Does this sound familiar? “Economists predict no recovery until 2013.” “Politicians and economists agree on the need for savage cutbacks.” “Economists don’t think people are rational.” (All real news stories.) These and a thousand other news stories reflect the high status economists have in the modern world. There is a Nobel prize for economics but [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Remember the advert, ‘And all because the lady loves Milk Tray’? A suave hero doing the derring-do to deliver a box of Cadbury’s best selling chocolate brand to ladies in exotic locations. The iconic ads ran for 35 years until they were axed in 2003. But Milk Tray is still a Cadbury’s best seller, and [...]
Green venture capitalist John Doerr says that America must win the race to dominate the new green economy. Is it just silliness to wonder which countries in previous wars would have talked in terms of global leadership, the must-win race and the supremacy of one country’s people? What horse are we backing here?
Pensions are the biggest source of investment capital in the world. They are going through a huge transformation of their own. It’s a transformation that will affect our responses to climate change in ways we’ve barely begun to think about. But the consequences could be enormous.
What this week has brought home is the size of the gap between our goals and our achievements. Climate change combatants are looking for ways to ramp up solutions : hopefully they won’t mistake the icepick for a solution