page 03 of 03
previous postings from May 2005
THE MURRAY EDMONDS FLYING CIRCUS
This is the seventh time I have led one of Murray Edmonds' Flying Circus tours of Australia and New Zealand - and it's great to be on the road again with Murray and Dobrina - and with a wonderful new bunch of speakers. Here is a miscellany of images accumulated during the 2005 tour. Some say this was the best tour yet, but each tour has had its own strengths, joys and nail-biting moments. None of them, however, would have got airborne had it not been for Murray and Dobrina's Herculean efforts (www.edmondsmgt.com.au).
I do not envy my neighbour's plate
On our first day in Melbourne, we visit a school that is 'going sustainable'
Dobrina awaits
The Circus warms up on the runway
The CSR 'crusade' builds
I lie cheek-by-jowl with David Grayson and Adrian Hodges
Peter Nelson (CEO, NZ Business Council for SD), Debra (Dunn), (Baroness) Barbara Young
Pamela Hartigan and Peter Nelson
Pamela's shoes
Richard (Murray), right, in conversation
David Smith, CEO, IAG New Zealand
Murray and Debra unwind at the farewell dinner in Auckland
Red shoes: Kerry Griffiths, Principal Sustainability Consultant, URS, New Zealand
And so good night.
Saturday, May 07, 2005
THE COLOUR INDIGO
Rooftop reflections
One of the questions I had been sent in advance for a session with the Melbourne City Council team yesterday was an oddball: 'What is your favourite colour?'
In preparing for the session - which mainly meant scratching my head on the flight across from Auckland - I had pondered this one at some length. The strange thing was that no particular colour fitted the bill. What came to mind, instead, was a sequence of diverse, mixed colourations: so, for example, lapis lazuli, rainbows, the Northern Lights. But, after discussion, I finally settled on some form of midnight blue, or - as Adam Briscomb prompted me to conclude - indigo. A blue-black, mysterious colour.
Primed with that thought, I was walking along Flinders Lane earlier on this afternoon, on my way to the National Galleryof Victoria (where I decided not to see the Adny Warhol 'Time Capsules' exhibition largely on the basis of the fact that I wasn't sure I had enough money both for that and for a taxi tomorrow morning), when I spotted some delightfully variegated and colourful painted lines on the entry ramp to some sort of parking facility. As I took photographs, an Asian employee who was smoking outside the building approached me with a nervous smile and asked whether I was planning to sue someone?
Then I went swimming in the pool on top of the hotel, at several points swimming out over the street. And there were touches of indigo in the water, I thought. Since I can't work out how to dimension the photos on my laptop, this is the only picture I will post until I get back.
Saturday, May 07, 2005
AM I AN INVASIVE SPECIES?
Don't drop names, I say, unless you can drop a barrow-load. So here we go. I'm back in Melbourne, after a whistle-stop tour of Australia and New Zealand with our annual traveling circus. We have done major conferences in Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland, though I have also been doing a number of other speeches and sessions on the side, including a session for the New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Development, a lunchtime session yesterday for Melbourne City Council (www.melbourne.vic.gov.au) and, last night, an Alfred Deakin Innovation Lecture (www.deakinlectures.com), in memory of one of Australia's most influential historic politicians, in Melbourne Town Hall.
The theme of the Deakin session was 'Using Capital Creatively', the chair was Victoria's Premier, Steve Bracks, and the other speakers included Bendigo Bank CEO Rob Hunt, Dr R.A. Mashelkar (Director General of India's Council of Scientific & Industrial Research) and, though a paper presented on his behalf, Senator Aden Ridgeway, an Indigenous leader and Democrats Senator for New South Wales.
Once again, our 2005 conference tour has been organized by Murray Edmonds, a long-standing member of our Faculty (www.edmondsmgt.com.au). This year the focus has been on the practicalities of implementing sustainable development and our line-up has included (Baroness) Barbara Young, who runs the UK Environment Agency, Richard Murray, who is Chief Risk Strategist for Swiss Re, Debra Dunn, senior vice-president at Hewlett-Packard (HP), Pamela Hartigan, who is Managing Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and two people from IAG, the Australian insurance group, Sam Mostyn (she toured with us in Australia) and NZ IAGCEO (are you keeping up?) David Smith, who joined us in Auckland. I have been enormously impressed by the way that IAG are embedding a range of corporate responsibility and sustainability-related priorities.
Before coming out, I did an interview with George Dallas, who heads the corporate governance practice at credit-risk-raters Standard & Poor's (S&P), which I brought with me in the form of a DVD and which we have shown at each of the conferences. It has gone down very well - and can be seen on the SustainAbility website. Note, incidentally, that George and I weren't in the same room when the filming was done - we were on different continents, filming at different times, so I was interviewing an empty chair.
Among other folk I meet again as we travel round: Ros Kelly (a former federal Environment Minister in Austrlaia, married to the CEO of Westpac Bank, David Morgan) and, in Auckland, Ann Sherry, who is Westpac's CEO in New Zealand. Ros reminds me, when we meet in Sydney, of the time - some years ago - when she invited me to dinner with David and some of his Westpac colleagues. She often remarks that this was a key milestone in the evolution of Westpac's sustainability thinking.
This is the seventh time I have done the Oz-NZ tour; last year I couldn't make it and my place was taken by ex-New Zealand Premier Mike Moore. Originally, in 1998, the focus was on environment, but the agenda opened out rapidly thereafter. Indeed the triple bottom line concept, which SustainAbility originated in 1994, has exploded in Australia and New Zealand - a bit like such introduced species as rabbits and cane toads in Australia and possums in New Zealand.
I'm still pondering whether to try swimming in the pool here at the Adelphi Hotel, a pool which is apparently cantilevered out from the hotel's roof, over the street, so you can swim over the transparent bottom and see pedestrians walking around many floors below. But, while I'm sure the perspective would be interesting, I suffer from vertigo and discretion may well get the better of valor. And this trip is already proving all sorts of bottom-up, top-down and inside-out perspectives that provide more than adequate compensation.
Three things that have been borne in on me are these:
First, the extraordinary impact that SustainAbility's work has had in different parts of the world.
Second, the way in which sustainability issues are now penetrating the political debate, both on this side of the world and in the UK - where Tony Blair is pledged to bring climate change into the agendas of his EU and G8 presidencies, while the Conservatives had threatened to eviscerate Barbara's Environment Agency and to drop the just-introduced Operating & Financial Review (OFR) requirement for companies, one of the most interesting recent advances in corporate governance legislation.
And, third, the way that markets are beginning to pick up on the social and environmental priorities that make up the sustainable development agenda. Debra Dunn noted that HP now wins contracts each year worth several billion dollars where the project criteria include social and/or environmental specifications. And, she added, that area of business is growing at 30-50% a year.
Oh, and a final thought. Our addition of Pamela's social enterprise component this year has gone down a storm. The 'can do' attitudes of social entrepreneurs chimes in very powerfully with the 'it's time to walk the talk' theme of the 2005 tour.
BLAIR, ERUPTIONS AND EELS
Well, Blair - along, presumably, with his pledges to bring climate change onto this year's G8 and EU Presidency agendas - is back. But his significantly reduced majority - and the fact that he has tapped Gordon Brown as his successor within the next Parliament - raise a forest of question marks over his future effectiveness. But at least the Conservatives aren't in and energetically disabling Barbara Young's Environment Agency or removing the newly introduced Operating & Financial Review (OFR) requirement, both things they had promised (threatened) to do.
A world away, Barbara tees up in Melbourne
Now that the blasts of hot air are over, we can settle back to politics as usual. Meanwhile, today's Australian Financial Review reports on a blast of 200 degree steam which erupted here a few weeks back. It was produced as part of attempts to exploit geothermal energy from the arid northeeastern corner of South Australia - by drilling four kilometres down into hot granitic rocks thought to contain twelve times as much energy as the fossil fuel reserves of the North-West Shelf. Apparently, these are the hottest rocks of their sort known worldwide other than beneath volcanoes.
Which reminds me of a conversation last night with Victoria's Deputy Premier, John Thwaites, after a dinner atop the city's ANZ Tower. He had just flown in from the Mount Eccles region, where he had visited an area where indigenous people some 8,000 years ago had cut into basaltic lava flows to divert local water flows and, by creating a series of wetlands, constructed a series of elver-rearing ponds. The spectacular wraparound views from the ANZ Tower and that blast of superheated steam the other day may have been pretty impressive, but the ponds (and the nearby clusters of stone-built homes) underscore the fact that the aboriginal peoples were often a great deal more sophisticated than many imagine. I thought I had been knocking off most of the places I still wanted to see in the world, among them northern Cyprus, but people just keep adding to the list!
Thursday, May 05, 2005
TALL POPPIES
In the final session of the Auckland conference, Professor Brian Springett once again raises an issue that has surfaced a number of times as we traveled around - that of the 'tall poppy syndrome'. The problem is that people who excel in Australia and New Zealand tend to be cut down. Indeed, as Brian puts it: 'There's a ruddy great mowing machine operating.' Given the importance of generating waves of successful social entrepreneurs, this potentially poses a major challenge. Interestingly, Pamela (Hartigan)'s presentations have addressed the issue of which cultures around the world support entrepreneurship - and which don't.
Brian and Delyse Springett part-hosted my first visit to New Zealand. When I ask Delyse this evening, at an end-of-tour dinner at the No. 5 restaurant in Auckland, when that was, she says it was in 1995. Thank heavens for external memory modules. That time, I was speaking at a sustainable tourism conference in Wellington. Air New Zealand flew Elaine and I out first class - the first and only time I have flown first class - and Gaia came with us too, traveling steerage at our own expense.
Typically, I had brought only summer clothes and we arrived in Wellington in the midst of their first snowstorm for 40 years. When we eventually crossed to South Island and started to drive south, we were turned back by the police, who said the roads were impassable. In the event, we discovered the delights of Farewell Spit and of whale-watching off Kaikoura. Most impressively of all, however, we pitched up at a winery in the Marlborough district late at night, to find it closed for the winter. It turned out to be owned by Jane Hunter, a well-known New Zealand vintner. She opened up her restaurant just for us, lit a huge fire and made us feel wonderfully at home.
When we finally flew out, after a visit to the hot springs of Rotorua, Gaia appeared in the first class lounge at Auckland airport as a post-Apocalyptic vision, wearing dreadlocks, paratroop boots and finger-drawn facial markings of Rotorua volcanic mud. Luckily, four or five minutes later, Roger Daltrey and The Who pitched up, too, and Gaia spent much of the flight back to London with them.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
SYDNEY HARBOUR
A moment out, in the dark. Debra (Dunn) and I walk back from The Wharf restaurant, hard by Sydney Bridge, to the hotel. Great restaurant, where I had been taken when I first came to Australia, by Paul Gilding of Ecos. One test of The Wharf's flexibility this evening: Debra, Pamela and I all ask for grilled barramundi, rather than fried – as it appears on the menu. And they oblige.
Anyway, Debra and I walk right around the harbor front, pausing to watch gulls circling like moths in the spotlights above the bridge - and later I learn they are themselves hunting for moths, attracted by the lights. How extraordinarily privileged we are to be able to have conversations like these in such places.
Pamela leaving The Wharf
Sydney Opera House
Sunday, May 01, 2005
100 MILLION HEARTS EN ROUTE TO OZ
Arrived in Melbourne around 04.30 this morning, to find BA had lost one of my bags in transit. Apart from anything else, it was the one with all my plugs and cables, making me realise - once again - how umbilically connected one is to the rest of the world, and how truncated when such things go AWOL. Roll on total wirelessness. Arrival takes a little longer than normal - and Murray (Edmonds) puts me in a car into the city with me still having no idea if and when the bag will arrive. But great to see him and, as I tell him, its extraordinary that he would greet a plane at such an uncivilised hour. Still, (Baroness) Barbara Young, another of our speakers was arriving not long afterwards, so it was two birds with one stone.
As flight BA17 flew in across bulldozer-scalped landscapes towards Changhi airport, Singapore, its shadow racing across the cleared areas and green pimpled oil palm plantations, I was just hitting page 181 in Kerri Sakamoto's astounding book One Hundred Million Hearts (Harcourt 2003). She writes about two sisters in today's world whose father was a (failed) kamizaze pilot. And the sequence on page 181 is about the Peace Park and museum in Hiroshima. Their reactions - or at least the reactions of the younger sister, Hana - were exactly mine when I visited the city in the 1980s. No sense of the historical context, nothing on the rape of Nanjing, just a story of an aerial holocaust wrought upon innocents.
The current row between the Chinese and Japanese about sanitised Japanese history books underscores the issue.