Journal

Invited to Bucharest by the Sustainability Embassy in Romania, Elaine (seen above in conversation with the British Ambassador to the country, Giles Portman) and I spent much of a fascinating week both in the capital city and then in the Danube Delta. More details on the Bucharest end of the trip here – and more shortly on the Delta.

I spoke again at the second ESG Europe Summit in Madrid, though this time it had moved to a larger venue, the Albéniz Theatre. Great spirit, though there seemed to be more advisory sector people there than folk from mainstream corporates.

Have been testing clear repeatedly after contracting Covid in Istanbul, but still with something of a cough to cope with. Still, made some great connections and had some rather wonderful feedback.

It’s quite the season for events, meanwhile. In the next couple of weeks alone, for example, I have Bucharest, Belfast, London, Paris and Newcastle to contend with. And just managed to finish off and publish my latest Substack post, this one on “tipping points” as covered by professor Tim Lennon and his team at Exeter University.

Rather thrilled to be mentioned by Earthshot Prize CEO Hannah Jones early on in this interview for the latest edition of the Royal Society of Arts Journal.

Elaine and I spent several magical days in and around the Global Leaders Summit on AI and Sustainability

The trip started well when Elaine and I shared an after-midnight taxi into Istanbul with professor Martin Gutmann of Lucerne School of Business – and author of The Unseen Leader. We had (for me at least) a fascinating conversation around the history and future of leadership.

And the pattern continued as we met some extraordinary people in orbit around the Global Leaders Summit. Theme: AI and sustainability. The event was held in the ÇirağanPalace, alongside the Bosphorus, and we stayed in the extraordinary Kempinski Hotel, where we had more or less peered through the bars when we first visited Istanbul, back in 2009. I was last in the city in May, when we launched the Turkish edition of Green Swans.

In my keynote on the first day of the event, I played a trick I first tried last year, with a title showing the “AI” letters at the heart of the world “SustAInability” highlighted. I learned a lot both from other speakers and from the participants I spoke to, many of them when I did a couple of book signing sessions.

We were very impressed by what Seda Mizrakli Ferik and Aycan Ferik of KREA have managed to achieve, though – as a variety of senior leaders talked about AI, sustainability and the green transition – I had the same sense that I used to have at the World Economic Forum summits. A sense that there is a huge chasm between having the right terms slotted into speeches and taking the sort of political risks that Joe Biden took with the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Still, transformative change often starts with baby steps.

And someone I had been looking forward to meeting, after I came across Substack writing recently, was Aysu Keçeci. I had asked Seda whether Aysu could have a media pass, given her writing, and was delighted when KREA embraced the idea.

On our third day in the city, Aysu took us to the vegan restaurant Telezzüz, with five of us enjoying a delightful evening eating under the (slightly occluded) stars. And there she surprised me with a stained glass work representing the triple bottom line.

One of the others around the table at the Telezzuz evening was Eylül Kiliç, a lawyer working with CNBC-e,. She used to work with the UN on human rights issues – spending six months in Afghanistan working with women and girls, before the Taliban took over the country once again. In a wonderful example of serendipity, she took us under her wing and drove and guided us around parts of the city we would not have seen in normal circumstances.

Less happily, one of the issues that kept surfacing at the edges of conversations was the impact of the huge number of refugees now living – and trying to work – in Türkiye. The country hosts more displaced persons than any other in the world. As in Germany and indeed in the UK, the stresses have been building and the political implications should be of much wider concern.

I plan to do a Substack post on the less personal aspects of the trip, but one thing that struck me as we talked to younger, entrepreneurial Turks was the way some of them are already working abroad or plan – or hope – to do so.

I wonder if a country that invests so heavily in education, and where we heard inspiring things from various people running tech clusters and hubs, may struggle to stop – let alone reverse – an evolving brain drain, and not just in AI.

Perhaps the sort of events that KREA organises can help rein in the problem, but – even if this wasn’t discussed at the event – I wonder whether some younger people may not vote with their feet for a more open society an less extractive approaches to the future?

Can’t really express how proud I am to have supported the Sustainable Eel Group for the past 15 years-plus. This media release gives a sense of the impact they have had on one of the defining issues of my own life.