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Keys to our future

Wonderfully, Sam was finally able to pick up the keys for the new Volans office this morning, at 2 Bloomsbury Place. Estate agent has been typical of the breed, one of the rare life-forms one would gladly see nudged into extinction.  Has taken quite a while getting to this point – given that our initial visit with Elaine featured in an 18 March blog entry – but my sense is that having our own platform will make a significant difference for the wider Volans team.  

Through much of the day I worked with Astrid Sandoval, who was our Editor on The Power of Unreasonable People at Harvard Business Press, and is now doing an MBA at IESE, Barcelona, and London Business School.  Very useful session where she probed me on my ambitions for Volans – and we began to craft new language around our tagline and mission statement.  May or may not survive our two Volans away days on Thursday and Friday this week, but felt like real progress.  A set of seed crystals to drop into the saturated solution.

Kurzweil, Wolf and Stern surf Wave 4

Ahead of a Volans team session at the end of this coming week, I have been trying to clarify my thinking on how I want to spend the next couple of years.  Yesterday, in ongoing conversation with the wider Volans team, I concluded that central to my mission and vision is the notion of mapping, connecting with and supporting the innovators and entrepreneurs who are at – or who are moving towards – the leading edge of the fourth wave in the model of change I began to map out in 1994 (see below for latest, summary version).

 The characteristics of Wave 4, at least in my mind, are – among many other things – a growing focus on disruptive innovation and scalable entrepreneurial solutions to the world’s great governance, economic, social and environmental challenges.

So two stories from today’s papers struck home as I read the papers today.  The first, from the New York Times supplement in The Observer, featured the thinking of Ray Kurzweil – and his notion that the Law of Accelerating Returns will mean that the solutions will emerge far faster than we might currently imagine.  The key point he makes, whether in relation to human genomics, life extension or solar solutions for climate change, is that: “Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace.  They make linear extrapolations from the past.  When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve.  If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”

Of course, what goes up can also come down, and exponential curves can take us places we absolutely don’t want to be. Waves can develop vicious undertows that drag would-be surfers into the depths, or or civilizations into a vortex of ecological decline.  This point was underscored earlier in the week by probably my favourite contrarian, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times.  He began: “Is it possible for the vast mass of humanity to enjoy the living standards of today’s high-income countries?”  Then he continued:  “This is, arguably, the biggest question confronting humanity in the 21st century.  It is today’s version of the doubts expressed by Thomas Malthus, two centuries ago, about the possibility of enduring rises in living standards. On the answer depends the destiny of our progeny. It will determine whether this will be a world of hope rather than despair and of peace rather than conflict.”

Wolf was drawing on a new book by Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth.  “The most illuminating concept,” Wolf note of the book, “is that of the ‘anthropocene’ – the era in which human activities dominate the world.  Peter Vitousek of Stanford University has documented the ways in which humanity has appropriated the bounty of the earth for its own use: human beings now exploit 50 per cent of the terrestrial photosynthetic potential; they have put up a quarter of the carbon di-oxide now in the atmosphere; they use 60 per cent of the accessible river run-off; they are responsible for 60 per cent of the earth’s nitrogen fixation; they are responsible for a fifth of all plant invasions; over the past two millennia they have made extinct a quarter of all bird species; and they have exploited or over-exploited more than half of the world’s fisheries.”

For entrepreneurial solutions to work, however, they have to be regulated, at least to a degree.  That’s where the governance element becomes crucial.  And that, in turn, is where the second piece of new today fitted in, at least in my mind.  Nick (now Lord) Stern is proposing the world’s first credit rating system for carbon offset in the developing world.  Given that it is estimated that perhaps two-thirds of some 3,000 offset projects being developed under the UN’s programme are, according to The Observer, “either late or will fail to deliver the promised carbon savings,” this idea (promoted by IDEAcarbon) is precisely the sort of market mechanism that I suspect will need to become much more common as the peak of Wave 4 eventually subsides and we move into the fourth downwave. Downwaves, as I often stress, is where the really useful work tends to get done.

Human Smoke

One of the books I bought in San Francisco recently was Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, subtitled ‘The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.’  When one of the venture capitalists I was working with in Palo Alto asked me what the heap of books I was carrying included (I had turned down a bag) and heard this title and the book’s theme, he asked why on earth I would want to read another book on WWII?  Because, I said, it’s healthy to explore different perspectives on a period of history you think you know quite well.  

The title came from something one of Hitler’s generals, Franz Halder, told an interrogator – that when he had been imprisoned in Auschwitz towards the end of the war, “he saw flakes of smoke blow into his cell.”  He called it “human smoke.”

And how different Baker’s perspective proved to be, steeped in a pacifism that was largely boiled off in the white heat of war.  But full of sorts of things that were totally new to me.  A fascinating corrective to jingoistic interpretations of what happened, though I did fret at times that Baker’s dice were heavily loaded and that the reader could almost end up feeling sorry for poor Mr. Hitler.   

Towering visions

Wonderful day spent at Ernst & Young’s South Bank offices, cheek-by-jowl with the GLA head-shaped haunt of London’s new Mayor, Boris Johnson, and overlooking both HMS Belfast, the forbiddingTraitor’s Gate entrance to the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. Could watch the changing moods of the water and skies all day, alongside the constant shuttle of vessels of all sizes and purposes, but we were intensively involved in the World Energy Council project as the ongoing story of the inner London Thames unfurled around us. 

ENDS & beginings

Deep, vexing irony today in that I was meant to attend (as a co-founder) a 30th anniversary celebration at the House of Lords this evening for Environmental Data Services (ENDS), hosted by Michael Heseltine, whose company bought ENDS a while back. But because we are in the midst of setting up a new venture, Volans, we have been hugely distracted – and found late today that we have been running parallel calendars, so I was double-booked.

Everyone had left ENDS by the time we discovered the problem, so I had to decide which fork in the road to take. Unusually, I took the family fork, for dinner at Livebait in Covent Garden with Elaine, Gaia, Hania and Elaine’s sister Christine. G and H had invited us to share some quite extraordinary news about their collaborative film script-writing. More anon, when it’s public.

In the meantime, even if remotely, my very best wishes to the ENDS team, particularly David Layton, the late great Max Nicholson and Georgina McAughtry – and in memory of the late, magnificent Marek Mayer.

Sarah Dodds

A heavenly cycle ride in to the office this morning, with open blue skies and the traffic moderately well behaved, but then heard the news about Sarah Dodds, Director of UnLtd Ventures, who has died after falling into a coma following a cycle accident in northern France. A wonderful tribute by Rod Schwartz can be found on the Catalyst Social Business Blog. I last saw Sarah at the Skoll World Forum, then later on the day the Forum closed at an Ashoka event in London, where she went out of her way to introduce me to an American she felt could help us with Volans. She and I were due to meet in the next couple of weeks, something I looked forward to hugely. Her energy and generosity of spirit were remarkable. A truism to say she will be sorely missed, but true nonetheless.

Skyscapes

There’s no question that contrails are implicated in climate change, in various ways, but sometimes the skyscapes they create are wondrous things. Watched the male contrails unfurl across female clouds this weekend – and felt at peace with the world.

Homo volans 1

Now that I’m once again thinking of things taking flight, thanks to the derivation of the first part of our still-evolving Volans Ventures, I am tending to see flight-linkages everywhere I go. Today, as I cycled alongside the Serpentine, I came across the preparations for the second Red Bull Flugtag. Chatted to a couple of the teams, including those sticking a load of white feathers onto their swanmobile.

Subsequent note: The Cullinan Bird, designed and built by a team of engineers and architects from London, wowed the crowd with the longest flight of the day, soaring for over 39m before landing in the Serpentine. No idea where the swan placed. But the Red Bull Flugtag competition isn’t all about distance and the Cullinan Bird team apparently failed to impress the judges with their pre-flight performance, resulting in a 5th place finish. Intriguingly, given my interest in the potential of Homo volans in all sorts of areas of innovation and enterprise, the competition was judged both on distance flown and on the level of creativity.

People, Planet, Profit

I still find it strange to see terms I have coined out there in the wider world, living their own lives. Green consumer and triple bottom line still pop fairly regularly, whereas today it was the People, Planet, Profit formulation I came up with in 1995 as a more populist version of the TBL. It pops up again as the refrain of the Financial Times Sustainable Banking Awards. The awards are a joint initiative between the FT and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the latter of which we have worked with on several occasions, most recently on SustainAbility’s Market Movers study.

A couple of the banks we have worked with over the years also pop up as winner and runner-up for the Sustainable Bank of the Year award. These are Banco Real in Brazil and Rabobank in The Netherlands. Sustainable Asset Management (SAM) in Switzerland, where I continue to serve on the Advisory Board of SAM’s Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, also appears as runner-up for the Sustainable Investor of the Year Award, after E+Co. Given that the awardees and runners-up were selected from a record 182 entries from 129 institutions in 54 countries, they are doing pretty well.

Hania’s fish

Hania, who came back from Greece just before I arrived back from Brazil, took this picture for me while there – in the spirit of my CounterCurrent symbolism. Wish I had taken it!