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A home for the Conscious Business community in the UK


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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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How to take advantage of an opportunity

I’ve just finished reading Felix Dennis’ very funny book “How to get rich”. It’s also very real and packed with useful insights.

I think the book is really about how to succeed at doing things (in his case it was getting rich). I think it’s very applicable to the question of how to ensure your business takes advantage of the sustainability opportunity.

I’ll put his suggestions into my own words (and add a couple of things I have gathered myself):

  1. Commit. Work out what you want to do. Choose something that is true for you. Make a no-let-out contract with yourself to do it. Make it despite any objections that come up.
  2. Recognise that everything that happens to you is down to you. Even including your upbringing and genes. If you can do this, then what happened in the past can be turned from a pain to something really useful – learning about what you did that worked and what you did that didn’t.
  3. Be totally fearless. Now that is difficult for a total coward like me. But I know it to be a great strategy. Amongst other things, it means stopping caring about what others think – and being true to yourself instead. It means handling what’s in front of you – and not thinking too much about what might or might not happen.
  4. Start (don’t wait or hesitate). That’s a tough one for me. I often procrastinate.
  5. Persevere. But if one approach doesn’t work, “do something different” (more on this later).

What a great plan. Anybody know if it works?


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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.


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Two birds with one stone?

Last night I met with some colleagues from the Transition Town network in Lewes (where I live) to brainstorm what the world of business might look like in 2025 – just 17 years away. I was really buoyed up by the discussion – and by the opportunities that will arise as people really start to address the issues that we face.

One of the important parts of our vision is that “Many more ventures will integrate social and commercial aims”. This is a view supported by Corporation 20/20, a new multi-stakeholder initiative that seeks to answer the question: “What would a corporation look like that was designed to seamlessly integrate both social and financial purpose?”

We also covered areas like customers, the broader market, work and employment, production and creation, industry sectors and how they are changing. And overall I got strong sense of a positive world where at the same time as solving our problems we are simultaneously improving our lot, individually and collectively. Inspiring stuff.


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Solutions not problems

There are some excellent summaries of what the sustainability challenge is all about. Personally I am more interested in solutions than the problems.

But just to set the context, I guess if you have read this far, you’ll agree that actually it’s not that surprising that as the world population has grown from around 2 billion people to around 6 billion in the course of just my lifetime (I am 50 years old) that the world is creaking a little under the strain.

That’s a huge understatement of course. There’s a long list of problems we face: climate change, poverty, nuclear annihilation, terrorism, resource insecurity, and so on.

To me sustainability is the solution to all these – “to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (that’s the Bruntland Commission’s definition).

And it’s solutions I am much more interested in than discussing the problems. And specifically what small and medium-sized businesses can do.


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Purpose of this blog

I have been asking myself for a while what can I do, within my life as it is, to move the world towards sustainability.

Reducing my personal carbon footprint is obviously important. But I’d like to go beyond that.

I realised that what I do for living – working with small and medium-sized businesses to improve and strengthen them – could fit pretty well.

It would be great, I thought, if I could help the businesses I work with learn how sustainability impacts them and how they can turn it from a problem into a huge opportunity. If just one or two them manage it, then my small efforts will be much magnified.

Having realised that, I then thought “How do I do that?”. I realised I probably don’t know enough about the problems and more importantly the opportunities and how to address them.

People who know me find my quite irritating because I tend to ask a lot of questions. I can be pretty indirect. But sometimes the questions lead to answers that are interesting, for me at least.

And a while back, some friends and colleagues, Tom Nixon and Will McInnes at NixonMcInnes, had suggested I start a blog. So I thought, I’ll start a conversation (with myself initially) and maybe I’ll learn something.