Sam Lakha, Manager, Volans Outreach.
New Champions and distributed leadership trend
During the closing remarks of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions, held in Tianjin, China, Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum, argued that the unfolding crisis presents a tremendous challenge to the existing financial order. “This is probably the first transformational crisis of our globalized age,” he said . “Many things will change.” While several of the world’s leading businesses in recent weeks have disappeared, new corporations will emerge from around the world to take the lead. That, in a nutshell, has been the founding insight for Volans - and our aim is to identify and support some of the highest potential champions of the new economic order, most particularly those in our Trailblazers portfolio.
In a poll conducted during the event, participants pointed to the current crisis as the greatest threat to global growth over the next 12 months. Old and new stakeholders need to work together to meet this common challenge, argued Robert Greenhill, WEF Managing Director. Meanwhile, the Forum’s Global Growth Risk Report 2008 argues that risk is exacerbated by focusing only on the current crisis and not planning to move beyond it.
Unsurprisingly, a majority of participants agreed that the greatest opportunities for growth lie in Asia and particularly in China. But now, more than ever, the participants concluded that real leadership is required, and that, while China’s US$ 2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves may make the country wealthy, it is unlikely that China will become the world’s sole leader. More than ever, leadership must be cooperative to weather the current, transformational crisis. “The whole notion of leadership has shifted,” Schwab concluded. “Leadership today is much more distributed.” And that, we believe, is where the power of unreasonable people fits in.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2008/09/new-champions-and-distributed-leadership-trend/.
- John ElkingtonEarth Overshoot Yesterday
Unhappy day. September 23rd, marked yet another unfortunate milestone: As of yesterday, humanity is estimated to have consumed all the new resources the planet will produce this year, according to the Global Footprint Network . For the rest of 2008, they conclude, “we will be in the ecological equivalent of deficit spending, drawing down our resource stocks – in essence, borrowing from the future.”
They continue to say: “The recent bank failures in the United States have shown what happens when debt and spending get out of control. We are seeing signs of similarly disastrous consequences from our ecological overspending. Climate change, shrinking forests, declining biodiversity and current world food shortages are all results of the fact that we are demanding more from nature than it can supply.”
Globally, we now use the biological capacity of 1.4 planets, according to Global Footprint Network data. Earth Overshoot Day (also known as Ecological Debt Day) was devised by Global Footprint Network partner NEF (New Economics Foundation). Each year, GFNcalculates humanity’s Ecological Footprint (its demand on cropland, pasture, forests and fisheries), and compares this with the amount of resources the world’s lands and seas generate. In 2008, the calculations now suggest that in less than 10 months we consume what it takes the planet 12 months to produce. “Humanity has been in overshoot since the mid 1980s,” GFN notes, “when the first Earth Overshoot Day fell on December 31, 1986. By 1995 it was more than a month earlier, arriving on November 21. Ten years later it had moved another six weeks earlier, to October 2, 2005.”
One key metric for the success of the movements and communities of which Volans is part will therefore be to start the clock hand moving back towards December 31 - and, eventually, showing a building process of regeneration. But with billions of new people expected on Earth by mid-century, coupled with the spread of consumerist lifestyles, the likelihood, however hard we work, is that our ecological debt will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2008/09/earth-overshoot-yesterday/.
- John ElkingtonOpening Maps and Rhizomes
As we work to develop the ‘Pathways to Scale’ framework to help social innovators mainstream their ideas and business models, we are wide open to sources of new ideas and ways of looking at the world. Indeed, being ‘open’ has triggered a peculiar chain of events.
We are developing a 5-stage model that goes by the acronym ‘OPENS‘. with the goal of opening doors, possibilities, and new markets to innovators seeking to solve social and environmental problems. It was therefore intriguing to come by an exhibition of contemporary Latin American photography called ‘Opening Maps’ (Mapas Abiertos).
The exhibition is an authentic journey through Latin American identity, its political and social struggles seen through the subjectivity of the artists and their cameras (picture below, credit: Tatiana Parcero). The intensity of the themes evoked Eduardo Galeano’s classic book ‘The Open Veins of Latin America‘, which describes five centuries of Latin America’s exploitation; a history that forms the basis of today’s political, social and economic injustice.
One of our central concerns is the process by which innovators influence incumbents, who usually have little incentives to address the market failures in the status quo. So these parallels with the opening of routes, maps, and veins felt therefore part of a larger, single narrative.
This single narrative around the ‘opening’ social transformation seems to move freely across organizations, regions, and social classes. It suggests a connectivity of political projects, led by (apparently) disconnected groups of individuals — leaders, artists, thinkers, managers, and the ordinary people that attend exhibitions, read manifestos, and join revolutions.
The work of modern philosophers Charles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is useful to understand this phenomenon. In their book ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia‘ they have borrowed the botanical concept of “Rhizomes” to refer to the way knowledge (including ethics) spreads in society.
A rhizome is a root-like, subterranean plant stem. It is commonly horizontal in its position, and can be thought of as the network-like roots of grass, which shoot and spread sideways. Deleuze and Guattari similarly referred to “rhizomatic networks” as narratives expanding virally throughout society’s disciplines, semiotics, power structures and bodies of knowledge.
The rhizome metaphor is a powerful one, especially for those working to improve the connectivity between actors in order to accelerate social change. The work ahead, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, should be focused on establishing “connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles.” Spread the word.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2008/09/opening-maps-and-rhizomes/.
- Alejandro LitovskyTrailblazers at work
Homo volans in moat
As the Autum/Fall begins, the latest round of our work with what we now dub our portfolio of Trailblazers has started. These are the 30 or so social enterprises and other innovative organisations we support around the world. In the past week or so, for example, I have been up to Cranfield University’s Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility to take part (a couple of panel sessions) in their big event with EABIS and, on Sunday-through-Monday, I was in a small castle outside Leiden, taking part in my first Board meeting with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). A brief account of that trip can be found here. The photograph is one I took of a sculpture that stands in the castle’s moat - and which seemed a perfect representation of Homo volans on the lookout for opportunity.
Meanwhile, Pamela has been in the US, doing a three-week stint at Columbia Business School, one of the schools we support as part of Volans Campus.
To be honest, when we came to map out all the organisations we are involved in both as part of our Trailblazers, Campus and Keynote programs, while we were putting together the latest iteration of this website, their sheer number came as something of a shock. On the other hand, we concluded that the sheer diversity and ambition of these organisations provides us with a means to considerably amplify our own impact over time.
Although Volans is unlikely to evolve into a financial venture fund any time soon, we aim to get much better at the art of investing our time, effort and networks in pursuit of social innovation and change. In the process, we would love to hear from people who have developed their own social change portfolios with a similar end in mind.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2008/09/trailblazers-at-work/.
- John ElkingtonSilver lining around capitalist market cloud
Long-standing Wall Street institutions are collapsing overnight, the role of the US Federal Reserve is being transformed, investors everywhere are losing complete confidence in the US market and opponents of free market capitalism are pointing to the US situation as proof positive that capitalism without government oversight leads to disaster. It is in this context that entered my classroom in Uris Hall, home of Columbia University’s Business School, to a room-full of 45 MBA students who had signed up for my course, Social Entrepreneurship: A Global Perspective – an elective. Dean Hubbard, head of the Business School, had only hours before gathered the students and faculty to share his insights on the impact of the Wall Street earthquake on the Business School. After all, many of Columbia’s MBAs are recruited directly into Lehman, Merrill Lynch, AIG to name the most recent victims of the debacle.
But the justified mood of gloom and doom stayed outside my classroom. Instead, we talked about the huge opportunity the situation presents to revamp unfettered capitalism which has benefitted a few hugely, some to a degree, but which has excluded the majority of the world’s population from many of the positive aspects of globalization. And because young people are by nature optimistic – and because all people desperately want to believe that change from the current situation is possible – we engaged in an energizing discussion about the emergence of a new breed of entrepreneurs, managers and employees who want more from life than a fat paycheck. I bombarded them with examples from all over the world of individuals who have used their talents to create and run enterprises that are, as US entrepreneur Bo Peabody notes, “fundamentally innovative, philosophically positive and morally compelling” – infecting those who work with them with the belief that they, too, can be agents of change.
But the challenge now – and the chance we have – is to re-examine how these kinds of companies can grow beyond being inspiring classroom anecdotes. Unless we take advantage of the present situation to revamp the way our capital market ecosystem works, our corporate leaders, no matter how well-meaning they may be, will always be slaves to the tyranny of the market.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2008/09/silver-lining-around-capitalist-market-cloud/.
- Pamela HartiganLearning from the Lystrosaurs
While getting ready to head out to Heathrow and my first board meeting with the Global Reporting Initiative, due to take place in some sort of castle outside Leiden, my mind has been chewing away at the central issue of scaling solutions. Then I read in today’s Sunday Times about new thinking around a complete new class of animals, the pig-like Lystrosaurs, which were among the few survivors of the mass extinction event around 251 million years ago that wiped out 95% of all living species.
One link with the scale issue was the fact that before the volvanic eruptions that caused the extinctions the Lystrosaurs were simply one among a blizzard of species, but the cataclysmic events removed their predators - it is thought that the Lystrosaurs survived because they lived in burrows. They subsequently exploded out across the surface of the Earth, then a single continent, for a golden era of 1-2 million years.
Interestingly, two other small populations of diminutive animals were among the survivors: the cynodonts, that would eventually give rise to the mammals, and the diapsids, that later branched out into the dinosaurs, reptiles and birds.
The article, by Science Editor Jonathan Leake, concludes by quoting a scientist to the effect that: “The amounts of CO2 we are emitting [today] are roughly equivalent to those poured into the atmosphere during the Permian eruptions. Our climate is changing like theirs did.”
In thinking through the implications of the era of convulsive change now coming our way, Volans will need to keep a constant eye on where our team invests its efforts - particularly across our evolving portfolio of ‘Trailblazers‘, profiled elsewhere on this website. Choosing where to place our bets will be as much a matter of intuition and blind luck as of metrics, I suspect, but I am finding that new processes of calculation and weighting are beginning to operate in my brain.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2008/09/learning-from-the-lystrosaurs/.
- John ElkingtonWorried about Black Holes? Well here’s a Green Plug!
Alejandro seems unmoved by the risk of Black Holes at 2 Bloomsbury Place
At home - and in the Volans London office - we have been buzzing with excitement about the launch of the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We’re always keen to know more about our Universe. But when talking in the office the other day with Ben Whitlock, who has been getting all our new computers, BlackBerries, printers and other equipment to talk to each other, someone raised the question whether any of us were worried about the prospect of Black Holes spawned by the LHC? No, I replied, and “Today’s the day we send out a Green Plug.” This was the media release on our new Advisory Board, one of the components of the new venture we have been compiling in recent months. The hope is that these ten extraordinary people - our own Small Idea Collider - will help us view and interact with the wider world in different ways. And we’re working on a parallel experiment, the Volans Ecosystem, of which more shortly.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2008/09/worried-about-black-holes-well-heres-a-green-plug/.
- John ElkingtonLatest Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes
The Volans team is currently racing to get the many components of our new website ready in time for our ’soft launch’ later this week. One component of that work is a pulling together of the nearly 30 organisations that we now serve as members of boards, advisory boards or similar. One of these is the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes initiative run by Sustainable Asset Management - and they have just released their latest company listings. Well worth a look.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2008/09/latest-dow-jones-sustainability-indexes/.
- John Elkington