Search Results for: Tim elkington

One of Britain’s finest contributions to the art of well-informed conversation is The Chatham House Rule. Frustrating, too. Had dinner this evening at the Chef’s Dining Room, Mews of Mayfair. Others around the table included the CEOs of well-known companies.  The conversation revolved around climate change in general – and, in particular, the conclusions of Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund in his new book, Earth: The Sequel.

 

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg had this to say about the book: “Krupp and [Miriam] Horn have turned the doom and gloom of global warming on its head.  Earth: The Sequel makes it crystal clear that we can build a low-carbon economy while unleashing American entrepreneurs to save the planet, putting optimism back into the environmental story.”  These – at the for-profit end of the entrepreneurial spectrum – are some of the people we aim to find new ways to help through our fledgling new company, Volans Ventures.

Elaine and I drove across to Tetbury this morning, albeit with difficulty – there was a long tailback before we got on to the M4, because truck had hit a car, or vice versa, the ensemble blocking two lanes out of three.  We ended up having to drive significantly faster than I would have liked to get to the Calcot Manor Hotel in time for me to begin my speech at 11.00 at an event organised by executive coaching firm Praesta.  After an excellent lunch at the hotel, we were all coached across to Highgrove to see what Prince Charles and his gardeners have achieved there.  

It’s a long time since I was there – and progress has been very considerable.  A high wind was blowing as we walked around, with the trees sounding as if they were gravel beaches, with great storm surges coming in and receding.  My favourite corner, by far, was in the old ‘Stumpery,’ where one of two classical mini-temples now contains a stunning black plaque in memory of Ted Hughes, showing him with a Longfellowish head of hair together with a crow and what my eye variously made out to be a salmon or a pike.

After a champagne tea, we were bussed back to the hotel, via Kemble station, and Elaine and I decided to drive up through Cirencester and thence to Little Rissington, to drop in on Hill House.  Turned out very well – with a lovely light slanting across the gardens as we collected vegetables to bring back to London.  I spent some happy moments watching bees making free with the foxgloves.  But all of this buccolia comes at a price: filling up the Volvo’s fuel tank in Tetbury cost £73.  Thanks heavens we rarely have to go anywhere by car.

Bee in foxglove Foxgloves Tim and Elaine netting  Caroline

A dozen of us (Charmian Love, Sam Gray, Martin Hartigan, Pamela Hartigan, Sam Lakha, Mark Lee, Geoff Lye, Astrid Sandoval, Kevin Teo, Sophia Tickell, Elaine and I) spent the day at 2 Bloomsbury Place, our new Volans office, the first of two Away Days. Part way through, Elaine spoke to someone from the Prospect office on the floor below – and discovered that, in addition to the building’s own garden, we have access to a quite extraordinary magic garden at the back, which – among many other delights – contains two elephant sculptures, presumably left by the people who were in our space before us, The Elephant Family.

Among many other memorable aspects of the day, and part from the Magic Garden, three stand out for me: the beautiful ‘stained glass’ version of our flying fish that Kim (Russell) had made for me; the one-candle birthday cake that emerged out of a cupboard late in the day, celebrating my imminent 59th and (in my mind) the birth of Volans Ventures; and the small granddaughter of the people upstairs coming down dressed as Ginger Rogers, one of my all-time favourite screen goddesses. (Flying Down to Rio being one of my Top 16 ‘Desert Island Discs’.)

Oh and then, as Elaine and I walked back home by Barnes Pond, in a setting sun that turned the trees and grass into a a form of sensuround stained glass, a heron (my totemic bird) flew in and and landed in the reed-beds. Apart from one piece of bad family news for one of our number during the day, this was virtual perfection.

Still life Sam, Astrid, Martin Flying fish 2 Flying fish 3 Elaine Garden Further in Elephants – with Sophia, Charmian and Sam Trunk fondling Sam in the belly of the beast Lock Wildflowers Martin emerges Kevin demonstrates Martin, me, Pamela Blowing out the candle Unused to cameras as I am …

Ahead of a Volans team session at the end of this coming week, I have been trying to clarify my thinking on how I want to spend the next couple of years.  Yesterday, in ongoing conversation with the wider Volans team, I concluded that central to my mission and vision is the notion of mapping, connecting with and supporting the innovators and entrepreneurs who are at – or who are moving towards – the leading edge of the fourth wave in the model of change I began to map out in 1994 (see below for latest, summary version).

 The characteristics of Wave 4, at least in my mind, are – among many other things – a growing focus on disruptive innovation and scalable entrepreneurial solutions to the world’s great governance, economic, social and environmental challenges.

So two stories from today’s papers struck home as I read the papers today.  The first, from the New York Times supplement in The Observer, featured the thinking of Ray Kurzweil – and his notion that the Law of Accelerating Returns will mean that the solutions will emerge far faster than we might currently imagine.  The key point he makes, whether in relation to human genomics, life extension or solar solutions for climate change, is that: “Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace.  They make linear extrapolations from the past.  When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve.  If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”

Of course, what goes up can also come down, and exponential curves can take us places we absolutely don’t want to be. Waves can develop vicious undertows that drag would-be surfers into the depths, or or civilizations into a vortex of ecological decline.  This point was underscored earlier in the week by probably my favourite contrarian, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times.  He began: “Is it possible for the vast mass of humanity to enjoy the living standards of today’s high-income countries?”  Then he continued:  “This is, arguably, the biggest question confronting humanity in the 21st century.  It is today’s version of the doubts expressed by Thomas Malthus, two centuries ago, about the possibility of enduring rises in living standards. On the answer depends the destiny of our progeny. It will determine whether this will be a world of hope rather than despair and of peace rather than conflict.”

Wolf was drawing on a new book by Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth.  “The most illuminating concept,” Wolf note of the book, “is that of the ‘anthropocene’ – the era in which human activities dominate the world.  Peter Vitousek of Stanford University has documented the ways in which humanity has appropriated the bounty of the earth for its own use: human beings now exploit 50 per cent of the terrestrial photosynthetic potential; they have put up a quarter of the carbon di-oxide now in the atmosphere; they use 60 per cent of the accessible river run-off; they are responsible for 60 per cent of the earth’s nitrogen fixation; they are responsible for a fifth of all plant invasions; over the past two millennia they have made extinct a quarter of all bird species; and they have exploited or over-exploited more than half of the world’s fisheries.”

For entrepreneurial solutions to work, however, they have to be regulated, at least to a degree.  That’s where the governance element becomes crucial.  And that, in turn, is where the second piece of new today fitted in, at least in my mind.  Nick (now Lord) Stern is proposing the world’s first credit rating system for carbon offset in the developing world.  Given that it is estimated that perhaps two-thirds of some 3,000 offset projects being developed under the UN’s programme are, according to The Observer, “either late or will fail to deliver the promised carbon savings,” this idea (promoted by IDEAcarbon) is precisely the sort of market mechanism that I suspect will need to become much more common as the peak of Wave 4 eventually subsides and we move into the fourth downwave. Downwaves, as I often stress, is where the really useful work tends to get done.

 

One of the books I bought in San Francisco recently was Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, subtitled ‘The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.’  When one of the venture capitalists I was working with in Palo Alto asked me what the heap of books I was carrying included (I had turned down a bag) and heard this title and the book’s theme, he asked why on earth I would want to read another book on WWII?  Because, I said, it’s healthy to explore different perspectives on a period of history you think you know quite well.  

The title came from something one of Hitler’s generals, Franz Halder, told an interrogator – that when he had been imprisoned in Auschwitz towards the end of the war, “he saw flakes of smoke blow into his cell.”  He called it “human smoke.”

And how different Baker’s perspective proved to be, steeped in a pacifism that was largely boiled off in the white heat of war.  But full of sorts of things that were totally new to me.  A fascinating corrective to jingoistic interpretations of what happened, though I did fret at times that Baker’s dice were heavily loaded and that the reader could almost end up feeling sorry for poor Mr. Hitler.