Njongonkulu Ndungane, then Archbishop of Cape Town (following on from Desmond Tutu) turned up on my doorstep in London shortly after the G8 Gleneagles Summit at which US$50 billion in additional commitments of international development assistance were made. His question, put simply, was how best to track the delivery of real money against these commitments. My answer, crudely, was that he was watching the wrong ball, and that the real menace was the arrival in Africa of ‘private finance initiatives’.…
Braunwald is a fairyland village high in the Swiss alps above Zurich, reached only by funicular, and around which you can only move by foot, ski, horse or electric buggy. As my contribution to the Swiss economy, i can recommend this stunningly beautiful spot for those wanting to take a break, and the aptly named Bellevue as the place to go with kids (for reasons you will have to discover yourselves).…
The heated debate about the current state of AccountAbility surfaces the more interesting question as to the contribution it has made over the years, and what if anything can be learned from its life and times to date. As I have been involved from the ground floor, I thought I might take bash at the first question, see what other folks think, starting with the core area of social auditing.…
Could there be a game-changing Bruntland Report II. That has got to be in the mind of Ban Ki Moon in his recent creation of the UN High Level Panel on Global Sustainability.
Co-chaired by Tarja Halonen , President of the Republic of Finland, and Jacob Zuma, President of the Republic of South Africa, the Panel is a rollcall of the smart, great and, hopefully, good.…
AccountAbility has come a long way since it was born as an idea in the closing minutes of a ground-breaking event in Scotland on social auditing back in 1994. At its height, it was a small but hugely productive institution, networked and so working from Beijing to Sao Paulo, Jo’burg to Copenhagen, and Amman to Washington. It would not be unreasonable to say, despite my obvious bias, that AccountAbility has played a modest role in shaping the last two decade’s work globally on business, accountability and sustainability.…
W. H. Auden, in his missive to love, As I Walked Out One Evening, allows one of his poetic lovers to express undying love to the other in the following words:
‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.
On that basis, of course, love may indeed have an end-date.…
Following a keynote presentation on Responsible Competitiveness I made at the Annual Colloquium in Poland of the European Academy of Business in Society (EABIS) in 2005, my good friend Atle Midttun, professor at the Norwegian School of Management, rose to his feet and accused me roundly of producing “half baked” work. It turned out that Atle was was not insulting me, but pointing out that I tend to offer framing ways of seeing a topic, leaving others to more diligently codify knowledge.…
Start-up companies call it the Valley of Death – the arduous terrain between proof of concept and the beginning of mass production and significant sales. The business and sustainability agenda has reached its own Valley of Death. We ‘get’ what needs to be done, but we do not know how to do it at the scale needed to make a serious dent in the problem.…
