Journal

Back today by Eurostar from Paris and HEC Paris, the business school, where I did the final plenary session at this year’s Social Business Conference, co-organised with Net Impact. The conference provided a useful opportunity to explore critical issues like poverty reduction, natural resource efficiency, public-private partnerships and the evolution of social business models in the company of MBA students from around the world.

 This is how I want to cycle.  Thanks, Gaia.

Each year, one of my favourite NGOs, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), surveys the landscape of environmental innovation in business. The aim is to find the “most compelling, and implementable, new practices and technologies—those that drive operational efficiency, create new business opportunities and carve out competitive advantages.” The conclusions this year came as no surprise: ‘That especially in these lean economic times, sustainability is business positive. From the Fortune 100 to the smallest start-up, U.S. companies are competing to be the most green.’ EDF hopes that the Innovations Review offers actionable models, inspires further innovation and continually redefines what is “business as usual.” The second year I have served on the Advisory Committee.

Chrysler Building from my bed

Spent much of the week in New York, primarily for the first meeting of the new Nestlé Creating Shared Value Advisory Board, of which I’m a member. More on the background here.

Strange feeling, looking out at the Chrysler Building from my hotel bedroom, with the company in the process of filing for bankruptcy. Truly the end of an era. But also magic moments when the sun came up and caught the great silver gargoyles atop the building, a profoundly Ghostbusters moment.  Today, we need the economic equivalent of that merry band.

On Wednesday, I dropped in on a number of people, among them Linda Rottenberg of Endeavor, Peter Knight of Generation Investment Management and Ed Hughes and Michelle Kahane at the Clinton Global Initiative.  Slightly distracted in the CGI boardroom when, looking past Ed and Michelle I saw a naked man disporting in a window of the Hilton hotel across the way.  Then in the evening I took the ‘F’ line to Brooklyn, visiting SustainAbility’s NYC office with Michael Sadowski, after which we walked back across Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan as the sun set – and had supper at an excellent vegetarian restaurant, Gobo, in Greenwich Village.

Chrysler Building, again Flags on Fifth Avenue One of the Creating Shared Value panels Yellow ribbons line church railings View from the other side of Generation’s offices – towards Statue of Liberty Me in the lobby of Clinton Global Initiative building Eight legs, or thereabouts Brooklyn Bridge

Grisly fact in The Times today, which says that the population of European eels is now at 5% of levels recorded as recently as the 1970s.  Given their role in tripping me into environmentalism in the 1950s, the news was particularly shocking.  And the story of a tagged eel’s 1,200 odyssey is extraordinary. The data on the recovered tag that had plotted the eel’s journey from Sweden towards the distant Sargasso Sea suggest that it was eventually eaten by a shark west of the Shetlands, then excreted – at which point the tag was probably eaten by a gull and then re-excreted.  Finally, it washed up on the shore, where a passer-by found it.