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Great few days with Sustainia in Copenhagen, including wonderful experience of co-compering the Sustainia 2014 Awards Ceremony with former Danish environment minister Ida Auken.

Stunning presentations from people like poet Sarah Kay, model-turned photographer Helena Christensen, Georg Kell of the UN Global Compact, Erik Rasmussen of Sustainia and Monday Morning, and Connie Hedegaard, on her last night as EU Commissioner for Climate Action.

Something of a whirlwind, with dazzling inputs from the likes of The Pastels, rap artist Stik Op Jakob and The Bottle Boys (you really have to see these guys!). Huge fun – and some deeply serious messages communicated at the same time.

And the 10 finalists from the #100solutions competition were outstanding. The winner, Wecyclers, hit all the buttons, economic, social and environmental. And great that the bicycle, one of our species’ greatest-ever inventions, is at the heart of all they do. The winner of the Sustainia Community Award was Fairphone, the award being picked up by Fairphone’s Chief Sustainability Oficer Sean Ansett.

The day before, I co-facilitated (with Sustainia’s Laura Storm) a high-level workshop on the business case for saving the world, out at the Carlsberg Academy. This is housed in the home that the brewery company gave Niels Bohr after he won his Nobel Prize. Intriguingly, the house had a direct (and free) beer pipeline from the nearby brewery. No wonder Bohr and Einstein had such great conversations there! But the downside would have been that there were no bottles for The Bottle Boys of the day …

The mood, though, was relentlessly upbeat, focused on opportunities and potential. So I ended up fizzing, regardless off how much beer I drank. All of which confirmed my long-standing conviction that “Ich bin ein Sustainian” (see English version here and Danish here).

And a couple of stray photos:

Once again, the last week or two have been a bit of a blur – leaving little time for blogging, though I try to keep the Twitter stream going at @volansjohn.

The week before last started with a visit from a Japanese study tour, with representatives of quite a few leading companies (including the likes of Mitsubishi, Nissan and Panasonic), organised by our longstanding partners in Tokyo, E-Square. Great fun – and apparently very well received.

Our Breakthrough agenda remains a bit of a stretch for such companies, however.

Later on in the week, I flew to Pennsylvania with Amanda (Feldman) for a session with a company where we are subject to a very tight NDA, so that story will heave to be for later. But a lot of driving (Amanda’s) through torrential rain, past at least one road-train that had apparently aquaplaned off the road and then down a slope, leaving its rear end sticking up into the air.

Didn’t stop a Duel-like truck driver from continuing to break the Sound Barrier alongside, however.

This last week, Sam, Astrid and I visited Gallup, to explore areas of shared interest, particularly in the area of well-being, which was fascinating – and on the way back (so the photos are the wrong way around) we stopped to look at part of the old Central Market Building in Covent Garden, which seemed to have taken leave (if not of its senses) of its columns.

Then, on 20 October, Elaine and I went to see Michael Palin’s penultimate show in his Travelling to Work tour. Wonderful, though the front row circle seats we were in were about as cramped as it is possible to be.

Next, on 22 October, we went across to SustainAbility for a celebration of two things: my 27 years with the company (I finally volunteered to step down as a Director earlier in the year) and my appointment as Honorary Chairman: a life sentence, I was told.

(I am beginning, on occasion, to feel a bit like an Elder in the sustainability space, and the delightful speeches celebrating my contributions to the firm, the team and the wider field strengthened the impression.)

Then they announced that, in honour of my work to date, SustainAbility was  sponsoring the release of 1,000 eels for each year that I have been involved with SustainAbility, which by most people’s calculations added up to 27,000, via the Sustainable Eel Group. This builds out from the eel release Elaine and I were involved in earlier this autumn.

Talk about a gift that will (hopefully) keep on giving …

(This blog’s title, incidentally, was accidentally suggested by Gaia’s husband, Paul Eros, when they came through yesterday to pick up the car en route to Little Rissington.)

Afterwards, with Rob Cameron, Tom Delfgaauw, Julia Harrison, Mark Lee, Geoff Lye, and John and Maureen Schaetzl, we went on to dinner at the Lutyens Restaurant – which was remarkable good, and remarkably quiet (in an acoustic sense).

Intriguingly, there was a blue plaque visible through one of the windows, looking onto a building where the first  edition of The Sunday Times was edited. And the building we were in used to be occupied, in the glory days of Fleet Street, by Reuters. The old ticker tape days are echoed in the marble floor.

And now I’m preparing for the Sustainia business case session and 2014 awards ceremony in Copenhagen in the coming week – and then for the trip to Chile that follows hot on their heels.

Flew from Berlin Tegel to Bern in a small plane – and was then picked up by car for the ride to Lausanne. Arrived slightly late for the reception at the Museum of the Olympics, but in good time for the subsequent dinner. some great people and conversations. And a lovely Moon as we walked out towards the lake afterwards to catch our bus back to the hotel.

The next day saw the 2014 Creating Shared Value Forum, where I was on a panel on sustainable supply chains.

And the overall message of the event? Business must reject short-term thinking and focus instead on long-term value creation for shareholders and society, was the way Nestlé CEO Paul Bulcke put it. “The global debt crisis was, in many ways, a values crisis,” he argued.

The President of the Swiss Confederation, Didier Burkhalter, gave an interesting speech – focusing on what he called “blue diplomacy,” which involves improving access to good quality water worldwide. For some background, see here.

Nestlé’s Chairman Peter Brabeck, told the Forum that, “We believe that there should be universal access to truly safe, not only improved, drinking water by 2025,” adding that the goal should be to accelerate the provision of access to improved sanitation to at least 120 million additional people per year.

Sadly, 2014 is to be Peter’s last CSV Council session. When he announced that in the Council meeting today, I made a short, unscheduled interjection to celebrate the role he has played, in both the Shared Value and water spaces.

The Council meetings are confidential, but it was great to hear an update on the evolution of the Shared Value Initiative from Mark Kramer. Am feeling much more positive about all of that now the Shared Value/Sustainability tensions have subsided.

For me, one key development this year at the Forum was the fact that Honey Care Africa won the Nestlé CSV Prize. I have long loved what they do, since meeting them through the Skoll World Forum, I think. I remember co-founder Farouk Jiwa telling me that the enterprise was developed along what we might dub triple bottom lines.

Another highlight was a great catch-up with SustainAbility co-Executive Director Rob Cameron and Peter Zollinger, a former SustainAbility CEO and now a founder of Globalance Bank in Zurich.

Then rode out to Geneva airport with Kraisid Tontisirin, Director of the Institute of Nutrition at Mahidol University in Thailand and FAO’s former Director of the Nutrition and Consumer Protection Division.

Another great conversation, alongside so many others this week. Thank you all.

Flew back from Turkey on Saturday, then off to Berlin on Sunday, 5 October. Across to Antica Lasagneria to speak at a dinner hosted by our friends at BSD Consulting.

Walls of the restaurant sport a glorious collections of black and white photographs of major politicians, including one of Joschka Fischer – who I debated with at a conference way back in 1989, in Wiesbaden.

Then back to Soho House, where I am staying. The place has an extraordinary history. As their website sums it up: Originally opened in 1928 as a department store, the property was seized by the wartime government before being occupied by the post-war, Communist regime until 1956. It was then used to house the Communist Party archives and the Central Committee’s Historical Institution. After German reunification the building was legally returned to the descendants of its original owners.

Up early to keynote the BSD Reporting 3.0 conference in the Microsoft Atrium. Photos of the session show me squinting a little as I try to get used to life (pro ten) without the glasses I managed to destroy in Turkey.

Had a range of useful sidebar meetings with  people in the field, including Michael Meehan, the new CEO of the Global Reporting Initiative. Then back to Soho House with Sam for a Skype call with Astrid Hvam Høgsted, who is part of our Breakthrough project team. We make great progress in the process.

In the evening, we co-hosted – and I spoke at – the Berlin launch of The Breakthrough Challenge, held in the library of Soho House.

Tuesday started with a meeting with Peter (Teuscher) and Sebastian (Straub) of BSD, after which we headed across to Impact Solutions – for a lunch with our friends Tell (Münzing) and Shamin (Rafat), and colleagues. This was followed by a working session with them and Johnson & Johnson.

Then a session with Shamim and Tell on joint strategy, after which we all had dinner with senior executives of DeutscheBahn (DB), on the top floor of their tower. Our host was Dr Karl-Friedrich Rausch, a member of the DN Management Board, who I had met at a previous Berlin dinner for business leaders hosted by Impact solutions at, yes, Soho House. Fascinating, off-the-record conversations.

Then, earlier today, I keynoted the sixth Humboldt University conference on Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility. Congratulations to (dR) Joachim (Schwalbach) for making this all happen.

Some fascinating speakers, including Tima Bansal. Then did a panel discussion with Tima, Joep Browers, Timothy Devinney and Toby Webb. Pleased to have a chance to catch up with Bob Eccles, who – among many other things – is a member of our Advisory Board.

Sadly, I then had to scoot off to Tegel airport to catch my flight to Bern. But that’s another story – or blog.

Odd to search back through this website and find (in Elaine’s blog at the time) that I had been injured in a cycling accident shortly before we came last time, in 2011.

That time, a cycle courier hit me at the drouth end of Bloomsbury Square, whereas a couple of months before we travelled this time I had to throw myself to one side on my bike in Oxford Street to avoid two young Russian girls who dived out into the road ahead of me. I haven’t cycled since and the bruises are still coming out of my elbow and wrist, though I think the salt water must have helped.

Third time lucky?

When you begin such a holiday, it seems that it will go on forever, and some part of me wishes it could. But as I watched the sun rise over the castle this morning, I knew I was deeply rested and restored and, because I had to, was ready to head home.

We sailed into Bodrum harbour yesterday morning with the castle projecting long-gone power. It proved to be a gentle day, strolling around the town, and including a trek up to the restored Greek theatre, with its glorious views of the town and harbour.

As Andrew’s notes reminded us, this was the ancient Halicarnassus, capital of the Hecatomnid king Mausolus. His wife (also she was also his sister) built the famous Mausoleum, one of the Seven Wonders, with many of the remains now to be found in the British Museum.

My much-loved, much-abused (in terms of being left behind here, there and more or less everywhere) Leica D-Lux 6 finally ran out of power just as we began the walk along to the castle, so I took it back to the boat – and we proceeded without.

The display of the Bronze Age wreck from Uluburun in the castle museum is breathtaking. First found by a sponge-diver in 1982, it yielded a veritable treasure trove of finds, as listed here.

Although the castle was originally designed as a killing machine, these days it has a wonderfully peaceful feeling to it, especially with all the trees and the peacocks inside its walls.

Later, after dinner, we hunkered down for a noisy night, but it wasn’t too bad. (Incidentally, it strikes me I haven’t yet mentioned the her, who achieved major culinary miracles below deck – and had us all wondering which film star he most reminded us of.) Overall, we have been pretty fortunate sonically this time.

We have also been very lucky with our ship-mates. Indeed, Elaine hugged the crew goodbye.

Over the two weeks I have managed to get through a fair few books, two of which I passed on to Andrew: Alan Furst’s Midnight in Europe and Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest. This was the first Amis book I had read, and while I came with low expectations I found its treatment of the Holocaust stunning.

When proposing a thank-you toast to Andrew the other night, I joked that we were already making plans for our third Lycian adventure. As I reflected on the two weeks on the flights back to London (TK2509 to Istanbul, TK1991 to LHR), I wondered whether this might prove to be less of a joke and more of a pledge to self?