Conscious-Business.org.uk

A home for the Conscious Business community in the UK


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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.


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Resistance is useless

I am struggling today with getting started.

I see the opportunity. But will I do anything about it? Before it’s too late? And “if you see a bandwagon it’s too late to jump on it …” as my old friend Damien reminded me just the other day.

Artists and writers of all kinds know about “resistance”. So do psychologists and therapists. Everything gets in the way of change – whether it be the higher desire to create (write, paint, draw, make music). Or the need to improve our lives. To stop being depressed. To achieve things we would like to achieve.

Experts in ‘change’ know about these things too. But I can’t really get to grips with many of these theories. Personally, I favour approaches where change emerges bottom-up rather than being “managed-in” from the top down. I could easily spend a few days thinking about this, working it out, burning some brain-energy.

If I did, of course, it would probably be just more resistance. If you’re truly interested in that topic I’ll recommend Steven Pressfield’s the War of Art. Three sections spell it out: what resistance is, combating it, and what happens when you get beyond it.

But the real answer for me, the way to get beyond resistance in a single step, to stop procrastinating, to suddenly find yourself doing what you know in your heart of hearts is the right thing, to suddenly find yourself in the middle of the process of addressing the opportunity of sustainability (as opposed to thinking about it, talking about it, and getting ready to start) is to Do Something Different.

Do Something Different is a phrase coined by some psychologist friends of mine, Ben Fletcher and Karen Pine. Of course there’s a convincing theory behind it. You can read about it in one of their books – which happens to be about changing eating habits.

But the truth is – the phrase itself says it all. Do something different from what you normally do. Strangely, it doesn’t even have to be anything to do with your objective. Just do anything at all, as long as it’s different. Do one thing different, then another the next day, and so on.

You’ll be different. And things will be different. They’ll be different from the very first action you take that is different, and your world will change.

And that’s the easy the way to get started. No motivation required. Resistance is useless.


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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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Stop working, stop spending and start living

I read a chapter by Tom Hodgkinson in “Do good lives have to cost the earth” last night. He wrote one of my favourite books of the last few years – “How to be idle.” His article is a variation on that theme – ending with the suggestion that in order to save the planet we should “stop working, stop spending and start living.”

I have huge sympathy with this idea and in our own small way I think this is what my wife and I have been trying to do for some years. I try to work as little as possible (although I fail lots of the time), and we have also down-shifted quite a bit.

Making this step is about attitude as much as anything else. And often my attitude is less than the best. I am still plagued by the same socially driven desires as most other people (Hodgkinson is clearly a saint). Security drives me, sometimes status drives me, and the desire for the easy, perfect, TV-like-life drives me.

But I agree with Hodgkinson, it’s worth the effort. Maybe I am getting better at it too. There really is more life with less spending and less work.

But what does that mean for businesses? Hodgkinson rails at business because he believes the whole system depends on greed. That 0 percent growth means death to business. And that “business” therefore drives us to work and spend.

I think he is talking about big business. I don’t see why small business (and he is the owner and operator of a couple of small businesses: publishing a magazine, writing books) has to be just about growth in terms of scale. It’s also about growing in strength. Perhaps it is easier to grow your small business if the economy is booming. But I don’t see why it has to be that way.

For example, a small business can get stronger by changing from a dependence on one large account to a larger number of smaller accounts. The latter business is stronger and more resilient. But its income (and profitability) may not change at all.

A small company can get stronger when one of the team learns some new sales skills. And then finds it easier and simpler to close a piece of business – using less time and less effort. If that sales person spends more time playing and doing nothing (and definitely not shopping) revenue won’t rise. The company won’t grow in conventional terms. But it is stronger and more resilient. So it has grown in that sense – like a piece of bamboo.


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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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Why, why, why?

Why does this all matter? It’s a question that rattles around in the back of my mind a lot.

I am convinced by the urgency of doing something positive, and I can see that there is a huge opportunity waiting. But I really like the “why?” question. Was it Ricardo Semler – of Seven Day Weekend fame – who said his company’s strategy is to ask the question “Why?” repeatedly when faced by any new initiative or problem? I think he said it helps them prioritise, and ensure they only spend time on the things that give the most real benefits. That’s something I guess we would all aspire to.

And it’s such a simple technique.

So “why” do something about climate change? Why do something about poverty? Why try to seize the sustainability opportunity, when there are probably plenty of easier ways to make a living, and probably easier ways to make money, if that is your goal too.

I read a little piece by Rosie Boycott the other day in a very good book called “Do good lives have to cost the earth” by Andrew Simms and Joe Smith. I wouldn’t normally have much time for something written by a former editor of the Express newspaper. I can’t be bothered with newspapers at the best of times, let alone the Express. But she reminded me that the reason we need to do something in the UK about climate change is partly to show our leadership to the rest of the world. This in turn reminded me that we need to do the same about sustainability in general, even though the UK is a small country with relatively little impact on these global matters.

So one answer to the question “why?” is that we should do it because we can – we have the wealth and security. And we also should do it because we have a responsibillty and an opportunity to show leadership to business people all over the world.

If we in the developed world can’t make good sense and good lives out of the opportunities arising from sustainability, how can we expect others to do the same? And, with the size of the opportunities and the size of the problems, we really need these others to be part of the solution too.


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Champion of small business?

Just listened to an interesting interview with David Wei, CEO of Alibaba.com on the great www.smallbizpod.co.uk.

After a slightly slow start it was interesting to hear of his conversion from a believer in the power of large corporations (while an employee of B&Q, I think it was) to his belief in the power of small business. He gave the example of B&Q’s minimum size order policy meaning it missed out on some of the opportunities created by the Alibaba global SME market-place.

He was also asked about the issue of pollution (including carbon emissions, I assume) in China and immediately identified an opportunity to use Alibaba.com to improve the efficiency of freight transportation in China.

Speaking about founder Jack Ma’s statement about having no technology, no money, and no plan, David interpreted these as three virtues: having to match technology to customer needs, keeping entrepreneurial, and staying flexible.

Alex Bellinger, the presenter, explained that Alibaba.com IPO’d last year raising around $1.5 billion and shortly afterwards was valued at around $26bn (yes billion). So, I am not really sure it counts as a small business. And it’s exceptional in many ways, but for me it highlights the possibilities and opportunities of the new global, internet-enabled economic landscape. This is also the landscape in which sustainability opportunities lie.

And it’ll be interesting to see how they use their money and newly found confidence. Alibaba_local?


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To grow or not to grow?

One of the debates that seems to be threatening to ignite right now is the one about economic growth and how it fits with sustainability.

Is it possible to have an economy that grows, and be sustainable at the same time? Some say yes, some say no, some say maybe.

The issue to me seems to be partly one of definition. Wikipedia defines GDP as “the total market value of all final goods and services produced”. The article also suggests that GDP represents a measure of “the sum of value added at every stage of production (the intermediate stages) of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time”.

There’s a well-known saying in business: “Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity”.

What I take this to mean is that any fool (more or less) can increase turnover, by for example, selling more products and services. The path to sanity is to focus not on turnover but on profit – because profit is a better measure of the value that an individual or an organisation adds to other people. It’s a measure of what we give, and, crucially, how well we do it.

If we accurately meet really important needs, and we do it really efficiently, the more profit we’ll earn.

I am not an economist, and so am probably making a idiot of myself here. But from my reading, GDP seems to be measuring something analogous to a country’s turnover, not profit.

Plants and animals (and people) grow – so I can’t see anything inherently wrong with growth. Small businesses seem to understand that growth and development isn’t just about size and scale. Profit seems to me to be an excellent way of measuring what we give to other people, and measuring our progress at getting better at that.

By the way, Wikipedia also lists 14 or 15 separate criticisms of GDP. It lists five alternatives to GDP and I heard about another one the other day: Gross Peaceful Product.

Perhaps as the sustainability/economic growth debate develops, we’ll agree some more useful measures of growth?