Journal

Following the Clean & Cool Mission to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, covered earlier, I did my first blog for Fast Company – posted today here.

The Emirates Stadium

Up at some unconscionable hour to trek across London to see Arsenal Football Club, starting with breakfast with Ivan Gazidis, their Chief Executive, and Svenja Geissmar, now their General Counsel. Then a session with their Board. Found myself much more interested than I had imagined I might be. Odd to be in a boardroom and Chief Executive’s office that had been moved in their wood-panelled entirety from another site – reminded me a little of the recent party in San Francisco with the house into which the owners had inserted a reasonable facsimile of a British pub. Then back to Bloomsbury Place to work on various writing projects and a couple of slide presentations, with the occasional telecon with people like Jeroo Billimoria of Aflatoun.

Mislaid Ocado van

Elephant graveyards – and now Ocado van graveyards, apparently. Seen on our way back from Barnes bookshop – and dropping off Amelia at the video store, the film of Amelia Earhart’s life that attracted highly critical reviews, but which I have to say I rather enjoyed. Hilary Swank was the spitting image.  

UEA advance guard UEA 2 Neal’s Yard 1 Neal’s Yard 2  

Lively start to the day with a group of 15 or so MSc students in branding from University of East Anglia, brought in by Robert Jones of Wolff Olins. Later in the day, Sam kindly walked me across to SustainAbility for a Board meeting – and then came and picked me up for the walk across to Neal’s Yard in Covent Garden, for a visit to the osteopath. Afterwards, Sam gave me a couple of bottles of mandarin and frankincense oils, which are meant to be delightfully relaxing and sedative. Can’t wait. Then back for a telecon with SAP, which was fascinating – part of the GRI project.

View from conference room Gone fishing: painting outside the conference room

We held the first of our roundtables on ageing, entrepreneurship and sustainability at Accenture’s offices this evening – and attracted an extraordinarily diverse range of participants. One of the receptionists wanted to know what the theme was, because the guest list was so out-of-the-ordinary. A great sense of momentum, though there’s still work to be done on how these three great areas of interest overlap. Extraordinary feeling reflecting that all of this span out of a short conversation David Grayson I had last year while I waited for a taxi back to Milton Keynes.