Search Results for: Tim elkington

Our joint Volans-UN Global Compact team has begun its scouting mission, delving into San Francisco (and later LA) versions of the future. We kicked off last night with a fascinating dinner with Joel Makower of GreenBiz on 7 April, to which I contribute a monthly column. Among other things we talked about the evolution of his VERGE platform. Wish I’d thought of it!

Then this morning across to IDEO’s amazing studio under the Bay Bridge, where we met Iain Roberts, via an introduction from our advisory board member Tim Brown, IDEO’s CEO. Fantastic discussion of the role of design in system change – and our shared ambition to have a disproportionate impact in the world. And of the sorts of things that are ‘core’ and ‘edge’ at IDEO. And of the need for organisations to be increasingly “permeable”.

Interesting resonances with Carlota Perez‘s thinking around K-waves. (I had talked to her a few weeks earlier.) My thinking has centred around waves and cycles ever since I gave up Economics in 1968, but emerged with a deep interest in the work of two singularly unfashionable (at least at the time) economists, Nikolai Kondratiev and Joseph Schumpeter. Some of that thinking is now surfacing again in our work for the Global Compact and for there Business & Sustainable Development Commission.

Iain spoke of waves of technology crashing onto the beach – and San Francisco, and environs, is where much of that has happened since WWII. I have been back and forth here since the 1970s, in search of the latest in renewable energy, biotechnology and information technology, among other things.

 

 

Having spent much of the Easter weekend working on the Breakthrough Innovation Program paper, I suggested we walk across Barnes Bridge. It turned into quite a hike.

Leaving around 12.00, we made our way across the Bridge, through Duke’s Meadows, along the north bank of the Thames to Hammersmith Bridge, and then back along the southern shore to Barnes, arriving home some two-and-a-half hours later.

One of the best walks we’ve done in some time. Weather fitful: bright sun, interspersed with quite high winds. This morning and later, there were bursts of hail. And this morning the newspapers had been turned to paper maché in the porch.

Delightful Saturday afternoon with Hania, Gaia, Paul and Jake at the Royal Albert Hall, seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark with a live orchestra. On the way there, I took Elaine around Imperial College, which she hadn’t been into before. Outside, the Imperial College Chamber Choir was doing a cappella pop songs, which was really quite extraordinarily good. All the while, a small girl keep popping out of the door at the top of the stairs into the Polish Club on  the other side of the road.

Then, on Sunday, across to Copenhagen with Richard and Sam for our 3-day session with the UN Global Compact, particularly Ole Lund Hansen, Ingvild Sørensen and Rosedel Davies-Adewebi. Great dinner on the Sunday evening with Ole and Ingvild, at Höst – with extraordinarily good Nordic cuisine.

On Monday evening, I took Susanne Stormer of Novo Nordisk to dinner at Uformel, which she suggested. Also great, as was the Vietnamese restaurant, LêLê, which we ate at on Tuesday evening.

The work went brilliantly well, with the team working very well together. Fascinating session with Erik Rasmussen of Monday Morning, during which I filmed an interview for our Breakthrough Innovation Program. Then I had to unhook first thing on Wednesday morning to fly to Stuttgart for Bosch.  Sadly, a trip that should have taken a few hours took over 8 when SAS cancelled my flight, with no explanation.

Great session with Bosch, where I spoke to a couple of hundred senior executives, including a couple of Board members – and then had a fascinating dinner with them afterwards.

Flew back to London the next morning, among other things for a session with Paul Bunje of the X Prize Foundation, which was immensely invigorating. Key input for our UN Global Compact work, with a scouting trip coming up to San Francisco and LA.

Great lunch, too, with Jamie Broderick, Howard Kemp and Giles Sibbald of UBS Wealth Management on Friday, which meant we were a little late back for a session with Cathy Runciman  and Lisa Goldapple of Atlas of the Future – but that went wonderfully well, too.

Then yesterday, Saturday, Elaine and I drove across to Little Rissington, to see Pat, Tim and Caroline. He is recovering from broken ribs again, after a fall. An interesting session with iPhones with Gray’s oldest son, variously known as Boo, Aston and Kipp. These phones can do so much wonderful work, with the quality of the video recording for our interviews quite extraordinary by historic standards.

Home lateish, where I watched the episode of The Night Manager I had missed when flying to Denmark last Sunday morning. Stunningly good.

Then this morning I awoke early, in the midst of a dream about interrupting a very senior person who was telling a group of us how to right the world. I banged my hand on the table and thanked him for his provocation, saying that I had cracked the problem. And then, when I woke up, it turned out that a sequence of ideas in my head were actually quite useful. I promptly hurried to capture them on my crack-faced BlackBerry.

Very sorry to hear news of the death of ‘Winkle’ Brown, but his obituary in today’s Times makes utterly fascinating reading. Some of the statistics of his career can be found here, courtesy of the BBC. Tim this morning recalled Brown as a “hoot”.

It’s taken us a while to get to see Spielberg’s extraordinary film on the Cold War, but today (hot on the heels of Star Wars yesterday) we did – and found it stunningly well made. Makes me determined to get to The End of the Cold War, by Robert Service, which is one of my stacks of impending books to read.

I have clear memories of the Wall going up, Powers’ u2 coming down, and the subsequent Powers-Abel exchange. And the scene of the young boy preparing for an atomic bomb burst brought back memories of young nightmares, too. I also recall the moment in the late 1950s when we were living in Northern Ireland and Tim went off for many months to fly fall-out monitoring missions around the British bomb-bursts on Christmas Island.

But I had never heard of the parallel-to-Powers story around Yale student Frederic Pryor, nor about the Nuremberg Trials background to the involvement of James Donovan.

A brilliant conjuring of the atmosphere during one of the world’s recurrent periods of paranoia. How long before we’re there again? If President Putin has his way – and perhaps it’s a complete accident that one of the four interogators working over Powers looked rather like an extruded Putin – we will be trading new types of asset across a new generation of Glienicke Bridges or Checkpoint Charlies?