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Author Archives: Pete Burden


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Close the loop

On Saturday I saw again the great little animated film The Story of Stuff – “a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns” according to the blurb.

One of the solutions proposed in the film is closed-loop manufacturing, an idea pioneered by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in the early 1990s. Essentially closed-loop manufacturing does what it says on the tin, and you can find out more about their version of it, “cradle-to-cradle” or C2C Design on their website.

Well worth a look.


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Realising opportunities

Let’s get practical. If you’re convinced there’s a opportunity around sustainability, what do you do? One way forward is to come up with ideas. Here’s a great little book by James Young – A Technique for Producing Ideas. In brief, it suggests there are five important stages to developing ideas:

  • gather raw material;
  • digest that material;
  • let your subconscious go to work;
  • let ideas appear;
  • refine and filter.

Then what? Personally I believe in collaboration as the key to making anything worthwhile happen. Another great book is Organising Genius by Warren Bennis (the leadership guru). The book tells the story of some amazing collaborative projects, including those at Disney, PARC and the Manhattan Project, and draws out lessons on what made them successful (its subtitle is “the secrets of creative collaboration”).

I won’t list them all – but these are some I really agree with, partly based on my own experience in “great groups”. Great groups:

  • Know that talent is key – great groups quite simply contain great people.
  • Value and nurture leadership – great leaders grow great groups, but great groups grow great leaders too.
  • Have passion, and mission. They believe they are “on a mission from God”.
  • Are isolated, yet connected too. This is why, for me, the “skunk works” idea works so well.
  • Believe they are underdogs, and usually have an “enemy”. When I worked with BBC News Online the group demonised and respected CNN.
  • Are optimistic. I prefer to say realistic – along the lines of the Stockdale Paradox. But basically I agree with the great man Bennis.
  • Put people in the right role.
  • Enable people – people are given what they need and freed from what they don’t.
  • Are focussed on concrete results – practical outputs.
  • Value work as its own reward.

Easy really.


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Oldest companies in the world

I found this piece on the oldest companies in the world at the Long Now site. And according to Business Week even well established companies can be vulnerable. Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, founded in 578 (yes, five hundred and seventy eight), succumbed to “excess debt and an unfavorable business climate” in 2006. The writer, James Hutcheson, draws some interesting conclusions:

“To sum up the lessons of Kongo Gumi’s long tenure and ultimate failure: Pick a stable industry and create flexible succession policies. To avoid a similar demise, evolve as business conditions require, but don’t get carried away with temporary enthusiasms and sacrifice financial stability for what looks like an opportunity. ”

The oldest in the UK is a relative youngster – only 467 years old. Surprisingly it isn’t in the City of London – it’s near Huddersfield and is called Brookes Mill. Textile manufacturing ended only in 1987, and the same family have transformed the business into a “heritage office park”. Sounds like a sensible evolution.

The youngest I recognised was Cordoniu who make rather good cava. Founded 1551. Our own local brew here in Lewes, Harveys, has a venerable 200 year history.

I wonder if there’s something especially sustainable about the drinks business?


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Sitting in the long grass

It’s that long grass time of year. That is, when the grass isn’t cut to 3 inches it can grow up to 3 feet or more. Great for sitting in and contemplating.

Somebody once said to me “enjoy nature”. And I think I know what he meant – relish it, absorb it, study it, let it overcome you. Nature has great lessons to teach. One is that anything important works on a long cycle.

Sitting in the long grass just now I was also reminded that business is a long game. I went to a course at the Sloan School of Management at MIT once and remember hearing someone say they surveyed a vast number of business startups and were surprised to discover that the average time from startup to being what they called a “mature business” was something like 18 years. Ok it might have been 16. But a very long time.

Much longer than I think many people appreciate when they start something up. Or when they try to change a business. I also heard today that while 2007 was the year of people learning about climate change, 2008 seems to be a year of people forgetting it again. Maybe this sustainability thing is just a passing fad?

But, as the people behind the Clock of the Long Now, and other interesting projects (I particularly like the Long Bets idea), are trying to point out, sustainability is a long game. The planet and nature work on long cycles.

It also takes time to develop a business strategy that will take you where you want to go. It takes time to implement it successfully. Sometimes a very long time.

So why not start now?


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Keeping going

What do you do to keep going when the going gets tough?

I guess we all have times when we feel like giving up. Maybe it’s the heat of the summer. Or the cold of the winter. Maybe it’s because things seem to be going badly. Or maybe they are going so well that all impetus is lost.

When I get like that, inspirational talks don’t help. In a different mood listening to an inspirational speaker might lift me up. For me, at that time, the obvious refrain “it’s different for them” becomes very attractive.

One thing I know helps is the support of friends. A talk with like-minded people can, at least for the duration of the session, get me fired up again. Of course, the last thing I want to do in this mood is get out there and meet friends.

At times like this having made a commitment to myself is probably the best source of forward motion. If I have previously promised myself that despite hitting the doldrums I will continue to move forward, then when I hit this state, that’s what I’ll do.

It works for me. What do you do?


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Social capitalists of the world unite

Looking around the web the other day I came across the FastCompany 2008 Social Capitalist Awards.

Along with a bunch of 45 not-for-profits, there is also an interesting list of 10 “companies not only striving to make a profit, but to also make a difference.” This seems to me to be the most interesting subset of social venturing firms – companies that somehow work with both aims in mind.

FastCompany’s list includes, purely for your inspiration:

These may be small companies, but many are having a big impact. DWM, for example, has $250 million under management.
SustainAbility seems to be the only UK entrant. Does anyone know of an equivalent list for the UK?


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Solar power – no thanks

I’ve asked the question before. Just what are these business opportunities? And do we need an innovation strategy to define them?

Not always – sometimes you can just look. And sometimes a little idle speculation helps. I like the idle bit especially.

It’s been raining a lot in the last few days. I have been looking out of my office window at the rain. I looked and looked. And looked again. The view from my office Window

Where does all that rain go I wondered?

The answer is a whole slew of new rainwater harvesting businesses – such as www.clearwell-rainpiper.co.uk. Offering rainwater collection services for businesses and consumers alike. As their blurb says, not only does collecting rainwater save a lot of money for a bigger business that is greening itself. But it also saves energy and can prevent flooding.

What could be more appropriate. In a rainy country like ours.


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The drivers of innovation

I have been struggling today to write something on innovation. I know it is a hugely important topic for this blog – and I was stimulated by reading Charles Leadbeater’s rather good pamphlet – The Ten Habits Of Mass Innovation.

I like his idea of every citizen becoming an innovator. And I agree there are many improvements to our society that would support this. Not least more tolerance, better dialogue, and a re-thought educational system.

But at heart I fear that, as my friend Duncan says, solutions will still be created “according to power, greed, selfishness, and perceptions of worth”.

This is what troubles me. Can we overcome these very human frailities and truly learn to collaborate, to innovate together? Will I, personally, stick my neck out, and create and innovate in some way that is beyond power, greed, selfishness and perceptions of worth?

I don’t have the answer – perhaps you do?


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Smug

I am feeling just a tiny, tiny bit smug today. As I watch oil and energy prices soar. And I revel in my new lawnmower.

The old flymo blew up a few weeks ago. We have a small lawn. I thought “Who needs electricity?”. “Who needs petrol?”. So I sought out a push mower.

Brill, I discovered, is the Rolls Royce of push lawn mowers.

Mine is simple and elegant. It’s well engineered and very well made. It packs up small. Cuts like a dream. Will last for ever (or so they say).

It uses no fuel. And it’s good exercise. Lord knows I need it.

I sincerely hope Brill practices low energy manufacturing. I wonder where they get the steel?

It’s made in Germany. So I guess it cost something in fuel and carbon terms to get it here. That troubles me.

Now there’s an opportunity. 25 million UK households. I wonder how many have a lawn?


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Is it just about winning?

For a little distraction today, I went to a NESTA funded conference in London on innovation. Bob Geldof was there and was really cogent and inspiring. I suspect he always is but I hadn’t seen him speak before.

Gordon Brown seemed a little less in touch with the mood of the conference, I felt. He suggested (rightly) that innovation is about people; but I think he missed the point when he suggested that innovation was all about success for Britain in a very competitive global market place.

I suppose as Prime Minister, you’d expect him to frame the problem that way. But if his advisors had been listening a bit more deeply they’d have heard several people in the audience, and on stage, say that this was a global problem, shared by all of us living on the planet. Not simply a national issue. Tim Berners-Lee (by video-link from CERN or somewhere), for example, was passionate about global cooperation and collaboration. So was just about everyone else I heard.

Competition clearly plays a role in business. But most of the time I think collaboration is just as important – if not more so. Creativity in business requires collaboration. So does implementation of anything more complex than making a cup of tea.

In the afternoon I went to a break-out group about climate change, etc, hosted by the very, very reasonable David King (ex Government Chief Scientifc Advisor). On the panel were David Puttnam (a bit less reasonable, and therefore to me, more fun), Fiona Harvey (Environment Correspondent at the FT), Jeremy Leggett (CEO, Solar Century) and Juliet Davenport (CEO, Good Energy).

All good stuff. Including the now standard question about “shall we just get started now and turn off the air-con?” (I have a lot of sympathy with this question). Lots of talk about World War II and how we had better gird our loins.

Perhaps it was watching the PM doing his very polished turn. Watching him tell his highly practised jokes. Being the entertainer. But I was left wondering something about all the speakers (including Sir Bob), and hence probably really about myself. Am I really more co-operative or really more competitive? Is my personal view of this different from what I say it is (when facilitating, coaching etc). Don’t I really just want to be the best?

And if I am not alone, how do we square this? The desperate need to collaborate when we are also desperately competitive creatures.