I’m nearing the end of writing the second edition of the book ‘Corporate Responsibility: a critical introduction‘, and I’ve been reflecting on the changes since I started on the first edition in 2006. These have been years of excitement and disappointment for anyone interested in the role of business in taking on the social and [...]
Any day now it will be my organisation, the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment‘s, annual world forum: this year on the topic of low carbon mobility. It should be a great event with prominent speakers and participants engaging on the economics and technologies of mobility in a low carbon economy. But the challenge [...]
Economist and business expert John Kay has a new book out called Obliquity. The main message is that we have got too caught up in numbers and measurement, and this has left us pursuing goals whose main justification seems to be that they can be spelt out in equations. Kay calls this ‘bogus rationalisation’ and [...]
The recent volcano in Iceland that brought European air travel to a halt, prompted a few people to think about this as a dry run for a world with fewer planes. I am part of a multi-company project thinking about the low carbon world, and here are some comments posted on that project’s message board. [...]
I have been tied up with organising a conference in Oxford on business’ role as an agent in tackling climate change. Here is the blurb and you can register online. I’ll post about the conference once it’s over. What is business doing about climate change? Society wants economic growth and a better lifestyle, and it [...]
Previously I’ve talked about Climategate as akin to what happened to Monsanto in the backlash agains genetically modified foods, or to the dubious science used to link MMR vaccines to autism. But my favourite interpretation that Climategate is a Tiger Woods moment. Tiger Woods is a great golfer: the best of his generation. But Tiger [...]
When you search on the name of your company and the first images that come up are ones with skulls, gas masks, protests, and aggressive cartoons, you know you have a communication problem. Welcome to the world of Monsanto: huge, successful, innovative, despised and distrusted. I’m not going to delve into whether Monsanto’s image is [...]
A while ago I likened tackling climate change to the 1st World War. But an earlier struggle also offers important lessons. I’m talking about the abolition of strategy in the British Empire. Why? Because it is one of those rare moments in history when ethical arguments eventually trumped economic ones. At least that’s the argument [...]
When Copenhagen winds up in a week’s time it seems pretty certain the limo we’d hoped would whisk us away to a low carbon world won’t have shown up. We may have a better idea of what a limo looks like, and we will probably know what limo companies to avoid in future. But the [...]
It’s been a busy couple of weeks. All around, people are caught up in the frenzied run up to the Copenhagen. Will there, won’t there be an agreement? Is it better to have one or not? There’s lots of blogging on this as you can imagine, and I’ll just flag up one of my colleague’s, [...]