Search Results for: Tim elkington

A day spent oscillating between San Francisco, Palo Alto and Sausalito (the subject of a separate post). The morning kicked of with a visit to Hampton Creek Foods, whose motto is “What would it look like if we started over?” Their product range started with plant-based substitutes for egg and egg-based food ingredients.

We were met by their Chief Happiness Officer, a large Golden Retriever. One interesting part of the conversation was around language – and how they avoid mentioning the fact that their products are vegan/vegetarian, even thought they are. This was a theme we encountered often during our California trip.

Then across to Palo Alto for a session with Marina Gorbis, Executive Director of Institute for the Future. Have long admired their work, back to the days of Paul Saffo’s time there, and it was great to catch up on some of the work they are now doing. Intriguing to dig a bit deeper into their 10-year forecasting cycle.

Among other things, Marina described the multiplicity of cultures in the Silicon Valley area, from the tech-obsessed through to the counter-cultural and humanistic. And what is striking is how these worlds can blur, as in people like the late Steve Jobs.

We also discussed the critical role of investigative reporting, with the Panama Papers, deservedly, getting a good deal of attention in the media at the moment.

Then into a great session with Gil Friend, who I have known and admired for many years – both at Natural Logic and now in his role as Chief Sustainability Officer at the City of Palo Alto. He has introduced us to a number of the people we are seeing on this trip. I don’t envy him the politics in his current work, but he is part of a growing movement of CSOs and similar in the world of local government. He referenced the work of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN.org).

As an example of the sort of dilemmas that people like him have to wrestle with, he noted that if Palo Alto pushes ahead with its plans to ensure the overwhelming majority of cars in the area are electrically-powered, companies like Tesla will do well – but poorer people (for example gardeners and maids) who can’t afford electric vehicles and have to commute in long distances will be disadvantaged.

We didn’t discuss it, but maybe the EV drivers will respond by buying robots to do the house and garden?

Then back to San Francisco for a session with Kavita Gupta and Chantal Buard of Amplifier Strategy. We met at The Battery, here it was interesting to hear about the evolving social innovation platform, Battery Powered. A great initiative – and one wonders how much of a following wind it may have been given by recent protests against companies like Google, as captured in Douglas Rushkoff’s book Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus.

His sub-title nicely (if uncomfortably) distils the issue: ‘How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity.’

Struck me today that if any one city could claim to be my alma mater, it’s got to be San Francisco.

After an Uber ride south to Woodside, through teeming rain and brilliant green landscape with streaks of cloud snagged in the tree tops, we had breakfast (with Carl Page of the Anthropocene Institute) in the legendary Buck’s of Woodside this morning.

Our table is the one shown in the Wikipedia image above, a table which, among other things, boasts a Braille edition of Playboy signed by Stevie Wonder.

One intriguing project at AI involves exploring the use of robots to kill the lion fish that are having such a devastating impact on key fisheries. An odd eddy of the push towards an autonomous future. But Carl’s analysis of where the world ocean is headed made grim listening.

In the afternoon, back in San Francisco, and still in heavy rain, headed across to the City Lights bookstore, which I love. There I bought seven books:

• Jeremy Caradonna’s Sustainability: A History, 2014. Slightly odd to see myself mentioned in the history books, already.
• Edward O. Wilson’s Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, Liveright Publishing 2016. Talk about bold: Wilson suggests setting side half the planet for Nature.
• Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilisation, City Lights Books, 2015. Billed as a Ginsberg-like Howl on what we’re doing to the world, it reads brilliantly well. And Scranton promptly retweeted my tweet to that effect.
• The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Verso 2016. “Anthropo-what?” they ask at the outset, before giving a pretty comprehensive answer.
• Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Scribner 1971/2008. I read this back in the 1970s, but adore her writing – and her theme here of “a future world racked by violence and environmental catastrophes” chimes with so much else that I have been absorbing as part of my background reading for our Exponential Futures mission to SF and LA.
• Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Ways of Curating, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Obrist is billed as the most influential curator of our age, having staged more than 250 art shows internationally. A useful guide, I’m hoping, to the best ways to promote generative conversations across cultures and across time.
• And then how could I go to City Lights and not come away with poetry? Stumbled across a newish book (albeit prominently displayed) by probably my favourite poet, Gary Snyder. This Present Moment is published by Counterpoint, 2015.  And, despite his warning to the reader not to read the poem, I started at the end with Go Now. Probably the grisliest and most beautiful love poem I have yet read.

A nice Newsweek piece of Snyder as the “Poet Laureate of Our Continent,” can be found here. Intrigued to see him recall his epiphany around age 7, when told his heifer couldn’t go to Heaven with him. So, he said, he didn’t want to go to Heaven. Exactly my reaction, in relation to nature more generally, and at pretty much exactly the same age, back in Northern Ireland in the 1950s.

Sad to think this could be his last book, but better to have loved Gary Snyder and lost, than …

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.