Global businesses complain that emerging market companies compete unfairly by ignoring social and environmental standards. The accused in turn point to international media bias and argue that sustainability standards are North Atlantic clubs dominated by incumbent businesses using NGOs to protect profitable markets.
At stake is not just the fate of individual companies, but the impact of intensified global competition on our natural environment and communities.…
There is no peace, says the Lord, for the wicked. But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. (Book of Isaiah 57:20). Classically, yes, but the street level meaning is more often that ‘something not very good is continuing although you might like to stop‘.
The busy-bee activities of the financial community fit this bill rather well right now.…
How much is WEF worth…well, obviously a lot given who it can draw to the table and what folks pay to get in the door and how the media covers Davos in particular…but how much?
Of course one answer is that it is a public interest organisation and cannot be thought about in that way. Trust in commercial organisations is after all painfully low, as the Edelman Trust Barometer for this year highlights.…
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).…
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.…
Anyone in Cancun right now at the climate talks, including myself, will know one thing: that ‘procedural accountability’ is not working. What I mean by procedural accountability are essentially stable rules of conduct for those with power carrying consequences for those who break them. Many activists and professionals have spent much of the last decade or so advocating and innovating in this space, betting especially on new standards and norms of transparency, especially for the corporate community, but also for governments.…
Weeks before COP15 at Copenhagen, ChinaDialogue and OpenDemocracy published versions of my ‘Plan B’ blog, where I argued that national initiatives would form the base currency of climate management for the foreseeable future, and the sooner we got with this new narrative the quicker we could work out how to get it done.
In a nutshell, I argued not just that a decent deal would not be done at Copenhagen, but if my accident one was indeed cut, it might prove to be a distraction that absorbed much energy (the human kind) and money, and most of all time, until its inherent shortfalls became apparent.…
