In Search of Glue

What the Frack?

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 14:08:00 +0000

What the frack

Is this lack
Of science I find?
(says Planet Earth)
Peering into the mind
Of your best and brightest - elected, no less,
On the promise to green and clean up your mess.

Is shale
Your grail
To get out of this fix?
(says Planet Earth)
When your energy mix
Spews out CO2 at ridiculous rates?
You should slam on the brake before it’s too late!

Shouting “gas!”
Is just crass -
I’ve had enough,
(says Planet Earth)
Of your ill-thought-out guff;
You dismiss renewable sources with scorn
Do you really prefer to dig up your lawn?

See the sun?
It’s just one
Solution I propose,
(says Planet Earth)
To your energy woes.
The technology’s here to turn things around
Invest - your economy’s sure to rebound!

I’ll be fine
I won’t whine
Don’t worry about me;
(says Planet Earth)
I don’t mind if the sea
Starts lapping at New York or London or Rome
But I can’t guarantee I’ll be a good home

For a race
Who won’t face
Up to the cold hard fact
(says Planet Earth)
That my climate reacts
To the burning you do - yes even from shale
You shout that it’s clean even over the gale

That I blow
Which could go
A long way to slowing
(screams Planet Earth)
The warming that’s going
To frack you, your children and all those you love
So stop digging - look up - the answer’s above.

Transformational change doesn't have to come from new ideas

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 13:49:00 +0000

This article first appeared on The Guardian website on June 6, 2012.

The World Health Organisation estimates that 30% of prescriptive drugs in circulation in emerging economies are counterfeit. Imagine you live in the developing world, and you depend upon regular medicine to keep you healthy enough to feed your family. There is roughly a one in three chance that each pill you take is at best ineffective, and at worst dangerous. Other than swallow and hope for the best, what can you do? Nothing; or at least that was the case until social enterprise Sproxil came along. Sproxil’s solution is as ingenious as it is simple: every medicine blister pack bears a small silver rectangle which can be scratched off to reveal a unique code. Text that code using a mobile phone to a special number, and within seconds you’re told whether the drug inside is genuine. Brilliant.

It has been said that there are no new ideas; there are only new ways of making them felt. Scratchcards have been used for years by mobile phone carriers as a secure means to sell “pay as you go” top-ups – and long before that for lottery tickets. Sproxil has simply applied a technology tried and tested by one industry to solve a seemingly insurmountable problem in another.

There’s a name for this: technological convergence.

As a society we have become remarkably good at specialisation: innovating within established industries, to raise the efficiency of the systems upon which we depend. A laser-like focus has enabled our best and brightest to increase crop yields, miles per gallon, processor speeds, and countless other measures beyond anything that seemed possible as little as a generation ago. But incremental improvements within current systems – however impressive they may be – are only going to take us so far if the systems themselves are not fit for purpose.

There is growing consensus that to address our biggest challenges – from resource depletion to poverty – our global food, transport, energy, and financial systems (to name but a few) need to be rethought. That means transformational rather than incremental change, which demands that we put specialisation to one side, look beyond our own areas of expertise, and examine what else is we can adapt and apply to do things differently. In short, we need to put our laser-like focus on hold in favour of something more akin to radar.

Thankfully, the signs are that sustainable convergence’ is starting to gain traction. Last week’s video for The Regeneration Project sees sustainable development pioneers such as John Elkington talk about the power of convergence and collaboration, and the recent VERGE London event brought leaders from business, academia and government together from across the energy, IT, building and transport sectors with a view to accelerating sustainable innovation.

I’ve seen a few business leaders roll their eyes recently in response to calls from sustainability practitioners to pursue “transformational change”. Yes, it’s a great idea, and we’re all for it in principle, but business realities mean incremental improvement is the only viable option. I’d challenge such leaders to ponder this: breakthrough solutions can arise from nothing more than looking at how a proven technology – or service, or business model, for that matter – might be applied in a completely different way. And this needn’t necessarily require huge investment, either in time or R&D.

The counterfeit drug market is estimated to be worth $200bn a year, and Sproxil could conceivably put a serious dent in that figure. What opportunities exist for your business to solve societal challenges, simply by looking at how to refocus something that has worked well elsewhere? Start thinking about “transformational change” like this, and maybe it’s not such a bitter pill to swallow after all.

The best placard ever…

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 09:40:00 +0100

The best placard ever…

Putting the Steve in Sustainability

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 09:00:00 +0100

“We’re here to put a dent in the universe.” Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs has passed away at the age of 56, having transformed the way we use and think about technology. Those of us working toward a more sustainable world would be wise to pay attention to how he did it.

I was working in the mobile phone industry in January 2007, when Jobs stood up on stage and revealed the iPhone to the world. Many of my colleagues looked on unimpressed – sure it looked good, but it was too expensive, too big, too slow for internet browsing, too hard to type on… in fact too just-about-everything. The consensus seemed to be that Jobs, as an ‘outsider,’ just couldn’t understand the complexities of the mobile landscape we all inhabited. What my colleagues missed was that Jobs wasn’t looking to find his own place in that landscape; he was planning to terraform it. And terraform it he did. Five short years ago very few people outside the industry had ever heard the term “smartphone,” but now it seems that every other handset you see is either an iPhone or an imitation of it.

What does all this mean for the business of sustainability? Well, Apple may not be known as a leader on environmental or social issues, but its winning formula serves as a great model for those who aspire to be. Jobs built an organisation that actively sought to shatter the status quo in every market it entered. The iPhone is just one of a number of successess – Macintosh, iTunes, iPad, and so on – that prove how a single company can really change the game if it thinks differently.

At Apple, Jobs created a culture hungry to understand its markets and compelled to disrupt them, a culture focused on simplicity and willing to say no to a thousand ideas in pursuit of one, a culture uncompromising in its pursuit of execution excellence.

Imagine if we could bottle this way of thinking, and prescribe a dose to every CEO working in the energy, food and finance industries. The growing effects of climate change, resource depletion and population growth are opening up tremendous business opportunities in these sectors – for those with the appetite, vision and courage to embrace them.

In the 1990s Jobs famously asked just one question to persuade John Sculley, then PepsiCo president, to join Apple: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Let’s put the Steve in Sustainability and pose similar questions to CEOs everywhere, starting now.

Today I have Steve Jobs to thank for the computer I’m typing on, for the phone which informed me this morning of his passing, and (lest we forget his pivotal role in creating Pixar too) for the fantastic movie that my daughter is currently being transfixed by. In twenty years’ time, I hope I’ll have something more profound to thank him for: showing a generation of CEOs that it really is possible for a single company to change the world.

This article first appeared on sustainability.com.

Great reflections on 9/11

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:48:03 +0100

Chris Hedges’ article A Decade After 9/11: We Are What We Loathe is well worth a look:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/nationalism_in_the_aftermath_of_9_11_20110910/

Bill Maher's superb rant about climate change deniers

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 19:37:00 +0100

If only scientists would speak as forcefully as Bill Maher does on their behalf:

Here are a couple of quotes, but I could have picked twenty others from the video that are equally as good, so go and watch it now!

There is no debate here: It’s just scientists versus non-scientists, and since the topic is science, the non-scientists don’t get a vote…

We shouldn’t decide everything by polling the masses, this is the fallacy called argumentum ad numerum: The idea that something is true because great numbers believe it. As in “eat shit; twenty trillion flies can’t be wrong.”

You’re wrong Mitt Romney, corporations are NOT people This...

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 10:21:00 +0100

You’re wrong Mitt Romney, corporations are NOT people

This morning’s New York Times quote of the day makes me want to throw furniture:

“Corporations are people, my friend.” said Mitt Romney, responding to a heckler in Iowa who wants higher corporate taxes.

If corporations are indeed people then let’s subject them to the same laws that we apply to individuals, and let’s restrict their freedom to do what they want when they’re in clear violation of those laws.

If a company is found guilty of something - anticompetitive practices, incorrect use of pension funds, falsifying accounts, damaging the environment - do we treat these actions as the corporate equivalents of antisocial behaviour, theft and assault? No. We rarely if ever do anything to prevent a company going about its business, no matter how badly it behaves. The most that usually happens is a token fine, and maybe the CEO gets fired.

Imagine someone shoots and kills another person in broad daylight with a hundred witnesses. If the accused were to say “it wasn’t me, it was my trigger finger”, would we consider that a reasonable defence? And would we in response remove the offending finger, replace it with another, and send the now-reformed murderer on his way? Of course not.

You can’t have it both ways Romney: either treat companies as people in every respect, or treat them as manmade constructs subject to a completely different set of rules. Arguing that taxes levied on companies should in any way reflect those levied on people is just stupid.

British government finally gets things under control Posted...

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:13:00 +0100

British government finally gets things under control

Posted from: SE24, UK

Google offers a window into our collective psyche reaching back hundreds of years

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:21:00 +0100

Here’s an excellent use of technology: Google has analysed the frequency of word use across all of the millions of books it has digitised over the past few years, and provided the means to query the results. The “Ngram Viewer” is a great way to see how our use of language is changing and how words have drifted in and out of our collective psyche. You can do something similar to assess the number of mentions of a word on the web of course, but that only goes back a decade or so.

What makes this so special is this: firstly, you can look back over many decades because Google has scanned a lot of classic texts; and secondly, you can click through on a time period to look at the exact references in the books Google has analysed. Suffice to say this is now my new home page. :-)

The URL to go and play is: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

If you’re interested in stuff around energy you might also want to try these queries:

Peak Oil mentions in the past 100 years:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=peak+oil&year_start=1908&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=0

Sustainability mentions in the past 100 years:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=sustainability&year_start=1908&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=0

Coal mentions in the past 300 years:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=coal&year_start=1708&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=0

Energy Security mentions in the past 50 years (note spike in early 80s):

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=energy+security&year_start=1958&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=0

Whale Oil mentions in the past 400 years:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=whale+oil&year_start=1608&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=0

And my personal favourite of the day - Electric Car mentions in the past 150 years:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=electric+car&year_start=1858&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=0

In 500 Words… Peak Oil I found the concept of “Peak Oil”...

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:51:00 +0100

In 500 Words… Peak Oil

I found the concept of “Peak Oil” confusing until the Oil Bear explained it to me, and since its implications are so profound I thought others might benefit from a quick overview.

What is Peak Oil?

Peak oil has nothing to do with the amount of oil left in the ground, and everything to do with how quickly we can pump it out.

Imagine that the world gets all its oil from one giant tap. As global demand grows, we simply turn the tap a bit more and the flow increases. Problem solved; we need more, we turn more. But now imagine that one day we try to turn the tap and it won’t go any further. No matter what we do, the flow won’t increase. What happens now?

Have we run out of oil? Of course not, the stuff is positively gushing out! But we need it to gush faster, and it won’t. That’s peak oil: when the tap won’t turn any more, we are suddenly unable to meet any new growth in demand.

What are the implications?

We have to get used to the fact that our daily consumption of oil cannot continue to grow indefinitely. That doesn’t sound too bad, until we realise that our global economy is completely dependent on moving people and things around, and our global transport system only works by burning oil. To grow the economy we need to move more stuff around more quickly, but when the tap will no longer turn that’s not an option.

So are we saying that peak oil means an end to economic growth? In a word, yes. Some might argue that in an ideal world that’s a good thing. But we don’t live in an ideal world; we live in one where people lose jobs and default on their mortgages and go hungry when economic growth stops even temporarily. The implications of a complete halt are almost impossible to imagine.

Which is why we need to get our act together and wean ourselves off oil as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter whether you ‘believe’ in climate change, or whether oil companies tell us there is still enough black stuff in the ground to meet current demand for a thousand years. Current demand is irrelevant because our society depends upon economic growth which in turn depends upon oil demand increasing. The only thing that matters is that there are physical limits to how quickly we can pump oil out of the ground. When the tap will no longer turn we are in for a shock which will make the 2009 recession seem like a party.

Many experts say that we have hit peak oil already, that the tap stopped turning a few years ago, and that the recent global economic slowdown is anything but temporary. Some say we’ve still got a few years. I won’t attempt to argue the case either way, because it seems to me that doing so would be like standing on the deck of the Titanic and debating whether the ice berg is one hundred feet away or two hundred.

My kind of map! An excellent interpretation of the Lake District...

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:56:00 +0100

My kind of map!

An excellent interpretation of the Lake District in the style of the iconic London Underground map :

See here for the full story.

The Value of the British Press

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:52:00 +0100

Worth three minutes of anybody’s time…

All school assemblies should be like this

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 13:04:00 +0100

A Cautionary Tale for Sustainability-Seeking CEOs

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 14:45:00 +0000

This article first appeared on The Guardian website on March 15, 2011.

At SustainAbility we are in the business of transforming business: helping companies to move to truly sustainable business models and supply chains.

But for the leaders of the global corporations with whom we work, real transformation – as opposed to low-risk, step-by-step change – can seem daunting. And, sure enough, it is. But whether they admit it publicly or not, most CEOs are equally daunted by the prospect of what awaits if they fail to prepare in the face of diminishing natural resources, population growth, and climate change.

So what does today’s daunted CEO need? Inspiration, of course – and what better than a textbook example of a global company which transformed itself virtually overnight.

For 25 years from 1967, Nokia was an industrial conglomerate with interests in everything from paper products and tires to military equipment and chemicals. But when Jorma Ollila became President and CEO in 1992, he made a bold strategic decision: to focus on telecommunications and move out of all other businesses. This move showed terrific foresight and led to the reinvention of the company.

Nokia quickly rose to become the world’s leading manufacturer of mobile phones, a position it has enjoyed for nearly two decades. Could this example of corporate transformation in the face of rapidly evolving global markets not serve as a model for sustainability-conscious business leaders today?

Well possibly, but 1992 feels like a very long time ago, and how are the mighty fallen. Last month Nokia’s current CEO sent a company-wide memo telling employees that the business stood on a “burning platform.” Before the shock had sunk in he followed up with a public announcement that would have been unthinkable just two or three years ago: a new strategic alliance with one time nemesis Microsoft to use Windows 7 for all future high-end phones. Many of Nokia’s employees downed tools and walked out hearing the news, and one highly-respected industry analyst has stated that the only logical end game might be for Microsoft to buy Nokia.

To those outside the mobile industry, this might all seem a bit dramatic. After all, in terms of unit shipments Nokia is still the biggest mobile phone vendor in the world. But most of those units are at the low end – basic handsets that do little more than make calls and send texts – where margins are razor thin. In the far more lucrative “smartphone” space, Nokia has failed to respond to the rise of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android (a software suite upon which any half-decent device manufacturer can build a handset with iPhone-like abilities in a few short months).

To understand just how important the smartphone battleground is, consider this: last quarter a meagre 4% of phones sold globally bore an Apple logo, but they equated to 20% of the industry’s total revenue and a staggering 50% oftotal profit.

To many in the mobile industry, the flames licking at Nokia’s heels have been evident for a long time. So how did the company which seemingly wrote the book on transformation let itself get to the point where the only strategy left is to ‘jump’?

Maybe this reaction to the recent events, from an ex-Nokia executive, holds the key:

Nokia’s problem is not, and has never been, that it lacks for creative, thoughtful, talented people, or the resources to turn their ideas into shipping product. It’s that the company is fundamentally, and has always been, organized to trade in commodities. Whether those commodities were stands of timber, reams of paper, reels of cable, pairs of boots, or cheap televisions for deployment in hotel chains, much the same basic logic applied: acquire, or manufacture, great quantities of a physical product for the lowest achievable cost, and sell for whatever the market will bear.

Perhaps Nokia’s 90s makeover was not quite as profound as it appears. Granted, the company rapidly transformed its core business, profitability, and product portfolio – pretty much everything that’s visible to an outside observer – but what about what’s not visible?

Could it be that the one thing Jorma Ollila failed to change was the company culture? This would certainly make sense: there must have been plenty of individuals at Nokia who saw the looming threat of Apple and Google, and they must have been buzzing with ideas about how to fight back. Why then is the platform still burning? Were these individuals unable to overcome the same pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap mentality that continued to pervade the organisation two decades after it had catapulted Nokia to the number one spot in the first place?

If this is true, what can the Nokia story teach today’s business leaders about transformation? I would argue that there is a valuable lesson here for the sustainability-seeking CEO: your own foresight and a willingness to act, however great, will only get you so far. The real challenge is to overcome your organisation’s cultural inertia. You may be able to manage near-term crises, and even turn them to your advantage, but the challenges facing humanity today – and thus your business – are extremely complex, only partially understood and rapidly evolving.

To prosper with any certainty in the long term, businesses must attain a level of organisational resilience and adaptability that can only come from embedding sustainability into their very DNA: every process, every product, every person. Get this right, and by the time your platform starts burning, you’ll be so far away you won’t even see the smoke.