Journal

Our autumn campaign has taken off with a bit of a bang. But, first, Elaine and I went across to a wonderful gathering on Thursday 12th at CDP to discuss next stages with fund-raising for the proposed Amulet memorial to Tessa Tennant in the City of London.

And the following day, Friday 13th, we went across to the Kochs (the good ones, not the bad ones), just the other side of Barnes Pond, to hear Mike Koch talk about his new book on his life as a wildlife vet in Africa. Called: Through My Eyes. Self-published and he’s hard to find on the internet, but a glorious, landmark publication.

At the weekend, while we were walking across Barnes Common, we watched as the wind stirred the ribbons on the plane tree that has been re-purposed as a memorial to Iris Goldsmith. Normally such memorials make me uneasy, including the vast mountains of plastic-wrapped flowers outside Kensington Palace when Princess Diana died, but in this case the effect is wonderful. A wind-powered tribute. Rather as if people are talking all around, with the ribbons picking up the zephyrs.

Then across to Copenhagen on Monday to speak at Dansk Industry (Confederation of Danish Industry)’s annual business summit, this time on the theme of the Green Transition. The event was attended by the country’s new Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, who I found impressive; the Crown Princes and Princesses of Denmark and Sweden; and some 1,300 CEOs and business leaders. Was told by several people that my speeches here in February helped put wind in the country’s sails.

The scale of what Denmark now aims to do collectively is breath-taking. To reduce carbon emissions by 70% below 1990 levels by 2030. Various speakers admitted they didn’t yet know how to achieve this, but the level of ambition is admirable and encouraging.

In my speech, I linked one of Denmark’s favourite sons, Hans Christian Andersen, to my evolving theme of Black Swans, Ugly Ducklings and Green Swans. As a test-run for the book, due to launch in January 2020, it seemed to go very well.

Then, on Wednesday 18th, after I flew in from Copenhagen, Louise (Kjellerup Roper) and I went across to the Royal Society to listen to Bill McDonough at an event hosted by Tim Smit and the Eden Project. Glorious meeting of the tribes, though at times uncomfortably warm.

And ringing around my head all week have been the words on the yellow banner wrapped around the September 18th edition of The Financial Times, shown below. I first caught sight of it as I walked into the Copenhagen airport lounge – and my immediate reaction was that it was one of those milestone moments when you actually see the world starting to tilt and pivot.

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.