it’s just what works for them. China is so large, and industrialisation has been so rapid, that maintaining any control over multiple sites is extremely difficult.” [Quoted from FT article.] But this reputational challenge can only grow, now the seeds have been sown.

Efforts are certainly being made to turn the growing tide of health abuses and environmental destruction. Indeed, the first copy of the China Daily I picked up (September 4 issue) reported that more than 750 industrial firms had been shut down – or ordered to improve their environmental standards – following a two-months campaign by the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA). Pan Yue, the high profile deputy minister at SEPA who I have met a couple of times since 2005, was quoted as saying that: “The campaign was only run on a small scale. We still have a long way to go to curb the nationwide industrial expansion, which demands high volumes of energy and creates huge amounts of pollution.”

Second, as WEF President Professor Klaus Schwab stressed in his own summary of the Davos-comes-to-Davos event, we are seeing a growing focus on entrepreneurialism and on social responsibility and engarement, worldwide. You could hear that in all of the sessions and many of the conversations around the giant conference centre. The outputs of this latest summit are destined to feed back into the deliberations in Davos in January. But an equally interesting question is how this experiment (“adventure,” Professor Schwab called it) in developing a Chinese “summer Davos” will mutate and evolve in the coming years. My own guess is that it will change profoundly over the next decade – and, in the process, drive very considerable changes both in the Forum and in the Davos agenda.

Third, as astronaut Jerry Linenger argued in Dalian (see ‘A Bigger Picture’ entry, September 8), it behoves us all to stand back from what we are experiencing, to critically evaluate our first impressions. It’s easy to be seduced by China, for all sorts of reasons. But we should recognise how this is often achieved. Dalian, for example, made sure that foreigners coming to the city were well looked after in a number of ways that suggest the power still wielded by the authorities: Astonishingly, the schools were shut down for the duration and local people lectured on how to treat outsiders. My own attempts to find even fairly inoffensive overseas websites ran into a bunch of problems, as they either failed to appear or accessing them was so slow that one simply gave up. I’m still not sure whether WEF’s own site fell victim to some form of official unease, perhaps because of suspect words used on it, or whether this had more to do with slower-than-normal Internet connections.

While I was in China there was plenty of evidence – for those with the eyes to see – that geopolitics-as-usual continue to crank along. President Hu Jintao, for example, warned President Bush in Sydney that the situation across the Taiwan Straits has entered a “highly dangerous period.” And then there was the little matter of the new Pentagon report highlighting what it described as an aggressive push by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to achieve “electronic dominance” over each of its global rivals by 2050, particularly the US, Britain, Russia and South Korea (http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article2409865.ece).
Of course, this may simply be a case of the Pentagon trying to crank up its own electronic warfare and countermeasures budget, but evidence is also emerging of repeated efforts by the Chinese to hack into government and military computer networks in the West. (I’m sure we’re up to the same tricks.)

My final word? Well, I have been reading an extraordinary account of the real Long March by Sun Shiyun (The Long March, HarperCollins, 2006) as I travelled. Given the horrors and abuses of the period – and of Mao’s subsequent rule, chronicled by Jung Shang’s extraordinary Mao: The Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape), which I am still inching through – it’s stupefying just how far China has come in a few short years. I can’t wait to see more of the country and to explore what SustainAbility can do to help.

Make no mistake, I hate what has happened in Tibet, what happened to the students in 1989 and what is currently happening to NGOs that are trying to bring acceptable standards of transparency and accountability to this giant country. But, like it or not, we all now have a vested interest in China’s future. And a blustery Dalian session chaired by a blustering (others’ description, not mine) Tom Friedman, who argued that China is failing to pull its weight in international affairs, particularly on issues like Iran’s nuclear stance, left me feeling that the West should be very careful to have its own house in order before it lectures the Chinese.

PAUL MACCREADY: SUSTAINABILITY GENIUS

Very sad to see news of the passing of Paul MacCready, the pioneer in human and solar-powered aircraft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_B._MacCready,_Jr), whose obituary appeared in Saturday’s Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article2409565.ece). The man was one of a small but growing number of geniuses who have applied their talents to the sustainability challenge.

I wrote about MacCready’s work in my book Sun Traps: The Renewable Energy Forecast (Pelican, 1985). Had always wanted to meet him and visit his company AeroVironment (http://www.aerovironment.com/), but somehow never quite made it work. A warning that I need to get on with such things, rather than waiting for time to sort things out.

One of their most extraordinary ideas was the SkyTower, using Helios, an evolution of the Solar Challenger to provide a much cheaper alternative to satellites. A solar-powered aircraft able to stay aloft in a circling mini-orbit in the stratosphere, the idea isthat Helios could serve as a platform for providing cellular, video, and/or broadband wireless Internet access from what, in effect, would be equivalent to a 12-mile high tower (see http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.etopiamedia.net/emtnn/images/http://johnelkington.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/heliosaloft1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.etopiamedia.net/emtnn/pages/bwaw/bwaw1-5551212.html&h=482&w=730&sz=275&hl=en&start=6&tbnid=RKn3Agn810puHM:&tbnh=93&tbnw=141&prev=/images%3Fq%3DAeroVironment%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26newwindow%3D1%26sa%3DN).

Helios

Sunday, September 09, 2007

DALIAN BLOGS

Summing up the Inaugural Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, WEF President Klaus Schwab noted that: “In this meeting, we were all bound together by the same spirit. The spirit of entrepreneurship and the spirit of social engagement.” Which is quite hopeful in terms of the theme and timing of our new book, The Power of Unreasonable People. This will be published on 5 February, just after Davos 2008, though we are hoping to be able to get a copy into the hands of everyone who comes to the summit. A series of blogs on Dalian I posted can be found at http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article2.asp?id=1010, the first time SustainAbility has had a blog on its home page – and something I’m keen to develop.

Klaus Schwab sums up

Saturday, September 08, 2007

PASSING SHOTS

Some photographs taken during this trip:

View from my bedroom window in Dalian

People were polishing everywhere

Brought to you by …

Part of reception area

Cyclists 1

Cyclists 2

Sign of the times

A tiny fraction of the security screen

In passing

Sat in on filming of BBC World Debate

WIKIDISINTERMEDIATION

Having written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica many moons ago, and having been paid in a set of volumes that seemed in danger of reaching across the street, I watched with interest as encyclopaedias got intermediated both by CD-based technologies and now by things like Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/), was in the ‘Philanthropreneurs’ session I moderated this afternoon. As someone who uses Wikipedia constantly, I wondered what he would have made of our publisher’s reaction to Wikipedia references in our new book, The Power of Unreasonable People. They see the Wiki thing as inherently untrustworthy.

True, I have come across some bizarre entries, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that in terms of overall accuracy, Wikipedia now rivals the Encyclopaedia Britannica. More importantly, it’s available at a few clicks of the mouse, it’s much more up-to-date and it links you out effortlessly to a bunch of other useful stuff. Wales noted that the process of disintermediation has only just started. Gulp.

A BIGGER PICTURE

By far the most engaging session I sat in on today was by Jerry Linenger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_M._Linenger). A former NASA astronaut, he spent five months 250 miles above the Earth’s surface in the Russian space station Mir. Deeply affected by his talk, I mean to track down a copy of his 1999 book, Off the Planet (http://www.known.com/orderofftheplanet.lasso).

To get a sense of the Big Picture, he said, you really have to step back – and it helps enormously to step right off the planet. He wishes that everyone in the world could be lofted into space for five minutes, an experience he thinks would transform them, just as it did him.

He used the microcosm of the space station – in which any misdeeds, including missteps with urination, ended up “in your face” – as a metaphor for the macrocosm of Earth. And he’s now actively engaged in a new initiative dedicated to tackling the global freshwater crisis (http://www.circleofblue.org/). Emerged from the session determined to do whatever I can to help.

THE GLOBAL WAR ON BABY GIRLS

Had breakfast this morning with Frances Cairncross, now Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, and her husband Hamish Macrae. Hamish, I recall, commissioned my first article for The Guardian (for which I wrote off-and-on for almost 20 years), that time on the financial page, way back in the late 1970s. Between the three of us, we have four daughters. And the thing that sticks in my mind was their mentioning someone also here in Dalian, demographer Nick Eberstadt, who holds a Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Among other things, he is focusing on what he calls ‘The Global War on Baby Girls.’

Can’t say I see eye-to-eye on the AEI on many things, given that in my mental map they are skewed way over towards the right-wing end of the spectrum. Indeed, it has been one of the ironies of SustainAbility, Inc.’s evolution that we shared an office building in Washington, D.C. for several years. (I always thought of them as occupying the backside of the building.) In any event, here’s one issue we do agree on as an increasingly urgent priority – the intense pressure in some societies to produce boys rather than girls, evidenced by the missing millions of girls in countries like China and India.

Hamish wondered whether this male skewing would make for a more militaristic China in future, though he then noted (on the flip side) that the removal of large numbers of men from Germany’s population by WWI didn’t do much to pacify that country in the following decades.

On its website, AEI makes the point that since 9/11 “the American public has received regular updates on what we have come to call ‘the global war on terror.’” But, he stresses, a “no-less significant global war – a war, indeed, against nature, civilization, and in fact humanity itself – has also been underway in recent years. This latter war, however, has attracted much less attention and comment, despite its immense consequence. This world-wide struggle might be called ‘The Global War Against Baby Girls.’” Eberstadt has done a short publication on the story (http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.25399/pub_detail.asp).

BAD LUCK, HOLLYWOOD

One of the people on the first panel I moderated today, on green technology, was Zhang Yue, Chairman & CEO of Broad Air Conditioning (http://www.broad.com/index-eng.htm). I began by asking the audience whether they had read the March issue of The Atlantic, one of my favourite magazines? No-one had. Pity, I said, since it contained a fascinating profile of Zhang Yue, noting – among any other things – that he has built himself a home modelled on the Palace of Versailles (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200703/fallows-zhang). I was pretty sure he was the only person in the auditorium to have done so, adding that while it was clear he was extremely interested in profit, he also seems energetically committed to environmental and sustainability issues.

The session was off the record, but I think I can mention something that David Hobbs, a VP and Managing Director, Global Policy, at the energy consultancy CERA said to me after the session. He had passed on the opportunity to say a few final words, because of the pressure on time, but what he had wanted to say was that if Zhang Yue has his way and managed to radically shrink the scale of the ventilation and air-conditioning plants modern buildings need, Hollywood will lose one of its main plot lines, where heroes and heroines scurry through ventilation and A/C pipes in their attempts to escape, while bad people hose the ceilings with machine-gun fire.

Still, on the basis of what I have heard about the penetration of such technologies in China to date, I’m again pretty sure most Hollywood moguls won’t be shivering in their shoes any time soon.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

CHINA DISABLED PEOPLE’S PERFORMING ARTS TROUPE

The most moving, indeed almost overwhelming part of the Gala Soiree this evening, at least until I left with my bat-like hearing overwhelmed by the thunderous noise of a kung-fu martial arts section, came from the China Disabled People’s Performing Arts Troupe. For sense of what this was like, click on the title line of this blog. More than 20 young artists, all of them deaf and mute, created a series of astonishing, scintillating, ever-shifting forms, many of which looked like some unbelievably beautiful sea anenome. No wonder that they recently were named the UNESCO Artist for Peace (http://portal0.unesco.org/es/ev.php-URL_ID=38976&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html).

STRONG ON CHINA

A non-flash image of part of the Gala Soiree

One of the more extraordinary people I talked to at this evening’s WEF Gala Soirée (where the acts ranged from trick cyclists to a version of Swan Lake that was literally out of this world) was Maurice Strong, who turned out to be on our table. He, it hardly needs saying, was one of the godfathers of the sustainable development movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Strong). His Wikipedia entry may be a mixed bag, but there is no question but that he has been an extraordinary eminence grise, or verte, and over many decades.

Among many other things, Maurice was the organiser of the first UN environment conference, held in Stockholm in 1972, and then founder-executive-director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Happily, UNEP have been a long-standing partner in SustainAbility’s work on what has variously been called environmental sustainability and/or non- or extra-financial reporting. This work has now branched into three strands of work programmes: (1) ‘Global Reporters’ (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/global_reporters.asp); (2) Engaing Stakeholders (http://www.sustainability.com/sa-services/engaging-stakeholders.asp); and (3) the searchable online ‘Learn from the Leaders’ database on sustainability reporting (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article.asp?id=732).

Later still, Maurice was a member of the Brundtland Commission, which reported in 1987 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brundtland_Commission), a few months after we founded SustainAbility. Their report, Our Common Future, established sustainable development as an emerging global priority. Always an early bird, he moved to China a while back, sensing that this is where the future was happening. It will be fascinating to see whether these two great interests of his – sustainability and China – can co-evolve.

WEN JIABAO: SUSTAINABILITY IN MANDARIN

Arriving late after facilitating another session, I found so many people crowded into the Plenary Hall to hear Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Jiabao) deliver his speech on a growing China’s ambition to embrace a “Bright Future” that the supply of simultaneous translation headphones had run out. So, in a space that seemed to have a couple of thousand people packed in, I propped myself against a wall and listened to him in full flow—in Mandarin. A bit like watching one of those airline films with the sound turned off, though in this case you could hear the regular rounds of applause. And it was interesting to see the languages offered, had I had headphones: English, Mandarin, Japanese and Russian. Luckily, the World Economic Forum then supplied translations of the speech, which—to my mind at least—turned out to be remarkably candid.

The Premier welcomed the fact that the World Economic Forum will now hold an annual ‘Summer Davos’ in China. He underscored the relevance of the Forum’s continuing overall theme of the ‘Shifting Power Equation’ and the focus of this Dalian summit on the ‘New Champions.’ And then he switched on the candour, speaking, among other things, of “problems such as unstable factors, imbalances and lack of sustainability” that are impacting China’s development and future prospects. These include, he said, “excessively rapid economic growth, acute structural tensions, the inefficient pattern of growth, depletion of resources and environmental degradation, mounting pressure on prices and entrenched structural and institutional obstacles.” Given all of which—and this has been an observation made by many I have talked to here in Dalian—is quite remarkable how far China has come in relatively short historical order.

While my fingers are crossed that this century will see Wen Jinbao’s vision—“of a “prosperous, democratic, harmonious, civilized and modernized China” making an “even greater contribution to maintaining world peace and promoting world progress”—coming to fruition, it’s very hard to imagine a future without some major demographic, health, environment and/or military discontinuities. Having said which, there is something about China’s extraordinary focus on the future and the ambition to get things right which I find remarkably energizing. And, like many visitors to this extraordinary country, I worry increasingly about Europe’s capacity to respond to the competitive challenge posed by a society that is developing such momentum.

Although SustainAbility is now determined to develop a physical presence in India from 2008, there is no question in my mind that we also have to be on the ground in China before long. In the session I facilitated earlier today on ‘Managing Regulatory Risk,’ I was very struck by an Indian participant’s observation that India’s weakness is its democracy, while China’s strength is its lack of the same. The net result, he said, is that it takes India ten times as long to do anything significant. Then he paused, before adding that he though longer term democracy would serve India better than any alternative system. In short, we are embarked on a vast, global experiment to test which of several competing political and economic models will dominate—and facilitate—sustainable human evolution.

Which is one reason why I have been so excited to be involved, in my capacity as Chairman of The Environment Foundation (http://www.environmentfoundation.net) in a two-part conference on ‘Democracy & Sustainability,’ to be held at London’s Science Museum on 23 October and in London’s Living Room, atop the GLA HQ building by Tower Bridge, on 24 October. I will chair the first session, Lord Patten the second.

SustainAbility—largely, I suspect because of my own aversions, formed during early work in the early 1970s—has tended to shy away from politics, government and public policy, but increasingly these domains will be central to the definition and delivery of sustainable development. And SustainAbility and I are thus now jointly pushing into that space to campaign and advocate with business leaders and others for the policy frameworks we need to support sustainable development goals – whether related to climate, water, or human rights. I feel rather like Bill Gates must have done when he finally woke up to the power of the Internet—with all the associated risks and opportunities in terms of Microsoft’s till-then successful business model. And we are going to have to learn to handle all of this in Hindi, Mandarin and—who knows—even in Russian.

QUEEN BEE & THE DRONES

OK, the title is a stretch for a World Economic Forum session, but I’ll explain that in a moment. The background is that I managed to squeak my way in to a second session in the WorkSpace this afternoon, called ‘Building a Sustainable Company.’ Fascinating, with participants encouraged to think out of the box by viewing the sustainability agenda for business through the lens of a number of biological metaphors.

WorkSpace, for those who haven’t encountered it, is a bit like a giant olive oil press used to encourage creativity in busy people and to squeeze out their best thinking in short order. This WEF offering (http://www.weforum.org/en/events/AnnualMeetingoftheNewChampions/IssuesInDepth/index.htm) is delivered by The Value Web (http://www.thevalueweb.com/), alongside Forum staff. Having led a couple of sessions on the future of cities in variants of the WorkSpace, one in Davos in January and a second yesterday, focusing on WEF’s evolving SlimCity initiative, I recommend it highly.

So back to the WorkSpace today. I was part of Group 1, which focused on the prairie as a metaphor, while the other six groups variously took the human body, meerkats, lions, tropical forests, coral reefs and bees as their guiding stars. In the case of prairies, a key text came from Kevin Kelly’s wildly wonderful book Out of Control – specifically Chapter 4, ‘Assembling Complexity’ (http://kk.org/outofcontrol/ch4-b.html). I love his work – and managed to track him to his lair in California early in 2005 (see 13 April entry under http://johnelkington.com/weblog/http://johnelkington.com/september-2007/).

I found the metaphor particularly engaging because I still have the diaries of a great-great-whatever grandmother who crossed the prairies (the ‘Great American Desert’ as some then called them) several times in prairie schooners in the 1840s. Those would-be settlers generally experienced the prairies as harsh, unforgiving environments, whereas those they rudely elbowed aside had come to see them as richly nurturing. I also have the patchwork quilt she made on one of those trips, stitched together from fine gowns she had worn out east, but thought she would have little need for in the west.

But one of my favourite stories, once the family reached Colorado, was the way, once they had set up a trading post in the hills above Denver, a store where many of the miners paid in gold dust, my great-great-whatever grandmother would dig up the dirt floor at the end of every week and pan it – successfully – for gold. They ended up founding a bank, which I believe still exists.

From such small seeds companies can grow, even in fairly hostile environments. But today’s session was an attempt to divine the characteristics that enable businesses to sustain themselves over time. In the case of our prairie metaphor, the answers included diversity, deep roots, symbioses, grazing and excretion, fire (whether lit by lightning or man), growing shoots tucked far enough below the soil to escape incineration, and so on.

But when it came to the report-backs, the best presentation – by far – came from my co-author Pamela Hartigan and her group. Unlike the other teams, that reported back in ones and twos, she brought her entire group (otherwise males), focused on the honeybee metaphor, spotlighted herself as the Queen Bee and her colleagues as worker bees, and has us all in stitches. Which led me, in the final discussion, to underscore a point David Christie – one of the organisers – had made right at the beginning, that unless you’re having fun you’re not going to change very much.

And that, in turn, put me in mind of the early days of SustainAbility when, instead of panning trampled dirt for specks of gold, we were looking for specks of green in the grime of capitalism. At the time, we called ourselves ‘The Green Growth Company’ and had just three missions in life: (1) to make a difference, (2) to make a profit (because that provided the wherewithal to do (1)), and (3) to have fun in the process. No, twenty years on, it’s all got a little more complicated, but apparently simple things – as many of the early pioneers viewed prairie ecosystems – often mask great complexity, diversity and resilience.

Writing on the wall

Meerkats at work

Queen Bee and The Drones

BUSINESS AND CITIES WILL DRIVE AGENDA

After my SlimCity session yesterday (http://www.sustainability.com/downloads_public/other/WEF-session2.pdf), I have been wondering whether I took a wrong turn in the 1970s? My postgraduate degree, at UCL, was in urban planning – and in 2007, the year that the human species becomes predominantly urban for the first time, cities are very much in the spotlight. Over breakfast this morning with Peter Head of Arup, deeply involved in a number of major urban development projects in China, among them Dongtan (http://www.sustainability.com/downloads_public/other/WEF-session2.pdf), we concluded that business and cities are likely to become even more powerful salients of sustainability in the coming decades.

Strikingly, on the hill across from the restaurant, there was a rather grisly geodesic red-and-white structure, rather like a massive football, but enough to remind us both of one of the towering figures in our space, Buckminster Fuller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller). Fuller was one of the great inspirations of my life – and I was lucky enough to have breakfast with him in Reykjavik in the late 1970s. Given that Peter says that the Chinese are awarding some extraordinarily ambitious urban projects these days, it would have been wonderful to see what ‘Bucky’ could have done here.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

DALIAN SUNSET

As I watched the sun go down over Dalian last night, I found myself reflecting on the turbulent history of this region – most notably the siege of Port Arthur, the port and naval base of Lüshun in northeast China, now part of Dalian. The Russian defeat in January 1905 was a catastrophe for them, further destabilising the Tsarist regime. The trench warfare and use of heavy artillery during the siege of Port Arthur prefigured the horrors of WWI and also, in retrospect, heralded the defeats of over-confident westerners in the early stages of WWII. Studied all of this in school History classes, but then it all seemed a long way away. Makes you wonder what the world will know in 2109, an equivalent period into the future, that it would have been useful to know today.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

GRISTLE AND RUBBER

Once upon a time, they used to say that when General Motors sneezed America caught a cold. These days, I reflected as our China Air 737 banked out of Beijing and began the long climb out of the smog that blankets the city – and as a man behind me sneezed convulsively, continuously – the modern variant ought to be: When China sneezes the rest of the world probably ought to run for cover. The country’s innumerable pig and chicken farms, and its shudderingly awful wild animal markets, are all potentially powerful incubators of pandemics that (as recent influenza outbreaks and the SARS story have shown) all-too-easily burst out into the wider world. Over the coming decades these problems can only be amplified by the growth of the country’s (and the world’s) swarming megacities.

The epicentre of the 2003 SARS outbreak turned out to have been wild game markets. Yet, as Time magazine put it that same year, “It turns out that few people actually enjoy the taste of pangolin, a scaly anteater whose flesh is a blend of gristle and rubber. The same goes for the nocturnal civet, which has a gamy aftertaste that even the thickest brown sauce can’t mask. And who really enjoys camel hump, which tastes just as you’d expect a blubbery lump to taste?” But, as Hannhab Beech put it in her article ‘Noxious Nosh’ (Time, June 2, 2003), “flavor isn’t what really matters to many of the diners tucking into China’s wildlife menagerie.” Instead, she quoted a Shanghai-based restaurateur – who had specialized in cobra and other wild animals until SARS knocked the stuffing out of wild-flavour cuisine – to the effect that business men were eating the stuff simply to display their wealth.

So it’s welcome news that an array of health issues will take centre stage this week at the inaugural Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian. “Finding innovative solutions to the challenges of infectious pandemics and chronic diseases is key to ensuring long-term economic development and the well being of nations worldwide,” as the World Economic Forum puts it. “More than ever it is critical for all stakeholders, including the next generation of leaders, to join forces to address global health issues such as rising healthcare costs, the devastating effects of AIDS, the rising burden of chronic diseases and innovations in healthcare,” says Jean-Pierre Rosso, Chairman of the Forum’s Centre of Global Industries.

The health side of the Dalian agenda is due to cover such topics as: the business case for tackling AIDS; the future of healthcare and pensions in China; the prevention of chronic diseases; healthcare innovation in emerging markets; and new frontiers in biotechnology and nanotechnology. The fight against AIDS has been a key area of focus for the Forum for many years – and the issue is particularly relevant here in China, where infection rates and the number of reported cases have seen a steep increase.

Key issues here, though I wonder to what extent they will be publicly discussed, include transparency (or the lack of it here) and the way in which NGOs are viewed. This was underscored for me a few moments ago when I tried to access the websites of two highly respected organisations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, from my hotel room – and both showed as inaccessible. Uncomfortably, part of wishing China well also means that we ought to wish NGOs – both home-grown and international – well, as they try to provide the information and political impetus needed to ensure effective, timely action.

THE ROAD TO BEIJING – AND DALIAN

I remember reading in a slightly weird book called The Celestine Prophecy that the way that you know that things are about to change in a fundamental way is that the number of coincidences you experience goes off the scale. True or not, there were a fair few as I made my way to Dalian. First, I bumped into David Rice in the Terminal 4 lounge – he used to run the human rights side of BP, and was on his way to Azerbaijan. Then the person in the next seat on the flight to Beijing, again quite coincidentally, turned out to be Chris Luebkeman of Arup, who I had first met in Davos.

Beijing’s airport was totally civilised when compared with Heathrow, though I confess to having suffered a certain nervousness when it came to flying China Air to Dalian. Their safety record has been so bad that David Rice noted, as I left him at heathrow, that when he was at BP there was a company-wide ban on using the airline. Still, we arrived in one piece and were severally bussed to our hotels in the city.

Flying in to the airport had been instructional, however, with great clods of geriatric industry sprawling across the landscape, including refineries, shipbuilding yards and power stations. We even flew through the plume from at least one smokestack. The predominant colour of much of the airport approaches seemed to be rust red. Many of the apartment blocks we flew over were reminiscent of those you find in parts of Eastern Europe and Russia, and some were located surprisingly close to the runways.

Still, Dalian is now more than rust-belt city: it is a high-tech centre. The temperature was 27 degree Celsius, the welcome warm and the city’s air decidedly cleaner than Beijing’s, where the horizon was invisible through the murk, a combination of haze and smog. Heading across to Dalian, the 737 took 30 minutes to break out into the blue.

Monday, September 03, 2007

EN ROUTE TO DALIAN

Well, if I’m not stalled by climate change protestors gumming up the works at Heathrow, I should have left for China today, en route to Dalian, where I am due to facilitate four separate sessions at the inaugural Annual Meeting of the New Champions. The event, which runs September 6-8, has been organized by the World Ecnomic Forum in partnership with the government of the People’s Republic of China. This time round, my involvement focuses on four broad themes: (1) managing regulatory risk in emerging markets; (2) the evolution and management of the cities of tomorrow; (3) green technology; and (4) entrepreneurial philanthropy (for further details on these sessions.

And the background? Klaus Schwab, the Forum’s Founder and Executive Chairman, explains, “The idea was born out of talks the Premier and I had two years ago during a visit to Beijing. The meeting is already well on track to becoming, alongside our Annual Meeting in Davos, the foremost meeting of global leaders from all sections of society, from all areas of business and from all regions of the world. Indeed, some are already calling it a ‘summer Davos’.”

Whatever the outcome—and I have heard the view whispered that this initiative is designed to head off the potential threat of China developing a World Economic Forum of their own—this isn’t a new area of interest for the Davos crowd. In January, for example, the Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos was entitled ‘The Shifting Power Equation’ and discussion focused on various aspects of the changing business landscape: the growing prominence of the emerging economies, the increasing power of individuals and small groups over large institutions and the stronger impact of consumers upon producers.

2007 marked my sixth Forum summit. The first—early in 2002—was held in New York, in support of that city in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. And the agenda has moved on substantially since then. Issues that were still frankly marginal in 2002 have thrust into the mainstream, among them climate change, the risk of global pandemics, poverty and the future impact of emerging economies like China and India.

According to the Forum, participants from 90 countries have already signed up and more than 1,700 participants are expected to take part.” At the core of the “new champions” are a new generation of companies that will fundamentally change the global competitive landscape. “We call them Global Growth Companies,” the Forum says. “These business champions come primarily from rapidly growing emerging markets, such as China and India, but also include fast movers from developed economies.”

Global Growth Companies are businesses that have demonstrated a clear potential to become leaders in the global economy based on such factors as a company’s business model, growth record, leadership and the markets it serves. Some of the typical indicators of these companies are that they:

– Are expanding outside their traditional boundaries
– Experience strong growth rates
– Have revenues typically between US$ 100 million and US$ 5 billion
– Have demonstrated leadership in a particular industry
– Have an outstanding executive leadership

TIME TO JOIN THE NEW CHAMPIONS IN DALIAN

Fly to Beijing today, then on to Dalian, where the World Economic Forum is holding its inaugural ‘New Champions’ summit. More details at http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article2.asp?id=1010. As background, am currently reading The Long March by Sun Shuyun (HarperPress, 2006), which provides a fascinating account of how powerfully the events of the 1930s shaped the mythology, culture and politics of today’s China. She has a wonderful way of personalising the great tides of history and conflict.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

SPOOK CITY

After getting back from India, I have been taking a couple of weeks off, ahead of travelling to China – and at home, to avoid airports, particularly with climate-change-protestors apparently supergluing themselves to Heathrow’s revolving doors. And one thing I’ve been doing, alongside taking on board copy editors’ comments on the new book, with Pamela’s help from Australia, has been reading William Gibson’s new novel, Spook Country. He has long been my favourite contemporary sci-fi author (http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/), though – as if often said – his books have gradually slid back into a mutated present.

Last night, Elaine and I went to listen to him at the Congress Centre in Great Russell Street, dropping off to see Gaia and Hania on the way, in their respective Soho haunts. A bit like tempting exotic reef organisms out of their lairs. By contrast, struck by the fact that a very high proportion of those turning up for the Gibson reading and interview were wearing black, though a fair few were exotic hybrids of one sort or another. His reading was so monotone that even I almost went to sleep. And when he answered questions, you sometimes got the sense he was trying to fend off the more obsessive elements of his following.

It struck me while reading the book – which I have almost finished – that there is a eerily steady, inexorable, unexceptional, highly detailed flow to the thing, broken periodically by astonishing insights and developments. Reminded me of walking alongside the Nile in Luxor, in 1975, looking across the steady northward flow of green-tangerine water, as the sun set in the west. And then, out of the blue, or green-tangerine, a pair of massive backs broke the surface in mid-stream, and disappeared – never to appear again.

As we walked across to the event, we passed through Bedford Square, where Earthlife used to be based in No. 37. Elaine also used to work for a publisher in the Square. And that set me thinking about Gibson’s ideas on “locative art.” At the moment London has its blue plaques commemorating famous people who lived in various buildings. But what if locative art (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locative_Art) took off here?

But, as he said at the event, the advent of the cell phone in cities like London transformed them. People who used to walk through the city alone, could now do so in company via their phone. (He noted that when he first saw people on cell phones in London, he thought someone had upended an asylum, because of all the people walking around and talking energetically to themselves.) But what if we could tag every building we had ever worked or lived in, so that others could access our memories, commentaries and so on? If you couldn’t elect to access the memories, it would be like drowning in other people’s worldviews, or taking LSD. But if you could choose what you accessed, it could make walking through a city an astonishingly rich experience.

Gibson in full flow

Monday, August 27, 2007

KURTA DAZE

Having decided not to post this photo, taken by Tell (Muenzing) over tea in the garden today, was persuaded to do so by Sam, who likes orange kurtas. This is one of two I bought when in Mumbai, withj help of Kavita (Prakash-Mani). I could get used to them. But Sam, to give the whole story, also says I look like a tipsy guru, so mixed blessings there. Still, I was clearly enjoying both the company and the weather.

Friday, August 24, 2007

ECHOES OF PHOEBE

Have always had a penchant for old ladies, so today was rather fun. Elaine and I took my mother across to see an old family friend, Bunny Palmer, in Icomb this morning. Striking how their friends have been dying off – though they were both in wonderful form today. Guy’s Farm garden not quite what it was, but still blessed with a glorious English charm. On the way out, we dropped into the old cookhouse, where a large oven used to cook for the whole village on a Sunday. The state of the roast very much depended on the length of the sermon. Also put me in mind of another much-lamented friend from olden Icomb days: Phoebe, the African parrot who used to hold forth raucously here – and hereabouts.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

ROBERT DAVIES

Jane Nelson called me last Sunday to let me know Robert Davies (http://www.seeingthepossibilities.com/) had died. Now that the news is out, with an obituary in today’s Financial Times (http://www.iblf.org/media_room/general.jsp?id=123950), it’s time to add my small tribute to the towering heap.

I last saw Robert on July 5, at the IBLF event in the Kew Orangery on social entrepreneurs (see blog entry that day, where he is pictured in reflective mood). He was a passionate, consistent, highly proficient example of the breed – and, although our approaches were somewhat diferent, I have always felt that we were very much shoulder-to-shoulder in this field. Alongside people like Stephan Schmidheiny and Bjorn Stigson of WBCSD, Robert was a pathfinder in driving our agenda into boardrooms.

There was clear personal strain in some of the battles he fought. I well recall him coming across to discuss the pressure he came under from parts of the food industry when he insisted on putting obesity on the IBLF agenda a while back. But, whatever the pressures, his approach was admirably summed up by the title of his website and blog, “seeing the possibilities.”

When Elaine and I had breakfast with Robert in Davos earlier in the year, he projected confidence that he could shake the cancer. Having seen so many people succumb in recent years, however, I can’t say I have been particularly optimistic. Still, whatever our condition in life, the last paragraph of the Alison Maitland and Sarah Murray’s FT obituary summed up a key lessons that Robert drew from his own journey: “Our lives are too short not to share what and who we know so the world can profit and the journey to sustainability can be shorter.” Typical of the man – and a model for all those still pursuing the path.

HILL HOUSE GREENING

Am often told that my lifestyle isn’t nearly as green as it ought to be. True, but – for better or worse – my generation’s influence on my parents’ household has been considerable. My father long ago gave up insecticides and switched to biological controls, including getting grandchildren to hunt down caterpillars. Some of the plantings of greens in the garden behind the barn are like lacework, thanks to the depredations of the caterpillars that survived.

Another question that has taxed us briefly in recent days was whether it’s better to have creepers on a house or not, with some seeing them as damaging to stonework, while others argue that they protect walls against rain and other insults. Looking back at the family photograph albums, which show the house since we moved in almost 50 years ago, in 1959, it strikes me that the greened version of the exterior is way more pleasing than the way it was it looked more or less bare. The last photo: wild strawberries by the front door.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

IN THE VALLEY

Caroline drove us down into the valley this afternoon to a friend’s house with a gaggle of children, to swim. Victoria plums ripening on the walls of the garden – and memories of when, as teenagers, we used to fish and swim in the nearby Windrush. Then back up the hill. The sliced fruit are part of Caroline and Tessa’s preparations for a forthcoming party of theirs.

THIRD LIBERATION IN OPENDEMOCRACY

My mutated piece on India’s impending ‘Third Liberation’ now appears on the openDemocracy website (http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/globalisation/institutions_government/india_sustainability), whose format and topicality is a wonderful example of the breed.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

GREEN COLLEGE

On our way down to Little Rissington today, we dropped off in Oxford to see Geoff Lye – and discuss SustainAbility futures. After lunch, we walked across to Green College, where Geoff is now partly based, and he showed us the Observatory. A different world.

Monday, August 20, 2007

TALKING HEAD

The first in a series of mini-video-interviews on the subject of corporate social responsibility and sustainable development can be found at http://www.bigpicture.tv/videos/watch/00411460f. The filming was done by Marcus Morrell of Big Picture TV, motto ‘Talking Heads, Talking Sense.’ I’m certainly the first here, but it’s for viewers to judge on the second.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

INDIA’S THIRD LIBERATION

On August 16, the day after India celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of its Independence, I found myself standing alongside Niraj Bajaj as we watched the figures on the electronic displays at Mumbai-based National Stock Exchange go from bad to worse—and playfully calculate how much poorer he was as the head of one of India’s largest business houses as the global market correction roared through. Later the same day, on the other side of town, he chaired a session hosted by the Indian Merchants’ Chamber—of which he is President—at which I gave the keynote in support of the Chamber’s centennial year theme of inclusive growth in the context of globalization. My simple message was not entirely comfortable: India faces a far bigger market convulsion before the country reaches its centenary (http://www.imcnet.org/aboutIMC_news.asp?newsid=134).

In his introduction, Mr. Bajaj noted that the ‘Triple Bottom Line’ concept, which I launched in 1994, now offers a means of helping India, Inc. to come up with answers to the challenges that Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh had raised in his Independence Day speech. Before explaining how the TBL approach can help, however, I stressed that the world’s second most populous country is now embarked in its third great liberation process since the end of the Second World War. And the third is likely to be greater than either the first and second taken together.

The first was the process of achieving liberation from British rule, finally achieved at horrendous cost in 1947 as the Partition process literally tore the country apart. It was fascinating in recent weeks to see the media—both in India and the UK—explore the rights and wrongs of it all. Suffice it to say that the seismic aftershocks of Partition will probably still be shaping our world in 2047.

The second liberation saw the iron grip of the state gradually prized away from the levers of economic power, as India struggled to catch up with the processes of liberalization, privatization and globalization from 1991. Again, the seismic shockwaves are still working their way through the country’s economy—and will continue to do so for decades to come. But among the beneficiaries of the new order have been some of the leading business people I met during my week in Agra, Delhi and Mumbai.

And the third liberation? Well, if the first broke the stranglehold of the British and the second that of the state, the third will have to simultaneously achieve a triple-whammy—breaking the stranglehold of poverty by bringing the benefits of a modern economy to the more than 250 million of India’s billion people trapped below the poverty line, while protecting the country’s natural environment.

Apart from the pollution and natural resource degradation that are such a striking feature of today’s India, there is also now the growing threat of climate change. Indeed, among those who spoke at the IMC event was Shailesh Haribhakti, Managing Partner & CEO of the leading financial services firm, the Haribhakti Group. Himself a past President of the IMC, he now chairs the Chamber’s committee on global warming.

The scale of the social challenge facing the country was underscored by the Prime Minister’s speech, in which he argued that economic, social, political and educational forms of empowerment are crucial to the nation’s future—alongside effective efforts to tackle the growing range of environmental issues, notably global warming (http://www.hindu.com/nic/pmspeech070815.htm). Like China, however, Indian leaders have often argued that global warming is not India’s problem, given that it “only” contributes a few percentage points of global greenhouse emissions. Indeed, I had heard a senior retired environmental official make exactly that point in Agra earlier in the week, at a business leaders programme organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

There I found myself working alongside people like Professor Stuart Hart of Cornell University’s Johnson School, where he holds the Samuel C. Johnson Chair in Sustainable Enterprise Management (http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/faculty/profiles/Hart/) and Professor P.D. Jose of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB). And the mood among the business leaders taking part was distinctly more engaged than it would have been a few short years back, which is just as well, since the country’s second liberation means that a growing share of the responsibility for tackling India’s sustainability (or rather unsustainability) issues will devolve to business. One key factor in that changing mood has been the work of the CII-ITC Centre of Excellence on Sustainable Development (http://www.sustainabledevelopment.in/), under the current chairmanship of ITC Chairman Y.C. Deveshwar.

ITC, which originally stood for the Imperial Tobacco Company, is a company that splits me down the middle. On the one hand, it is like an Indian version of Philip Morris, though the proportion of its revenues derived from the sale of tobacco products has fallen to around 47%. On the other, ITC is increasingly well known for its extraordinary successes in such areas as social forestry—exactly the sort of the ventures that the Prime Minister would like to see more of.

In his speech at the CII event, Mr. Deveshwar accepted that the company’s profile put it in a difficult place. But he stressed ITC’s commitment to “achieving Triple Bottom Line benchmarks is key to our resolve to contribute to the national goal of sustainable and inclusive growth.” The same messages were blazoned over a number of pages in the Independence Day edition of India Today. Among the achievements he reported were the facts that ITC has been a “water positive” company for five years in a row and “carbon positive” for the last two years. It also aims to achieve “zero solid waste,” having recycled over 90% of its solid waste during the past year.

Although such statements are encouraging, it is very clear that—despite a profusion of NGOs—India still has some way to go in developing the sort of civil society organizations that play such a key role in monitoring and challenging business in the developed world. WWF, which also took part in the CII event, is now calling for a Sino-India “axis for business sustainability,” to ensure that the transformation of the global economy proceeds on increasingly sustainable lines (http://assets.wwfindia.org/downloads/wwf_report___indian_companies_in_the_21st_century.pdf). Certainly there is growing awareness that this will be one of the defining issues of the twenty-first century, a point underscored forcefully during last year’s World Economic Forum summit in Davos.

If such countries fail to get their act together in time, we are likely to see the mother of all market corrections. While I was in India, the new broke that the boss of a Chinese factory supplying toys to Mattel had hanged himself as the US company was forced into a massive product recall, following the discovery of unacceptably high lead levels in the paint used in some toys. Such problems, though, are likely to pale into insignificance if and when problems like global warming go into overdrive—and the business community is seen to have dragged its feet as other parts of society tried to mount an effective response.

One of the questions at the IMC event in Mumbai asked what I felt about the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Although I believe that Union Carbide was initially culpable, and that Dow Chemical—which bought Union Carbide’s Bhopal assets in 2001—failed to fully grasp the way that legal, financial moral liability regimes are morphing around the world, I also conclude that various levels of Indian government were to blame for the totally shambolic handling of the aftermath of the tragedy. This is an agenda that my colleague Geoff Lye explored in a recent report sparked by a number of visits to Bhopal, The Changing Landscape of Liability (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/liability.asp).

The changing agenda is easily illustrated by the shift in the work SustainAbility itself has been doing in India. To begin with, the clients were non-Indian companies (like Ford of India) wanting to test their local policies and operations against emerging local concerns, or companies like BT (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article.asp?id=153) and Norwich Union that have been offshoring call-centre and other operations to India, wanting to assess the responsibility of the relevant operations and relationships. Increasingly, however, there is a sense that Indian companies themselves will be in the market for help in shaping their strategies, performance and accountability mechanisms in areas covered by the Triple Bottom Line agenda.

As one result, we are planning to establish our first emerging economy market office in India next year. That said, my experience in the country as it embarked on its seventh decade of independence leaves me in no doubt that if we are to succeed, we will need to mutate our own business model. A daunting challenge, true, but one that growing numbers of businesses will need to tackle as the impact of the emerging economies increasingly determines the shape and direction of the global economy. And this time the judgment on how we performed will not be made just by the investors and shareholders who have been closely monitoring recent market corrections but by the hundreds of millions of people still excluded from today’s mainstream economy—and, most fundamentally of all, by future generations of Indians and non-Indians alike.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

MUMBAI

Arrived in Mumbai yesterday, Independence Day – and the 60th anniversary of the 1947 liberation from British rule. Day started with a session with Hindustan Unilever, followed by a lunch with the top team at the National Stock Exchange, where I had to speak, then – after a slight detour to the shops with Kavita – an evening conference at the Indian Merchants’ Chamber, where I was the plenary speaker (http://www.imcnet.org/aboutIMC_news.asp?newsid=134). Session chaired by Niraj Bajaj, IMC President. Very lively discussion afterwards, after which we had dinner with Rajni Bakshi (author of Bapu Kuti, and a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty) and Shailesh Haribhakti, Managing Partner & CEO of the Haribhakti Group, a leading financial services firm. He had been at the National Stock Exchange lunch, introduced me at the IMC event this evening and leads the Chamber’s work on global warming.

View from my hotel bedroom in Mumbai

Sculpture at Hindustan Unilever

Flowers at the National Stock Exchange

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

AGRA AND THE BLACK TAJ

Flew in to Delhi on Friday, getting to the Habitat Centre hotel at around 01.00 on Saturday morning, then up at 04.30 for trip by train to Agra, with Kavita (Prakash-Mani) and colleagues from the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). Disorientating, shocking experience of wading through the still-asleep bodies of the poor in the railway station, with rats picking their way here and there, and then standing on the station while the dawn gradually lit the sky. Then, once on the train, the Shatabdi Express, through tent shanties into open countryside, with – at one point – a couple of wild peahens making their way past rice paddies in the middle distance.

We have been in Agra for the 1st CII Business Leaders Programme on Strategies and Leadership for Creating Sustainable Organisations (http://www.sustainabledevelopment.in/). (Professor) Stu(art) Hart of Cornell University led off the first two days, Kavita and I the second two. Some of my conclusions on the basis of the experience will be covered in a later posting (‘India’s Third Liberation’). One early highlight: watching Kavita as the only woman in a late-night game of cricket behind the hotel, as bats (the winged variety) flew around overhead – attracted by the insects drawn in both by the spotlights and by the audience. Women seemed to be bitten a good deal, whereas I seemed to escape. Then dinner, where the food was exquiste. But can’t get the country’s yawning social divides out of my head.

One the Monday morning, around 06.00, some of us took off to see the Taj Mahal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj_Mahal), which I found profoundly beautiful and moving, in multiple dimensions. One of the most extraordinary moments was when our Muslim guide sang the call to prayer inside the tomb – and the echoes trailed off into eternity. The echo was so perfect that you could almost see the decay equations hanging in mid-air. Had promised Sam (Lakha) that I would reflect on her parents, who came here on their honeymoon, and did so as I watched tiny tadpoles wriggling around in one of the ornamental ponds.

I had loved the notion that Shah Jahan had planned a black mirror-image of the Taj for the opposite side of the river, in which he planned to be buried, but Wikipedia concludes that this was a myth. he ended up alongside his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, in the Taj itself.

Not quite the Express: old Japanese locomotive in the the grounds of the The Mughal

Spot the mongoose pair below the pipes

Kavita prepares to play near-midnight cricket, with bats flying overhead (not shown)

Fish watch us having dinner

Outside the Taj

Getting closer

In view

Stu Hart in green

Taj reflection


Saris

Camels

Thursday, August 09, 2007

TIM – THE COMPANION PIECE

A companion piece to the photograph of my mother, Pat, which I posted on 23 June is this picture of my father, Tim, signing yet another round of Battle of Britain prints. You can see it in his eyes. But it strikes me that the image is an interesting bookend to the earlier one.

THE FOOL

Not sure what I would have made of him in the flesh, but the obituary of Lee Hazlewood in The Times a day or two back (actually on 7 August) was a reminder not only of his glorious (“immortal”, The Times says) song These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, recorded by Nancy Sinatra, but of his sundry other claims to fame. What I hadn’t known about him until I read the obituary is that he also wrote one of my favourite songs from the 1950s, 1956’s The Fool, recorded by Sanford Clark. Found it on the iPod this evening and played it in honour of Hazlewood’s passing.

TREADING WATER

Am watching the crab apples turning red in the garden, as I wait for Demon to come back online after yet another excursion. Working at home today, have been wildly productive, despite the number of times the broadband connection has crashed. Even so, there’s a strange sense of suspension at the moment. Now that the book is in the busy entrails of Harvard Business School Press, I’m finding myself wondering what the next one will be about. I should know better. But something else to think about on the flight to Delhi tomorrow.

Hopefully, will be good to rest the brain for a few hours: the last week or so has been fairly frantic, with other writing tasks, developing an Environment Foundation conference for October on the theme of democracy and sustainability, working on a new project I’m hoping to get off the ground in the realm of private equity and venture capital, and meeting a steady stream of people passing through the office, all on top of more than the usual crop of office dramas. Have myself playing guitar a good deal in the evenings, to decompress, and reading several books – notably finishing Al Gore’s The Assualt on Reason a few days back. A stunning diagnosis, prognosis and prescription for the ills that ail American politics currently.

Sunday, August 05, 2007

GORE & HAWKEN ON IMMUNE SYSTEMS

Have been reading Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason, in recent days and finding it wonderfully provocative. Interesting that both he and Paul Hawken (Paul in his new book Blessed Unrest) use the metaphor of the human immune system for the political challenge facing us: Gore because the Bush Administration (alongside other, deeper-seated factors) has been busily undermining US democracy, Hawken because he optimistically sees civil society organisations worldwide ramping up to the challenge of providing a global political immune system.