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A home for the Conscious Business community in the UK

Category Archives: Business


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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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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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Do the right thing

I hate the idea of being forced into things. It makes me squirm. If someone tells me that I have to do something, I will immediately start scanning around for arguments I can use to take an opposite position. It’s probably something to do with having three older and, I must have thought, smarter brothers.

Sometimes climate change and resource issues (like peak oil) feel like that to me. That we have no choice and that because of things that other people have done (over many hundreds of years perhaps) I am going to have to curtail my great life style. That offends my childish sense of freedom – my sense that it’s definitely not fair.

I remember watching this fun video on risk on Youtube a little while ago. I did my own little analysis over the weekend. What it told me was that barring catastrophe the major significant risks of climate change and oil depletion are to less developed countries than ours. Climate change is real, but the UK is already a very resilient, and wealthy country. We can buy our way out of many problems. Yes, it will probably hurt, but even here mainly it will hurt the poor.

And what about catastrophe? If you read the press and watch TV that is always very likely. One after another, regular as clockwork, the disaster stories come (and often go). Bird flu, MRSA, asteroid impact, child snatchers – the list goes on and on. This is hardly a surprise. News is “meant to be” negative. If you look up “news values” on the web, you’ll find lists of criteria by which stories are selected as newsworthy. Negativity – bad news – usually appears pretty high on the list.

Of course this wouldn’t trouble a normal person. But if like me you have a tendency to catastrophic thinking then you probably need to read the great Martin Seligman‘s book “Learned Optimism“. In which he gives simple techniques to manage this kind of destructive thinking.

So if we can dismiss catastrophe, or at least put it in its proper place, then from my simple analysis, I believe that in the UK (and other developed countries) we will probably continue to thrive and prosper. By probably I mean, trying to be very specific, “with some considerable certainty”. Despite the many catastrophes the world faces.

In that case seizing the business opportunity of sustainability, climate change, poverty, disease, hunger, and resource insecurity is a moral and ethical issue. It’s about doing the right thing. It’s about how we share this planet – about our connection with others. We need, for example, to create a low-carbon economy because it’s the right thing to do.

And how do we get there? I believe the first step is simply to ask questions like “what does a low-carbon economy look like for business?” What will your business look like if travel and transportation costs rise further? How dependent is your business on the price of oil? And what are the opportunities?

Anybody want to to make a start?


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The power of leverage

Courtesy of my brother-in-law Alex, who lives in the US, I saw this interesting piece in the Atlantic magazine about Bill Clinton and what he is up to these days.

This blog is mainly about small business. Not every small business has access to Bill Clinton, and his incredible personality, address book, and no doubt relatively large personal wealth.

And not every small business wants to travel the world to solve global problems. But this is an inspiring tale anyway. Essentially it’s about how Clinton and one of his long time associates, Ira Magaziner, are taking on global challenges like climate change.

Buoyed up by their success with re-engineering the developing world market for AIDS drugs, Clinton and Magaziner, supported by a host of Harvard MBAs, are attempting to develop markets for a host of technologies and products that are very climate-change-friendly.

The idea is that through buyers clubs, for example, it’s possible to create a market pull for new products and thus stimulate a fall in price, and hence a wider and quicker spreading of these same products.

The author seems to draw a distinction between this and what is described as social entrepreneurship of the Grameen type. I am not sure I can see the distinction. Both use the profit motive and the methods of business to solve social problems. The only difference I can see is the breadth of ambition – Clinton and his colleagues aim to address one large and significant market after another. Is there another difference?

But whatever else, this tale illustrates well the power of leverage: the ability of a small number of people to make big changes, if they get the focus right. And that is one reason why small business is so interesting to me.


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So what are the opportunities?

I just finished reading Stuart Hart’s Capitalism at the Crossroads.

I took from it a few pointers about what the business opportunities might be for bigger corporations. His argument is that the 4 billion people at the “bottom of the pyramid” (“BOP”) is an amazing new market. Of the six billion on the planet, these are the poorer people mainly of the developing world.

It’s a market that can’t be addressed in the same way as the developed world markets we are used to. And the best bit of the book for me was how businesses need to change the ways they work with and understand people in order to create relevant, insipiring and above all sustainable products and services.

Another book along these lines is Natural Capitalism (by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins). Again the authors show how capitalism can be adjusted to become part of the solution.

But what about small and medium-sized businesses? It seems to me that the opportunities fall into several obvious categories.

  • SMEs can create B2B products and services for large and small companies who are both “greening” themselves and also addressing the BOP market.
  • SMEs can create products and services for government and other agencies that are influencing the market.
  • And SMEs can create B2C products and services for non-BOP consumers who are greening themselves. Most SMEs don’t have the reach to address the BOP market, without partnering with bigger corporations.

Creating B2C products can be done on a global, national or importantly on a local scale. Another important shift at the moment is relocalisation (or relocalization depending on where you live), driven by the twin needs of reducing carbon emissions and reducing our dependence on non-renewable forms of energy, such as oil.

What does this mean in terms of business ambition, I wonder? Will our definitions of growth and life-style businesses have to change in this new world? How do we match a business owner’s ambitions to grow their business to this new landscape? It’s a challenge.


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Big business or small?

I said earlier that I am primarily interested in small and medium-sized businesses and what they can do. Does that mean that I am against big business, by which I really mean trans-national and multi-national corporations?

Of course not. I think big business is far too wide a term to rail against indiscriminately. I think there are good big businesses and probably bad ones too (the film “the Corporation”, based on Joel Bakan’s book, is a great awakener). And plenty in between.

I do think big business is different from small business. It seems to me that small business often starts from a position of “giving”. Many small businesses are set up initially to give something to someone else.

Big businesses seem to me to be small businesses that have grown (!), and often, somewhere along the way, they have also forgotten this central purpose. There are exceptions of course, and indeed corporate venturing in spin-offs or small teams often seems to try to reinstil this purpose.

But in general, this idea of serving the customer, or society, does seem to get lost. I don’t whether it’s because the founders left and all that remains is an echo of the original vision. Or maybe the pressures of being big and having so many stakeholders are just too distracting.

But really that’s why I like small business and think it’s important. It doesn’t have the reach, of course. But its flexibility, energy, and creativity make it very important as we face the opportunitities of sustainability. We need to innovate not just around products or services, but also around business models, and indeed even around the very purpose of business.

This seems to me to be something that small and medium-sized businesses are very well positioned to do.