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Willie Cheng opens the conference

Various of my books on sale, including The Breakthrough Challenge

Jacqueline (Lim)

Part of the view from my bedroom window in the Marina Bay Sands hotel

Flew in day before yesterday for the annual Singapore Institute of Directors event for directors, this time on the theme of ‘Towards the New Capitalism’. I was keynoting the conference, which was huge. Great to be in the company of Jacqueline Lim, a key member of our London team.

I was invited to speak by Willie Cheng, a former Managing Partner of Accenture, who is now Chairman of SID. He is also a member of the Volans Advisory Board.

Then, after the keynote yesterday, I was part of a discussion panel, chaired by Professor Tommy Koh (Ambassador-at-Large, Ministry of Foreign Affairs), and otherwise including Euleen Goh (Chairman, Singapore International Foundation), Lim Boon Heng (Chairman, Temasek Holdings), Peter White (COO, World Business Council for Sustainable Development) and Stephen Young (Executive Director, Caux Round Table).

A striking feature of the event was the Social Enterprise Marketplace, held over the extended lunchtime. The social enterprises featured were:

Adrenalin

Beat’abox

BettrBarista

Bizlink Centre

Bliss Restaurant & Catering

Circus in Motion

Dialogue in the Dark

Dignity Kitchen

Dream+

Employment and Employability Institute (e2i)

Ecosoftt

Edible Gardens

Eighteen Chefs

Ground-Up Initiative (GUI)

iNKFusion

Milaap

Newton Circus

NTUC FairPrice Cooperative

NTUC First Campus Cooperative

NTUC Learning Hub

PlayMoolah

ProAge

SATA CommHealth

Singapore Corporation of Rehabilitative Enterprises (SCORE)

SilverSpring

TagBio

Think Your Way Out (TYWO)

T.Ware

Wonderful to talk to many of the social entrepreneurs and their team, though several are having a tough time of it. That said, the evolution of the sector since Volans first got involved here has been quite remarkable – and the fact that SID is now pulling them in is very encouraging. social entrepreneurs are truly part of the new capitalism.

Today Jacqueline and I visited SingTel, then had lunch with Willie (Cheng), then did two sessions for the Hong Leong Group, the first for senior executives, the second for a team from City Developments Ltd (CDL). Both sessions convened by Esther An, CDL’s Chief Sustainability Officer. Impressed by the quality of the discussion – and by what I learned about CDL’s sustainability-repeated activities in particular. Then out to Changi Airport, for the flight back to the UK – reading I Am Pilgrim, by Terry Hayes. Gripping.

Before the proceedings start

Members of the Dialog CSR team

Advertised

Sign at entrance to Nuga Gama

Banyan tree in the dark

Banyan at close quarters

Screened as we go in on day 2

British Council Director Keith Davies interviewed

Flew to Sri Lanka via Maldives, arriving yesterday afternoon – and was picked up at the airport by Michael de Soyza of Dialog Axiata. Finished reading Charles Cumming‘s brilliant spy novel, The Trinity Six, on the last leg.

Thence to the Cinammon Lakeside hotel to shower and brush up, before I met the company’s CEO, Hans Wijayasuriya, following which we made our way across to the conference venue for the first of two events, this one for an audience of invited CEOs.

The panel discussion that followed included Dr Hans and Dr Rohan Fernando, chairman of the Sri Lankan UN Global Compact network. Dialog have active programs around social enterprise and base of the pyramid markets.

Afterwards, some 20 us had a wonderful dinner at Nuga Gama, under a towering banyan tree, with traditional music and dancing. Amazing how much cooler it was under the banyan than it was in the wider city. At one point, a member of the restaurant team demonstrated the system of bells that runs through the tree, to disturb the bats that might otherwise rain droppings on the diners beneath.

Then back to the hotel, where I had to work late on some outstanding things for Volans.

Today there was a repeat performance for CSR and sustainability practitioners and members of the public. My warm thanks to the British Council, once again, for its support for such aspects of our international work. An even livelier discussion today than yesterday.

Then out to the airport with Michael for the flight to Singapore. Flying Emirates, I found their vegetarian meal in Economy significantly better than BA’s equivalent in Business class. BA makes you feel that you are doing penance for following a vegetarian diet, whereas the Emirates equivalent feels almost celebratory. Time for BA to pull up its vegetarian socks?

As for Sri Lanka, this was my first trip – but it already felt like home.

On the train towards Verbier

Ditto

W Hotel in Verbier

Desktop art

Wall art

Up the mountain

Chateau de Chillon at speed from train

Spent Friday and Saturday en route to, at and on way back from Verbier, Switzerland, keynoting the launch of the Verbier Institute.

Other speakers included Julia Groves of the Trillion Fund, Aleyn Smith-Gillespie of the Carbon Trust, André Schneider of the EPFL and the Danish artist Per Arnoldi.

Kudos to the Verbier Institute team: Anders Sjostedt, Robert Howe and Michael Mathres.

Some fascinating conversations along the way, during and after, especially with André. Among the things we discussed: the EPFL Blue Brain Project and the Venice Time Machine. Plus a bunch of other things.

Had read about them both before, but it’s amazing what interesting work is going on in some parts of Europe. Turned out that André is a Dr Who fan, too.

Had a quick-fire trip (with my case) up the mountains afterwards, with perhaps 10 minutes at the top before taking a cabine down to Verbier and then down into the valley, to catch the first of two trains back to Geneva. Gave a useful perspective on it all.

Fingers crossed that the Institute takes off.

One of my longstanding heroes has been Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the man who designed and built much of today’s London sewerage system. I learned more about him while writing an article, ‘Breathing Life Into the Thames,’ that appeared in New Scientist on 24 March 1977.

As our species increasingly crowds into cities, such skills will be in growing demand. So I headed back into the office today, after a day out with labyrinthitis, in large part because I wanted to honour a commitment to meet Himanshu Parikh, the Indian engineer who has been a leading figure in the field of slum networking.

He was one 50 pioneers in social innovation spotlighted in our report The Phoenix Economy. Today, he was accompanied by his wife Rashmi and their daughter, Dr. Priti Parikh, who is a lecturer in the environmental and geomatic engineering department at UCL. And Bazalgette was one recurrent theme in our conversation. I am pretty sure he would have been fascinated by the approach Himanshu has pioneered.

Slum networking involves a citywide, community-based sanitation system and environmental improvement programme. It seeks to upgrade the infrastructure of a whole city using the network of slum settlements as a starting point. The result has been a dramatic improvement in the city infrastructure, with a piped sanitation system, clean rivers and a much improved road network – at a fraction of the cost of conventional approaches. The improvements in the infrastructure rapidly lead to a significant increase in the quality of housing, as people begin to invest time and money in their homes. Dramatic improvements are also seen in the health and education standards in the slum.

Illustration via Thames Water.

As we start to crank up for the publicity drive for our new book, The Breakthrough Challenge: 10 Ways to Connect Today’s Profits With Tomorrow’s Bottom Line (John Elkington & Jochen Zeitz, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, September 2014), our antennae are increasingly sensitive to news indicating that our agenda is engaging.

Given that one of the key arguments in the book is that we need to change not only accounting but also capitalism’s master discipline of economics, it was interesting to see the front page story in today’s Financial Times, headlined ‘China puts quality of life ahead of GDP.’

The FT concludes that the move, “which follows a directive issued by top leaders last year, is among the first concrete signs of China switching its blind pursuit of economic growth at all costs towards measures that encourage better quality of life.”

The logic behind the move is interesting. As the FT reports, “Analysts say that adherence to GDP as a performance metric – thus linking it to local officials’ promotion – has contributed to environmental degradation and urban sprawl as officials encouraged heavy industry and bulldozed agricultural land to build housing developments.” Among others, the FT quotes Xie Yaxuan, head of macroeconomic analysis at China Merchants Securities in Shenzhen. His view: “Using GDP as the main assessment method has caused a lot of problems, like unequal income distribution, problems with the social welfare system and environmental costs.”

The initiatives spotlighted largely relate to smaller cities and counties, and the FT notes that larger cities and regions are still riddled with patronage and other forms of corruption (a subject the paper also covers, this time with a full-page story on page 7). But big things can grow from small seeds – and major breakthroughs often start with Aha! moments that most people would ignore.