page 02 of 03
previous postings from May 2005
TOKYO FISH MARKET
Did I know you?
Tomoo and I make an early morning visit to Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market, a first for us both. Earlier, Tomoo and Judy had forwarded me a link to an Observer article on the implications of the nature and scale of Japanese fish consumption for the world's oceans:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/foodmonthly/story/0,,1453356,00.html
One of the most striking lines from the piece, by Alex Renton, was from a fish conservation poster in the Misaki fish market, featuring a smiling fisherman and a haiku:
Shining ocean
Is a big mirror
Which reflects our future.
True, but unfortunately the reflections suggest a pretty dire future for oceanic fish, for this extraordinary fish market and for fish consumers, both in Japan and elsewhere.
Take the bluefin tuna. As Renton puts it: "The bluefin is the black truffle of the tunas: mysterious, rare and stunningly expensive. Its raw belly meat provides the greatest otoro, the fatty tissue that is the most prized for sashimi and sushi. This gourmet's distinction has been unfortunate for the fish, making it 'severely endangered': the Atlantic variety of bluefin is likely to be the first tuna species that will become effectively extinct. But, absurdly, the price of this luxury has collapsed because the market is glutted. That same quality bluefin tuna, from the same fishing ground, raised 2,250 yen a kilo on the Misaki quayside two years ago - maybe twice as much five years ago. "
We have failed, again and again, to police the world's oceans. As Renton concludes: "It's a documented and recognised global disaster, but one we can do nothing about. No multinational mechanism exists with the muscle to beat the wallets of the fish-eaters." Not sure what we can do in this area, but came away feeling SustainAbility should be doing something.
Retail fish market
Last tuna from morning's auction
Tuna head
More tuna
Fugu, the deadly delicacy, contains a toxin 1200 times more lethal than cyanide
Some form of garfish?
Eco-crimes: shark's fin and whalemeat
Where are you from?
Fading, but the colours are amazing
Swimming in a sea of blood
These guys again
Shoal on ice
The sharp end
Octopus
And, in the end, we drive it all ...
Sunday, May 15, 2005
PICASA, THUNDER AND BLENDED VALUE
One of the great joys of recent days was my - perhaps somewhat belated - discovery of Picasa 2, the image management software now offered by Google. Geoff Lye at SustainAbility had mentioned recently that he found it hugely helpful, so I downloaded it yesterday (free) from www.picasa.com onto my ThinkPad. The first thing it does is to trawl through your hard drive to find all the images - and it was amazing to see images I had used years ago surfacing, like so many coelacanths. Easy to use, pretty much akin to what I have been using on my Mac for several years, and hugely recommended.
A day largely spent tapping away in my hotel room, sketching out an invited paper for California Management Review on the blended value agenda, which I'm co-authoring with Jed Emerson (who coined the blended value term, see www.blendedvalue.org) and Seb Beloe of SustainAbility. At one point in the afternoon, there was an enormous series of crashes outside, which at first I thought was an earthquake - but which turned out to be a thunder storm.
Saturday, May 14, 2005
'CRANE' AND BULLET TRAIN
Heron stalks ...
Tabloid headline: 'Gotcha!'
Well, maybe it was a white heron rather than a crane, but as I walked around the Hama-rikyu Gardens this afternoon a water bird caught its prey. At one stage, this was effectively the family garden of the Tokugawa Shogun, a place for leisure and duck hunting. The place was pulverised, however, by the Great Kanto Earthquake and by WWII bombing raids. A typhoon - 'Kitty' - also hit in 1949, the year I was born. Much of the gardens still seem in shambles, with diggers at work in various places behind 'No Entry' signs. And the moat around the gardens is rancid and foul-smelling, full of prams, haversacks and other rubbish - surprising in such a tidy city.
Soaring over the gardens is a glistening wall of skyscrapers, including the one where we had dinner the other evening. As I walk back to the hotel, bullet trains slide noiselessly through the backdrop. Then off to dinner with friends, their children and mother-in-law. Wonderful to see a Japanese family at home. Then driven home in - you guessed it - a Prius.
Bullet train: Ambitious Japan!
A DAVID IN JAPAN
Saying goodbye to Judy (Kuszewski) this morning, I was reminded of something that a number of the Japanese people we have met this week have said, often with a slight sense of awe. They simply cannot imagine how SustainAbility, which we openly explain is a global midget of between 20 and 25 people, can have had such an impact in Japan. Indeed, there often seems to be a Wizard of Oz character to our reputation here.
The answers to the riddle, I suspect, are relatively simple. They include picking the right issues over the years, building relationships with the right partners, and coming here year after year. This must be my tenth or twelfth trip over the past 20 years or so. The interesting question as our interests expand to include countries like China and India is how we can build the capacity to invest similar - or greater - levels of effort across the wider region. This is something we will have to think about in greater depth when Kavita (Prakash-Mani) and I join Judy back in our London office, after our impending trip to Beijing.
Friday, May 13, 2005
E-SQUARE AND TACHI, A HUMAN PHENOMENON
Tea ceremony house roof
This morning included a fascinating session for E-Square Inc., founded in September 2000 and dedicated to creating a 'green economy' (www.e-squareinc.com). Their CEO, Peter David Pedersen has visited our London offices several times, typically with a small group of Japanese companies in tow. Today's session attracted around 30 people, from companies as diverse as All Nippon Airways, The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Fuji Photo Film, Matsushita Electric Industrial, The Seiyu, Sekisui Chemical, and the charmingly named Unicharm Corporation. The theme of the session, for which I was providing the keynote, was 'sustainable business models and branding'.
But by far the most charming feature of the event was Takashi 'Tachi' Kiuchi, one of Japan's most iconoclastic businessmen. He picked Judy (Kuszewski), Tomoo (Machiba) and I up from our hotel in a chauffeur-driven limousine and took us to Kaitokaku, a huge grey house on a hill at the eastern end of the Tanakawa Heights - an area once famed as a place to view cherry blossom and the moon.
As Chairman and CEO of Mitsubishi Electric America, Tachi oversaw the company's transition from the old to the new economy. He also championed a "living systems" approach to business that included rapid adaptation, financial transparency, openness, cultural diversity, executive positions for women and environmental sustainability. But he is perhaps best known in NGO circles for developing a breakthrough agreement with the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) to promote corporate sustainability.
Among other things, he is now Chairman of the Future 500 (www.globalff.org) and CEO of E-Square. Surfing the Net to find out more about him, I was not surprised to find (on the Forum for Corporate Conscience site, www.forumforcorporateconscience.com) that in his spare time he skydives, runs marathons, climbs Mount Fuji, rides his bicycle to the Future 500 HQ in downtown Tokyo and does 1600 push-ups a day.
On top of it all, he has a wonderful sense of humour. Indeed, one of the things I commented on during the Kaitokaku session was that the participants had been showing a great deal of humour as we ran around the table. And that, for me, has always been a good sign, suggesting that people are no longer in awe of the agenda, but are allowing a degree of playfulness to creep in - and this, in turn, potentially fuels creative, lateral thinking.
After the excellent lunch with the E-Square team and other participants, Judy, Tomoo and I walked around the gardens, among other things watching the huge trellised wisteria being pruned by a platoon of gardeners. The somewhat drear grey stone main house was designed by English architect Josiah Conder, but - following extensive damage during the wartime air raids - the interior was reconstructed from 1963. Commissioned by Yanosuke Iwasaki - who died the same year it was finished - the house was later used by the Mistubishi Company to entertain executives and staff.
The gardens also suffered post-war neglect, but things have been looking up. The 300-year-old wisteria produces huge blossoms each year, each some 24-24 inches long, indeed the remnants of these were being trimmed away by the gardeners as we watched. And in the rose garden, something like 1,000 rose bushes bloom all at once each year, which must be a spectacle.
Wisteria gets a trim
Judy and Tomoo in Kaitokaku gardens
Shaking hands with the dragon
Then we crunched across the carefully raked gravel to yet another taxi for the trip to the next session, this time with the Nikkei BP Environmental Management Forum. I did the speech, Tomoo translated, and - once again - CSR was on top of everyone's mind. In this case, however, one key area of interest was how an initiative originally set up to tackle environmental issues could transform itself to handle the wider corporate social responsibility agenda.
Interestingly, a degree of angst was expressed by at least one major company about the way in which the questionnaires sluicing in from foreign socially responsible investment (SRI) funds increasingly feature a growing range of social issues, among them issues related to human rights. So, while apologising for possible political insensitivity, I explained why human rights are important even in developed countries like Japan, noting the presence of sizeable excluded populations in Japan - quite apart from the ongoing dispute with China over wartime atrocities carried out by the Japanese.
Later in the evening, Judy, Tomoo and I walk out into the city, drop into a small, convivial bar, and have a wonderfully relaxing supper - surrounded by end-of-the-week salarymen who get progressively livelier as the evening wears on - and the beer and sake flow. In the background, a cook throws the most extraordinary range of species onto the open grill, triggering great clouds of steam and sheets of flame. A speciality of the house seems to be huge fish-heads
Back of the beast
Thursday, May 12, 2005
'RISK & OPPORTUNITY' LAUNCH
Main event of the day is the launch of the Japanese language version of our Risk & Opportunity report in front of 250-300 executives. Judy and I both speak, together with Daisuke Fukutomi, Director of Corporate & Government Ratings at Standard & Poor's, our partners in the project - alongside the United Nations Environment Progamme (UNEP). I get hooked out of the session before Judy begins to begin the first of a series of five or six press interviews, most with photographers buzzing around like electric bluebottles.
Afterwards, we are taken out to dinner by people from the Japanese end of Ernst & Young. The Japan-as-predator theme continues in my brain as we are served with white clods of conger eel in clear broth, and the delightful waitress gaily tells us that the animal was killed but moments before for our dining pleasure.
What with the 90-minute interview I did early this morning for the Editor-in-Chief of Toyo Keizai magazine, I end the day feeling fairly hoarse. Toyo Keizai, who are 110 years old this year and describe themselves as the Japanese version of The Economist, are organising a major conference later in the year at which I am due to be one of the speakers. And then, from 22.30, do a 60-minute teleconference with the SustainAbility Board, with calls linking in from the West and east coasts of the US, the UK, Belgium and Switzerland. Highly productive.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
PANASONIC'S FUTURE LABORATORY
I go bladerunner
We kick off the day at the Panasonic Center Tokyo, complete with photovoltaic cell-stippled roof, where the Matsushita Group spotlights its twin visions of 'the ubiquitous network society' and of 'peaceful coexistence with the environment'. We meet Managing Director and Board member Hidetsuga Otsuru and several of his colleagues, before they take us around the exhibits. When I am subjected to a retinal scan, my retinas glow blue and I end up looking like something from Bladerunner. We also visit the 'Future Laboratory', where all sorts of futuristic machinery responds to every human whim. All utterly fascinating, but leaves me feeling somewhat uneasy. Odd sense that we dream of living in Star Trek luxury, but may end up back in caves rather faster than we can imagine.
Later in the day, I do a keynote at a Nikkei CSR Group session with 25-30 executives. Discussion, as ever, slow to start, so I end up giving 10-minute answers to the questions I do get, though this includes Tomoo (Machiba)'s translations. Companies present include Shiseido, Sumitomo Forestry, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and Tokyo Marine & Nichido Insurance.
After drinks, Tomoo and I head off to dinner at Zipangu with two colleagues from Sony, Asako Nagai (who I first met when she worked with Ford in Detroit) and Hidemi Tomita, who I first met when he worked with Sony in Germany. We dine on the forty-seventh floor of a soaring Shiodome skyscraper, which soon has us talking about earthquakes. The trip down in an open, glass elevator is vertiginous - and, as my ears pop, I wonder if the same thing happened to those who fell to their deaths from the World Trade Center.
Wonderful meal, with the only hiccup being the arrival of carefully prepared servings of shark's fin. I gently squawk and avoid, but the more I eat out in Japan, the more I have the sense of a mighty predator drawing in threatened species from around the globe. And the fate of dominant species in overtaxed environments was nicely spotlighted earlier in the day by the dinosaur scultpure rearing through the heart of the Panasonic Centre.
Eco-efficient mini-dishwasher
21st century luxury at finger-tip command
Tomoo sees future of transport
Judy views over-bed dream machine
Dinosaur sculpture and solar cells
And so goobye: Elkington-san, Otsuru-san, Kuszewski-san
Our team: Tomoo (second from left), me, Judy
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
SPELL GINKGO
Spot the missing ginkgo. To my left: Mr Chung Haebong (Chief Executive Officer of Eco-Frontier), and to my right: Professor Byoung-Hoon Ahn (Korea Advanced Institution of Science and Technology Graduate School of Management).
One of the nice touches of this visit has been that Antonius Papasiropoulos of Shell came up with the idea of having a small golden badge struck for the occasion, in the shape of a ginkgo leaf (gingko also seems a permissible spelling). The point being that the ginkgo tree is a symbol of longevity in Korea - and has been around as a species for some 270 million years. By the end of the day, half Seoul seemed to be wearing them on their lapel. I'm normally not a great badge-wearer, indeed I avoid them like some lapel plague, but have rather enjoyed the sense of confraternity bestowed by this one.
Monday, May 09, 2005
CHEONGGYE CLEAN UP
Seoul
Arrived very late last night, after storms reduced Hong Kong's airport to chaos. When I had flown to Melbourne, BA lost one of my bags, whereas this time Cathay Pacific manages the feat of losing both. As longstanding colleague Antonius Papaspiropoulos of Shell Gas & Power kindly greets me and travels with me in the limousine into Seoul, where we're staying at the Lotte Hotel, it's around midnight and I'm wondering what it's going to be like greeting Mayoral folk and the British Ambassador tomorrow in jeans.
In the background, the news continues to be about Pyongyang's continuing threats to test a 'plutonium-based nuclear device', or bomb as Tom Lehrer long ago encouraged us to call such things. But, as someone says to me today, the further away from Korea you get the more fearful such issues seem - and vice versa. People here seem surprisingly relaxed about it all.
Today starts with a breakfast with Dr Colin McClune, Chairman of Shell Pacific Enterprises, and some of his colleagues, followed by a session with a number of Korean journalists, mainly from business magazines and media. Much interest in how Korea stands in relation to the rest of the world in relation to our issues. Well briefed by Shell, my hosts here, local NGO Eco-Frontier and Insight Communications, I was able to say that Korean companies have been making a fair amount of progress, albeit from a relatively low base.
Some 2,500 are now registered under the ISO14001 environmental standards, perhaps 50 have published environmental reports and seven - with Samsung SDI having jumped in first - have produced at least one sustainability report. Several banks have signed the Carbon Disclosure Project and a fair number of companies also now have product-related environmental certification. But my sense is that most of this driven by concerns about the environmental and sustainability concerns of major international markets and customers rather than by any great local appetite for sustainable development.
One of the most interesting meetings is a session with the Vice Mayor of Seoul. (The Mayor, we are told, has lost his voice but see below.) The Vice Mayor turns out to have an attractive sense of humour, as do many of the Koreans I meet. We talk about a number of sustainability-related issues, including air quality problems in the city and the 'yellow dust' problem caused in Korea by soil erosion in nearby China. But the subject that I was particularly interested in was the Cheonggyecheon restoration project, which involves removing an elevated stretch of highway and uncovering a long-buried stretch of stream in the city centre.
In some ways this is a matter of national pride, in that the environmental defects now being addressed reflected the exigencies of post-war reconstruction, at a time when Korea's GDP per caoita stood at a mere US$100, compared to US$10,000 today. The Vice Mayor and I hover over maps of the scheme while photographers happily snap away.
Diplomatically, none of us mention the latest news: a second Vice Mayor, Yang Yoon-jae, has just been arrested as part of an investigation of the stream restoration project - and charged with allegedly accepting 200 million won (US$200,000) from a real estate developer, in exchange for relaxing height limits for a building due to be built alongside the stream. If proved true, this could be a major blow to the Mayor's own presidential hopes. But, whatever the facts of the matter, the financial corruption charges should not blind us to the very real environmental and civic benefits of a project designed to clean up past ecological corruption.
By late morning, one of my bags - and my suit - turns up. So I am at last respectably turned out, though am still wearing an unfamiliar dolphin tie lent to me this morning by Colin McClune. One oddity: as we drive through the city today after one of two events I spoke at - a British Chamber of Commerce lunch at the Grand Hyatt Hotel and a 'Sustainable Korea' workshop organised by Eco-Frontier - someone points out that most of the cars here are white, off-white, pale brown, grey or black. The overall impression, coupled with the Eastern bloc aesthetic of much of the building, is dusty, workaday, drab.
By contrast, our dinner this evening with the British Ambassador, Warwick Morris, is a welcome respite in a small green oasis, complete with lawns and even a newly constructed - and thatched - bird table. Sadly, though, bird life is in short supply here, given the general hostility of the surrounding environment to wildlife. Many interesting conversations, but one in particular sticks in my mind - with Dr Chul-Hwan Koh, a profesor of marine biology and member of Korea's Presidential Commission on Sustainable Development. Having spent seven years as a member of the European Commission's Consultative Forum on Sustainable Development, which proved unwieldy at around 30 members, I am interested to hear that Korea's version is having a real impact with 80 members.
In my small thank you speech as the dinner winds down, I note that the day's conversations have encouraged me to do my homework on Korea when I get home. And the process is already starting. When I get back to the hotel, there is a new book on my bed: The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies, by Michael Breen (St Martin's Press, 1998/2004). Something to read on tomorrow's flight as my bags no doubt go AWOL again.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
CATHAY PACIFIC TO HONG KONG
What do you do? we are often asked. One of the SustainAbility team recently found it all so hard to explain that he began telling people that he was a banker. But every now and then you get into a conversation where it's easier. I had one of those today.
The day started in Melbourne and, if all goes well, will end in Seoul. Up at 05.15, after a much-disturbed night of riotous noise in the streets outside: post-football revels, I learned. The hotel's Indian receptionist – originally from Hyderabad - said (despairingly) that this was pretty typical for a weekend. My taxi driver, originally from the Punjab, agreed. The back seat of his car was covered in the vile debris from previous passengers who, he sighed, were generally drunk. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t enamored with Australian youth or sports culture.
Brilliant white banks of mist stand between trees, over river courses as the sun rises over the airport. I am flying Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong, then on to Seoul. Business class is bursting at the seams, with two travelers ahead of me being involuntarily downgraded because no-one is prepared to accept money to switch to Economy. Another sign of the growing importance of the 'China trade'?
I find myself sitting next to a white-haired Australian farmer, traveling to China and Japan as part of a delegation from a dairy cooperative. They sell powdered milk and cheeses to Asia. He asks me what I do, and when I tell him, he regales me with some of the many issues the farming community now faces, particularly the long-running drought and incipient problems of soil salinization caused by irrigation. His farm's water allocation has been cut back again this year, which makes life progressively tougher. Many people are leaving the land, though the fact that water rights are now tradable and they can sell their increasingly valuable allocations often helps ease the transition. He's not at all sure that he will encourage his children to stay on the land.
We trade notes on some of the politicians I have met on this trip, among them Victoria Premier Steve Bracks, Deputy Premier John Thwaites and Treasurer John Brumby, and he comments that they are all more aware of environmental and other sustainability issues than their predecessors. But he wonders whether we are acting fast or effectively enough.
Our talk roams back and forth over decades. And, as it happens, today is my parents' 58th wedding anniversary. As we head north over the old, scoured, arid wastes of the Australian outback, I find myself musing how all our issues will be seen 58 years from now, in 2063. I shall be long gone, of course, but I muse to my farmer friend that a world of 9-10 billion people is going to be radically different, with growing problems in such areas as climate change and human and livestock pandemics.
Rick Murray of Swiss Re used an extraordinary slide during our conferences this week which underscored the ways in which the impact of diseases such as foot-and-mouth, BSE and SARS already impact the insurance and reinsurance industries. Both Australia and New Zealand are now highly expert at biosecurity, with intensive checks as you land to ensure visitors don't bring in diseases, but no system is perfect. And there will be those who intentionally introduce diseases as acts of terrorism or economic warfare.
In fact, one of the most interesting bets Wired magazine 'Senior Maverick' Kevin Kelly told me about when I visited him in San Francisco a few weeks back and we talked about the predictions open for wagers on the www.longbets.com website was that one million people would die in a single bioterror or bioerror incident in the first few decades of the 21st century.
Having read the latest issue of Scientific American on the flight up from Auckland a few days back, I would say that the chances were high. Scientists researching ice cores have found evidence of falling carbon dioxide and methane levels accompanying massive historic die-backs in the human population, as when 25-40% of the European population were killed by bubonic plague in Roman times, and again when similar proportions were killed in the Middle Ages. But perhaps most dramatic was the period of die-back of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas when the Europeans arrived, bringing with them diseases such as smallpox. Perhaps as many as 50 million died.
Sustainability may be hard to define, but that strikes me as one form of unsustainability.
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