Journal

Ian Keay forwarded me a fascinating New York Times article a couple of days back on R. Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller.  Fascinating to see how Fuller wove his own myth, consciously or not.  Ian had introduced me to Fuller’s work in the early 1960s, building geodesic domes out of matchsticks in his bedroom in Icomb.  Given my enthusiasm for these structures, our home in Barnes was lucky not to sprout a truly geodesic extension, since experience shows that they often leaked when put up by non-experts.  

I eventually met Fuller in Reykjavik in 1977, I think it was, and had breakfast with him.  Included some of that conversation in the article I wrote for New Scientist on the plane back to London – the first time I had to write against a really urgent deadline.  A fair bit of Fuller’s writing, which still occupies considerable shelf space at home, was pretty inaccessible.  Even so he had a profound impact on my thinking – whether or not he contemplated suicide on the Chicago waterfront one day in 1927, fully half a century before our paths crossed.  He died in 1983.

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.

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.   

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.

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.