Search Results for: Tim elkington

Dozing 1 Dozing 2 The photographer

There are times when it all becomes a little overwhelming – and a sofa can come in handy. This afternoon was one of those times. Have been feeling wrung out for a couple of days – and managed to grab 10 minutes in the spirit of Churchill’s brief naps. All I need is a boiler suit of the sort he wore and an endless supply of Pol Roger.

Part of SAP sustainability-branded area Peter Graf, SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer Tobias Dosch of SAP and Pieter Schoehuijs, Chief Information Officer at AkzoNobel We are plugged The shark is hungry Karina interviewed – my turn next Formula 1 exhibit Co-CEO Bill McDermott – the word is ‘Sustainable’ Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe

Took the Eurostar from London to Brussels yesterday, then an ICE train to Frankfurt, arriving late – but just in time for dinner with a number of people from SAP. Managed somehow to mislay the ticket I had printed off for the ICE train while still in London, and scrambled around Brussels to find a way of accessing and printing the ticket – trying first an internet cafe and then an Ibis Hotel, helped remotely by Sam. Luckily, we made it work – but I never came across the ticket again, suggesting some sort of Bermuda Triangle in my luggage.

Then up very early this morning to get to the Messe conference complex in time for a 07.00 start, with a breakfast-time panel discussion. Early hour meant slightly thin audience to begin with, though it filled out later, and we apparently had the biggest audience of all the sessions at that time. Extraordinary weather outside, with rain drumming on the conference centre roof, very audibly.

We did various interviews – for one showing me looking quite tired, and “jowly”, noted our erstwhile intern Zheng Jieying from Auckland, see here. In the early afternoon, there was a bigger panel session, during which I also trailed the “we’re moving from push to pull” in corporate sustainability reporting message, which will be central to our new report – The Transparent Economy – which launched next week at the GRI conference in Amsterdam.

Then I headed for the airport with co-panellist Karina Litvack of F&C.  When I opened a conference centre door to exit and collect my bag, a great heap of snow and sleet fell across me. Found out later  that my plane had been hit by lightning, so the passengers for Munich had to be transferred to another aircraft. All handled surprisingly smoothly.

Reflection Barnes Common Local Nature Reserve Path Cricket starts As the rain begins

Elaine and I walked Hania across to Barnes station just before 5 this afternoon, breathing in the smells of the Hawthorn blossom and what may have been Queen Anne’s Lace or Hedge Parsley. As we walked back, the cricketers came out to play, so we wandered in among the trees to watch, partly because the rain was starting fall.

We gradually made our way home, at one stage standing under a Horse Chestnut across from Chris Patten’s home as the rain thumped down. I watched it blur a distant Poplar – and found myself thinking of how the men in the WWI trenches would have experienced such downpours. Wonderful feeling, to be sheltered by a great tree.

Have spent much of the day wading through the newspapers from the past week – and, at one stage, booking a Eurostar ticket for tomorrow, in case my flight to Frankfurt is grounded by the incoming ash. Some geologists say that we are possibly heading into a period where some much larger Icelandic volcanoes begin to erupt. Time to explore videoconferencing more seriously?

Rain 1 Rain 2  

School of Management 1 School of Management 2 Professor Arthur Francis kicks us off Kyoko Fukukawa and her husband And their daughter

Travelled by train, via Leeds, to Bradford – to do a lecture at Bradford University’s School of Management. Amazing to see the landscape taken over by the acid yellow colour of rape fields. Read a stack of magazines, including Newsweek, which foresees the end of the euro and a second great depression. Theme of my talk was the Phoenix Economy, the title of our report last year, which plays into the same space, with discussion of the implication of the work of long-dead economists like Nikolai Kondratiev and Joseph Schumpeter on long-wave economic cycles.

Very much liked the School’s new extension, shown in the first two photos, on the back of the old building, shown in the fourth. Was hosted by, among other Kyoko Fukukawa, whose book on CSR in Asia I did a foreword for some time back. Lively discussion with School of Management alumni, and others, after which I took a bus back to Leeds and then headed south, getting home around 21.30.

Battle bus Clegg at work Symbolic of British public finances 2011?

Across to the Work Foundation this (Sunday) afternoon for a Lib-Dem ‘green growth rally’, led by Nick Clegg. Outside, the London Marathon, with scenes which made me think of the not-much-discussed-by-politicians looming crisis in public spending.  Met a number of the usual suspects, including Tom Burke, James Cameron (the Climate Change Capital variety), DK Matai, Rosie Boycott and Paul Ekins, and found Clegg’s comments encouraging – but not exciting. Later, I did a note that was published by DK’s ATCA, in response to a posting by Clegg.  Will copy it below, though the London 2012 idea didn’t make the final ATCA cut, perhaps because I sent it through later.

The ATCA posting:

I am reminded that when we founded SustainAbility way back in 1987, our tagline for many years was ‘The Green Growth Company’ — inspired by the notion that the environmental and wider sustainability agendas will create some of the defining market opportunities of the twenty-first century.  The latest report from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, ‘Vision 2050’, talks about markets worth USD 3-10 trillion by 2050.  

But, while I am impressed at the early momentum established by Nick Clegg and his team, welcome his pledge of GBP 3.1 bn and will once again vote Lib Dem next month, I feel very strongly that Britain has a fundamental problem when it comes to sustainability-related enterprise.  And it is a problem brought home to me once again when I co-led a study mission of 19 founders and CEOs of UK cleantech companies to California, particularly Silicon Valley, earlier in the year.

Stripped to its essentials, our basic, recurrent problem is that we are not good at bringing new solutions — cleantech or otherwise — to scale. We invent things like railways, exporting them to countries like Switzerland and Argentina (or at least did so when the world was our market oyster), but end up with the Germans increasingly running ours!  That’s the new Europe – and I welcome many aspects of it, as I do the fact that Nick Clegg is able to speak a number of languages. But how do we as a nation learn to speak the language of scale? How do we recover our ambition to drive new industrial revolutions?

I was meant to be in Korea last week, speaking at the Business for Environment (B4E) summit, but Vulcan willed otherwise. I was disappointed on various fronts, but particularly because I wanted to talk to some of those behind the country’s Green Economy strategy — which operates against a time horizon out to 2070. Korea sees itself as a future hub of the global Green Economy.  

Money isn’t the main problem here, welcome though that GPB 3.1bn would be.  Instead, as has often been argued, we need a more entrepreneurial, globally-oriented culture — so, in my dreams, I imagine the Eden Project’s Tim Smit as the UK’s Minister for Green Enterprise — within an evolving economic paradigm forcefully shaped by one of the greatest living Britons, James Lovelock. 

And this was my addendum:

My question to Nick Clegg and his colleagues is this: How can we ensure that we develop and sustain a vibrant, internationally significant Green Economy that doesn’t simply gift-wrap our inventions and innovations and hand them over to others (as happened recently with the sale of Cadbury to Kraft) who DO know how to scale?

Much of this comes down to global branding and sustaining national momentum over time. So here’s an idea that I think the next Government should take on. 2010 marks both the London Olympics and the 25th anniversary of the formal introduction of the linked concepts of sustainability and sustainable development by the Brundtland Commission. Under our noses, London has emerged as what I like to call the ‘World Capital of Sustainability’. This isn’t fanciful, it’s reality.

So the question here is how we can both celebrate this fact and build on it, positioning London and the wider UK as a sustainability hub for the world.

I think we should, I think we can, and I think it would be fun to do.

It would also signal the new Government’s serious intent in relation to the great social, environmental and governance challenges of our time, while discreetly noting that we are committed to being the go-to people.  And that’s where policies, not just money come in. If we fail to put in place the policy architecture that sustains this, we risk having the whole think implode, like Tony Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’.

To conclude: There’s a huge market–indeed civilizational–opportunity here to position London and the UK for the new century’s great challenges and opportunities. We should grab it with both hands. But we should do it with others, from the EU to Korea, and we should do it so well that others do our marketing for us.