Energise Barnet

Energise Barnet is a shining example of how just one person can influence others to take action. Aware that his borough had the highest emissions in London, and that no group was taking ownership of the problem, Nigel Farren decided to act. He has brought together an impressive and diverse coalition to make low carbon technologies more accessible and affordable for his local community. And he doesn't plan to stop there. Once Energise Barnet has proved itself, he plans to extend it across the UK to become the Groupon of the community energy sector. He works full time and unpaid on the project, but to scale it up he needed an injection of capital. Enter 1010 and The Funding Network. At 1010s Pitch Pledge Party, Energise Barnet was granted enough funds to fund a modest office space and some administrative support to enable it to move forward with its plans.

Amazing what you can do when you gather a few like-minded people together!

Serendipity

Watching Jonathan Ross's interview with Jamie Oliver, two facts stuck with me. Firstly, Jamie has sold over 100 million books Worldwide. Secondly, on the night he was "discovered" working in a restaurant by a TV crew, he shouldn't even have been there. He was covering for a friend who wanted to skip his shift to be with a new girlfriend. So in a sense Jamie's entire career - his books, his restaurants, the Fifteen Foundation, his campaigning work on school dinners and family nutrition, all derive from that single act of friendship. Perhaps Jamie would have achieved those things anyway. After all, he is great at what he does: genuine, engaging, passionate. He certainly took full advantage of the opportunities that came his way and you can imagine that he would do so in any situation. But it's hard to see how he could have risen so far and so fast without the extra amplification that early TV exposure provided.

For those who remember the movie, Jamie's presence at the restaurant that night was his "Sliding Doors" moment - a single accident of fate that determines somebody's entire future from that point on. We all have them, and they are difficult to recognise except in retrospect. But the more challenges we accept, the more favours we perform, the more opportunities we embrace, the more likely we are to be present when our own moment arrives.

Too Good to Waste

Top London chefs are backing a campaign to encourage diners to take home leftover food. The Too Good To Waste campaign, organised by the Sustainable Restaurant Association, aims to cut the 200,000 tons of food estimated to be wasted each year. Although American diners are more than happy to ask for a bag to take home uneaten food, it seems the British are just too reticent. In a recent survey, although 90% thought restaurants needed to do more to cut down on waste, a third had never thought to ask for a doggy bag and another quarter were too embarrassed.

Now, restaurants that support the campaign will stock “doggy boxes” and train staff to offer them to diners who don’t finish their meals. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who is leading the campaign, says “Food waste in restaurants is a massive problem and doggy bags are an excellent way of cutting waste. There’s no need to be shy.”

Having tried, and failed, recently to get a suitable container to take home untouched cakes from a recent afternoon tea at a top hotel, I’m delighted by this move. Just like the serving of tapwater, I’d like to see this become standard practice at all restaurants.

Musings on values and world views

I spent today at an event hosted by the fantastic Forum for the Future, which featured a truly inspiring session on the significance of World views. A key takeaway was that while many of the CSR concepts like social justice gain general agreement, different points of view about the detail lead to uncertainty and conflict.

Arriving home, I was greeted with a request from my 11-year old son to help him with his homework. Coincidentally, he had been asked to present me with three views held by him that we were to debate. Rather touchingly, his views were:

There is no excuse for war
Everything is limitless
Every living thing is equal

Initially, I had no problem agreeing to the first one - but there followed an interesting debate on whether retaliating to an attack constitutes a state of war if you do no more than defend yourself. I felt that if active defence was acceptable, this view might be more accurately defined as "there is no excuse for aggression", but my son held that the term war applied only to an act of attack.

I took issue with the view "everything is limitless"; I am acutely aware that the resources of our planet are limited and that we are consuming beyond those limits. It turns out that my son's view is that the cosmos is limitless and that more planets probably exist, maybe in different dimensions, that could meet our needs. Perhaps, but who is to say that a) we will discover them in time and that b) they won't contain people who need our resources to make up for limitations in their own.

We struggled quite a lot with "every living thing is equal". In general terms it seems reasonable, but delving into the detail caused quite a few disagreements. We explored dilemmas around choosing whether to save an animal or a human from danger, and my son modified his view to "every living thing has an equal right to life". This, he felt, made a distinction between the right to kill something because it's not human and the right to prioritise saving a human life over the life of another species. Then I introduced the example of a mosquito infested swamp next to a village, where children were dying from malaria - would it be acceptable to eliminate the mosquitoes? Sadly, it was bedtime so we never really resolved this one. But it's reassuring to see that at 11 my son is already wrestling with some of the moral issues that my generation has failed to get to grips with.

Dematerialising Christmas

Money saving Martin reminds us today that it's only 100 days to Christmas, and has published tips on avoiding overspending during the festive season. Here are mine, approached from the angle of reducing the level of consumerism.

Why not agree a gift anmesty with your family and friends? Mutually decide that you won't buy for them and they won't buy for you. Perhaps you could exchange something else instead - a card with an extended personal message, perhaps? Or you could agree to spend a minimal amount, or buy gifts only from charity shops, or re-gift something you own and they have admired.

If you don't want to cut down on what you spend, consider buying activities rather than goods - tickets to concerts, pamper days, meals out - either for your friend and you, or given as a voucher for your friend to share with whoever they choose? Or choose an antique or vintage item you know they would like.

Leading on from the Unicef report that says children are stuck in a "materialistic trap" in which they are unable to spend enough time with their families and instead are bought off with "branded goods" by their parents - could you buy your kids a little less and instead spend a little more time with them? Or invest in a shared experience like a trip to a theme park, theatre or activity centre?

We all tend to buy a little too much food at Christmas, so invest a little time planning menus and making a shopping list of the quantities you actually need - including some ideas for cooking your leftovers, too. Try to source ethical and local ingredients; they may cost a little more but if you also cut out the waste you probably won't spend any more.

Last year I left it too late, and by the time I spoke to my family about cutting down on the consumer goods, they had already started their shopping. So with 100 days to go, I'm starting now.

News International - a failure of culture?

The hackgate scandal and the subsequent repercussions in the News International empire have provided a graphic demonstration of what can happen within a company with a toxic culture. It's quite possible that the various executives were telling the truth when they sat before the select committee and professed their ignorance of phone tapping, but that doesn't mean they were blameless. Accounts of journalists working there at the time of the alleged events describe a workplace where there was overwhelming pressure to get the story at all costs. It's quite understandable that under these conditions some might feel compelled to resort to illegal methods of getting the scoop. The leaders of a company set the vision and values that drive its culture, and in doing so create a kind of moral framework that informs the decisions made by its staff.

This kind of culture is a hangover from the Gordon Gecko "greed is good", "win at all costs" mentality of the nineteen eighties that has mostly been left behind by today's more enlightened businesses. In its place, we are seeing a new approach to doing business where social capital is valued alongside financial capital on the triple bottom line. These organisations have a "win/win" mentality and aim to beat their competitors not by undercutting on price (and, as an inevitable consequence, quality) but by being more trusted as business partners. So as consumers - of goods, media, services, whatever - we now have a new benchmark for judging the desirability of a brand. Integrity, respect and honour are becoming the new currency of business, and the cynical and exploitative companies will find themselves outmanoeuvred in a way they quite possibly won't fully understand until it's too late.

Embedded sustainability - an idea whose time has come

I have been struck recently by the possibility that business may finally be grasping the concept that corporate environmental and social responsibility needs to be embedded in the organisation and, furthermore, that it might actually bring commercial benefit. This point is made convincingly by a new book - Embedded Sustainability: The Next Big Competitive Advantage, by Chris Laszlo and Nadya Zhexembayeva (Greenleaf Publishing, 2011). There's an executive summary of its contents, and a discount code (although sadly not valid on the ebook), on the Defra Sustainable Development website.

The book argues that the companies who will succeed are those who choose to embed sustainability into their DNA, incorporating environmental, health, and social value into core business activities with no trade-offs in price or quality. But unlike the ubiquitous bolt-on approaches, embedded sustainability requires a fundamental paradigm shift across every dimension of the business. The writers believe that most organisations have yet to discover how to meet both shareholder and stakeholder requirements in the core business – without mediocrity and without compromise – creating value for the company that cannot be disentangled from the value it creates for society and the environment.
 
This point of view is taken still further by another author, Carol Sanford in her title The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success (Jossey-Bass, 2011). Carol argues that the most successful and profitable businesses, over time, will not be those that "practice CSR" but instead those that rethink their purpose, reorganize themselves to draw upon the creativity and passion of all, and integrate responsible behavior into the way they do everything they do. And, as she told Greenbiz.com, that goes beyond embedding sustainability into the business; taken to its logical conclusion, it could mean the end of CSR as we know it.
 
These are familiar concepts to me, after almost 20 years working for a subsidiary of Kyocera Corporation, which could be the poster child for responsible business. Kyocera's founder, Dr Kazuo Inamori, established the Kyocera Philosophy in the early 1960s, shortly after the company was founded, and at its heart is a single, simple promise: to do what is right as a human being. Almost 50 years on, and with over 60,000 employees across the World, Kyocera employees are still trained in the Kyocera Philosophy and refer to its guiding principles in their daily decisions. All well and good - but it provokes another dilemma. We simply don't have the vocabulary to describe this alternative approach to business in a way that is concise and easy to understand. As with sustainability, the lexicon for ethical and responsible business is littered with terms that fail to convey effectively the commercial and social benefits that accrue from this approach.