Archive

Sunday, January 30, 2005

DAVOS 05

Even before I arrived in Davos for the thirty-fifth World Economic Forum summit there was a sense that this year’s agenda would be different. “There is a strong feeling that everything on the surface looks pretty good, but something somewhere is not behaving itself underneath,” HSBC chief economist Stephen King had told the Financial Times. This, apparently, was to be his first summit and I have no idea what he made of it all, but it was my fourth and, like many I spoke to, I was stunned by the seismic shifts in the agenda.

No doubt HSBC had in mind issues like the sagging dollar and soaring deficits, and such issues certainly sent powerful tremors through the summit, as did the rise of China as an economic power. But an early warning of the wider tectonic processes at work came during a ‘Global Town Hall’ meeting, where some 700 leaders were asked to select six priority ‘tough issues’ (www.weforum.org). Many CEOs and company directors who had followed well-worn trails to Davos may have expected well worn issues to resurface, with perhaps something topical on how corporations can best respond to natural disasters. But what they got was almost as unexpected as the tidal waves on 26 December.

When the votes were counted, the top issues were: poverty (64%), equitable globalization (55%), climate change (51%), education and the Middle East (both scoring 44%) and global governance (43%). WEF founder Professor Klaus Schwab later stressed that social and environmental issues have been part of the Davos Forum’s agenda for decades, which is true, but the difference is that they are no longer confined to workshops in distant hotel basements. They are centre stage.

As President Chirac was followed by Prime Minister Blair and Blair by Chancellor Schroder, hope grew that a deeper set of political responses might now be emerging. It is clear that such leaders now recognize the need to address systemic issues of poverty, governance and climate change. The anti-globalization protestors may have been less in evidence, but their issues were ubiquitous, in the speeches of political, business and civil society luminaries. In an exit video ‘vox pop’ poll, indelicately, I even found myself saying that it had often seemed as if ‘the lunatics have taken over the asylum’.

Still, many still worry that it will be the usual problem of too little, too late. Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski wondered aloud how such horrors could have been allowed to happen. Some of us silently wondered whether by 2065 the world won’t be asking how a new set of horrors happened?

Al Gore, for example, shocked the final plenary with his dramatic wake-up call on climate change. And UK trade and industry secretary Patricia Hewitt recalled that the heat wave of 2003 led to 26,000 premature deaths in Europe and costs of around £13.5 billion.

But it remains to be seen what long-standing WEF supporters make of all this. Some may be taking comfort in a recent polemic in The Economist arguing that the corporate social responsibility agenda has gone too far, but a striking number of business people publicly and specifically refuted that line of thinking during the summit — indeed, even some Economist journalists present privately expressed dismay.

Shimon Peres on Middle East (©JE)

Al Gore on climate change (©JE)

Final lunch (©JE)

Alpine cooking (©JE)

Alpine music (©JE)

Coming down (©JE)

Monday, January 24, 2005

BLOOD AND GORE

Spent much of the day sketching out the program for our conference tour of Australia and New Zealand in May, plus heard that in addition the trip will now take in not only South Korea and Japan but also China.

In the evening, went across to Buck’s Club, Clifford Street, for a meeting of the 21st Century Trust (www.21stCenturyTrust.org). The Environment Foundation, which I chair (www.environmentfoundation.net), has decided to come in alongside the Trust to organise an annual series of consultations. The Foundation has been slowed down in recent years by a number of factors, but particularly by a multi-year legal battle we had to fight with the Charity Commissioners to establish sustainable developent as a legitimate charitable objective. We won, with the result that SD is now formally a charitable objective, but the distraction cost us dear.

Chris Patton, who chairs the Trust, spoke and described the convergence as akin to the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which struck me as a little OTT. I then Googled it when I got home (http://www.britainexpress.com/History/tudor/cloth-gold.htm), which left me slightly worried – since the 1520 event stretched the finances of the English and French treasuries to the limit – and didn’t move things forward politically very much, either. But the imagery worked well and the sentiment was appreciated!

On the way along Clifford Street to the meeting, I was hailed by a couple of friends from Generation Investment Management (http://www.generationim.com), who introduced me to Al Gore (Generation’s Chairman) and David Blood (its CEO). Blood used to head the asset management side of Goldman Sachs. Interesting, since I have just finished an interview of Gore for SustainAbility’s newsletter, Radar, which I did by e-mail.

And way overhead all these meetings, what looked like a full moon sailed serenly across the London sky.

Sunday, January 23, 2005

SEEING THE RUSHES

Gloriously sunny day, so we take a long walk in Richmond Park. The papers are beginning to play with the Davos agenda, which I’ll have to get my brain around next week. Apparently, the World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org) will be running some sort of voting scheme again to see what people think are the Big Issues, which will help as input to the new book. Apart from coverage of the film and pop celebrities who will be there, the main themes to date seem to be: something has gone wrong in the world and we don’t know what it is or how to fix it; the US is key (partly because they seem to be pushing their stick into all sorts of hornets’ nests without any very good idea of what to do next), but Bush and his new US Cabinet won’t be attending; and the Chinese will there, but they – like the Japanese before them – will be listening rather than saying very much.

Oh, and I know not to shoot into direct sunlight, but I have always been intrigued by the kaleidoscopic effects that result.

Shadows (©JE)

Dogs (©JE)

Rushes (©JE)

Friday, January 21, 2005

CAN – COMMUNITY ACTION NETWORK

By train to Waterloo, admiring in passing the chimneys on the old Barnes station building, for fascinating morning with three CAN people: James Alexander (Managing Director), Jeremy Raphaely (Director of Social Enterprise Development) and Owen Jarvis (Director of Social Franchising). They support social entrepreneurs in the UK. Just upstream of HMS Belfast, we met in the Mezzanine area of the 1 London Bridge complex, where CAN estimate they save the cluster of NGOs and charities they house some £230,000 a year. Had heard of CAN over the years, without ever quite being able to pull the jigsaw puzzle together. Now it’s much clearer (www.can-online.org.uk) – and I’m impressed. Particularly liked the sound of their ‘Beanstalk’ programme, designed to help social entrepreneurs grow and replicate through franchising.

Barnes station (©JE)

HMS Belfast (©JE)

Thursday, January 20, 2005

COLLAPSE AT ROYAL SOCIETY

Out into the darkness after Diamond’s brilliance (©JE)

Elaine, Kavita (Prakash-Mani), Tell (Muenzing) and I make our way across to the Royal Society to hear Jared Diamond speaking about his new book, Collapse – which explores the question why societies collapse. One thing that sticks in my mind is the insult hurled by Easter Islanders at each other as their society spiralled down into the dark night of war and cannibalism: “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.” Reminds me of the book I was reading today on my way to Happy Computers – Rats: A Year With New York’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants, by Robert Sullivan. Rats are a mirror species to our own. When squeezed, they too resort to cannibalism. But Diamond describes himself as a “cautious optimist.”

I had recommended Collapse as required reading to people taking part in a scenarios project a few weeks back, sight unseen, simply on the basis of reviews I had read – and my appreciation of Diamond’s earlier books, The Third Chimpanzee and Guns, Germs and Steel, both excellent. This evening confirmed the prejudices that had led me to do so.

Interested in kowning more? Try http://149.142.237.180/faculty/diamond.htm

HAPPY

Since SustainAbility has been having hiccups with its IT as we switched to new servers in recent days, I worked at home on my Mac before leaving for my meeting with Henry Stewart of IT training company Happy Computers (www.happy.co.uk). Getting off the District Line Tube at Aldgate East, I walked further east – and completely overshot Adler Street, where the Happy empire is based. As a result, I got to see a part of London which I haven’t seen in years – and which could easily be Bangladesh, with a heady interlacing of faces from other parts of the Muslim world.

Happy founder Henry Stewart had taken me to task on what he thought I had said at a Business in the Community conference last year. We had sorted that out, but agreed to meet. And it was astounding how much we proved to have in common. The Happy group may be around twice SustainAbility’s size, but the values and approaches overlap in many areas. The two organisations were founded around the same time. Like us, they are a social enterprise (though neither organisation describes itself as such), highly democratic, but privately held. And, like us, they publish most of their ‘crown jewels’, their training manuals, rather than protecting them as intellectual property. The idea being that if you give today you will receive tomorrow.

Happy Computers banner, with Erotic Gherkin in background (©JE)

Henry Stewart (©JE)

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

POLITICS

As I walked through Docklands today, with a blustery, cold wind coming up off the Thames, I was thinking that we – both SustainAbility and I – will need to spend more time on the political dimensions of the issues we are trying to tackle. That’s in part because of the current media coverage of the Corner House (www.thecornerhouse.org.uk) legal challenge to the Department of Trade & Industry and, specifically, the alterations made to the ECGD (www.ecgd.gov.uk) rules on bribery and corruption. (And I was headed across to ECGD’s HQ at the time.) But it’s also a sense that as these great issues thrust into the mainstream, as we are now seeing with both climate change in US and EU politics and with human rights concerns (in addition to all the other concerns) in Iraq, the political battles will become increasingly urgent and it may well prove progressively harder to maintain a neutral, objective stance.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

ZHAO ZIYANG

An extraordinary and very brave man, Zhao Ziyang is probably best remembered for his visit to the protesting students in Tiananmen Square on May 19 1989. “I came too late. I came too late,” he told the doomed students, in distress and close to tears. At the time, he headed China’s Communist Party.

What is interesting reading the Financial Times obituary today, though, is just how long Zhao had been out of synch with what passed for Communist thought. While Mao whipped himself up into a frenzy of enthusiasm for a “new society” based on rural communes, Zhao focused on trying to improve agricultural yields. Falling foul of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Zhao was toppled by the Red Guards and paraded in a dunce’s cap, but later bounced back into power. But 1989 marked the end of his public career: he had effectively been under house arrest ever since. But, as the FT notes, it could have been worse. While Zhao was even allowed the occasional round of golf, in 1969 former president Liu Shaoqi was allowed to die in prison of untreated ailments.

Saturday, January 15, 2005

DIGESTING THE IMPLICATIONS OF A DIM SUN

Several people in recent days – including Elaine – had told me what an impact a BBC 2 Horizon program had had on the way they saw the threat of global warming. Tonight she made me watch a repeat, which I found fascinating. The focus initially was on the process of ‘global dimming’, with particular pollution from around the world creating a haze which reflects sunlight back into space, cooling the Earth’s surface (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4171591.stm).

The impact of the haze was graphically demonstrated after the 9/11 attacks, when US airlines were grounded for several days. As the contrails faded, ground temperatures leapt an average of around 1 degree, which was way beyond what the scientists had expected. Factor in other forms of haze and the cooling effect could involve as much as 10% reduction in incoming sunlight. If so, most current climate change models are probably signficantly under-estimating global warming.

One weird thing about the progam: there were several sequences when rain or melting ice created waterscapes which were highly reminiscent of last night’s dream (see previous entry).

DREAMING OF A FECUND UNIVERSE

Section of Japanese Bridge at Giverny by Monet

They say the brain’s a pattern recognition organ, but today mine has been on something like speed. Talking to Elaine as we woke up this morning, I remembered a deeply moving dream I had last night. (Which in itself was slightly odd, given that I had been talking to someone at Shell yesterday who said he hadn’t dreamed, or remembered dreaming, for 15 years.)

In the same way that some forms of software cross-connect with everything on your computer once uploaded, this dream has been cross-connecting with just about everything that passes though my mind today, though on the face of it this was a pretty simple thing.

The dream?

I was in conversation with an unknown person beside an expanse of water covered, at least close to, by water lilies. When I looked down, the nearest lilies and water were painted, but exquisitely so you could hardly tell that they were not real. But then the further out one looked, the more the landscape seemed totally natural. Next, however, I noticed that the water between the lily leaves, which at first glance moved and reflected just like normal water, was in fact composed of a profusion of mini ripple systems, as though a constant fine rain was falling on the surface. And as I continued to observe, it became clear that these ripple systems were being generated mathematically, not just mathematically describable, as if the whole thing was being dreamed by a silicon brain or created by some incredibly powerful computer. And then the ripples decomposed into spirals, suggesting deeper worlds.

And that was it, except that then the cross-connections began as I talked to Elaine and Gaia (and her friend Becky, who is staying with us) over breakfast, and read today’s stack of newspapers.

First, there was the news of the extraordinary success of the Cassini spacecraft and of the Huygens probe it carried in landing on Titan, the giant moon of Saturn. The best illustrations were on the front page of The Independent, which I had tried to cancel last week but which Elaine had insisted on keeping. The visual mindstorm that was already taking over parts of my brain was now cross-threaded with the series of sweeping arcs, trajectories, fly-bys and orbitings that brought the cameras across two billion miles in seven years, from Cassini’s launch in October 1997 (when, incidentally, SustainAbility had agreed to work with Shell after two years of saying no) to yesterday’s landing.

No wonder that the NASA and ESA scientists are elated, believing that the images that have been streaming back give us some idea of what the primitive earth would have been like.

After breakfast, I tracked down the book on Monet I had bought Elaine some years ago, but never really read: Monet by Himself, edited by Richard Kendall. Samples of a couple of his paintings are dropped in above. But as I looked at the images, the droplets continued to play across that dream surface, reminding me of someone yesterday who had brought spirals into a conversation, but even more of something I read earlier in the week about the ‘fecund universe’ theory, if I remember right. The notion being that new galaxies are constantly forming and, something I think I also read, that even entire universes may also be continually forming, on the other side of black holes, and spooling out into who knows where.

The dream image that on first glance had seemed static, like a landscape caught in ‘Golden Pond’ amber, and when I think of it hugely reminiscent of a painting my grandmother Isabel Coaker had in her flats in Pont Street and Lennox Gardens in the 1970s, was in fact sizzling with unseen creation, a roiling wealth of new opportunities. Perhaps, these are the micro-worlds, potential new universes, that the social entrepreneurs that are the subject of the new book I’m just beginning to write are helping lead me into?

Whatever, beneath calm surfaces great energies are often quietly working. Victor Mallet writes in today’s Financial Times of how those at sea experienced the Indian ocean tsunamis. Many died, but some boats sailed across the seas all oblivious. “We had two boats sail through the tsunami,” Mallet quotes one charter company executive as saying. “There was death and destruction on either side of them and they barely noticed the wave. They felt it might have been a boat wake.”

Whatever has been driving it, the process of cross-linking continued apace as I continued reading through the papers. The Times, for example, which I sometimes describe as a comic now that it has gone tabloid, opened out into a seemingly endless series of supplements, each nested within another. So we started with things like ‘Money’ and ‘Weekend Review’, moving on through ‘Travel’ through to ‘The Eye’ and ‘Body & Soul’. It was very much like a series of nested universes, flaring or flowering before me.

Then there were the climate change stories, with The Guardian reporting that bears in Russia that are meant to hibernate until March are out and about already. Behind the day-to-day reality we have grown comfortable with, stupendous changes are now taking place, though currently it’s a bit like catching sight of them in peripheral vision, like those spirals between the lily leaves. The Times, alongside a photo of what it says is a Muscovite ice sculpture exhibition melting, says that Moscow is having its warmest January since records began.

And while on the subject of records, just as I was wondering whether I needed an even stronger cup of coffee, I came across obituaries in both The Times and The Independent on Spencer Dryden, drummer during their glory days with Jefferson Airplane (www.jeffersonairplane.com). They were one of my favourite bands during the late Sixties, indeed I remember racing out to get their first album, Surrealistic Pillow, when it first appeared, and their song White Rabbit features in my Top 16 tracks, listed elsewhere on this site.

Having always been a sucker for Ravel’s Bolero, I was seized by Adam Sweeting’s throwaway line in The Guardian‘s obituary that Dryden, originally a jazz drummer, had given the song a bolero beat. I mentioned that to Gaia, who promptly exactly reproduced that insistent, druggy beat, all spiralling out to Grace Slick’s rendering of the story of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and her adventures underground.

And that put me even further in mind of those distant, heady days of psychedelia and the underground politics of the Sixties. Instead of reading magazines like Wired or Fast Company, as I do today, I then subscribed to Rolling Stone and Ramparts, the New Left organ of folk like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Weirdly, and these things do happen, my Mac, which has been playing a succession of blues tracks I bought last week after seeing several of the unbelievably good Blues series pulled together by Martin Scorsese for PBS (wwwthebluesonline.com), and particularly the Wim Wenders film on Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James and JB Lenoir, is just now playing Cassandra Wilson’s version of Lenoir’s Vietnam Blues. And what should I be reading this week but Ho Chin Minh: A Life, by William J. Duiker, though whether I manage to make it to the end of this particular Ho Chi Minh trail, reading every word of the 700-page tome, remains to be seen.

Oh, and with Lou Reed’s laconic, rippling, thumping version of Skip James Look Down the Road now playing, it strikes me that this day isn’t yet even half way through.

Friday, January 14, 2005

GERALD LEACH: GENTLE GIANT

It’s an interesting reflection of how long the environmental and sustainable development movements have been a-building that these days I quite often turn to the obituary pages to find news of a colleague or acquaintance in the field who has just died. This time, in The Times, it’s Gerald Leach, whose writing I read avidly when he was at The Observer, where he helped break the Limits to Growth story, and who I later was to meet a number of times, mainly at parties at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), which he later joined.

I’m six foot, but my memory of him is as a gentle giant, stooping to maintain contact with lesser (or do I mean shorter?) mortals. His work on low energy strategies was hugely influential in shaping my thinking on work I did as part of the UK Conservation and Development Strategy, published in 1983, and in the early days of Environmental Data Services (ENDS), where I was editor from 1978 and then managing director until 1983.

A godfather, really, of sustainable development.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

BITC AS ‘FIG LEAF’

One of the things we have long encouraged companies to do is to pressure industry associations they are part of to pursue policies aligned with the corporate responsibility and sustainable development priorities the relevant companies have adopted. In the same spirit, we have also encouraged industry associations to drop member companies that do not meet their own (often dilute) CR and SD requirements. In this context it’s very interesting to see today’s Financial Times, whose front page reports that Suffolk brewers Adnams – which won the first “small company of the year award” from Business in the Community in 2003 – has resigned from BITC.

The company’s explanation? Its chairman, Simon Loftus, told the FT that BITC was being used as a “PR figleaf” by some member companies – and that it is too soft on irresponsible members. Whatever the facts of the matter, and I have worked with BITC and its affliated Business in the Environment over many years, I hope (but don’t expect) that more companies will follow Adnams’ lead with bodies like the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the International Chamber of Commerce).

Friday, January 07, 2005

(S)CARE IN THE COMMUNITY

Got a better idea of what care in the community can mean today. As I was coming back from the Soho Curzon, where Elaine, Gaia and I had seen the fabulous ‘House of Flying Daggers’, I turned into our road, on my own, to see a well-built young man attacking cars as he came towards me. “Who killed John Lennon?” he demanded, before shouting “I did” and launching into me, telling me about Hitler as he did so. Somewhat hampered by a large bag I was carrying, I managed to extricate myself, then followed him while dialling 999.

It turns out they put you in a holding queue while they try to get through to Scotland Yard, no less. Meanwhile our friend smashes various cars, attacks another – elderly – man beating him to the ground and dislocating his shoulder, and so forth. Determined not to let him get away I follow him, through snickets, around corners, calling 999 three times to let the police know where he is headed – and eventually stopping two police cars when they finally arrived to say he’d taken off in a completely different direction. In the end, feeling I had done enough and was tempting fate, I headed home, meeting Elaine coming to look for me on the way, only to find another police car near the scene of the attacks, which I also stopped. Then a bunch of neighbours came out to complain that their cars had been damaged.

Spent this evening in Roehampton and then Kingston Hospitals, with a wind so violent as Gaia and I made our way through the endless, bleak maze of Kingston Hospital that it ripped my glasses from my face and sending them spinning through a wire fence. Luckily, Gaia had a torch, so eventually we found them in the dark. Only a bit of rib damage, whereas with the other man you could see the dislocation – and yet, even so, it took the hospitals ages to get to treating him. This evening two policemen come around to tell us what happened: they caught the man. Well, I knew that, having heard them reporting in over one of their female colleagues’ wireless. “He’s got some mental issues,” they said through the static. Whatever, thank heavens for cell phones – and thank heavens, too, for the poor people who struggle to keep our ailing health care system wobbling along on its gangrenous legs.

Monday, January 03, 2005

LONDON WETLAND CENTRE

Much of the day spent working through notebooks from the interviews I did with social entrepreneurs – many of them with Pamela Hartigan of the Schwab Foundation – at last year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Am feeding it all into the structure of the new book Pamela and I are writing, which is hugely energising.

Then, this afternoon, Elaine and I walk across to the London Wetland Centre, run by the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (www.wwt.org.uk). This is a 105-acre wetland landscape in the heart of Barnes, with 30 different habitats, 170 wild bird species recorded, plus more than 300 butterflies and moths – and 20 dragon and damselflies. When we arrived in Barnes, 30 years ago, this area was covered by four huge water reservoirs. It’s been a while since we last walked across, but – drab weather or not – it’s a staggeringly beautiful memorial to Sir Peter Scott who conceived both the Trust and the Centre. His statue, saluted (I like to think) by a swan, welcomes visitors to the Centre.

Sir Peter Scott saluted by swan (©JE)

Keeping a weather eye on proceedings (©JE)

Sunday, January 02, 2005

THE TIDE IS OUT

Elaine and I took a delightful walk around Barnes during most people’s lunchtime, across the Common to the old cemetery where old Bruce Ismay of White Star Line and Titanic infamy is buried (many years ago, in Pembrokeshire, we knew one of the Ismays who, when she wasn’t looking after her horses was grinding lenses for her telescope), then around to the Thames – where the tide was spectacularly out. Interesting to read in the papers how few people knew that a rapidly retreating tide is a tsunami precursor.

Barnes Pond (©JE)

Elaine 1 (©JE)

Elaine 2 (©JE)

Barnes Cemetery 1 (©JE)

Barnes Cemetery 2 (©JE)

The Thames towards Hammersmith (©JE)

Elaine shoots the Thames (©JE)

Barnes Bridge (©JE)

 

Thursday, December 30, 2004

TSUNAMIS AND BUSINESS

The scale of the disasters caused by the Indian Ocean tsunamis was put into context by Raja Jarrah of Care International today, writing in The Times. For the aid agencies, he said, dealing with the consequences “is like dealing with five or six simultaneous disasters, each of which would make major news in its own right. It is as if the Goma volcano, the Zimbabwe famine, the Bam earthquake and Hurricane Mitch had happened on the same day.”

Although much of the media attention is inevitably focusing on the inadquacies of most government responses, and on the role of aid agencies and the UN, Robert Davies of the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) has sent out a brief on the potential role of business, which is well worth reading. Click on the link below:

http://johnelkington.com/wp-content/uploads/2004/12/TsunamiIBLFbrief.pdf

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

THE HILL HOUSE ‘GHOST’

Arrived yesterday in Little Rissington, to see my parents, with Elaine, Gaia and Hania. As we dropped down towards Burford, gateway to the Cotswolds, it was wonderful to see the church spire in the distance and brilliant white swans in the water meadows. Burford was jammed, but once we were over the old woolpack bridge, we were back in the clear.

As we had driven west from London, we had seen a fair number of foxes dead on the road: hope they’re not taking additional risks with the traffic because the banning of fox hunts has robbed them of life’s excitements? A huge hunt pours through Little Rissington today, December 29, all in blacks and greys. The sheer spectacle from our kitchen window is a wonder to behold. But I’m conflicted on hunting. Always disagreed with Julia Hailes on the issue when we were writing books together. She’s pro, I’m broadly anti. Not because I don’t like tradition and not because I think foxes should be sacrosanct – they can look after themselves perfectly well – but because of the sheer arrogance of the hunting fraternity when we have collided with them in the countryside over the decades. With a few, honourable exceptions, the experience has tended to surface emotions that track back at least to the time of the Saxons and Normans.

Spent yesterday afternoon with friends in Icomb, then early part of this afternoon going through old family photograph albums compiled over decades by my father, Tim. Given that I also have kept fairly extensive photo albums over the decades, I often wonder to what extent one’s memories would be different if such photos didn’t exist. And now that digital photography gives one editing powers unknown even to the most sophisticated of Stalin’s henchmen, I also wonder how real the pasts we look back at a few decades from now will be?

Elaine saw the Hill House ‘ghost’ again last night. In the past, she has seen what she described as very like ball lightning hanging in the air in one of the attic bedrooms. This time we were sleeping on a different floor, a part of the house where the ghost is not meant to penetrate. Nonetheless, Elaine awoke to a clash of cymbals, very much like – she said – the fanfare when a magician produces the rabbit out of a hat, and the bedroom was full of sparks, crackling as they fell slowly towards the floor.

Searching the Net, I came across a site devoted to ball lightning – and the descriptions seemed fairly close to what Elaine has described over the years. Makes me wonder whether the house – one end of which, the end most affected by the ‘ghost’, is several hundred years old – is sited or wired in a way that generates unusual phenomena?

Fireball at Salagnes, in W. deFonveille, Thunder and Lightning, 1868, from www.ernmphotography.com/Pages/Ball_Lightning

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

UKRAINIAN SCHADENFREUDE

It’s amazing how the map and experience of ‘Europe’ are reordering themselves. In the wake of the accession of the ten new EU member states, the news comes in today that Viktor Yushchenko – Ukraine’s pro-western opposition leader – has won the rerun presidential elections, by 52% to 44%. With the dioxin poisoning of Yuschenko, we have come to expect a degree of skulduggery, and today’s news doesn’t disappoint: Ukraine’s Transport Minister has been found dead at his dacha, with a gun nearby.

No doubt much unsavouriness is going to come out in the wash, but at the same time that parts of the Indian Ocean were being seismically jolted into 2005, the Ukraine has been jolted sharply towards the new Europe. I just hope that we have the political vision, the wisdom, to make sense of and manage this massively expanded sphere of influence.

An excellent column in yesterday’s Financial Times by Viktor Yushchenko, talking about the ‘Orange Revolution’ by which, he argues, the country has “put a definitive end to its post-Soviet period. By rejecting managed democracy, Ukraine has affirmed itself as a free European country that shares the political values of modern democratic states.” It remains to be seen, however, how people in the east of the country react. Some still fear that they may try to secede.

Meanwhile, I confess, there’s a certain Schadenfreude to be enjoyed in seeing the erstwhile Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovych, who presided over the massively corrupted first-round election, saying that he will appeal to the country’s Supreme Court about corruption this time around. Maybe he’s angling to win a degree of immunity for what went before?

Monday, December 27, 2004

KANDAHAR

Having been warned against it – “no joy” – I sat down this afternoon to watch the film Kandahar, by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Absolutely brilliant.

True, the plot is spare: Nafas, a young Afghan woman now living in Canada, tries to reach Kandahar from Iran to save her sister, injured by a land mine, whose letter had said she would commit suicide during the last solar eclipse of the millennium. But, despite the bleakness of the story and the stark, washed-out landscapes in which most people seem to stagger around on crutches, the film had me sitting breathless at times. (Nafas, I read, means ‘Respiration’, the notion being that as a Canadian she is not suffocated by the burka as Afghan women have been, though she has to adopt one to find her way into Afghanistan.)

The lead role is played by Nelofer Pazira, 28, whose family fled Afghanistan in 1989 and now lives in Canada. She had originally contacted Makhmalbaf to ask him to film a journey she planned to make to rescue a friend in very similar circumstances. A radio and TV journalist, she was unable to persuade Makhmalbaf first time around, but later he suggested a fictionalised version of the story. Bilingual, she talks to refugees in the Afghan variant of Farsi, using English when she speaks into a tape recorder to record her journey and impressions.

Makhmalbaf ends the film on a profound downbeat. And he has been pessimistic about any impact the film might have: “I don’t believe,” he says, “that the little flame of knowledge kindled by a report or a film can illuminate the deep ocean of human ignorance.” Well, maybe, but it’s one of the most moving I have seen. His website (www.makhmalbaf.com/movies.asp?m=10) gives some sense of the wonderful imagery.

Some critics have protested the use of gloriously coloured burkas to make the film easier on the eye, though somewhere on his website someone notes that Afghan women who cannot compete in terms of their looks do so via their raiment. Whatever, some the clothes are staggeringly beautiful – as are many of the Afghan faces, which helps bring the tragedy home. And the scenes of artificial legs being parachuted into the desert landscape, ahead of a surging field of crippled farmers and ex-soldiers chasing the aerial booty on their rough crutches, is an unforgettable moment of cinema.

© Mohsen Makhmalbaf

FOX, FULL MOON, FALLING OVER

Wonderful moment last night, after we we returned from Hampstead – where we had had a glorious lunch with Kavita Prakash-Mani, her husband Kartik, Nick Robinson and his partner Fiona. As we left, the full Moon was sailing across the dark sky, a serene moment in the wake of the terrible news of the earthquake off Indonesia. As we shut down the house to go to bed, the Moon was almost directly overhead and a dog fox was howling a few gardens away, like a coyote.

Was also in the process of finishing off The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki – a fantastic book. But there are moments that remind us that we are ultimately individuals, like that howling fox who – as Elaine noted – shares our space but lives in a very different world.

This morning, as I was reading the papers, and in the midst of another in the strean of blue-skied mornings, Tom Delfgaauw (one of SustainAbility’s two non-executive directors) called with a progress report on his accident outside St Paul’s Cathedral just before Christmas. He damaged both legs, it turns out, and will be bed-bound for a while.

The story struck home for a number of reasons, one of which was sympathy felt because of the much smaller accident I had suffered in Italy a few months back, when I tore a ligament. The problem was caused by tripping on the smallest of kerbs. Still hurts, although Elaine insisted a few days back that I apply some weird (Acu-med) plasters containing zinc and copper in a magnetic field. It’s meant to work with the skin’s moisture to create small pulses and stimulate the body’s natural mechanisms. And the weirdest thing? It seems to be working.

Friday, December 24, 2004

FT ON OLD FOES

Today’s Financial Times includes a substantial article by Alison Maitland on the new ways in which business and NGOs are working together, in which I am fairly extensively quoted (http://news.ft.com/cms/s/3ebf3b36-5551-11d9-9974-00000e2511c8.html).

Thursday, December 23, 2004

RECONNECTED

Pretty much a month after disconnecting me, BT has finally reconnected the broadband line this afternoon – though not without endless to-ings and fro-ings today. I simply cannot imagine a future in which consumers put up with this sort of service. No doubt the offshoring process will lead to strong IT providers in countries like India and China – and then God help the old purveyors in the once-industralised world. When IT services can be connected and delivered remotely, BT risks being consigned to some museum rather like the local chamber of horrors they used to have in Bourton-on-the-Water, displaying double-headed piglets and the like.

Monday, December 20, 2004

PEOPLE TREE

Safia Minney of People Tree and Matt Loose of SustainAbility (©JE)

Busy day, trying to get our latest proposal for a research program out to the wider team and others who will work on it. But the day started with a session with Safia Minney of People Tree (http//:www.peopletree.co.uk), the fair trade fashion house. Fascinating – and, as ever, those who took part from the SustainAbility team were bowled over by the sheer energy. Am gearing up to start work on the social entrepreneurs book over the Christmas break, with a large bundle of documentation just courriered in from the Schwab Foundation (http://www.schwabfound.org) to digest over the next couple of weeks.

Sunday, December 19, 2004

RICHMOND PARK

Magical walk through Richmond Park, with Elaine and great herds of deer, the intense winter sun slanting off the ponds between the trees.

Between the trees(©JE)

Two deer crossing (©JE)

Many deer approaching (©JE)

Branches in the Secret Pond (©JE)

Fungus on branch in Secret Pond (©JE)

Crow in blasted tree(©JE)

Saturday, December 18, 2004

60 YEARS ON: A PHOTO IN THE TIMES

My photo of Tim’s photo in The Times (©JE)

Odd. A few days back, on 13 December, I cut an obituary from The Times on Group Captain Frank Carey. Partly influenced by the powerful photo of Carey with a Spitfire in India, partly by the extraordinary story of the man’s life. Found another obituary in today’s Independent, which I also cut. Then, quite unrelated, rang my parents this morning, and discovered that the photo in The Times had been taken by Tim, my father, in August 1944.

Turns out that Tim knew Carey quite well, indeed they were both in the Royal West Sussex Hospital a few beds apart – after being shot down in August 1940. Then, a few years later, Carey appointed Tim to command one of his units when they were both in India, flying against the Japanese.

Having spotted that the photo was his, Tim e-mailed The Times to note the fact. They replied to say that they were sending the royalty cheque!

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

CHURCHILL AND THE ICY THUMB’S UP

Trafalgar Square after HSBC meeting (©JE)

Leaving an HSBC senior executive session late this morning, held at the St Martin’s Lane Hotel, I walked back to the Piccadilly Line via Trafalgar Square. The Square, including the lions, had been sprayed with artificial snow and there was also a large hand carved out of ice. In the background a large screen showed various characters from British history, from Florence Nightingale to Winston Churchill. Part impressive, part tacky. But I had dinner with the HSBC people last night at The National Gallery, and was impressed as I arrived to see what a difference the closure of the northern side of the Square to traffic has made to the quality of the visitor experience.

Monday, December 13, 2004

ODE TO JOY AND BROADBAND

Ah, the joys of IT! The BT engineer today reconnected the lines my Mac uses from home, three weeks after BT first cut them off. Now, apparently, all I have to do is wait seven working days for the broadband connection to be restarted. Until that happens, I can’t post images to the site. Amazing how dependent one becomes on particular technologies – and over a surprisingly short time. But my exposure in recent weeks to what passes for customer service in the telecommunications world persuades me that the market must be wide open for rival suppliers who use state-of-the-art technology to provide a human and humane experience for the customer.

WE’RE ALL LOOKING YOUNGER

During the SustainAbility team away-day(s) (©JE)

Someone commented this morning that the SustainAbility team is looking younger this week, probably because the tempo has slowed and people aren’t quite so hung over. Last week was absolutely frenetic: SustainAbility’s Swiss, UK and US teams convened for most of the week to review the past year and look forward. Little if any of this will be caught on our current website, because we are in the process of blowing up the old one and starting again from the ground up. Hope is that the new www.sustainability.com site will launch late in January.

Overall, though, 2004 has been an excellent year, the team is in much better fettle than it was a year ago, and even I find the energy and enthusiasm with which we plan to approach 2005 infectious!

This afternoon, while most of the team were off seeing Local Hero in a hired mini-cinema, I was in the SustainAbility offices with Pamela Hartigan of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship (www.schwabfound.org), with whom I’m planning a new book on social entrepreneurs, and Gaia (Elkington), who is helping with research and editing. Wonderfully productive session. Am really looking forward to getting stuck in.

Then we join the rest of the team for an evening out at a Middle Eastern restaurant close by Bond Street. Our tables turn out to be in a couple of vaulted ‘caves’, which bombard the more acoustically sensitive among us with noise levels that would not only breach industrial health and safety standards but also, I suspect, human rights standards on what constitutes wilful torture. Have always had bat-like hearing in the higher frequencies, which makes such environments particularly unpleasant. Described it as the Seventh Circle of Hell, but without being able to remember what happens in all the different circles …

Others enjoyed it, however, and many went clubbing afterwards, which makes me realise just how old I am!

Sunday, December 12, 2004

KILLER ANGELS

Among other things, am reading Michael Shaara’s outstanding book The Killer Angels, an account of the Battle of Gettysburg. Have read a huge amount of military history, but can’t remember when a book grabbed me in this way. It was a gift from (Professor) Jim Salzman, a member of SustainAbility’s Council who stayed with us last week – though I think it was also recommended to me very strongly some years back by another American friend, Peter Kinder of KLD.

Saturday, December 04, 2004

APPETITES FOR THIEVERY

And BT still have me cut off. The newspapers are full of the Bhopal hoax and of the much happier news (though we’ll see where it all ends up) that Ukraine’s Supreme Court has overturned the energetically disputed election result, opening the way for an electoral re-run. The Guardian magazine carries a series of photos of dumped Christmas trees in various states of decay in a range or rural and urban landscapes, taken by Martin Burton, who came into the office yesterday to shoot me for a piece to appear in The Director.

Reading an extraordinary book at the moment: Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, translated by Ahdaf Soueif (Bloomsbury, 2004). An extraordinarily engaging account of what it is like to be a displaced Palestinian. The book is full of the most unusual poetic images, triggering all sorts of memories. For example, Barghouti quotes one of his own poems, Qasidat al-Shahawat (‘Poem of Appetites’).

An appetite for the thievery of the child within us,
Slipping through the miserliness of the old woman whose face
Was like biscuit dampened with water,
To steal the almonds from her field.
Our pleasure is that she should not see us.
And more pleasure, should she see us running away.
And more pleasure yet
If her cane catches one of us
And whips him.

Barghouti manages to make the Palestinian plight abundantly clear, but does so in a tremendously powerful way by being balanced at times when most of us would be tempted to rail endlessly at the forces of the ‘Occupation’. He also establishes a profound emotional connection between his world and those of his readers, or at least this one.

The image that came to mind when reading his story of the almonds was from when I was perhaps 11 or 12. We sometimes went ‘scrumping’ for apples in local orchards, but in this case were crossing a (private) bridge at the foot of the steeply sloping garden of the Le Marchant family. One of the most impressive Le Marchants, who we only knew as Miss Le Marchant, appeared like a black-clad Disney cartoon figure and raced down the lawn, she must have been in her sixties or seventies, but she set about the leader of our group with her walking stick. He fought back with his own cane, and the duel swayed back and forth for what seemed ages but was probably only a few seconds. Yes, I feel a degree of guilt, but there was something mythic about the moment and I wonder whether even Miss Le Marchant didn’t find her ancient blood somewhat stirred.

Friday, December 03, 2004

THE YES MEN

Amazing day, though BT still has me cut off from broadband, so can’t actually post blogs. Unexpectedly, not least because he was meant to be on a later plane – pass (Professor) Jim Salzman, a member of our Council, in Hammersmith station as I rush for the Tube. He’s inbound from US and headed for Barnes, where he’s staying with us. I have five or six meetings today and am slightly late for the first, though in the event I get there on time.

One interview I do during the day is interrupted by a mad rush to sort out what our position is on the unbelievable spoof the Yes Men have just pulled on BBC World, which runs an interview with someone they imagine to be a spokesman for Dow Chemical, but who turns out to be a complete Trojan Horse.

The company’s share price fell in the US and Europe once it was known that the ‘spokesman’, Jude Finisterra, had promised that Union Carbide would be liquidated and a further $12 billion paid to victims of the Bhopal disaster and medical help given to up to 120,000 people affected by the gas leaks. It’s astounding that the BBC didn’t pick up the blazingly clear warning signs, including Finisterra saying that Dow would be pressuring the US Government to extradite Warren Anderson, Union Carbide’s head at the time of the disaster, to India to stand trial. The very idea!

Though we didn’t approve of what was also a pretty cruel hoax on the victims, the bogus interview is further confirmation of the main thesis in Geoff Lye’s report on liability: that companies will increasingly find themselves not only to tort and class actions in the law courts but also to trial in the ‘court of public opinion’.

Thursday, December 02, 2004

‘UFO’ IN ANTWERP

Still cut off by BT. Just back from Antwerp, which is splattered with construction projects, as if preparing for something on the scale of an Olympics. (Had been giving an evening presentation yesterday for Akzo Nobel.) Then, at the end of a wide avenue, the shining metalscape of the new Palace of Justice, a mix of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum on Bilbao and a crown-of-thorns starfish. Astonishing, totally out of character with the surrounds, a bit like a Spielberg rendering of a UFO landed in the Late Middle Ages. Taxi driver said the building had been HUGELY controversial. Maybe, I comforted, people would love it in 50 years. 100, he said.

Given a box of chocolates last night, in fact, what turns out to be a box of hands, in white, milk and dark chocolate. According to legend, the accompanying note said, the name of the city of Antwerp originates in the story of the giant Druoon Antigoon, who used to levy a heavy toll on traffic along the river Scheldt. If a skipper refused to pay the toll, the giant would chop off one of his hands and throw it in the river. Then a Roman centurion, Silvius Brabo, killed the giant, cut off his hands and threw them in the Scheldt. (So hand-werpen, where werpen apparently means ‘to throw’.)

Geoff was on the BBC’s Today programme this morning, with his new report, The Changing Landscape of Liability, published yesterday. One of the most political projects we have yet done, with push-back both from Dow Chemical and from people representing the victims of the Bhopal disaster during the course of the project, but Geoff was remarkably patient in ensuring all voices were properly represented. The conclusions, though, are not encouraging for companies like Dow. The report is downloadable free at: www.sustainability.com

 

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

FROM PARIS TO PYGMIES

Still cut off by BT. Am in Paris with Nick Robinson for the French launch of Risk & Opportunity, working alongside Utopies. Unbelievable morning sunshine glittering off the gilded domes of the city, particularly the Musee de lArmee, which is just around the corner from the Ministry where our launch was held – and blazing from buildings and columns as the taxi flashes across the Place de la Concorde.

Take the Eurostar back to London, where I am due to take part in a multistakeholder event at the Department of Trade & Industry, hosted by CSR Minister Nigel Griffiths. Am part of a panel with Nigel, Sara Parkin of Forum for the Future and Ian Russell, chief executive of ScottishPower.

Then chair the discussion session, at the end of which I spot Bob Worcester of MORI in the audience and invite him to take my slot on the podium to do a summing up. He does wonderfully well and, though some thought it was a set-up, it was really on of those spur-of-the-moment jollities. Explain to the audience that one of my New Years Resolutions is to let others do the work, wherever possible, though there was serious intent: the event was a bit too stage managed for a real stakeholder dialogue, so I was trying to pull different voices into the conversation.

Next, walk across Westminster Bridge, trundling my bags, to the Shell Centre for the first (and apparently the last in the present form) Shell Chairmans Christmas party hosted by Jeroen van der Veer. Stop by the London Aquarium to take a photo of the extraordinary car-converted-into-a-fish-tank.

As Elaine and I stroll back through Waterloo Station after the party, we bump into Phil Agland a colleague in the Earthlife days of the mid-1980s, a film-maker who has made wonderful TV series on the Cameroonian rainforest (Korup), the Baka Pygmies and a Chinese city (Beyond the Clouds), plus a rendering of Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders. We hadnt seen him since the premiere of that film. Wonderful case of serendipity.

Then, having missed our train, we were walking back to find a new one when we saw Nick Hildyard of The Corner House, a long-standing friend, who was seeing off a couple of Sudanese anti-diamond-industry campaigners. Among other things, he told me he had filed suit earlier in the day against the ECGD, whose advisory council I sit on. What a day!

Thursday, November 25, 2004

?WHAT IF!

Still cut off by BT. Busy morning in the office, then across with Yasmin (Crowther) to McKinseys offices at 1 Jermyn Street for a meeting of the Harvard Business School Alumni Club, where I was due to be the main feature. The event, organised by Daniela Barone Soares of Save the Children, resulted in an energetic discussion and a roiling series of conversations afterwards, with among others a number of current and would-be social entrepreneurs.

Then on with Yasmin to ?What If!, the innovation company based here in London, and in Manchester, New York and Sydney. We are talking to Kris Murrin about developing a process to help leapfrog SustainAbility into a new way of operating by the time we (hopefully) hit our twentieth anniversary in 2007.

Among the reasons we are interested in them: they were recently listed by the Financial Times as No 1 in the Best Place to Work for in the UK competition; and they are interested in supporting social entrepreneurs, as they have in helping launch the Belu bottled water brand, which generates funds to pay for clean water in developing world communities.

Then across to Regent Street to meet Hania and wander agog around the new Apple store there. Centred around a great glass staircase, the store is a virtual heaven on earth for the Apple-minded, Hania and I among them. What looks like a full moon this evening and, as ever, I feel revived. Home to find an amazing programme on BBC 2: a portrait of the wildlife and landscape of the Mississippi through the eyes of River Rat Kenny Sawley. Outstanding, numinous. Had me in tears at times. And then Gaia arrives back from Edinburgh. A red-letter day.

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

PACKAGING, BHOPAL AND NATASHA KAPLINKSY

A somewhat convoluted day and also finally discover that my ability to connect to the Net and broadband from my Mac at home is because BT have cut off the line. They had been sending bills to an old SustainAbility address and our accounts people hadnt noticed that. But dealing with BT is like dealing with a vast, emotionless robot, a Kafka-esque maze of dial this number and dial that but get used to being ignored whichever number you dial.

Started with a keynote speech at a conference organised by INCEPEN and the Packaging Federation. Among the people I met was Robert Opie, who founded Britains first museum of advertising and packaging, in Gloucester. Now it is moving to Londons Notting Hill and, he tells me, will focus more on environmental and sustainability aspects of the packaging story.

Then back to SustainAbility for the tail-end of an editorial meeting for the next issue of our newsletter, Radar. Then a couple of campaigners involved in campaigning for justice for the victims of the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India came in to discuss our impending report on liability regimes, which Geoff Lye has mainly authored, and which contains a case study on Dow Chemical which took over Union Carbides Bhopal assets.

The race back to Barnes to install myself in a black tie outfit which I loathe and head off to Thorpe Park, via the M4 and M25 and what seemed like endless traffic jams caused by a crash in Richmond and huge roadworks on the M25. Arrive simultaneously with Graham Tubb, Head of Sustainable Development at SEEDA (South East England Development Agency), who kindly ushers me in. Once inside the Dome, full of Disney-style giant fossils and writhing octopus tentacles, I gave another keynote to kick off the 2004 Sustainable Business Awards for the South East awards ceremony organised by SEEDA.

At dinner, find myself sitting between Kit Oliver, who first dreamed up the award scheme and chairs the judging panel, and BBC Breakfast News presenter Natasha Kaplinsky. Enjoyed them both tremendously – and found the evening tremendously energising.

One of the award winners (in fact, they won three awards) was CottonBottoms, founded by Joanne Freer to manufacture and distribute cotton nappies and to provide a nappy laundry service. Boots, Woolworths Big W and John Lewis now all supply the companys products. The significance of what CottonBottoms is trying to do is underscored by the fact that in 2003 alone 6.8 million disposable nappies were landfilled in the UK each day. And the approach avoids around a tonne of waste being landfilled for each child using real nappies.

As I mentioned to Joanne at the end of the event, our 1988 book The Green Consumer Guide had looked at the nappy issue and concluded that there wasnt (at that point) much to choose between disposable and non-disposable nappies. One reason: at that stage, nappies had to be boiled and a fair amount of detergent and/or bleach used. The increasing use of laundry services helps address those issues.

In parentheses, its interesting to note that when Gaia was born in 1977 she inherited Elaines huge, designed to last forever cotton nappies. We switched to disposables later, because of the sheer damned nuisance of all the soaking and boiling. Then I spent a merry Christmas evening, with snow falling, unblocking the drains because we had flushed the disposables and clogged the sewers.

Sunday, November 21, 2004

LES PAUL

On my way back from a day spent at the office yesterday with the board of trustees of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, I dropped into Waterstones and Virgin in Piccadilly. Bought a number of CDs, including albums by the likes of Bill Haley & The Comets, Link Wray, Les Negresses Vertes and – on an impulse – Les Paul’s ‘The Complete Trios-Plus (1936-1947)’. Know Les Paul from his guitars for Gibson, but hadn’t realised what an extraordinary guitarist he was/is. Love his tracks with Georgia White and with Bing Crosby.

Looked him up on Google and found that not only is he still alive, but still plays in public. According to Associated Press and Yahoo News, he “can use only his left thumb and pinkie [little finger] to perform at his weekly nightclub gigs in New York. The 89-year-old takes no medication for his painful arthritis and permanent injuries from a car accident 56 years ago, because it exacerbates his ulcers. But twice every Monday night, the renowned musician also known for his innovations on the solid-body electric guitar and multitrack recording gets on stage with his trio at the Iridium Jazz Club.”

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland opened a Les Paul exhibit in March. Born Lester William Polfuss, over the past three decades, Paul has won various awards, including a Grammy with Chet Atkins for best country instrumental performance. In 1998, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in September he won a lifetime achievement award at the Emmys.

Iridium, hopefully, here I come.

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

SAP RISES IN EAST BERLIN

Berlin. Taxi from Tegel airport drops me a block or so from the front door of software-maker SAPs front door, which gives me an opportunity to see what a contrast their modern office block makes with the surrounding dereliction of the old East Berlin. In town to do a panel session, hosted by SAP, on the results of SustainAbilitys Gearing Up report for the UN Global Compact and, in particular, to focus on the issue of corruption.

Moderated by author and journalist Susan Stern, the panel includes Catherine Volz (Chief, Treaty and Legal Affairs Branch, UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Vienna), Peter Eigen (Chairman, Transparency International, Berlin), Michael Buersch (Member of German Bundestag, Berlin, and Chairman of the Parliamentary Study Commission on the Future of Social Civic Participation), Pierre-Christian Soccoja (Executive Director, Service Control de Prevention de la Corruption, Paris) and Chris Sorek (Senior VP Public Communications, SAP, Walldorf).

The event, aimed at German corporate members of the Global Compact and of Transparency International, academics, the media and other stakeholders, is lively and prompts a good discussion. The scale of the problem in countries like Russia was underscored by several speakers, however. Having had my PC temporarily taken over by a swarm of viruses and pop-up ads while in Brazil, that is the image that comes to mind now when I think of corruption: demands for bribes at every step. We heard that even getting permission to build an apartment block in Russia takes 127 permits, involving 127 bribes.

Whatever the figures, the syndrome can only be an intense drag on the health of the economy and on the ability of ordinary citizens to think and act in the interests of the longer term.

Stay at the Westin Berlin and find myself looking straight down on the VW building where I spoke earlier in the year.

Thursday, November 11, 2004

INSTITUTO ETHOS

Spent much of the day with Instituto Ethos, a leading Brazilian CSR organisation which SustainAbility has worked with on a couple of projects. Its 907 company members account for annual revenues of approximately 30% of the Brazilian GDP and employ roughly 1.2 million people. Their main characteristic, Ethos says, is “their interest in establishing ethical patterns for the relationship with employees, customers, suppliers, community, shareholders, public power, and the environment.”

Chaired by Oded Grajew, the person who conceived the Social World Forum and a member of the Global Compacts Advisory Council, Instituto Ethos has also recently launched UniEthos, a ‘CSR university’ for Brazil. Meet some of those involved. Then out to the airport, for Iberia, Madrid and London.

UniEthos (©JE)

DYLAN’S CHRONICLES

Read Bob Dylan’s book Chronicles on the flight back from Brazil, given to me shortly before I left by Steve Warshal. He and I have been a couple of times recently to see Dylan play – and, though my ears tend to ring for days after, the man and the music are pretty much part of my DNA. Facinating to read about his own influences – and about the process of re-invention he put himself through. Time for me to do the same?

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

FABIO FELDMANN

Spent the day with ABN Amro Real, doing two sessions, first with CSR people and then with senior management. Very impressive bunch of people – and clearly committed to the sustainability cause.

In the evening, across to dinner with Fabio Feldmann and friends. In October 2000, Fabio was appointed the Executive Secretary of the Brazilian Climate Forum, and was also Special Advisor to the President for the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) meeting preparatory process in Brazil. Before that, in 1994, he was appointed State Secretary for the environment of São Paulo, leaving office in 1998. He coordinated the group that wrote the chapter on the environment in the Constitution passed in 1988. Like Julia (Hailes) and I, he holds UNEP’s Global 500 award.

Monday, November 08, 2004

NATURA

Spend the day with Natura, the hugely successful Brazilian cosmetics company, an hour’s drive from the city. Do two 1.5 hour sessions during the day with different audiences, either side of a lunch with senior management, including: Antonio Luiz da Cunha Seabra (Board Member and Founder Chairman); Guilherme Peirão Leal (current Chairman and Board Member); and Pedro Luiz Barreiros Passos (Board Member and CEO).

Natura came sixteenth in SustainAbility’s latest benchmark survey of corporate sustainability reporting, an extraordinary achievement. As the photos below show, the company’s NQ is both dramatic and beautiful, overlooking an extensive bowl of forest. Then in the evening, dinner with several Natura people at Carlota’s, run by chef Carla Pernambuco. Great wine: Case Silva 2003, from Chile.

One of the many great things about the visit to Natura was seeing an example of Brazil’s national tree, Caesalpini aechinata, commonly known as ‘pau brasil’ (www.globaltrees.org/reso_tree.asp?id=25). The tree gave its name to the country.

Sadly, years of harvesting of the Atlantic Coastal Forest have reduced the species to the verge of extinction. Exploitation still continues, however, because the tree’s extremely dense hardwood is ideal for making bows for stringed musical instruments. It was also long used to produce red ink – an ironic link to the ecological its felling has caused. Tried its fruit: delicious.

Part of Natura’s HQ (©JE)

Natura vista 1 (©JE)

Natura vista 2 (©JE)

Inside view (©JE)

In the Hall of Mirrors (©JE)

Darkest tree is Pau Brasil (©JE)

Waiting (©JE)

Sunday, November 07, 2004

NO MAN’S LAND IN SAO PAULO

Nelmara Arbex of Natura picked me up from the hotel and took me to lunch and then to the São Paulo’s 26th Biennial art exhibition, held in 25,000 square metres of exhibition space on three floors of the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, Parque do Ibirapuera. The theme: Território Livre. In English, apparently, that’s ‘Image Smugglers in a Free Territory’. The concept stems from the notion of no man’s land, geographically, politically, socially and aesthetically – with art defying the boundaries of reality.

Among the wonders: a giant spider by Louise Bourgeois and a huge plane made from all the sharp objects we aren’t allowed to take into the skies these days. As we walked back through the park, dropping off to suck on a coconut on the way, my eye was taken by a 10-seater bike at a cycle rental stall. Perfect locomotion for a crowded world.

Spider by Louise Bourgeois (©JE)

Memorial to extinction of passenger pigeons (©JE)

Giant plane made out of … (©JE)

… all the sharp things we can’t take on plaes today (©JE)

Nelmara Arbex (©JE)

Bike for an increasingly crowded world (©JE)

ECONOMIST ON RISK & OPPORTUNITY

The Economist ran a nice article and leader on SustainAbility’s latest report, Risk & Opportunity, in last week’s edition.

The leader, which is premium content, is at:

www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=3353315

The article, which is freely available, is at:

www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=3364578

Saturday, November 06, 2004

THE SOCIAL CAPITAL MARKET

Chaired the final plenary session of the Schwab Foundation summit early this afternoon. The focus was on what financial and development institutions can do to support social entrepreneurship.

The panel were: David de Ferranti (Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean, World Bank), David Horn (Managing Director, Private Wealth Management, Morgan Stanley), Jan Piercy (Shorebank, one of the first US regulated banks to embrace sustainable development goals), Alvaro Augusto Vidigal (President, Banco Paulista, and Head of BOVESPA’s – they are the Sao Paulo Stock Exchange – social investment market), Youssef Dib (Global Coordinator, Private Wealth Management, BNParaibas) and Peter Blom (CEO, Triodos Bank).

A very enjoyable session, with real energy. Then by car to Sao Paulo, with Thais Corral, who runs REDEH (Rede de Desenvolvimento Humano), then out to dinner with Thais and Fabio Feldmann (see subsequent entry).

Friday, November 05, 2004

GILBERTO GIL

Second day of the conference – and I chair a session on the potential of mergers & acquisitions in the field of social enterprise, then report back to the plenary. Vigorous discussion, but most of the entrepreneurs find it hard to see how M&A approaches could help, or at least do so without inolving the sacrifice of their values. But towards the end of the session, a number of speakers give examples of how mergers have worked in the worlds of social enterprise.

In the evening, there’s ‘Brazil Night’. We are serenaded by Gilberto Gil, one of the founders of the ‘Tropicalia’ movement in the 1960s. His first album in 1967 helped win him great popularity, but then he and Caetano Veloso were exiled from Brazil by the military regime. Returning to Brazil in 1972, Gil not only continued to build his musical reputation but also emerged as an energetic political and environmental activist – and was appointed Brazil’s Minister of Culture by President Lula, a role he continues to play.

Finding myself at Gil’s table, we talk about guitars: one of his first instruments was an accordion – and he later tranposed his accordion style to the guitar. Then the evening rages on with an extended performance from one of the samba schools. [Later addition: Because of my ankle, I don’t dance – and on the next day am repeatedly chastised for my failure to do so by folk who had invited me to take to the floor. An extraordinary example was set by one of the social entrepreneurs who took the floor in his wheelchair and executed the most amazing gyrations in the midst of the samba dancers.]

Gilberto Gil (©JE)

Thursday, November 04, 2004

BIRDSONG WITH HAMMERS

Arrived in Campinas, Brazil, yesterday morning. The noise outside my window in the Royal Palm Plaza is more or less what you’d expect of any emerging economy: birdsong, overlaid with frantic hammering and sawing, against the backdrop of distant traffic. Am here for the ‘How Big Can Small Get?’ annual summit of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. And because of recent changes at the World Economic Forum, I have been asked to chair an additional session tomorrow – on the theme of what we can learn from scaling in different growth models, which is pretty much core to the event’s theme and an area we are increasingly pondering at SustainAbility.

Monday, November 01, 2004

RISK & OPPORTUNITY LAUNCHED AT S&P

Frenetic day, then across with much of the SustainAbility team to Standard & Poor’s HQ in Docklands for the launch of Risk & Opportunity. Energetic event, though the acoustics in the vast atrium left a little to be desired. Powerful reverb.

One difficult question in the discussion period focused on why British American Tobacco (BAT) appears in our Top 10, given that their products kill people? Question came from the anti-smoking group ASH.

My answer was that, while we don’t work with the tobacco industry, despite frequent requests to do so, I feel that our benchmarking work should cover all sectors and all relevant companies. provided the data are publicly available, campaigning groups and other actors can then bring better informed pressure to bear on offending industries – as ASH did with BAT’s first social report, which they reverse engineered to produce and publish statistics on how many deaths it took BAT to make each million pounds – or whatever – of revenue.

Next: Nick (Robinson) and Peter (Zollinger) area heading off to Seattle to launch the report at an event hosted by Starbucks, then come Berlin and Paris.

Some of the participants at the launch (©JE)

 

Saturday, October 30, 2004

REGIME CHANGE IN LIABILITY INSURANCE

Back late last night from three days in Zurich, attending a conference on the future of liability insurance hosted by Swiss Re, the reinsurance group. Geoff Lye presented the results of SustainAbility’s forthcoming report, The Changing Landscape of Liability – for which Swiss Re was one of the major funding partners. Event held at Swiss Re’s Rüschlikon conference centre. The conclusions were very well received – and I’ll do a more detailed note on them when the report appears late in November.

Great opportunity to catch up with Peter Zollinger, whose home is ten minutes walk from the conference centre, to agree a new program for SustainAbility – and to try out the ‘Mobility’ service he uses rather than owning a car.

Geoff Lye and Peter Zollinger with ‘Mobility’ car (©JE)

Rüschlikon 1 (©JE)

Rüschlikon 2 (©JE)

Rüschlikon 3 (©JE)

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

JOHN PEEL

Text message from Elaine saying John Peel has died of a heart attack in Cuzco, Peru. Pretty much my favorite voice on radio. I first saw Peel at Middle Earth, Covent Garden, in the late 1960s, where he was DJ-ing. Shared his taste for bands like The Incredible String Band and Country Joe and the Fish at the time, but not always his later enthusiasms. The music magazine NME gave him a ‘Godlike Genius’ award 10 years back, which was stretching things a smidgeon, but he will be sorely missed.

Monday, October 25, 2004

DEBATING THE CORPORATION

Spent the morning with a group of Japanese companies exploring the corporate social responsibility agenda in Europe. Then some writing, then across to ERM with Judy Kuszewski to do a session with their Chairman Robin Bidwell and some of his colleagues in the CSR area. Then on to the Soho Curzon to chair a debate on The Corporation, a new film based on the book of the same name – and subtitled ‘The pathological pursuit of profit and power’. Among the panellists were Joel Bakan, who wrote the book and Jennifer Abbott who co-directed the film, plus good people from ActionAid (Ruchi Tripathi, www.actionaid.org), Corporate Watch (Claire Fauset, www.corporatewatch.org) and Platform (Dan Gretton, www.platformlondon.org).

Saturday, October 23, 2004

THE NEWS: KYOTO GOOD, BAGHDAD BAD

The news that the Russian Dura has ratified the Kyoto protocol on climate change is encouraging, given that it paves the way for an international system of emissions trading. It’s inevitable that as these great ecosystem issues become mainstream particular countries will use them to leverage their own interests – in this case, Russia wanted EU support for its application for membership of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

But an even more highly-publicised bit of attempted leverage – dominating the front pages – is the story of the kidnapping of Care International Iraq’s chief, Margaret Hassan. Given how much she and CARE have done for the country over such a long timescale, it brings home even more powerfully both how this war risks spiralling out of political control (e.g. with NGOs dragged into the fray) and how complicit the media can be in feeding the whole process, whether or not this is the intent.

I sent a message of support to CARE today (www.care.org). To do likewise click on the title of this entry.

NATSONS: EXCELLENCE AT MICRO SCALE

Over the nearly 30 years we have lived in Barnes, our newspapers have been delivered faithfully every day by a nearby newsagent, Natsons. As I sat this morning, ploughing through The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Times, as usual, it struck me how easily we come to take such services for granted. Travelling to Zurich on Tuesday, I will sadly miss an open evening at Natsons – celebrating the fact that they have just won the 2004 UK-wide Retail Industry Industry Award for ‘Independent Newsagent of the Year’, which is quite something.

Thursday, October 21, 2004

COMMISSION FOR AFRICA

Started day wandering across Horse Guards Parade in search of HM Treasury, which is at 1 Horse Guards Road. Shows how much I know about the institutions of British governance. Still, the Parade was impressive in the early light, and I did eventually get back on track, thanks to a couple of heavily armed constables. I was chairing a workshop at a Commission for Africa conference hosted by Treasury, focusing on how the private sector can support improvements in public sector governance in Africa.

Then, after lunch, on to Docklands for a meeting of the Advisory Council of the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD). A series of sculptures caught my eye as I walked from Canary Wharf to the ECGD, including an aggressively canine one outside Canary Wharf Tube station which was like something out of Ghostbusters, a disembodied head (which impresses somewhat differently in the light of the Iraq beheadings) and a bronze rower outside the ECGD building – though the preserved dockside crane is also pretty scuptural.

Horse Guards Parade (©JE)

Canine sculpture (©JE)

Disembodied head (©JE)

Rower and crane (©JE)

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

MONTGOMERY COMES TO LUNCH

Thanks to a link-up effected by Francesca Muller, Stephen Bungay of Ashridge Management College did a lunchtime session for us today at SustainAbility. The author of books like The Most Dangerous Enemy (probably the most insightful book I have yet read on the Battle of Britain) and Alamein (the story of the battle of El Alamein, which is now top of my to-read pile alongside Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, just sent through to me by Steve Warshal), Bungay develops management insights from the thinking and behaviour of WWII leaders.

His tack today was to look at how Montgomery handled his first 100 days in the desert – and particularly the first speech he gave to his new command. Though I find much about Montgomery hugely uncomfortable, his use of language on this occasion, much of it monosyllabic, was quite masterly.

Am reading The Most Dangerous Enemy at the moment and finding it totally absorbing, with new facts and angles on every page. It was interesting that even team members too young to have had parents involved in WWII were rapt.

My father, Tim, was due to be posted to North Africa, but was switched to fly off CAM (Catapult Aircraft Merchantmen) ships, as the convoys fought their way round to Murmansk and Archangel. That was considered at the time to be pretty suicidal, but of the rest of his squadron sent to the desert, only one pilot survived. And Elaine’s father, Stanley, was in the desert for six years, as a doctor treating skin diseases. He was married just before the war, then didn’t see his wife, Margaret, until after the war ended.

I confess I had been slightly fretful about exposing the team to such military history and analogies, but their reaction was hugely positive and engaged, not least because the analysis was so insightful. Odd concatenation of circumstances, though, that I then had a (quite unrelated) meeting with – among others – an anti-defence-industry activist, as preparation for a film preview I have to chair a panel discussion at next week. The film: The Corporation.

Although I was true to type in the Sixties and radically opposed to the military-industrial complex, my view these days is that – given the sort of species we are and our history – the 21st century is likely to be at least as hazardous as the 20th, and that we will always need a defence industry. But the one we have, globally, is massively corrupt and generally motivated by the basest of principles – which makes my argument rather difficult to sustain.

Monday, October 18, 2004

CORPORATE LOBBYING

A weekend largely spent on finalising our new benchmark survey report, developed with Standard & Poor’s and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Poor Nick (Robinson) was holed up for much of the time in the office, holding the reins on the various horses, and working via telephone with Rupert (Bassett) on the design and layout. I really enjoy this stage, particularly the way late-stage thinking bubbles up and creates much of a report’s character.

Eventually, the horses were stabled and the report went off to the printers this morning. One of the issues it deals with is the extent to which even leading companies report candidly and coherently on their lobbying of governments: the answer is very little, though a couple of companies are now breaking ranks.

This afternoon, with Seb (Beloe) and Katie Fry Hester of our US team, I went across to WWF’s London offices for a 3-hour Chatham House Rule session with NGOs and companies on the same theme – how corporate lobbying can be made more transparent and, a closely linked question, how companies in solution-providing sectors can be aligned to lobby more effectively for the sort of market changes that will help drive sustainable development. Then home, on my rather painful sprained ankle, for supper with Jane Nelson. As ever, an enormously stimulating conversation with one of the key figures in this area.

Friday, October 15, 2004

RULES FROM THE HP GARAGE

Across to Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, driven by a Bangadeshi who – it turned out – used to work with Muhammad Yunus of Grameen fame. Like many others, he’s here angling for a role in the continuing Silicon Valley adventure. I spent part of the day being made up with a powder puff in the HP boardroom, prior to shooting several brief commentaries on the e-waste recycling prospect for something that will apparently air on CNN and CNBC. On the way back to the airport (SFO – and a striking contrast to the garage era architecture) to meet Mark Lee ahead of flying out, I had the same driver take me across to the garage where there the HP story started.

Always loved The ‘HP Way’ – and the 11 rules developed by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in the early days:

Believe you can change the world.
Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.
Know when to work alone and when to work together.
Share – tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.
No politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage.)
The customer defines a job well done.
Radical ideas are not bad ideas.
Invent different ways of working.
Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.
Believe that together we can do anything.
Invent.

The HP garage (©JE)

SFO detail (©JE)

Thursday, October 14, 2004

JOHN SEYMOUR

Another missed opportunity. Elaine and I were invited earlier in the year to a ninetieth birthday celebration for John Seymour, whose obituary appears in The Times today. Couldn’t go, because I was travelling, so I never got to meet the man – though his writings on self-sufficiency were a key part of the movement that I got embroiled in during the 1970s.

Seymour’s books in this area included The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency, Far From Paradise, and Blueprint for a Green Planet, written with Herbie Girardet, who I first met in 1976, I think when we both worked on an alternative version of that year’s UN Habitat Conference. The UN did its stuff in Montreal, I seem to remember, whereas we tried to demonstrate alternative technologies and aspects of sustainable lifestyles in, of all places, Surrey Docks.

Much of the movement’s energy has since gone into mainstreaming projects, like the work that we now do with business, but the self-sufficiency strand remains a key part of the DNA of the wider sustainability community.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

SoL SEARCHING IN DEARBORN

Just spent an entertaining and informative couple of days at the Society for Organizational Learning’s ‘Business Innovation for Sustainability’ Forum in Dearborn, Michigan, cheek-by-jowl with Ford’s manufacturing heart. Bill Ford, the company’s CEO, did the best speech I have yet heard him give by way of welcome.

Other speakers included the likes of Peter Senge (of The Fifth Discipline fame and the prime mover behind SoL), Peem Juan Arcos (from the Ecuadorian rainforest and resplendent in a rainbow of feathers when I had breakfast alongside him), Janine Benyus (of Biomimicry fame), Stuart Hart (who has done more than anyone else to get our sort of issues into the pages of the Harvard Business Review – and whose impending new book I was reading in advance copy on the plane across), Leroy Little Bear (a Blackfoot and former director of the Harvard Native Studies Program) and Amory Lovins (of the Rocky Mountain Institute and co-author of a new report – Winning the Oil End Game, see www.oilendgame.org).

My session focused on ten years – to date – of the triple bottom line, and I had two leading figures in the field riding shotgun: Sarah Severn of Nike and Mike Dupee of Green Mountain Coffee. Ended up with standing room only and an energetic – but time-limited – discussion. It was wonderful to be there and there were some excellent sessions, but I came away acutely and uncomfortably aware of just how big the gap is between where this movement is and where the world needs to be by, say, 2050.

Ford conference center reflects (©JE)

Fuel cell Ford (©JE)

Gil Friend (www.natlogic.com) and David Isaacs (www.theworldcafe.com) (©JE)

Saturday, October 09, 2004

SMILE

Bought Brian Wilson’s Smile (Nonesuch Records – www.nonesuch.com) at the Royal Festival Hall earlier in the week and have been playing it more or less constantly . Unbelievable that much of this was written when he was 24. Recorded after the concert I saw – also at the RFH – earlier in the year. have loaded it onto my iPod for the flight to Detroit tomorrow.

Thursday, October 07, 2004

BILL WYMAN’S RHYTHM KINGS

Much of the day spent in meetings or working to finish the latest Global Reporters benchmark survey. Lunch at the Tate Modern restaurant, overlooking the Thames, with Seb (Beloe) and Kavita (Prakash-Mani) and Mandy Cormack of Unilever. And then …

Thames from Tate Modern (©JE)

… across to the Royal Festival Hall in the evening for an evening with Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings. Glorious music, with Ronnie Wood of the Stones and Eddie Floyd (‘Knock on Wood’) joining the band on stage. Charlie Watts of the Stones in the audience. We took Hania and Steve Warshal, of Greenpeace Business, among other things. First time I had seen guitarist Albert Lee in performance: blazing solos and delightful stage presence. Stunning encore, Johnny Burnette’s Tear It Up, with four guitars going at it hammer and tongs: Terry Taylor (co founder of the Rhythm Kings with Wyman), Lee, Wood and the extraordinary jazz guitarist Martin Taylor (www.martintaylor.com).

On his website, Wyman says that this is the last tour of by the Rhythm Kings. I hope this is just another case of a “last farewell” followed by others, but at his age I wouldn’t be surprised.

Terry Taylor and Bill Wyman (©JE)

Graham Broad, Ronnie Wood, Albert Lee and Frank Mead (©JE)

Wood, Broad and Eddie Floyd (©JE)

Mike Sanchez (© Hania Elkington)

Albert Lee and Nick Payn (©JE)

Tearing it up, with Martin Taylor, second left (©JE)

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

ILLEGAL DRUGS

Attended my first Council meeting at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and the Society’s 250th AGM, which was a fairly historic moment. The Council meeting included a session on illegal drugs. In the discussion period, where most people had focused on users, I dived in towards the end – just after a judge sitting two seats along from me had spoken – to declare, in the interests of full disclosure, that I had taken illegal drugs in the 1960s, including LSD, and might well do so again if the circumstances were right, before I turned to the subject of the drug producers.

I noted that this is now a huge, highly profitable industry, that is pouring money into R&D. Put together ongoing (mainstream) work on human genomics and pharmacology, I noted, and the chances are that the next 20-30 years will see a flood of new psychoactive substances in our streets and homes that we can scarcely even guess at today. I don’t like this, indeed I think the vast illegal drugs trade is yet another dreadful legacy from the Sixties, but if we simply focus on users the flood is going to be over our heads before we have put together any sort of Ark.

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

THE HOXTON APPRENTICE

Another social enterprise. Elaine and I went to The Hoxton Apprentice for dinner with two long-standing friends, Jonathan and Andrea Shopley. Developed by the charity, Training For Life, this is the first in a planned series of Restaurants For Life that will “combine high quality dining with a training and support environment for disadvantaged people from a local community.” All profits are ploughed back into the work of the charity. Restaurateur and chef Prue Leith designed the menu.

Had slightly wondered what we were in for, but it turned out to be a really delightful evening. The restaurant, housed in what was apparently once a school, proved to be in a high-roofed space which meant that you could hear each other speak, the front-of-house staff were incredibly friendly and professional, and the food was excellent. Keen to go again.

Among other things, caught up on Future Forests (www.futureforests.com), which Jonathan runs, and which has recently been the subject of some critical coverage in The Guardian. One reason, I suspect, is that Future Forests is a for-profit social enterprise, as SustainAbility is. We also had some challenging coverage in The Guardian and The Independent in the late 1980s, the second running a story with a massive cartoon showing a very large wolf in sheep’s clothing – which I think was meant to be me. Another reason, for the challenge, though, is that much of the money raised for Future Forests goes into buying carbon sequestration rights rather than planting trees, which is absolutely legitimate but not necessarily understood by everyone donating money.

It’s actually a fascinating time to be involved in all of this, with a growing range of social enterprises spanning the not-for-profit-through-to-fully-for-profit spectrum. This is another area that would benefit from better communication and greater accountability, but also from what Tim Smith (the social entrepreneur responsible for the Eden project) called for in the interview I did with him for SustainAbility’s newsletter Radar (www.sustainability.com/news/articles/core-team-and-network/john-elkington-tim-smit-interview.asp). In this case, he argued that “the environment movement needs to get closer together and be supportive of each other, forgiving of dissenting views, but working hard to establish those things we can agree on.” Ditto the wider movement that is trying to scale up the response to these challenges through purpose-built enterprises.

Saturday, October 02, 2004

ON BREAKING CODES – AND ANKLES

Back to London last night: distinctly cooler and Heathrow glittering in recent rain. A wonderful break and managed to plough through five books, apart from anything else.

Odd how many of them had something to do with breaking codes: Bill Bryson’s A Short Hisory of Nearly Everything, was the first, with its accounts of things like the breaking of the genetic code; then I read Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress, the sort of thing that John Buchan in an earlier era would have described as a ‘shocker’, which focuses on the US National Security Agency’s six-storey TRANSLATR (sic) code-breaking mega-machine; Andrew Robinson’s The Man Who Deciphered Linear B, an account of the life and work of Michael Ventris, the man who cracked the earliest European writing system pretty much at the same time that Watson and Crick were unravelling the secrets of the double helix of DNA; and, another shocker, Tom Clancy’s The Teeth of the Tiger, which is fairly gripping, but generally struck me as post-9/11 American wish-fulfillment.

By the end of our time on Lake Maggiore, my eye was trying to decode the deep symbolism of virtually everything, from the Moon sailing overhead as we watched bats flitting back and forth in pursuit of insects to workaday signs chasing each other across a hoarding in the backstreets of Locarno.

Maybe that’s why I lost my footing on our penultimate day, walking back from the dock, where we had disembarked from a boat from Ascona. Ended up twisting my ankle fairly badly — and am still wearing an elastic sock with the affected areas sluiced in Arnica cream. Amazing how everyone starts looking at you once you develop something as simple as a limp.

Full-ish Moon (©JE)

Arrows pointing to Locarno’s Castle of the Counts (©JE)

 

Thursday, September 30, 2004

RAMPARTS, IRAQ AND TWO GAVINS

The book I arrived in Orselina reading was Gavin Maxwell’s astounding A Reed Shaken by the Wind, recounting his travels among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq with Wilfred Thesiger. The book is so beautiful I often found myself reading out whole pages to Elaine. But the nature of these people is not romanticised: they are pretty savage at times, indeed Maxwell on one occasion notes that attempts by the central government to be liberal backfired badly.

Maxwell also credits Gavin Young, the other Englishman linked with Thesiger’s time on the Marshes, noting that he “first towered on my horizon as a namesake against whom the Arabs measured me to my discredit, as a man who could shave with three strokes of a razor and had learned their language in a week.”

I still sometimes wish I’d taken Gavin (Young) up on his offer to travel around the world with him, on the journeys that became Slow Boats to China and Slow Boats Home. No way it would have worked, I suspect, since much of the delight of the books was that he travelled alone and immersed himself in the cultures he visited, but I would certainly have come back a very different sort of Englishman.

And, as Elaine — the main reason I had wanted to stay in England all those years ago — and I wandered around the castle in Locarno, it struck me yet again how lucky we are to live in times of relative peace. Elaine bought a book on the great peace conference held here in 1925 — and we were forcibly struck by the very different looks of the different national delegations.

I know we are all Europeans now, but some of the Germans looked, well, like the sort of people who would do what the Nazis began to do in the 1930s, the Belgians all looked like Poirot, the Frenchmen looked deeply suspect, the Poles looked solidly interesting, the Czechs looked intelligent and great fun (to my memory, only the Czech delegation seemed to feature women as members, and they looked intriguing), and the English, well they looked handsome, a bit straight-laced, well-intentioned but possibly just a little above it all.

How’s that for a fully-fledged set of prejudices? The sort of prejudices that can lead to war? Or, just maybe, those photographs were some weird form of litmus test, distilling elements of national character that were to colour — and in some cases discolour, stain – the European map over the coming decades.

There’s a great deal more travelling these days, but I wonder whether we know other peoples any better as a result? Any culture able to spawn, disseminate and learn from the likes of Maxwell, Thesiger and Young would be better equipped to deal with the cultural collisions forced by our shrinking world. The stunning lack of Arabic speakers among young American students — at least until the recent fracas — speaks volumes.

Ramparts (©JE)

Inside the castle (©JE)

Elaine (©JE)

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

SMOOTH SNAKE, WROUGHT IRON

It’s strange what spools through your head when you move between worlds. From the wakes of the boats on the lake to the intricate ironwork seen through an arch in Ascona, the week has been full of vaguely serpentine forms. Then, when we were walking down the mountainside to Locarno, I came across a great looping smooth snake. Not sure what it had been up to, either sunning itself or dining on lizards, or some mixture of both, but when I looked smooth snakes up in a natural history guide in a bookshop later, the animal in question was being swallowed head-first by a much larger snake. Hope it’s not an omen.

What follows is a grab-bag of images that caught my eye as we strolled around.

Taking pictures (©JE)

Scrollwork (©JE)

Sculpture by Jean Arp (©JE)

Elaine in church (©JE)

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

ISOLE DI BRISSAGO

Took the boat out to the Isles of Brissago. In 1885, these two small island had been called the Saint Leger Isles, after their then owners, and on the larger the Baroness Antonietta had built a small a palace, creating a large garden full of exotic plants. Then, in 1949, the islands were declared a botanical park. Apart from what I think was a golden pheasant that insisted on taking a ferocious dust-bath at our feet, the high point was watching great fish patrolling the foot of the lakeside walls.

Orange blooms (©JE)

Cleaning frenzy (©JE)

Sunday, September 26, 2004

A DIFFERENT SORT OF SUMMIT

Many of the events I go to these days seem to be described as summits, but it’s nice to get to the top of a real one, overlooking much of Lake Maggiore. We took two cable cars up, then — after surveying the scene — walked down. As ever, it took much longer than we had imagined and our legs were aching and wobbling by the time we finally got down to Orselina.

But the view from the top was well worth it — particularly the perspective provided on the alluvial fan which erupts into the post-glacial lake, with Locarno located on the northern, left hand side of the fan in the photo, and Ascona on the southern, right hand side. Reminded me of my time in the Nile Delta in the mid-1970s, which features a very similar shape erupting out into the Mediterranean. I’m seeing the scene a little differently, however, because of one of the books I’m reading: Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Almost literally unputdownable.

Still, the facts given on the likelihood of a new ice age — which I know, but don’t like to be reminded about — are quite literally terrifying. (As is the threat posed by the geological disaster lurking under Yellowstone Park, something that would knock Krakatoa into the proverbial cocked hat.) The evidence of the forces that the ice sheets impose on the areas they ride over was all around us today as we walked.

More happily, the cloud formations were quite beautiful, with many adopting semi-lenticular forms. Bryson also talks of Luke Howard, who named the clouds. I have a book on him beside my bed back home. Must read it. Have always been struck how differently I see clouds when compared with people like my father, whose very life must have depended on being able to see and think about clouds in a much less romantic vein during the Battle of Britain and its aftermath.

The summit (©JE)

The fan on which Locarno and Ascona stand (©JE)

Saturday, September 25, 2004

WATERWORLDS FROM ORSELINA

Elaine and I arrived last night in Orselina, high above Locarno and the northern end of Lake Maggiore. Although we drove past the southern end of the lake many years back, this is the first time we have stayed here. The time-scale has been a bit squeezed by the WEF event earlier in the week, but that was well worth the trip – and now comes the unravelling.

Or at least that’s the plan. In any event, we have brought a caseload of books. And the process is greatly aided and abetted by the outstanding views from our balcony. Both Elaine and I have always wanted to live overlooking water – and this continuously unfolding spectacle of boats, wakes and patterns of light and shadow is unlikely to dissuade us.

Hotel Orselina (©JE)

Elaine’s shadow (©JE)

Acer leaves in the morning sun (©JE)

Looking down onto Locarno’s marina (©JE)

Boat heading south (©JE)

Snake wake (©JE)

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

BLENDED VALUE AT WEF

Back from two days in Geneva, at the World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org), taking part in a workshop on blended value investing, or ‘private investment for social goals’. Hosted by WEF, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Rockefeller Foundation.

Did a panel session on the first day with Bill Drayton of Ashoka (www.ashoka.org) and Will Rosenzweig of the Haas School of Business, chaired by Sally Osberg – president and CEO of The Skoll Foundation (www.skollfoundation.org), launched by e-Bay’s first employee and first president, Jeff Skoll. Wonderful event and came back with my head absolutely buzzing with ideas.

Sunday, September 19, 2004

RICHMOND PARK

Much of the morning spent working on the new reporting benchmark survey – which is going very well. A new landscape is starting to evolve in my brain. All sorts of strands beginning to converge. Then a glorious walk in Richmond Park this afternoon, with Elaine and Jed Emerson – of ‘blended value’ fame (see www.blendedvalue.org). Clacking of fallow deer stags as they clashed horns under the chestnut trees. Then home for a roiling conversation that stretched through the evening.

Red deer stag – and, below, locking horns (© JE)

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

CRUELLA

Glorious, chill autumnal evening as I cycled home through Hyde Park, with cyclists disappearing into a golden haze and pedestrians emerging from it. Day started as it meant to continue, slightly weird, with an early meeting with a venture capitalist interested in the CSR area. Unexpectedly, he came with someone else, an extremely well-known American actress. A very interesting conversation. Told her we would have a plaque struck to hang over the sofa, saying ‘Cruella Sat Here.’

Hyde Park (©JE)

Monday, September 13, 2004

ACRONYM SOUP IN THE COMMONS

Interesting evening at the House of Commons, with the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), discussing the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI)’s Operating and Financial Review (OFR) draft regulations. Sandwiched between a right-wing Baroness (all for blowing up the DTI) and a left-wing Lord (whose daughter he described as the last surviving Communist).

If and when introduced, the OFR will cover around 1300 quoted UK firms, requiring them to provide a balanced, comprehensive and forward looking review of their business operations and prospects. Seems like a reasonable idea to me, though I asked the second question, about what the UK legal profession makes of it all? My fear is that if the DTI misjudges, the lawyers will take over, as they have in the US, and the net result will be considerably less than helpful.

Big Ben (©JE)

MICHAEL ROYSTON

Sad news. Heard over the weekend from David Royston, a son of Michael Royston, that Mike died last Thursday. He was the author of Pollution Prevention Pays, an early book which helped shape the business-and-environment agenda. I first met him in Reykjavik, in 1977, at a conference organised by Nicholas Polunin, then subsequently at a number of business schools, including IMD, where we were both promoting the concept of pollution prevention to the rising generations of managers.

Saturday, September 11, 2004

WORLD TV

Third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Day spent mainly working on our latest Global Reporters report and on a new book idea.

Yesterday, was collected from home at 08.00 by a Toyota hybrid Prius and ferried through lava-like traffic jams to TV studios to film a series of panel discussions for a CNBC TV series being made by World Television on ‘The Business of Development’. Studio anchor was Jane Dutton, now with BBC World, and I did three sessions: one on mobile phones, one on sustainable agriculture and food, and one on computers and the internet.

A couple of the other speakers had PR minders: while I like company, it made me even more conscious of how privileged I am in being able to say pretty much exactly what I think.

Thursday, September 09, 2004

HANDEL AND HENDRIX

Evening out with Francis and Christine Kyle of the Francis Kyle Galleries in Maddox Street (www.franciskylegallery.com). Started with a concert at the Handel House a few blocks away, where George Frederic Handel lived from 1723 to 1759. Given my taste for world music, I was fascinated to hear Clive Bell (North Indian flute), Udit Pankhania (tabla) and Stephen Bull (violin) performing and discussing a range of music illustrating the intermixing of Indian and Western musical traditions, mainly focusing on the 18th century.

Though I pass the Handel House every time I cycle down Brook Street to SustainAbility’s Bedford Row offices, I hadn’t realised it was there – nor that this was the building that Jimi Hendrix had lived in. His top floor flat now serves as the administrative office for the Handel Museum. As I struggle to play even fairly basic sequences on my 30-year-old Gibson, I appreciate even more Hendrix’s mastery of his instrument and art (www.jimi-hendrix.com). As we walked south towards the Worseley restaurant, we pondered what Handel would have made of Hendrix’s music? At least Handel apparently had a sense of humour.

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

TO DTI WITH NGO DELEGATION ON CSR

Afternoon spent with a group of NGOs – among them ActionAid, CORE, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and Traidcraft Exchange, at Amnesty’s London HQ, then on to the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) with most of the above – to lobby for changes in the DTI’s international position on corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Friday, September 03, 2004

OXFORD VISION 2020

Just back from a couple of days at the second Oxford Vision 2020 conference, held over three days at the Said Business School, Oxford. Typical trip down yesterday morning: the train was 45 minutes late into Oxford. Found myself staying at The Randolph Hotel, for first time – and recalled the friend who – some decades back – checked in at the hotel as ‘Lucifer’, then started striking matches in an attempt to burn the hotel down. Gray, my brother, had to drive in to Oxford to collect the would-be arsonist from the police cells.

The friend, clearly, was having mental health problems. This time around the subject under discussion was other forms of non-communicable disease. Oxford Vision 2020 agenda has opened out from last year’s focus on obesity and diabetes to this year’s focus on 3 risk factors (tobacco, diet and lack of physical exercise) that cause 4 chronic diseases (cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic lung diseases and some cancers), accounting for 50% of deaths globally (summed up in this year’s slogan 3>4 = 50).

Energetic morning today, with people like Erik Rasmussen (of Denmark’s Monday Morning think-tank) arguing that the Baby Boom generation are going to drive a radical refocusing on patient-centred health care, Sophia Tickell (of Just Pensions) arguing for a much clearer campaigning approach, to avoid the pitfalls that have slowed the UN Global Compact, and Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Rebien Sorensen pledging that his company would support the Oxford Vision 2020 initiative for another three years.

So why is Oxford Vision 2020 needed? “Public health priorities and the attention of most media, public funding bodies and people at large are primarily focused on the scourges of AIDS, TB and malaria,” the website explains. “And yet, 50% of people in the world die due to four chronic diseases: CVD, diabetes, chronic lung diseases and some cancers, which are linked to three risk factors: tobacco, diet and lack of physical exercise. The projected numbers for the year 2020 are frightening, putting an impossible burden on people and healthcare systems alike. If the current spiral continues unabated 400 million people, or one in ten of the world’s population, will be suffering from diabetes alone by 2020.”

Potentially a gold mine for Novo, the world’s largest manufacturers of insulin, used to treat diabetes. But it’s a mark of Novo’s corporate conscience that it is trying to catalyse a multi-stakeholder response to prevent many of the chronic disease problems that otherwise threaten to slow or derail health care systems. No company is perfect, but Novo has to be the most moral company I have ever worked for or come across. Our relationship goes back to 1989, when Mads Ovlisen (still the company’s chairman) called SustainAbility in to do an environmental review after the publication of our book, The Green Consumer Guide.

(And, speaking of chronic health problems, when Elaine and saw Bill Clinton in Davos earlier in the year, we both commented how unwell he looked. The e-news this afternoon reports that he has just checked into hospital for a quadruple bypass operation. If so, every best wish to the man and his family. The most inspiring politician I have ever heard in the flesh, by far – though there are continuing rumbles as the US presidential election builds to a frenzy about the failure of successive administrations to take the threat of al-Qaeda sufficiently seriously. On the train back, I start reading the 9/11 Commission Report – and the news comes in of the latest, horrifying casualities from the hostage-taking at a Russian school in North Ossetia.)

Said Business School (©JE)

Erik Rasmussen of Monday Morning (©JE)

Lars Rebien Sorensen (©JE)

Wednesday, September 01, 2004

STASILAND

Yesterday and today with VW, in what used to be East Berlin. On the way back, I bought a couple of books, one of them Anna Funder’s Stasiland. Complusive reading. Extraordinary account of a society – Communist East Germany – which monitored everything but failed to join up the dots in the right way.

“The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control,” Funder notes. “Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around. It was a bureaucracy metastasised through East German society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellows and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub. Obsessed with detail, the Stasi entirely failed to predict the end of Communism, and with it the end of the country.”

The wrong sort of transparency.

In Nazi Germany, there had been one Gestapo agent for every 2,000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR one KGB agent for every 5,830 people. In the GDR, there had been one Stasi officer or informant for every 63 people.

When I was born, 55 years ago, the Berlin airlift was still under way. Funder recalls that the bombers flying in from the west were known as Rosinenbomber, or ‘raisin bombers’, because they brought in food. As I was driven through the city, my mind tried to picture where the unexploded bombs that some of the same planes had dropped in wartime still lie underground – like the Luftwaffe bomb discovered a few years back in the garden that abuts our kitchen in Barnes.