Monday 7 November 2011

November e-bulletin

The protesters of the Occupy Movement have decided to get up and take action on something they believe in, they're looking for ways of getting their voices heard, they want to have a debate about our future.

We whole heartedly welcome the activism and energy and debate. But we don't agree with them. The problem with the protestors is that they don't know what they want to change, they don't have any alternatives and they're wrong to just rail against business as if it's a monolithic entity or against capitalism as though it's the system that's the problem. It's not.

And indeed with the economic news seeming to get bleaker by the day, we need the enormous capacity of businesses to generate wealth and get things moving more than almost ever before. It's the only way we're going to move forward.

In this month’s Good Business e-bulletin, Giles calls for new bravery from business and delves into what this might look like and how we might measure it. To read more, email David@goodbusiness.co.uk.

Friday 4 November 2011

It's a curious old world


The Rio +20 Summit is taking place next year and the environment press is already trying to gee everyone up and convince us that this, not Copenhagen 2009 or Cancun 2010, has to be the turning point in a global response to climate change. There are always high hopes for these conferences and to date none have lived up to expectations. That is why Paul Hohnen writing in the Guardian last week quite rightly pointed out that ‘the message from Rio+20 matters more than ever’. Paul identifies 5 groups of people, each with a different perspective on and response to climate change. There’s the ‘clueless’, the ‘cynics’, the ‘curious’, the ‘champions’, and the ‘calamitists’ – no great surprises and I’m sure we all know people that would fit into these categories. The group that clearly need the most focus is ‘the curious’; they are the ones that haven’t fully made up their mind either way and need a bit of encouragement. And this is where businesses can play a powerful role. Both by taking actions to reduce their own impacts and helping consumers find ways to reduce theirs, companies and brands can help empower ‘the curious’ to feel like they are part of something bigger and that their actions, however small they may seem on their own, can actually make a profound and positive difference.

From my sarcasm at the beginning of this post, perhaps you’ll assume I’m a cynic; to a certain degree you’d be right. But it’s not cynicism about the reality of climate change or the need for the Rio+20 Summit; it’s cynicism about what is expected from these summits and whether efforts would be better spent focusing on supporting and pushing business to take a greater lead.