Journal

My 4-page article on the ‘3Rs’ of responsibility, resilience and regeneration makes it into the September issue of I By IMD magazine. Published by IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland. Six copies arrived in the post room at Somerset House this week. It will be a month or more before this article pops up on their website. Bit by bit …

Across to 999 3rd Avenue, Manhattan, for the 10th anniversary celebration for The B Team. The message: ‘Time to be Bold’. Couple of hundred people, many of whom I knew, and wall-to-wall conversation with interesting folk. Then I was somewhat bouleversé when Jean Oelwang, who runs Richard Branson’s charitable arm, Virgin Unite, name-checked me from the stage.

One result was that there were queues to talk to me afterwards. Not a situation I particularly enjoy, but nice to be acknowledged. What with things like a lunch with Paul Bunje of Conservation X Labs and a second jaunt to a wine shop in Grand Central Station, to buy a bottle of a Quivira wine for Elaine (according to this blog, we visited the Sonoma Valley winery on 11 April, 2005), I walked around 100 city blocks today – and the walk home was marked by thumping rain. Thank heavens I had brought a large umbrella.

In very much the same way that I have long loved to visit the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., when there, so I try to do the same with the Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA, when in New York. Walked there today, around 20 blocks either way. Long queue to get in, but it moved quickly.

One thing I love about the D.C. setup is the waterfall by the restaurant – and today I dropped into Paley Park, near MoMA, with its glorious water cascade.

And now for some images from the MoMA visit proper:

I always forget how late even major Brazilian events are in kicking off. The second day of the UN Global Compact event for Brazilian business today started 30 minutes late, precisely when I was meant to speak – and time-keeping didn’t improve much thereafter. Great fun, even so.

Note to self, though: ensure you deliver what your title promises. My title was Cleaner Fish, Dirty Waters. The idea was that we spend too much time thinking about cleaning up individual companies, too little time cleaning up the markets into which we then re-release them. But then I said too little on markets.

Knew it myself, but it also attracted a comment from my friend Peter Senge – who it was wonderful to see again. On the upside, I attracted separate three invitations to speak in Brazil while at the event – and did three on-camera interviews for the Global Compact and for Exame, which should keep the messages rippling out.

Serendipity can work in mysterious ways. Some years ago Elaine showed me a media report on Jubilee Marsh, near Southend-on-Sea, where 3 million tonnes of spoil from the Elizabeth Line tunnelling project had been used to reinforce and extend a saltmarsh. I made a mental note to visit it someday.

Then, today, the Volans team took the train to Rochford, Essex, to visit the self-same marsh. I only realised last night that where we were headed and where I had wanted to head several years ago were one and the same place.

We were hosted and guided around the site by RSPB team members, Lizze and Rachel. The visit followed an event that Volans organised at Somerset House some time ago, where residents were invited to imagine the local ecosystem as some sort of salt marsh. And there were also interesting links to our infrastructure and tunnelling conversations with at least one client.

What a joy it was to breathe the open air, to watch egrets and flights of golden plover, and taste marsh samphire as we progressed around the site. At one point, our guide wondered aloud what the marsh would become when sea level rise inundates much of the region.

An excellent account of the background story by Robin McKee can be found here.

One thing we discussed with our taxi drivers there and back was how the area around Southend-on-Sea became an overspill area for Greater London after WW2. As we arrived in – and drove through – Rochford, you could see the changed development patterns very clearly.

One thing we didn’t discuss though, was the wave of school closures in the wake of growing concern about RAAC, or reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, used in a huge number of buildings at the time. It now turns out that Essex has more such buildings than anywhere else in the country. I wondered whether our alma mater, The University of Essex, was affected by the crumbling concrete syndrome, but apparently not.