Journal

Tomorrow, I speak at the Confederation of Danish Industry’s ‘Green Transition’ summit in Copenhagen. And it hadn’t escaped my notice that Denmark is the home of Hans Christian Andersen, the writer who gave us the Ugly Duckling – a key concept in my forthcoming book, Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism.

Happily, and with huge thanks to Lisa Goldapple and her team at Atlas of the Future, we now have a 20-minute Green Swans video laying out key elements of our evolving exponential change agenda. Largely filmed at our 23 June event at the Barnes Wetland Centre, it features such people as:

– Mark Campanale of the Carbon Tracker Initiative
– Chris Davis of The Body Shop International
– Nick Haan of Singularity University
– The Rt Hon Nick Hurd, MP, at the time Minister for Northern Ireland and for London
– Andrew Kerr of the Sustainable Eel Group
– Jeremy Oppenheim of SYSTEMIQ
– Cathy Runciman of Atlas of the Future
– Hein Sas, of the flat oyster conservation campaign in Holland
– Sir Tim Smit of the Eden Project
– Tanya Steele of WWF UK
– Solitaire Townsend of Futerra

I am delighted with the way the video has turned out, capturing the main themes of the event, but we now also hope to cut it down into more sound bitey sequences to communicate the agenda to a wider audience. I won’t be able to say very much about the video tomorrow, but it seemed like an eminently suitable launch point for the Green Swans campaign that we plan to develop through 2020.

Volans continues to beaver away on our Tomorrow’s Capitalism Inquiry – so it’s exciting to have some of the early results spotlighted in the 2019 Global Goals Yearbook. The piece, by Richard Roberts and I, runs to six pages. Also wonderful this week to have our latest thinking posted on the Harvard Business Review website. Our title there: ‘6 Ways CEOs Can Prove They Care About More Than Shareholder Value’.

Just coming to the end of a fortnight of working from home, coupled with flashes of staycation. Coincided with figs ripening in the garden. And an opportunity to do things like: finally get a large sofa for our newish Somerset House offices; entertain friends; visit Kew Gardens, to see the Dale Chihuly exhibitions and have lunch overlooking the Palm House; visit Gaia’s dazzling floral display chez Roland Mouret; and trundle across to Oxford to see the Last Supper in Pompeii exhibition at the Ashmolean – and have lunch with Geoff (Lye) and Sarah (Ellis).

On the work front, I went back and forth with Fast Company Press, the publishers of my new book, all going very well; did some outreach for both Volans and for the Business Declares Network, where I am now on the Board; worked with Lisa Goldapple to evolve our film on Green Swans and Regenerative Capitalism, due out later this month; and developed a piece for HBR.org, due out tomorrow, in response to the Business Roundtable’s statement on the future of capitalism.

Perhaps inevitably, another book idea began to bubble, too, spurring a good deal of background research into areas I don’t normally probe.

We also watched a fair amount of television (including glorious programmes like the last of Jim Al-Khalili’s Revolutions series, focusing on telescopes and the last one, on robots and artificial intelligence) and last night finally watched a DVD of Bohemian Rhapsody, utterly joyous.

And I read for England, while feeling increasingly angry about the direction that the Johnson regime is taking the country in. Looks as though I will be out on the streets again soon.

Books I particularly enjoyed, or at least found fascinating, included Diarmid Ferriter’s The Border, Donald D. Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality, and, on the fiction front, and in the sequence in which I read them, Gareth Rubin’s Liberation Square, Joanna Kavenna’s ZED (am minded to buy everything she has ever written) and Pat Barker’s exquisite The Silence of the Girls – the last exquisite in Barker’s use of language, not in subject matter. Intriguing that all three are by the same publisher, Penguin Random House.

I am quoted in this Fast Company piece on a milestone announcement by the Business Roundtable. Literally 25 years after I came up with the Triple Bottom Line, the Business Roundtable in the USA has made an announcement potentially reversing over 50 years in which Milton Friedman’s doctrine of shareholders-above-everything-else has prevailed.

The article by Rick Wartzman opens as follows:

For the past two decades, the official stance of America’s top corporate executives has been that the interests of shareholders came before the interests of all others—workers, consumers, the cities and towns in which their companies operated, and society as a whole.

The Business Roundtable, a lobbying group composed of the nation’s leading CEOs, just announced that its members “share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders”—each of whom “is essential”—while pledging “to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities, and our country.”

With its “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation,” the Roundtable has affirmed the need for “meeting or exceeding customer expectations”; “investing in our employees,” including by “compensating them fairly and providing important benefits,” as well as offering training and education so that they can “develop new skills for a rapidly changing world”; “dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers”; “supporting the communities in which we work”; and “generating long-term value for shareholders.”

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase and the Roundtable’s chairman, says he hopes that this declaration “will help to set a new standard for corporate leadership.”

It is, without question, a huge deal.

Read the full piece here. Just over a year after my ‘product recall‘ of the Triple Bottom Line, via the Harvard Business Review, it feels as if the world is beginning to catch up.