Journal

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Aegis Media accelerates

Arrived in fog- and smog-cloaked Beijing this morning, after easy fight from London. Blown away by the new Terminal 3 here, the biggest in the world, only open for around a month, and stunningly efficient as far as my experience went. Met off the plane by a charming VIP guide and steered through all the formalities, which helped immeasurably.

Then into the city by limo, alongside someone who does Formula 1 racing for a living. I mentioned my recent role with Honda, who raised something like $1 million with their Earth-painted racing car. Managed to steer some significant funding towards the Marine Stewardship Council and Wiser Earth. But am much more interested in how F1 racing can be used to force technology, as in recapturing energy lost in braking – something the industry is coming under intense pressure to crack. Talking with Scott Garrett, head of marketing at Williams, I noted that I like competition, as in The X-Prize Foundation’s work on sustainable mobility, because it taps into fundamental elements of the human psyche which the missionary approach to sustainability rarely – if ever – does.

Here for an event organised by Aegis Media on the theme of acceleration. Interesting to hear Nigel Morris, CEO of Isobar, encouraging the conference to engage with the sustainability agenda. As the man who identified the digital media challenge and opportunity space ahead of many in the industry, his views carry real weight. But when I saw the clothes he was wearing, and knowing he was chairing the introductory session I was about to do, I streaked upstairs, stripped off my tie and changed shirts. Adaptable, me.

As I write this, while waiting to go out to dinner, the sky over Beijing is pulsing with lightning, rolling with thunder. A reminder of the difficult weather in which the rescue operations are proceeding here after the recent earthquake. And now it’s pouring with rain, which hopefully will flush some of the gunk out of the city air. It’s stunning what China has achieved in short order, but looking out of the window I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to run a marathon here yet awhile.

Sunday, May 11, 2008 

SustainAbility.com reborn

Friday saw the launch of the first version of the revamped SustainAbility website.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

BA can be BAd

Front covers of the National Journal, where I was interviewed yesterday

Was hoping to fly back from Dulles at 23.00 last night, after doing my lunchtime session at the National Press Club for the World Environment Center. Unfortunately, however, something went wrong with one of the engines, so our take-off was aborted part-way through. We ended up spending a further 3-4 hours in the plane and airport before we were released to bed for the night. In the meantime, someone stole my suit jacket from the plane. Merry chase with an air steward trying to track down the culprit, him convinced we would find the jacket, me – having seen the jacket that had been left instead, pretty sure I would never see my jacket again. Because the loss means I can’t wear my only smart light-weight suit in Beijing next week, this means I have to buy another in short order. Flew back with United Airlines, which was rather less hectic.

Hurricane chases Spitfire around Dulles

Ditto

Thursday, May 08, 2008 

Sixtieth anniversaries

Israel celebrated it’s sixtieth anniversary today. I haven’t been there since I was a child, in 1959, when one of the high points – as I remember it – was sitting on the lap of a pilot of a DC3, or Dakota, as we flew across the Dead Sea, and being allowed to ‘steer.’ Now, with Beirut teetering on the edge again, it’s hard not to have mixed feelings about the Near and Middle East, Israel included. But there was another anniversary today that I feel much less conflicted about, my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary. Well, perhaps conflicted in another way. It’s painfully characteristic that I’m travelling – that I allow myself to be borne along on this travelator – rather than there, but we will be celebrating this extraordinary family event in just over a week, when (hopefully) we’re all back in the country.

Thunder in DC

Flashes of lightning and thunder claps as I wrestled once again with Microsoft Outlook over a glacial Internet connection in the JW Marriott Hotel, Pennsylvania Avenue. Cold rain slashing at the window. CNN covering, endlessly, tomorrow’s Time magazine cover declaring Barack Obama as the “winner” of the Democratic nomination. But with the process still under way, it’s hard not to recall the saying, “There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip,” or words to that effect. Still, if I had a vote I would vote for him, not least because America, to my mind, needs to make a truly radical break with its recent past, and nothing would signal that more clearly, particularly in places like the Middle east, than an Obama win.

Arrived in from San Francisco late last night, then today had meetings with people from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and Environmental Defense (Fund: EDF). Shuttled across to the old Watergate complex for an interview with the National Journal early in the afternoon, then back to SustainAbility’s offices in R Street, NW. Thrilled I brought an umbrella. Then back to the hotel to work on things for WEC, China Dialogue and innovations. Will catch up on blog entries when I get back to London, hopefully on Saturday.

Monday, May 05, 2008 

KQED and IDEO

Started the day with an hour-long interview on the Forum program on KQD, alongside three social entrepreneurs: Stephanie Bernstein (CEO & Founder, To-Go Ware), Matt Flannery (Co-Founder & CEO, Kiva) and Eric Grossberg (CoFounder, Brilliant Earth). Then Matt kindly drove me across to Pier 28 and IDEO, where I met up with Matt (Lee) and we dived into the rest of the day c/o IDEO, where we were launching our latest report, The Social Entrepreneur: A Fieldbook for Corporate Changemakers.

In the afternoon, overlooking the Bay, we did an IDEO-style session with 40-some folk. In the evening – introduced by IDEO CEO Tim Brown – we opened it out to some 60 people. Then, after dinner, I chaired a panel session with Sam McCracken of Nike, Cristin Lindsay who heads the Progressive Automotive X-Prize operated by The X-Prize Foundation and John Wood of Room-to-Read.

Eric, Stephanie, Matt

In front of Kiva.org

Inside Kiva.org

Behind Kiva.org

Debra Dunn, John Wood, Brett Galimidi

Martin Fisher of KickStart holds forth

Sam McCracken, John Wood, Cristin Lindsay

Susannah Kirsch and Will Rosenzweig of Physic Ventures

San Francisco slipstreams

Flew to San Francisco on Thursday, with a mad dash to get to T5 because of a taxi that didn’t arrive. Then the BA check-in was primeval, following which – with my adrenaline cranked up to unusally high levels – I left my credit card in a machine and didn’t wake up to the fact until I was half a T5 away, which was an unbridgeable distance. Plane was late to take off and therefore late into San Francisco, which then meant I was racing to get to a dinner hosted by Physic Ventures at Kokkari. But great when I eventually managed to get there.

Friday was pretty much all Physic, where I am a member of the Strategic Advisory Board, on the twentieth floor of One Embarcadero center, with a spectacular view of the harbour. As I was photographed by a floor-to-ceiling window, I kept getting flashes of intense vertigo. Then in the afternoon Will (Rosenzweig) drove me in his Prius, across the Golden Gate Bridge to his Marin County home, from where I looked down on circling turkey vultures – and, among other things, did a long telecon in relation to a stuttering energy-related project that Volans may or may not do this year.

Yesterday, I did a fair amount of work on the laptop in the hotel, before first meeting up with Paul Hawken for a semi-magical chat, and then heading across to see old friends, Ian Keay and Alda Angst. Wonderful Indian meal, after which they drove me back into town. Today, I have been working pretty solidly, until around 18.45, when I walked across to 570 Fourth Street for dinner with Mark (Lee). Keep walking through slipstreams of hashish or marijuana here in San Francisco, which is oddly comforting. Flashes of the old San Francisco.

Thursday, May 01, 2008 

LSD and Corporate Governance

As I packed this morning for T5 (God help me) and the US, I tidied up a set of cuttings from recent newspapers, including two obituaries, one from today’s Times and the other from yesterday’s paper. Today’s was for Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who worked with Sandoz and discovered LSD. When we met Shawn Phillips in Positano in 1970 (see under Influences, Music), Hofmann was a key topic of conversation. Some sort of psychedelic saint. My own LSD experience had been either in 1968 or 1969, I can’t now remember. But, though I wildly regret what has happened to the illegal drugs industry since, that experience truly opened doors of perception I am glad didn’t stay closed to me.

And the link to the second obituary? This was for Sir Derek Higgs, who was Chairman of Alliance & Leicester, and who I mainly knew through the time when we worked together at Business in the Environment, part of Business in the Community. In any event, his key 2003 report on corporate governance was a brave attempt to help business leaders cope with the blizzard of signals that come in from every part of the business environment today.

In a way, it is almost as if companies are potentially on the corporate form of LSD, open – through their employees and other stakeholders – to endless stimuli. And we have certainly added to the challenge with all our efforts to promote wider forms of stakeholder engagement. The key task of boards and other organs of corporate governance is to ensure that the doors of corporate erception are sufficiently open, but that in the midst of all of this the key strategic priorities are identified and addressed.

More anon.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

GlobeScan Salon

Took part in a GlobeScan Salon this evening. Other speakers from Amnesty, Nestle and Vodafone. Sam (Lakha) and Alex (Nick) also came from SustainAbility. Wonderful evening, lively debate, good wine, and afterwards Elaine and I took a taxi home with Doug and Margot Miller.

Chris Coulter and Doug Miller of GlobeScan, Kate Gilmore of Amnesty

Doug 1

Doug 2

Doug 3: locking up

Doug 4: this world is mine

Monday, April 28, 2008 

Drenched

Glorious sunset as I cycled home this evening, particularly as I passed the Albert Memorial. But a weird golden-brown effect around many of the clouds. Then, a few moments later, as I passed Whole Foods Market, the heavens opened – and I was totally drenched. Continued to cycle with claps of thunder happening almost overhead. The temperature of the rain was icy. By the time I got home I looked like a drowned rat that had been fished out of the Thames, but it was all oddly exhilarating.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

The journey home

Back home by Eurostar – astoundingly efficient, though apparently a train that went the other way on the day we went out took forever to get to Paris because of breakdowns.

Friday, April 25, 2008 

Lèche-vitrine, moi

Apart from a World Energy Council teleconference this evening, we had a delightful day wandering the city, taking in the perfume museum at Parfums Fragonard, the shop windows of Printemps, the Café de la Paix, Le Jardin des Plantes, a favourite scarf shop of Elaine’s nearby, and then the Delacroix museum. For me, oddly, a high point was walking by the Printemps windows, in an activity the French call lèche-vitrine, literally window-licking. A couple of the windows are captured, after a fashion, below.

Essential oils

Bottles

Swan’s-head perfume bottle

Bag

Printemps 1

Printemps 2

Samsung: I liked the man’s head and the woman with magazine over hers, as sun-shade

Dans Le Jardin des Plantes

Elaine in Delacroix’s garden

Thursday, April 24, 2008 

Père-Lachaise et M. Blériot

A day spent walking the length and breadth of Père-Lachaise cemetery, then – at greater speed – up and down, in and out, through the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Took a long time tracking down Jim Morrison in the cemetery, even though Elaine had been there before, and found many of the other graves and tombs more moving – including one extraordinary one commemorating a Quintin Craufurd, with his knight’s helm decorated with what I think is an ermine that has seen better days. Elaine was happy to at last find Delacroix. Later, in the Museum, the scientific instruments were a wonder, but for me Foucault’s pendulum and the sight of Blériot‘s plane hanging in the church were simply out-of-this-world. Almost felt the earth move.

Guardian

Crack – with skull in shadows, bottom right

Hammer Horreur

Time-worn ermine

Look upon my works …

Button-holed

Oscar Wilde’s tomb (detail) – spattered with lipstick kiss marks

Reflection 1

Sore feet

Early batmobile

Reflection 2

Pendulum 1

Pendulum 2

Nice pair of headlights

Spirit-raising use for a church

M. Blériot’s aerial pram

We’re ‘Essential Green Reading’

At least according to Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&plgroup=6&docId=1000210851

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 

Unicorn and speech bubble

Two images shot as we walked around the Places des Vosges neighbourhood, one the sign of the unicorn, the other a delicately shod young man with an unfilled speech bubble. Tempting to imagine the horn of the one popping the bubble of the other – or simply to fill in the bubble.

– posted by John Elkington @ 10:43 PM  

Democracy & Sustainability

An article I did on the theme with John Lotherington of The 21st Century Trust is now posted on the openDemocracy site.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 

Footsore and fancy free

After lunch with the EcoVadis crew yesterday, we walked and walked and walked. Among the museums we visited was the Musée Maillol, full of unappealing fat naked ladies – both sculptures and paintings. That said, there were some well-known found objects. But for me the high point by far was the museum’s spiralling staircase.

Staircase 1

Staircase 2

Homeward bound 1

Homeward bound 2

Today it was both brighter and warmer, so we went off by Metro and Shank’s pony to the Musée du quai Branly, devoted to indigenous art, which was hugely impressive in terms of the scale of the collection. After a while, though, one tends to drown a little in all that concentrated symbolism. Have always suffered from some form of Stendhal’s syndrome – and this triggered a version of that in both of us.

Then we pottered back along the Seine to Shakespeare & Company, where I bought three books: Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, on the reading brain; The Reserve by Russell Banks; and Joseph Heller’s Closing Time, billed as a sequel to Catch 22. Can’t imagine it’s anything like as good. Catch 22 got me in endless trouble at school, when I would collapse into helpless laughter day after day in the period when we were meant to lie in silence on our beds after lunch.

Eiffel Tower through frontage of Quai Branly Museum

Parisian gem – Shakespeare and Co

The weight of learning

Keyboards

Philosophical interlude

Nin – and someone who looks like Paul in Sgt Pepper days

Plath & Hughes

Someone doesn’t fit

Sunday, April 20, 2008 

Paris in the rain

Photo: Hans Silvester

Arrived in Paris by Eurostar late afternoon yesterday and made our way to Rue de Turenne, where Elaine had found a wonderful apartment for less than we would have paid for a hotel. Pierre let us in – and turned out to be a good friend of one of the handful of people I know in Paris who works in sustainable development (developpement durable), Elisabeth Laville of Utopies. Last time I saw her was when we marched across Westminster Bridge after Anita Roddick’s wake. Will try to see her while here.

Last night, we had supper in the Place des Vosges, where I memorably stayed with Gavin Young in 1973. Today Elaine and I walked around the city, in occasional rain, slowly decompressing. Found a wonderful book by Hans Silvester on kites (cerfs volants) in a delightful little bookshop, La Belle Lurette in the Rue Saint-Antoine. Leafing through it now reminds me of when we used to fly a great orange (ex-RAF emergency) box-kite in Nicosia, in the late 1950s. There seemed to be a magic moment when the kites – of multifarious forms – would begin to sprout in the evening sky across the city.

Apartment 1: still life with wooden fruit

Apartment 2: figurine

Nearby garden 1

Nearby garden 2

Place de la Bastille

Self-portrait with graffiti, on Le Promenade Planté, an old railway viaduct

Graffiti

Rusty nut

Old man watches in-line skaters

Thursday, April 17, 2008 

Enter the Social Intrapreneur

There was an extraordinary buzz around the launch events for SustainAbility’s new report, The Social Intrapreneur, yesterday and today. Last night we hosted a dinner at the Covent Garden Hotel, while this morning we co-hosted a breakfast brainstorm (a little early for my reptilian brain) and an evening reception and launch event with IDEO.

This evening, Maggie Brenneke – who had orchestrated the events – asked me to be Oprah Winfrey, facilitating a concluding panel session with Bob Annibale of Citi’s global microfinance team, Sam MacCracken of Nike’s Native American business and Kerryn Schrank of BP fuels. I opened the session by admitting that I was multiply challenged in relation to the role because of (among other things) gender, race, hair and the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever watched Oprah. Still, some photos below:

IDEO 1

IDEO 2

Reception

Reminiscent of SustainAbility’s early days alongside Brand New Product Development

Good to go

James Parr sparkles 1

James Parr sparkles 2

Gib Bulloch

Animation: Daniel of Mars and Kavita of SustainAbility

Reflection: Nick and Astrid of Allianz

Monica of Allianz

Meghan of SustainAbility

Ziba of Nike

James of IDEO

Not one of ours

The report

Manuela of SustainAbility, James

Polar bears – IDEO is in London’s White Bear Yard

Bug

Filming begins

Furniture’s equivalent of jelly babies

Sam of Nike, in the background SustainAbility’s Jonathan Halperin

Mark Lee

Bob, Sam, ‘Oprah’

Sam and Kerryn

What’s next? Alexa (Clay), Kerryn, Maggie, Mark

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Camila Batmanghelidjh and Colonel Elkington

Began the day at The Entrepreneurs’ Summit, held at the Marriott Hotel, Grosvenor Square. Organised by Real Business and the Confederation of British Business (CBI), the event focused on “how risk-takers can be winners in 2008.” Early speakers included CBI Director-General Richard Lambert and Sir Ronald Cohen, chairman of Bridges Ventures. I was then part of a panel titled ‘The new agenda for entrepreneurs.’ My co-panellists were MIVA President Seb Bishop, Innocent Drinks Managing Director Jamie Mitchell and Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of Kids Company. First time I had met Camila, whose work I find glorious – like her wardrobe.

Then we listened to DWP Secretary John Hutton, who sent me a note which got to me during the course of his session. Went out to meet him in the reception afterwards – and he asked me whether I am related to my namesake, Colonel John Ford Elkington, which I am. He is doing a book on the extraordinary story.

Camila follows me into the hot-seat (photo: JE)

Friday, April 11, 2008

Murray Edmonds

It’s just over 10 years since Murray Edmonds turned up in SustainAbility’s Kensington offices. An Australian, he had come across our work on environmental reporting and wanted to launch an annual series of conferences in Australia and New Zealand, which we duly did – over the years taking the show to such cities as Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Auckland. each year I shared the platform with a different line-up of speakers, starting off with Linda Descano and then opening out to include people like Tom Delfgaauw (then of Shell), Pamela Hartigan (Schwab Foundation), Rick Murray (Swiss Re), Sarah Severn (Nike), Simon Zadek (AccountAbility) and Debbie Zemke (then of Ford) and a kaleidoscope of local speakers, including politicians and business leaders.

When we first met, I said I was more interested in spotlighting the bottom line agenda than environmental reporting, but that had to wait till the second year – after which the TBL agenda replicated like rabbits across the Antipodean landscape. The only other country where I can say it had a similar impact, particularly in the 3P (People, Planet & Profits) formulation I had also come up with in 1994/5, was The Netherlands.

Now retired to Switzerland with his wife Dobrina, Murray had volunteered to fly over to celebrate our first meeting a decade ago – and all the exploits since. At times, over the years, it was like a Rolling Stones travelling show and, despite ourselves, we were soon pondering what we might do next as Elaine, he and I relaxed over a wonderful meal and French Pinot Noir at the Tamarind restaurant in Queen Street.

A distant mirror at the Tamarind
– posted by John Elkington @ 11:06 PM

Thursday, April 10, 2008

The nightmare scenario?

Have been feeling pretty exhausted in recent days, struggling to get out of bed in the mornings. Probably a combination of factors: not travelling allows the wear and tear of past travelling to catch up; unhooking to a degree from SustainAbility after 21 years also must be having an emotional impact; and then there’s the effort of keeping options open for our new venture, Volans, as we search for offices and build our capability to tackle a new generation of projects.

Progress is being made, no question, but at times it’s often a lot slower than I would like. Maybe I’ve become impatient with old age? (Met someone this week who said she had read so much by me over the decades that she had expected me to be grey and wizened … I said I am grey and the wizening will no doubt come in due course.) When I think back to the 1978 when we founded ENDS and 1987 when we founded SustainAbility, things now are coming together at least as fast as they did then – but with the difference this time that we are sliding into a much tougher business environment.

It’s not just the developing financial crisis, but the sense that the environmentalist nightmare scenario is finally beginning to build momentum, with a combination of climate change, food shortages (partly fuelled by the demand for crops for biofuels) and rioting about food shortages in cities around the world possibly heralding a new, nastier era in global politics.

Sam waves goodbye as I head off somewhere …

Birthday celebration, with Patrin, Kavita, JP and Ori

Shot while Sam I walked to the ‘scrivener’ to have my passport notarised

Energy, Environment and Competiveness

Lovely morning as I wend my way to the Design Council in Bow Street, pretty much exactly where the Indonesian hit me in 1975 as I cycled down to King’s College, leaving me with three broken ribs – though I only realised how much damage had been done when I got into bed in Cairo later the same day. Today it’s a Franco-British Council debate on issues around the prospect for a post-Kyoto treaty on climate change. Profoundly useful session for the project we are discussing with the World Energy Council.

With market bears on the rampage, this bull opposite the Design Council caught my eye

Cleaners gone

And this picture of a brain, particularly the yellow pin

And the red and the yellow – and the white


Then this looked like some illumined brain behind glass

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Tiger Lillies

Remarkable start to the week, going out with Gaia and Hania on both Monday and this evening, Wednesday. Monday was dinner at Scott’s, the extraordinary seafood restaurant in Mayfair. A first time for us all – and in celebration of the girls making progress with their script-writing. An astounding start with four different sorts of oyster, and a highlight for me was the leek and potato soup made with wild garlic.

Then this evening, they took us on a mystery night out, to see what turned out to be the Tiger Lillies, a band Hania and John Jencks originally introduced me to – but which I hadn’t yet seen live. Tried to describe them to Elaine as we sat down for the concert, as some weird combination of scatological vaudeville and punk – but even so wasn’t prepared for the full force of their ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ show. God forbid that there was anyone in the audience who had just lost a baby or child. It takes a lot to shock me, but this show did. Still, one of those experiences that lives on in the memory, for better or worse. Three great instrumentalists, though.

Before the show

She’s eating fire

Monday, April 07, 2008

Sun plus Rein

Thérèse Rein came in to the office today, to talk to Mark (Lee) and I. Impressive and engaging. Perhaps symbolically, the sun shone into our conference room as we talked, quite a surprise after earlier hail. As Australia’s relatively new PM, her husband Kevin has already taken some dramatically different positions on issues like climate change. They are turning out to be a breath of fresh air after the stagnation of the Howard era. Makes me even sadder to have had to cancel a trip to Australia this autumn.

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Seahorses – good news and bad

seasearch.wisshost.net

Nice story in today’s Sunday Times about the discovery of a colony of short-snouted seahorses in the Thames estuary. Though discovered in 2006, the creatures have been kept under wraps until they could be protected. Another sign that the Thames is now far cleaner than it has been for a very long time, but also very likely a symptom of the warming waters associated with climate change.

Friday, April 04, 2008 

Tällberg Conversation

Spent much of the day at the Work Foundation’s HQ, taking part in the first Tällberg Conversation, organised by Sweden’s Tällberg Foundation. The focus was on what sort of new economic model we now need, a question given greater urgency by what is happening in financial markets all around us.

Indeed, Jakob von Uexkull of the Right Livelihood Foundation(http://www.rightlivelihood.org/jakob.html) and World Future Council (http://www.rightlivelihood.org/jakob.html) – who I first met in the early 1980s when a number of us were launching The Other Economic Summit (TOES) – brought participants up short at one point in the proceedings by asking what would happen if the current economic model melted down to the extent that the heads of the sustainability movement were called up in the middle of the night and asked to take over the reins of government?

This was exactly what happened, he stressed, when Communism melted down in the late 1980s and people who had been on the margins, or in prison, were asked to take over. Not sure he got the sort of answers he wanted, but his question provides a useful goad in terms of the nature and scale of the challenges we are likely to face.

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Sustaining a Successful Brand

Keynoted the ‘Sustaining a Successful Brand’ conference today, organised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM). Down to Bristol by train last night, staying in a hotel where football seemed to be the cult du jour. Good to see Phil Comer again, who has championed our issues energetically and effectively within the CIM.

A lively plenary session – but I left for the station in the afternoon feeling quite grateful that I don’t have to record conferences against a training budget. This event, apparently, was worth five hours of professional development, under category 7, whatever that may, towards achieving or maintaining Chartered Marketer status. Progress, surely, that sustainable development now slots into all of that, but I hope that when the time comes that my sort of work is professionalised to anything like this extent I will be either long since gone – or long since dead.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008 

ENDS: 30 years and counting

It would be easy to say something along the lines of “How quickly time passes,” but the 30 years that have passed since David Layton, Max Nicholson and I set up Environmental Data Services, better known as ENDS, seem to have stretched over several lifetimes. After spending a couple of months doing a feasibility study while still at TEST, I arrived to find one staff member, Georgina McAughtry – later a Director – in place, ahead of me by a few days, and we took it from there.

Today I did an interview with the current Deputy Editor, Philip Lightowlers, which brought it all back to mind. My involvement partly stemmed from writing I had been doing over several years for New Scientist, increasingly focusing on business – and ENDS gave me the opportunity to visit a huge number of companies around the world at a time when the environmental agenda was just beginning to blink on the edge of their radar screens. Also led to my first book, The Ecology of Tomorrow’s World, published in 1980. My thanks to all at ENDS and at Incomes Data Services (IDS), the original parent company, who made the new venture possible.

Saturday, March 29, 2008 

Light Blues, Dark Blues

It’s an odd reflection of the modern world that you can see far more of many events by staying away than by going, as was illustrated by today’s Oxford vs. Cambridge Boat Race. This was the seventieth year that the race has been televised, one commentator mentioned, but the degree to which cameras are now everywhere is extraordinary. Since the race passes Barnes, a few blocks over, Elaine walked down in the rain to watch from the river bank, while I stayed at home working on a new project for the World Energy Council. But simpy by turning to the television and snapping away at the screen, I could get more intimate – if somewhat granular – images of the race than Elaine could with the same sort of camera.

Light and dark

Ahead by more than a nose

Melee 1

Melee 2

Flash

The moment that …

Skoll World Forum 5

I have no idea how it happened, but during the fifth Skoll World Forum on social entrepreneurship this week, I managed to slice open a knuckle. It happened when my mind was elsewhere. The theme of the event, held at the Saïd Business School in Oxford, was culture—and I was talking over lunch with an American who was trying to persuade me to help Disney (who have played a key role in defining our consumer cultures) engage the rapidly evolving world of social and environmental entrepreneurs. It was he who kindly pointed out that I was bleeding profusely, which later struck me as a metaphor for some of the challenges the world now faces—and which Al Gore would spotlight in an extraordinarily speech the next morning.

In the case of our planet, we have managed (without intending to) to slice into our global knuckles and knees, with the result that tropical forests are shrinking, fisheries collapsing and the polar ice-caps melting. Not much new there. Indeed, Jeff Skoll, who co-founded the online market eBay, introduced Gore by recalling the foreword the former US Vice-President had written in 1992 for a new edition of Rachel Carson’s paradigm-shifting book Silent Spring, published three decades earlier in 1962. At the time, Skoll noted, Carson was described as “hysterical” by the chemical industry and some of the scientific community. In the same way, many of the social and environmental entrepreneurs assembled in Oxford have been described as “crazy,” even by their family and friends—because they propose solutions to problems that most people see as insoluble. These are the extraordinary people who we spotlight in our new book, The Power of Unreasonable People.

As my finger continued to bleed, I was painfully aware that I was missing the start of the second of SustainAbility’s sessions on how to build successful partnerships between such actors. We had developed the sessions with the Skoll Foundation and two other leading organisations, the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) and IDEO, the hugely influential international design company. So successful were our sessions—and so great is the interest of social entrepreneurs in working with committed companies—that there were queues to get in, with even some leading entrepreneurs unable to gain entry.

There were queues, too, for other key sessions, particularly for the one with ex-President Jimmy Carter and the closing session featuring Al Gore. Though there was a strong sense, as Skoll, Foundation President Sally Osberg put it, that there are no “silver bullets,” there was an extraordinary degree of optimism about the potential to bring the world of the best social entrepreneurs to scale.

For me, one of the most fascinating presentations in that final session came from Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~econpco/). Interestingly, he argued that the direct markets represented by the world’s billion poorest people are “tiny.” Or at least they are tiny if we think of these people as consumers, but it could be very different if we think of them as producers. He proceeded to give some remarkable examples of how countries—whether coastal or land-locked—could create clusters of customized production, like the single town that now controls 65 percent of world button production.

As Acumen Fund’s Jacqueline Novogratz put it as the meeting drew towards a close, markets are “the best listening devices” we have for understanding people’s needs. Many of the world’s biggest social, economic and environmental challenges exist precisely because there are market failures, areas where the economy is both deaf and blind. So the third year of our Skoll Foundation-funded work on entrepreneurial solutions will switch from the social entrepreneurs (covered in our 2007 survey, Growing Opportunity, see http://www.sustainability.com/insight/skoll_article.asp?id=937) and their counterparts inside companies (who we spotlight in a new report called The Social Intrapreneur, see http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article.asp?id=1457) to the potential future markets for the sort of solutions that an increasingly populous and carbon-constrained world will demand.

Sonidas de la Tierra in the Sheldonian

Manuela (Fremy) posts it

Work in progress

White boarded

Session 1

Sophia on camera

Reflective monment, Richard Kelly of IDEO presiding

Quiet moment

Friday, March 21, 2008 

2degrees et al

Back this morning from two days in Oxford. Initially had lunch with Sophia (Tickell) at The Jam Factory, then across the road to the Said Business School for the first advisory board meeting for 2degrees (http://www.2degreesnetwork.com/index.html), founded by serial entrepreneur Martin Chilcott. Then, yesterday, much of the day spent with Elaine, Geoff (Lye) and Sophia, before dinner in the evening with Sophia and her husband James.

Geoff and Elaine

Near the castle

My hat and coat on Geoff’s Klimt mannequin

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Office hunt

Sam, Elaine and I spent the morning visiting some of the offices that are on the short-list for our new organisation, Volans Ventures. One, which I particularly liked, was highly reminiscent of the offices Earthlife had in Bedford Square over 20 years ago – and is also owned by Bedford Estates.

 

Democracy & Sustainability

Can we vote our way to a sustainable future for a world of 9-10 billion people—or are new forms of leadership (even forms of dictatorship) going to be necessary?

Is China—with little need to consult its people—or India—with its flawed democracy—best placed to move towards more sustainable forms of development?

Are the time-scales of democratically elected governments appropriate for delivering sustainable development?

If not, what needs to be done—and by whom?

These are some of the questions we (The Environment Foundation, which I chair, and The 21st Century Trust, with support from The Esmee Fairbairn Foundation) have begun discussing at http://democracy.sustainability.com/.

Today we held a series of events at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre on the same issues – with a particular focus on London. Among the speakers was Doug Miller of GlobeScan, who brought along the Rt Hon Joe Clark, a long-serving Foreign Minister for Canada – and, briefly, that country’s PM. A particularly interesting session saw Sara Parkin presenting one of her former students, Jenny Pidgeon, now with Upstream.

Later, I found myself recruited onto the final panel at the last moment, chaired by Lord (Chris) Patten and also including Sara Parkin and Charles Secrett. Tom Burke did a couple of hugely insightful sessions. To minimise disruption, I didn’t use flash, which explains the suitably blurred effect in some of the images. Walked back to South Kensington station with Tessa Tennant.

Sara Parkin en route to be YouTubed

Hugh Knowles and Sara

Dana Centre 1

Dana Centre 2

Charles Secrett, Craig Bennett and statue

Preparing for ‘Question Time’

John Lotherington of The 2st Century Trust

Sara, Charles, Chris Patten

Professor Chris Rapley of The Science Museum sums up

Monday, March 17, 2008 

Aflatoun launches

Back late from highly impressive launch of Aflatoun (http://www.childsavingsinternational.org/) in Amsterdam. Last night, after a session with the impact metrics committee that I chair, we all went to dinner in a mini castle. Then today I chaired a lively session in the afternoon with a panel of bankers from around the world. Then a fair number of us climbed into a canal boat and went cruising through the drizzle. After a rushed – but delightful – dinner at an Indonesian restaurant in the city centre, I headed off to the Schipol.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

ECO:nomics

Just back, h3 Los Angeles, from the Wall Street Journal ‘ECO:nomics’ conference in Santa Barbara, California, which was sub-titled ‘Creating Environmental Capital’ (http://www.economics.wsj.com/index.php). On the way out, I was bounced from an ANZ flight to LAX at Heathrow, when the plane had to turn back after an engine failed. The steward on the flight home told me he had been on that problem flight and that they had had an interesting hour-and-a-half flying around while they dumped enough fuel to make a safe landing. In the event, I ended up on Virgin Atlantic, which wasn’t as bad as I remembered, even though I was more or less cheek-by-jowl with the bar. Slept less than I had hoped.

Asked the taxi driver who drove me from the local airport what Santa Barbara is best known for and he answered rich people and its avocado and citrus orchards, even my weary brain recalled the Santa Barbara oil-spill of 1969, which did so much to spur early environmentalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Barbara_oil_spill). Wasn’t sure whether that was why the Journal chose to locate the event there, but it made sense of a sort to me. They have always struck me as a lagging indicator of change in this field – and at least one of their people at the event was still in the old, snarkey mode, though interestingly she got precious little support from the audience.

Recalling the oil spill reminded me of just how long change can take. Indeed, it struck me as we drove into town that it is now 21 years since I produced The Green Capitalists, sub-titled ‘How Industry Can Make Money – and Save the Environment’ (Gollancz, 1987). With a final chapter by Tom Burke, the book mapped out much of what is now happening, though it has all taken rather longer than I think I then expected.

Thank God I had been reading Thomas McCraw’s absolutely stunning biography of Joseph Schumpeter, Prophet of Innovation (The Belknap Press, 2007), which underscores how long truly fundamental economic change can take. By the time I got home, I had read around 350 pages of the book, which is one of the most exciting works on economics – indeed on history – I have ever read.

Schumpeter was among my greatest influences in the late 1960s, alongside the likes of Nikolai Kondratiev, Thomas Kuhn (he of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, probably the book that most changed my thinking), Rachel Carson, Frank Herbert (particularly Dune, with its exploration of how environment shapes culture), Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand (the Whole Earth Catalog was pretty much my bible) and Jim Lovelock. I was privileged to meet Fuller, Herbert and Lovelock over the ensuing decades, but what I wouldn’t give for a couple of hours with Schumpeter in his later years! What an astounding personal story, full of intense intellectual excitement and Stygian tragedies, all set against booms, busts, two world wars and the Cold War. Page 300 brought it all home with a vengeance.

But back to ECO:nomics. A very impressive roster of CEOs spoke, starting with GE’s Jeff Immelt (who I missed, since that was on the first evening and I was still in the air) and then including folk like Lee Scott of Wal-Mart, Andrew Liveris of Dow Chemical, Jim Rogers of Duke Energy, Bob Lutz of GM and Dieter Zetsche of Daimler. Among the NGO speakers were Mindy Lubber of CERES and Fred Krupp of Environmental Defense, whose new book – Earth: The Sequel – The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming – was handed out. Delightfully, The Power of Unreasonable People went into everyone’s bags, themselves a nice shade of green and supplied by Patagonia.

The most inspiring session – SustainAbility CEO Mark Lee said to me later – was that by John Doerr of venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. But the session I found most useful was the one that pitched the climate specialists for the three major presidential campaigns – McCain, Clinton, Obama – against each other. Fascinating to see how the issue has now shifted to centre-stage, though with the financial market news getting darker by the day in the background, it will be interesting to see how robust the climate interest proves in the coming months. Sadly, I missed the final summing up by Arnold Schwarzeneggger, because I had a couple of planes to catch and a carbon footprint to extend.

Another (professional) photographer at work – witness the size of his lens

Lee Scott explains his ‘personal sustainability plan’

Abyd Karmali, Global Head of Carbon Emissions, Merrill Lynch

Mindy Lubber

In the distance, centre stage, an oil-rig

Dinner at the Bacara Resort & Spa

In the LAX lounge, I watched the planes go by – and tractors waltz to and fro – as I imbibed Schumpeter

Tuesday, March 11, 2008 

Skoll 2 in design

Very lively meeting with Rupert Bassett and the team (Maggie, Alexa) on the design of the latest report produced as part of our Skoll Foundation-funded work. Getting to this point has been tough work for all, but I always enjoy this stage. This time we are focusing on social intrapreneurship, entrepreneurial work done on social and environmental challenges inside major companies.

Alexa (Clay), Maggie (Brenneke), me and Rupert (Bassett)

Ditto

Shooter shot (Sam)

Sunday, March 09, 2008

Power plated

Forced to lie upside down on the Power Plate this evening, to relieve the intense ache in my shoulder muscles from another day spent at the laptop, tapping away at the second in our series of reports for the Skoll Foundation, this time on social intrepreneurs. Worked most of the time at the kitchen table, from which I could see – through the glazed roof – the successive layers of rain cloud pass through. A large storm is meant to be on the way. Had been hoping to cycle to work tomorrow, but perhaps I’d end up in Kansas? What with having ‘flu for something like 6 weeks before it finally went, and travelling fairly intensively in the midst of it all, have not been cycling as much as I would have liked, and am seriously mising it. Still, got a modest walk in today, watching parakeets fly past against the gathering clouds.

Saturday, March 08, 2008 

Snake’s Food

Interesting article by Charles Campion on wild garlic in today’s Independent Magazine.  Known by some as Ramsons and by others as Snake’s Food, Stinking Jenny or Bear’s Garlic, I remember the plant well from when I was away at prep school near Wookey Hole and Wells, in Somerset.  In the woods on the grounds there were areas of Ramsons, which I used to snack on – without at the time realising what they were.  Then one evening, when all the boys were having supper, the headmistress – the redoubtable Mrs Adams – suddenly brought the proceedings to a grinding halt and demanded to know who had been eating garlic.
With no idea that this was what I had been eating, I stayed mum.  So she embarked on a grand tour of the dining hall, smelling every boy’s breath, until she came to me.  She was quite convinced that I had a stash of something like garlic sausage in my tuck-box.  So an inspection of said tuck-box was duly initiated.  When she heard that instead the aroma reflected the fact that I was in the habit of eating leaves, roots and berries around the grounds, she took it even worse than if the alleged sausage had been discovered.  But, somehow, I had always had a sense of what was edible and what not – and continue to find Ransoms exquisitely beautiful to this day.

Unreasonable reader

Sam (Lakha) was in the British Library yesterday when she noticed that a nearby reader, apparently with much evident pleasure, was absorbed in The Power of Unreasonable People. So at least it’s out there.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008 

The Hard Economics of Green

Am just starting the process of contributing to a Harvard Business Review online discussion on ‘The Hard Economics of Green’ (http://www.hbrgreen.org), following on from an initial post by Sir Stuart Rose on Marks & Spencer’s ‘Plan A’ (see http://www.hbrgreen.org/2008/03/the_hard_economics_of_green.html).

Friday, February 29, 2008

Leapfrogging on Leap Year Day

Arrived back this morning, Leap Year Day as Google informs us, from Washington, D.C., where we made a number of leapfrogging announcements at our conference at The Willard Hotel on Wednesday. Among them, SustainAbility will this year set up a Foundation and an operation in India, both developments that I had long dreamed of. The third announcement, though we aren’t going in to any great detail as yet – partly because we are still developing our plans – was that from April I will be launching forth with a new organisation, Volans Ventures, with the other founding partners being Pamela Hartigan, Kevin Teo and Sophia Tickell.

Some of the background can be found at http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article2.asp?id=1338. An extract from our press release:

[…]

Pointing to findings from the just released GlobeScan/SustainAbility survey of active sustainability practitioners, [SustainAbility CEO] Mark Lee emphasized that “approaches from the past will not help much with tomorrow’s challenges. We need new business models, new ideas, and new thinking. New forms of collaboration are already emerging within leading companies as they find ways to turn risk into opportunity and generate value for both shareholders and stakeholders.”

Stressing the critical need to drive step change with business through markets, Elkington spoke of the growing urgency “to scale solutions rapidly so we bridge – and then begin to close – the growing global divides that threaten the economic and social well-being of current and future generations. The risks are now beginning to be recognized – our challenge in the next decade is to ensure that the opportunities are just as clear to those who run, invest in, work for, buy from and invest in business.”

SustainAbility and Volans Ventures anticipate working collaboratively on select research projects to leverage their dual capabilities, experience, and orientation to risk. Additionally, SustainAbility and Volans will share strategic resources, key people will have joint appointments, and both firms share the same core ambition to quickly advance the sustainability agenda.

[ENDS]

A few final ruminations. The name Volans comes from the Latin volans, for flying or flying thing, as in Pisces volans, or flying fish. When I was prowling around the Internet this evening, searching once again for images of flying fish, I came across two which literally took my breath away.

The first is this, of a galleon during Spanish Main days, the skies full of piscatorial aerobatics:

The second is by Andrea Offermann (http://www.andreaoffermann.com/), done for the book The Life of Pi, which – if memory serves – was discovered at Canongate by a friend of Gaia’s, Francis Bickmore:

Both images capture my sense of the weird and wonderful future we are about to leap into. 

Ode to Unreasonable People

The reviews of The Power of Unreasonable People are coming in thick and fast now, but Ode magazine (http://www.odemagazine.com/p/about) is, I think, the first to review the book back-to-back with Muhammad Yunus’s new book, Creating a World Without Poverty.

I quite like their fist Earth illustration – at one stage, in the early 1990s I collected images that played games with the image of Earth, from advertising, campaign posters and the like, intending to do a book, but never quite got round to it.

D.C.

Some more photographs from some of last week’s sessions in Washington, D.C.

Flowers in the Willard Hotel lobby – the word ‘lobbying’ was coined in the Hotel

Mark prepares alongside a poster for one of our reports of yore

Jonathan (Halperin) and Mark (Lee) keep seats warm for filming

Ditto

Exhibits at Georgetown University, where I did a session on social entrepreneurship

Ditto

View from seminar room window

Sunday, February 24, 2008 

Another NYT mention of our book

A nice mention of The Power of Unreasonable People in the New York Times can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/business/24social.html?ex=1204520400&en=d4aed6ababf81903&ei=5070&emc=eta1.

Saturday, February 23, 2008 

The Wallacespace Six

Spent three days this week (20th-22nd) at the Wallacespace in Covent Garden, with six members of the team for a new venture I’m working on. Dinner on second night on the top floor of Waterstone’s, Piccadilly, with – among others – Bunker Roy of Barefoot College. The formal launch for the new venture won’t be until the Skoll World Forum next month, though we are trailing it at a session SustainAbility is holding at The Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., this coming week. More anon.

Auspicious number for our meeting room

Good to go

Feet first into the future

Quiet moment

Kevin and Pamela

Point made

Pamela and Sophia

Cookie pause

Paws and cookies

Quiet corner

Other news

En route to dinner

Bunker Roy

Work in progress

Sam and Kevin

Kevin and Sophia

Screen shot

Snap!

Spring

Thursday, February 21, 2008 

A Specter over Detroit

Interesting to see myself quoted in a splendidly long article on carbon footprinting in The New Yorker, at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/25/080225fa_fact_specter?printable=true. Michael Specter (who I liked enormously when he came into our London office) writes very well and is accurate in terms of what I said. But, as ever, some of the context is left out.

SustainAbility, for example, continues to work with Ford, but I haven’t in quite some time. I do indeed think that much of Detroit is doomed, but I really wouldn’t single out Ford ahead of other US manufacturers as particularly vulnerable. Each of these companies is on something of a roller-coaster ride and, as with Chrysler in the past, it’s often a matter of timing and luck (good or bad) as to whether a particular company goes down, stumbles on or recovers.

The problem that companies like Ford and GM face is that they are long-rooted incumbents, with deeply entrenched operations and mind-sets. But we are seeing Ford experimenting with some fascinating projects focusing on sustainable mobility in cities Sao Paulo, so who knows?

Monday, February 18, 2008 

Hurricane resurrected

Chris Banyai-Riepl painted the Me-109 of my father’s nemesis Helmut Wick (see blog entry for Sunday June 25 2006), and now Robert Gretzyngier has turned his brushes to the Hurricane Tim was flying when his path (we now believe) crossed Wick’s in 1940.

Sunday, February 17, 2008 

Hill House

Drove down to Little Rissington yesterday afternoon with Gaia and Hania, arriving to find the house bursting at the seams. Odd to see various Cotswold stone walls in the village doing the same, including part of the wall of the lower garden, towards the church. Luckily, it burst inwards rather than out. Saw another in the village in a similar state on our way out this afternoon to Burford.

Much comment as Gaia, Hania and Pat read Elaine’s account of her somewhat erratic career, 1968-1977, due to appear on her website, itself slated to launch later in the month. Ranges from Lord Lucan to Antonioni, via Hammer Horror Films and the Playboy Club. The stars were brilliantly clear last night as we said goodbye to parents of Marina, one of Caroline’s most-painted models. This morning, no surprise, there had been a hard frost. When Dad cut a full stalk of Brussels-sprouts and brought them into the kitchen to accompany Hania’s extraordinary pie, it took a fair while for the sprouts to defrost. Should have gone for a walk. Didn’t.

Chimney

Distant frost in lower garden

Blue chairs

Hania

Pat reading Elaine’s reminiscences of work, 1968-77

Marina in style

Saturday, February 16, 2008

 

Poverty warps brains

In the next phase of my working life, I plan to focus even more urgently on the nexus of challenges at the interface between the areas flagged by my 1994 formulation of the triple bottom line, ‘People, Planet & Profit’ (the 3Ps).

Fascinating to see in today’s Financial Times an article on recent research showing that early poverty impairs the development of the human brain, locking in a range of social and health problems. Interesting, too, that the same paper carries a report on Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank making its first microfinance loans in, of all places, New York City. As the FT puts it, “the bank’s entry into the US, its first in a developed market, comes after mainstream banks’ credibility has been hit by the mortgage meltdown and many people are turning to fringe financial institutions offering loans at exorbitant rates.” Once again, Grameen is helping the iron grip of poverty on the poor.
 

Spineless menace

One of the most painful experiences of my entire life came off the Greek island of Skaithos in 1970. Swimming over quite a distance back from an offshore islet, I suddenly felt I had been kicked in the chest by a mule. The aftershock was like a combination of an electrical and chemical burn. Looking down, as I tried to regain my breath, a saw a tiny purple jellyfish floating away. Now the Mediterranean is being plagued by a spectrum of the blooming things, a symptom – some scientists believe – of the rapidly deteriorating health of the world ocean. A key cause, it is thought, is overfishing. More at http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/the-spineless-menace-jellyfish-overwhelm-the-sea-783036.html. 

Hoax and Prairie Home Companion

Am scrambling to write a number of things, most particularly the latest report for our Skoll Program. yesterday, for example, kicked off with a session in Barnes with Rupert Bassett, Maggie Brenneke and Alexa Clay on the structure and design of the report. Some really quite intriguing ideas surfaced over coffee and croissants.

Somehow, however, Elaine and I have managed to squeeze out time to watch two films from 2006 in the past week – and both have had me beside myself with joy. The first was Hoax (http://imdb.com/title/tt0462338/), about the spoof biography of Howard Hughes, which delightfully – among many other joys – includes a pair of Creedence Clearwater Revival tracks.

Then last night we finally got around to watching Prairie Home Companion (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0420087/) – and I was completely blown away. It took me a while to realise the full import of the angel’s appearance in the final frames, however. I want the cast version of Red River Valley/In the Sweet By and By played at my funeral, please.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

LEAD in a brown-bag

Fascinating brown-bag lunch today with LEAD International and much of SustainAbility’s London team. More on LEAD at http://www.lead.org/. They were kicked off in 1991 by a huge grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which at the time was run by Peter Goldmark, later a member of SustainAbility’s Faculty. We are looking for ways to overlap and better use our networks.

LEAD set up

The LEAD story

JP perplexed by an illuminated Simon Lyster

Afterwards 1

Afterwards 2

Kim manages to spill coffee exactly on my image in today’s Guardian 

Let’s be unreasonable about this

A piece of mine on the theme of the new book appeared in The Guardian today – and can be viewed at http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/13/socialenterprises?gusrc=rss&feed=society, albeit without the ‘Hell’s Social Entrepreneurs’ cartoon that accompanied the article in the paper. Rajni Bakshi also had a piece on the book published in LiveMint.com in India, owned by the Wall Street Journal, at http://www.livemint.com/2008/02/12231129/Power-of-unreasonable-people.html.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Missing Reindeer

A chauffeur-driven car was waiting for me a few days back when I arrived at Oslo airport, in driving snow. We headed north for three hours, at a fair click on fairly hazardous roads, at one point seeing a massive road-train that had lost traction and ended up on its side in the ditch, like a road-weary line of elephants. We also saw a pair of cows madly racing along the road amongst the snow flurries, but I missed the reindeer that apparently wandered past the Sanderstolen hotel where I was due to speak at a conference organised by the Energy Policy Foundation of Norway. The theme: Sustainable and Secure Energy (http://www.epf.no/).

Apart from a 1.5 hour session which I had to myself, I also appeared on a panel as the event wound towards a conclusion, moderated by Ed Crooks, Energy editor at the Financial Times. Also on the panel were people like Andris Piebalgs (EU Energy Commissioner), Helge Lund (President and CEO, StatoilHydro), Graeme Sweeney (Executive Vice President, Future Fuels and CO2, Shell) and Rex Tillerson (Chairman and CEO, ExxonMobil). Ended up finding Tillerson quite engaging, but he and I locked horns a numbers of times, both in my session and during the panel session. Somewhat reminiscent of those antlered beasts I hadn’t seen, I suppose.

Flew back to Oslo in a small plane on Friday night, arriving after midnight to find the hotel had no registration in my name – though finally managed to find somewhere to spend the night. Then back to a brilliantly sunny London on Saturday afternoon, where I found that my online bidding via a U.S. escrow account for a website I desperately need for a new venture I am involved in had finally been successful. The site had previously been held by a man in St. Petersburg with the memorable surname Nabokov, who may – or may not – be the first cybersquatter I have encountered. But all’s well that ends well, as they say. More anon.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008 

Sanderstolen

Arrived earlier this evening in Sanderstolen, Norway, after a three-hour drive north from Oslo – in fairly heavy snow. Despite the Mercedes suspension, the ice-packed road surfaces meant that at times it was like being on a PowerPlate vibrator. Highlights along the way included two escaped cows bowling along the road in the dark and a huge road-train that had just slid off the road into the ditch and was lying on the snow like a herd of elephants having a siesta.

Still fighting the ‘flu, despite having come to the end of the antibiotics I was prescribed in Davos. And only half way through a week that feels a month long already, starting on Monday morning wih an interesting session with Colin Le Duc at Generation Investment Management and then a SustainAbility Board meeting yestereday, both exploring paths into the future. And then we heard yesterday that we have probably landed a very challenging project with the World Energy Council, a project which (if successful) is bound to get under some folks’ skins – but that has always been a key part of what we do when we are in change-driving mode.

Friday, February 01, 2008

Hanging by a Thread

The last in the short series of Davos-inspired blog entries by Sophia Tickell and I has just been posted on the SustainAbility website at http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article2.asp?id=1332.

Davos: Ends and Beginnings

A summary of some my headline conclusions on Davos 2008 can be found at the openDemocracy website at http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/globalisation/davos_2008_the_hydra_s_year.

Wednesday, January 30, 2008 

CIO Insight

Interesting to see how media is slicing and dicing the book, even before it’s published. Here’s a link to an excerpt of our profile of Mitch Kapor, who I saw again in Davos a few days back – in this case aimed at the IT sector, particularly Chief Information Officers. See http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Books/How-QTEUnreasonableQTE-People-Can-Improve-IT/

Monday, January 28, 2008

DJSI and Sustainability Yearbook 2008

En route home from Davos, Elaine and I arrived in Zurich yesterday afternoon – and had dinner with Alex Barkawi, his wife Kecia, Reto Ringger and his wife, John Prestbo of Dow Jones and Steve Viederman, a long-time friend and colleague. Reto is CEO at Sustainable Asset Management (SAM) and Alex runs their Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes side (http://www.sustainability-indexes.com/). Then today, Elaine and I met Peter (Zollinger) for an extended hot chocolate in a wonderful little cafe in the city, the Cafe Schwarzenbach. Next Peter and I headed off in bright sunshine on the tram to SAM, for a team brown-bag lunch and a meeting of the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes advisory board.

SAM have just launched their Sustainability Yearbook 2008, which is well worth a look. The Yearbook is the world’s most comprehensive reference work for assessing exchange-listed companies according to their triple bottom line performance. Only the best 15% of the companies in 57 industry sectors are included. For the first time SAM, has developed a classification system that breaks down the leading companies into SAM Gold, Silver and Bronze classes.

Another balancing act: On SAM’s doorstep

Sunday, January 27, 2008 

Davos 2008

Elaine and I have just come down the mountain to Zurich, by train, after spending the previous week first in Zurich at the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship summit – and then at the 2008 World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos (http://www.weforum.org/en/index.htm). Because of IT challenges, I have been filing blog entries erratically, with a series of three due to appear on the SustainAbility website at www.sustainability.com/saatdavos, with commentaries by Sophia Tickell.

Flying fish spotted in Davos

Since I have blogged fairly extrensively for SustainAbility’s website (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/article2.asp?id=1305) – and have a piece on Davos 2008 appearing shortly on the openDemocracy site, which I will provide a link to here when it is posted – what follows is simply a sequence of some of the images that struck me during the summit.

Waiting for Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Larry Brilliant of Google.org and Tom Friedman

Bono and Mary Robinson embrace after Al Gore’s sermon on the market opportunities in global warming

Bono commented on venture capitalist John Doerr’s shoes – so here they are

Part of a line of totem poles in the WEF annual meeting reception area

Ad for World Food Programme en route to a Nike lunch focusing on the plight of girls

During the session I moderated in the WorkSpace for consumer sector CEOs

Detail of scribing during the session

I told delegates that the WorkSpace was like an olive oil press – and they were the fruit

Action now!

Reed Paget of Belu (UK Social Entrepreneur of the Year) stoops to confer

Aftermath of protests behind the Congress Centre

Spotted in the WorkSpace: the symbolism of Pisces volans will become clear later in the Spring

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Co-authors

Here’s a picture that Doris Michaels, our literary agent based in New York (http://www.dsmagency.com), took of Pamela and I at the Schwab Summit earlier today.

Two exhausted co-authors brought to book 

Schwab Foundation summit

We arrived in Davos today, by train from Zurich – where we had been attending what may prove to be the last summit meeting of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship entrepreneurs. Held in the Swiss Re Ruschlikon complex outside Zurich, overlooking the lake, the event was organised very differently this year, with much more active engagement of the entrepreneurs and other participants. Wonderful gathering of the tribes. On the first evening Elaine, Sophia (Tickell) and I had dinner with Barbara Fiorito, who used to chair Oxfam in the US, and from that point on it was a veritable blizzard of conversations and connections. As the event wound down and it was announced that Pamela was standing down as Managing Director of the Foundation, she deservedly received a standing ovation – but, sadly, by that time we were already on the train to Davos.

All a bit of a blur for Freeplay’s Rory Stear

What’s the collective noun for glasses?

Elim Chew: Director, Social Innovation Park, Singapore) and Elaine

Ricardo (Young da Silva) of Instituto Ethos, Brazil

Pamela in full flow

Sunday, January 20, 2008 

Expecting to Fly

Spent much of yesterday with Craig and Rachel Ray, working on the impending revamp of this website.  Was busy well after midnight trying to find suitable photos for the section headings and so on.  Just as well, because BA sent a text message to say that our flight to Zurich tomorrow (today) had been cancelled, so had to find an alternative in short order.  Probably linked to the crash at Heathrow on the 17th, something none of us should have been surprised by.  The recent safety record of the major airlines has been extraordinary, but the risks are always there.
As we prepare to fly, it’s an uneasy thought that statisticians note that rare events cluster.  And with the flight lanes in to LHR passing directly over our home, I have often visualised what would happen if one of those things decided to pay a visit here.  When we first moved here, it was more a question of kerosene being dumped in large quantities over the washing – and, closer in, where the wheels came down, frozen bodies falling out of wheel-wells.  Heathrow has always been a difficult neighbour and its impending expansion, which I voted against in the recent public consultation, can only make things worse.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Visiting Professor

So, now I’m a Visiting Professor – at the Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility at Cranfield University’s School of Management (http://www.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/research/centres/ccr/).

Thursday, January 17, 2008 

Signing On

Ori

Now that copies of The Power of Unreasonable People have arrived in our London office, I have been doing a marathon signing session – and Ori (Chandler) and Sam (Lakha) have been sending the mailmen away laden to the gunnels (or gunwales). The pictures above and below were taken by Sam during the process, the last of which is an acknowledgement of where all this product comes from.

One of many packs

Can I plead RSI?

Arboreal neighbour

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Sir John Harvey-Jones

Returned from Washington to find the news that Sir John Harvey-Jones had died. It’s a long time since I last met him, having first interviewed him for ICI Magazine in the mid-1980s, when he was Chairman of ICI. He was certainly a breath of fresh air. But I also included some of the same interview in my book The Green Capitalists, published in 1987 – the year he retired from ICI. In retrospect, reading back through that section of the book, it’s interesting to see how even he was a captive at the time of pretty standard (and pretty defensive) industry views on issues like acid rain and ozone depletion.

The world was about to shift on its axis, however. With the Antarctic Survey discovering the Antarctic ‘Ozone Hole’ in 1985 and a UK Friends of the Earth campaign against CFCs having a major impact on public opinion in 1987, the ground was well prepared for our first green consumer campaign in 1988. It always struck me that ICI was full of great ideas for new, greener technologies, a number of which we spotlighted when I was a judge with initiatives like the Pollution Abatement Technology Awards (PATAS) and the Better Environment Awards for Industry (BEAFI), both hosted by the RSA. But precious few of those ideas ever made it through to the market.

Ironically, it was a chance comment from Mike Flux, ICI’s Group Environment Adviser at the time of the the ‘Green Designer’ exhibition at the Design Council in 1986, which I helped organise, that triggered the thinking behind The Green Consumer Guide. Mike noted that it was all very well for environmentalists like me to urge ICI to produce more environment-friendly technologies and products, but experience had shown that no-one wanted to buy them. OK, I thought, let’s mobilise the consumer, a phrase I coined for the Design Council exhibition, and off the green consumer rocket went.

Friday, January 11, 2008 

World Entrepreneurship Summit 2008

Once I got back from Washington yesterday morning, I headed home to recover a bit from my aerial coughing, though that had been much less bad than it might have been becayuse I slept soundly. Then later in the day I headed in to the World Entrepreneurship Summit (http://www.wes08.net/) in the QEII conference centre, Westminster, to absorb some of the atmosphere and key issues ahead of my plenary presentation today.

When I took the stage, after the event got off to a late start, partly because of rain, I started with two rather startling images from the world of StarTrek, noting that making one’s away around the QEII centre in search of breakout sessions was a bit like trying to find one’s way around some abandoned space hulk, where you would look through internal portholes and see small groups of people earnestly debating (as perhaps they had already done for years, decades or even generations) questions around whether social enterprise is different from ordinary enterprise. Someone from the UN had told me yesterday that as far as he was concerned anything that was an enterprise and employed people was a social enterprise. So, I wondered aloud, did the Mafia fit the bill?

My second USS Enterprise picture is below – and I used it to look forward to the day when we could use something like Google Earth not just to spot concentrations of humanity or sources of greenhouse gas emissions, but to map the intensity of entrepreneurial effort on the great challenges of the new century.

I was then asked to join the following panel discussion, chaired by Vicky Pryce, Chief Economic Adviser at BERR and Joint Head of the UK Government Economic Services. The other panellists were George Polk (Founder, The Cloud and The Catalyst Project), Herta von Stiegel (Executive Chairman, StarGate Capital), Andrew Bainbridge (CEO, Bank Muscat International), George Dragnich (Director, Office of Economic & Development Affairs, US State Department) and Max Mickelsson from Microsoft. My mmemory is that the panel really caught fire and was a pleasure to be part of. Certainly as people wound out to coffee I overheard some very positive commentary.

Towards the end of the session, I took the opportunity to end a series of points by proposing a vote of thanks to Rebecca Harding, who has been the driving force behind WES – and there was a resounding outbreak of applause. She has been at least as ill as I, but soldiered on. True, much needs to be done to turn the summit into something really worthy of the name, but the vessel’s now well under way.

Brainstorm

Walking back around Barnes Pond on my way home from the World Entrepreneurship Summit, having extracted myself early because of my gathering flu symptoms, I found my brain playing havoc with various things it encountered – including the results of a recent storm. Odd how the mind begins to see the world in altered states. Everything starts to look slightly numinous – something Van Gogh caught with his study of a working man’s boots. Things begin to glow, as did this bench – though the light here was silvery, sold, wintry. The brancing patterns put me in mind of the blood supply to the brain.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Library of Congress

What a treat. Jonathan Halperin had fixed me up with a guided tour of the Library of Congress this morning. On arrival, I was taken under the comforting, highly informed wing of Madonna Robins and steered around this extraordinary institution. Fascinating wander around the ‘Exploring the Americas’ exhibition, with some amazing early maps of the Americas (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/earlyamericas/).

Then I was handed over to Abby Yochelson for a tour of the Reading Room, plus – when I mentioned an interest – a visit behind-the-scenes to the old card index system, inevitably, thankfully, replaced by computers. She had a brief on my writing career to date, with 16 books included in their reference system and the latest, The Power of Unreasonable People, already on their radar screen. Still you would need a bevy of supercomputers to keep track of such outputs in the midst of the tsunami of new titles they receive each year.

Library of Congress 1: Knowledge lights the way

Library of Congress 2: Raising a torch

Library of Congress 3: Thomas Jefferson contemplates loss of much of his library, gifted to the Library, in a fire in 1851 (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jefflib.html)

Library of Congress 4: Uplifting

Lbrary of Congress 5: Card index – from Horror Tales to Horse Pulling

Library of Congress 6: Paws for thought in ‘Exploring the Americas’ exhibition

Tuesday, January 08, 2008 

Fast Company Awards

Spent a glorious evening, albeit on cough sweets, at the Fast Company awards ceremony at the Westin Washington. SustainAbility won one of the 2008 Social Capitalist Awards (see http://www.fastcompany.com/social/ and, for my perspective on all of this, http://www.fastcompany.com/social/2008/articles/john-elkington.html).

Our table at the awards ceremony had been organised by Jonathan Halperin of our DC office – and I sat next to Herve Houdre, general manager of the famous Willard Hotel. He was the man who, after breakfast at The Willard, steered me across the road to a nearby Borders bookstore to ensure I tracked down a copy of an extraordinary biography of Benjamin Franklin, an early – and almost definitive – example of a social entrepreneur. The book: Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2003). Made sure Herve got a signed advance copy of The Power of Unreasonable People this evening, in which he is credited in the Acknowledgements. Because Pamela was there, too, she signed also. (She and I had done a twin-header presentation of the book earlier in the day at the Fast Company conference that preceded the dinner.)

Some of the things Franklin did were not-for-profit, some for-profit. And it was significant that tonight’s awards went largely to not-for-profit social enterprises, but with – for the first time – a separate category of for-profit ‘social capitalists’. Alongside SustainAbility, and because of the tyranny of the alphabet I came last in a sequence of some 50 award recipients, were nine other for-profits: Better World Books, Developing World Markets, Domini Social Investments, Equal Exchange, Herman Miller, New Leaf Paper, Organic Family of Farms, Seventh Generation and ShoreBank. What truly glorious company to be in!

Sunday, January 06, 2008 

Of planes and adrenaline

Arrived at Terminal 4 shaken, stirred and almost beside myself on adrenaline breakdown compounds today after a breakneck trip around the M25 in a taxi, having been caught in a jam on an M4 exit road for 20-25 minutes. Got to the desk just in time to be told that if I had got there just 5 minutes earlier, my luggage would have got on board. Typically, as I headed home the road closure signs on the exit spur had been removed. Still, because I was meant to be flying business – thanks to a top-up with Air Miles – I can fly tomorrow at the same time.

The need to take account of unforeseen wrinkles is one I have to constantly re-learn. One of my worst flights was to Australia some years back, when I got on the wrong plane. Turned out I had tickets on two planes leaving at same time for Oz, one to Sydney and one to Melbourne. Meant to be on the latter, I found myself on the former – and airborne. The slight wrinkle here was that I was meant to be having an hour or two of rest in Melbourne ahead of a major speech, but had no idea how I was going to get from Sydney to Melbourne in time. In the event, I found a connection and got to the ventue just in time to take the stage. Am very much enjoying Craig Venter’s extraordinary book A Life Decoded at the moment, much of the early part of which is on his research on adrenaline receptors. My receptors must have been in overdrive that day.

Saturday, January 05, 2008 

Reptile on BBC Today Program

Relatively early start, at least on a Saturday, when I’m likely to feel particularly reptilian in the morning. And ironically, given the subject I was to talk about, I was picked up by an ultra-smart BMW early this morning to be whisked across to BBC for an interview on rising oil prices – alongside Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth. Unfortunately, the interview didn’t really engage some of the issues I had discussed the previous day with the researcher, but my sense is that rising energy prices are a necessary condition (and a catalyst) for a profound restructuring of the global economy – as argued in my 2001 book, The Chrysalis Economy. My problem is that I try to answer the questions asked, rather than driving my own agenda from the outset.

A central idea in that book was that the first 30 years of the new century would see the same sort of processes in the economy as you see in a chrysalis, where a resource-intensive, environmentally damaging organism (the caterpillar) goes in and – after a period of total meltdown, where the old organs are pretty much liquidised to provide the nutrients needed to build the new – a much more sustainable organism (the butterfly) emerges. As we enter recession, I see this as the threshold of a fundamental reworking of the economic order. Perhaps not surprisingly, when I attempted an economics degree in the late 1960s, the two economic thinkers I found most interesting were Nikolai Konradtiev and Joseph Schumpeter …

Nor will all of this be uniformly good news in terms of sustainable development. Instead, we will see some extremely worring trends in terms of political economy. The news yesterday that Gazprom is trying to gain access to Nigerian oil and gas reserves has to be seen as bad news by western companies that have argued they can’t stop flaring in short order, since that is part of what Gazprom now seems to be offering.

Whatever the facts of the matter, no-one who has seen BRIC energy companies at close quarters can be under any illusion that they will get anywhere near competing with western companies on humans rights and environmental priorities. For that to happen, we need a sustained 15-20 year campaign focusing on them – and keeping them under the same sort of concerted pressure that has persuaded their western counterparts to at least begin the processes of change. The work of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre is one part of that, but we need to massively scale up our efforts in this area. 

Backing Obama

Don’t quite know what to make of his chances of bringing real change if he finally made it to the White House, but the news today of Barack Obama’s win in Iowa feels like a huge shot in the arm. Have long felt that a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton outcome would not only take us back to the Roman Empire but also sound the death knell for something quintessential in American politics. Suddenly, there’s a sense of new shoots, new potential, new hope – all the more important given what has been happening in places like Pakistan and Kenya.

Having spent part of today in the East End of London, I’m even more persuaded of the need for the broad mass of people to believe in a better future – and for political leaders to make it possible for ordinary people to believe that they can make real changes for the better in their own lives and conditions. But, even more importantly, there is a need – something Obama has publicly acknowledged – to “renew America’s moral position in the world.” In that respect, I find it simply astounding how far that great country has fallen in recent years.

Friday, January 04, 2008 

Les Echos

Delighted that we got an article into the French financial daily Les Echos today, on the subject of responsible supply chain management. I wrote it with my SustainAbility colleague Jean-Philippe Renaut and spotlighted the work of EcoVadis (http://www.ecovadis.com/).

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Year of the Frog

Having been switched on to wildlife and environmentalism in large part by amphibians in Northern Ireland – and having spent recent years in a growing state of anxiety about the impact of the chytrid fungus on amphibians – see 4 February 2006 entry (http://johnelkington.com/weblog/http://johnelkington.com/january-2008/) in this Journal – I was pleased to see in today’s Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3118736.ece) that 2008 has been declared the International Year of the Frog.

Weirdly, when asked for a US survey of environmentalists for my favourite animals only yesterday, this was what I (very selectively) fired back:

Q3: Favourite animal?

“Can’t do just one …

– Mammals: hares, meerkats, lemurs, dolphins, humpback whales – indeed more or less any whales
– Birds: The red kites that have been reintroduced in the west of England
– Amphibians: frogs, toads, salamanders
– Reptiles: chameleons
– Fish: The flying fish
– Insects: the honeybee and the dragonfly …”

In any event I, for one, will be supporting the Amphibian Ark campaign (http://www.amphibianark.org/yearofthefrog.htm) to save frogs, toads, salamanders and the like.