Filed under: Uncategorized
Tomorrow I leave for northern India. Disconnect, reconnect, etc. So, this blog is on pause. In the meantime, two daydreams about my trip. The first, a painting called Green Fields Of Manali, by Priyadarshi Gautam. The second, a photo from Chasing Himalaya.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Accenture, Apple, CEO, Dow Chemical, GE, Ikea, Intel, Nike, P&G, Quotes, Shell, Unilever, virgin, Volvo
These days it seems like business leaders are queuing up to talk about their role in society. That’s good, right? They’re saying all the right things. I’ve been hoarding a bunch of quotes – here they are below. But first – it’s always slightly scary when a new orthodoxy emerges (even when it’s yours), so some wise words from Warren Buffett:
“The five most dangerous words in business may be ‘Everybody else is doing it’.” Warren Buffett (source)
A new world view
“We are seeing the birth of a new perspective of the world, where ecology and economics are two sides of the same coin.”
Leif Johansson, CEO, VOLVO (source)
“We cannot choose between [economic] growth and sustainability – we must have both.”
Paul Polman, CEO, UNILEVER (source)
“Business is the force of change. Business is essential to solving the climate crisis, because this is what business is best at: innovating, changing, addressing risks, searching for opportunities. There is no more vital task.”
Richard Branson, CEO, Virgin Group (source)
“Solid, hardwired, rigid approaches to business are rapidly giving way to the fluid, open, flexible in literally everything we do and with ramifications we are all grappling with.”
Robert Pitfield, EVP, SCOTIA CAPITAL (source)
The company of the future
“In my view the successful companies of the future will be those that integrate business and employees’ personal values. The best people want to do work that contributes to society with a company whose values they share, where their actions count and their views matter.”
Jeroen van der Veer, Committee of Managing Directors, SHELL (source)
“The brands that will be big in the future will be those that tap into the social changes that are taking place.”
Sir Michael Perry, Chairman, CENTRICA (source)
“We see sustainability, both social and environmental, as a powerful path to innovation, and crucial to our growth strategies.”
Mark Parker, CEO, NIKE (source)
The need for collaboration
“Successful companies can only create solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems by working collaboratively. Business must engage — with communities, governments, customers and each other — because the status quo is not an option. It is not only possible for a global business leader to be a good citizen, but a requirement.”
Jeff Immelt, CEO, GE (source)
“The opportunity for businesses today is to become networks—with a culture of collaborative innovation, stewardship and integrity.”
Filippo Passerini, President, PROCTOR & GAMBLE (source)
“Business, government and civil society and people everywhere can leverage technology to work together in new ways to solve the greatest problems of our multi-polar world.”
Bill Green, Chairman and CEO, ACCENTURE (source)
“The new engine of innovation driven by collaboration, openness, stewardship and the power of the social web gives all of us an opportunity to drive even more rapid, meaningful change across global institutions”.
Michael Dell, CEO, DELL (source)
Going beyond the expected…
“It is not good enough to do what the law says. We need to be in the forefront of these [social responsibility] issues.”
Anders Dahlvig, CEO, IKEA (source)
…or not:
“Corporate responsibility is about doing the right things right.”
Paul Otellini, CEO, Intel (source)
(as opposed to what exactly? Doing the wrong things wrong? Doing the wrong things right?)
It’s core business…
“In short, we are committed – through chemistry – to the betterment of global humanity. And it is this commitment that drives all of our strategies for growth and profitability”.
Andrew Liveris, CEO, Dow Chemical (source)
“We believe that better use of information and communication technologies can contribute in a big way to economic growth while offering opportunities to address global warming.” Stephen Elop, CEO, NOKIA (source)
Tomorrow is too late
“All companies face a direct impact from decreasing natural resources, rising populations and disruption from climate change. And what may be a subtle effect now will only become more intense over the next five to ten years. Never has business had a more crucial call to innovate — not just for the health and growth opportunities for our companies, but for the good of the world.”
Mark Parker CEO, NIKE (source)
“The time to take risks is when you’re successful, not when you’re sliding down the slope.”
Tim Mohin, ex-director of Sustainable Development, Intel and Apple (source)
I’m aware that all of these quotes are very Anglo-Euro-American. Partly that’s because I don’t speak mandarin. So a final piece of wisdom from the East:
“If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.” —Chinese Proverb
And if you really couldn’t be bothered to read all the quotes, I did a Wordle of the entire post, so you can get the general idea:
Image from Jupiter Images.
There’s a lot of strong anti-corporate feeling about at the moment – UK Uncut and it’s cousin US Uncut are good examples. I’ve been working with some big corporates, clarifying the “social purpose” of the business – and I keep hitting upon an anti-corporate instinct. Of course, there are many examples of corporate wrong-doing – past and present – but there’s an anti-business impulse in culture that goes deeper than this.
Anti-corporate archetypes are strongly embedded in popular culture. The shady, inhuman, unaccountable MegaCorp is a universal enemy, featuring in everything from Charlie’s Angles and the A-Team to Superman, Terminator and Avatar. Corporates reaching a certain scale will trigger this unconscious archetype.
All of this is probably, on balance, a good thing. We should maintain a healthy suspicion of corporates, just as we do of governments. However, it shouldn’t obscure the positive role a business can play in society. I’m going to write a post on “the case for business”, focusing on the developing world, to show this. In the meantime, here’s some good old fashioned logo-subvertising that I’ve dug up recently.
Logo images found at IndyMedia, Android Massacre, Logo Design Love, Red Staple Chronicles, Friends Of Reason, Know More Media, Worth1000, Snippets & Slappits, AlexaMCG, Not My Tribe, Creative Greenius,
Filed under: Uncategorized
I’ve had some downtime this week. Not vacation, just not working: catching up with people, doing the assignments for my New York Times course, reading, stuff. I thought I’d share some of the interesting people that caught my attention this week. A sort of long-form #FF, I guess – just in case anyone’s looking for inspiration.
1. JONAH LEHRER @jonahlehrer
I’ve been cyberstalking this guy – Rhodes scholar and science writer with a great blog Frontal Cortex. He writes a lot about how we think, make decisions, etc. Here’s a clip of him talking about the benefits of daydreaming, and how our gadgets and gizmos can get in the way.
2. BRENDAN O-NEILL
Is it a co-incidence that enthralled rhymes with appalled? Both describe my feelings towards Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked. Nobody prods and pokes at my comfortable pro-social precepts better than he does. Some headlines of his well-argued proddings:
I disagree with much of what Brendan says, but he’s the best antidote to lazy thinking I know. Here he is in a panel discussion from 2009 piling into the “miserablism” of anti-consumptionism and the fear of greed (I especially like his take on the banker’s bonus witch-hunt):
3. STEVEN JOHNSON @stevenbjohnson
This week I read Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From – really one of the best books I’ve read for a very long time, a really enjoyable read. I decided to buy the book after listening to his LSE lecture, which is a really good precise. His TED talk is pretty good too:
4. CHRISTIAN LANDER @clander
Author of the blog/book Stuff White People Like, Lander is part comedian, part anthropologist, part list-maker. He likes to dig at our smug white middle class lifestyles – we’re all so post-racial and meritocratic, right? Or are we actually wrapped in privilege and lack of self-awareness? He has a good pop at TED (amazing more people haven’t done this). Anyway, he’s thoughtful and hilarious. Here he is doing a talk show last month:
Filed under: Uncategorized
I got a nice email from WordPress on New Year’s Day, telling me “You’re doing awesome!”. It was their Blog-Health-o-meter. Looks to me like I only just make it into the green – but anyway, I thought I’d share, in case anybody is vaguely interested.
About 7,000 unique visitors came to the site in 2010 – apparently that’s around 18 full 747s. Not a huge number, maybe, but I’m very pleased.
TOP POSTS
1. Why the Plane Stupid ad works – people still watching the polar bears.
2. The Crazy Chemist: talking about legal highs – angry Daily Mail articles.
3. Climbing the social media ladders – people seem to find the links here helpful.
4. How to be happy: Hug a Homo – gay friendly countries are happier places…
5. Work, not charity – about my Ethiopia trip with the Nike Foundation.
TOP REFERRING SITES
1. twitter.com – various links to specific posts.
2. mothergrapevine.com – Mother’s staff directory (since de-listed!).
3. facebook.com – never managed to figure out why I get hits from Facebook…
4. bluelight.ru – big discussion about legal highs.
5. blog.ted.com – links to a post about Hillary Clinton’s TED talk.
TOP SEARCH TERMS
1. crazy chemist
2. antidote jon miller
3. some people are gay get over it
4. fuck cancer
5. crowdfunding
The big puzzle: each post gets a few hundred unique views, and I seem to have quite a few RSS feeds (…feeders?)… so why is the level of comment so low? I occasionally get people emailing me via the contact links, but hardly any comment. Any ideas?
Anyway, whilst we’re doing 2010 web stats – I thought this was interesting, from Google Zeitgeist. It’s the top searches for “how to…” and “what is…”. It paints an interesting picture (I had to look up “how to dougie” and “what is HPV”).
OK so this is the nerdiest post ever: a kind of that-was-2010 in the medium of maps. The first one is beautiful – an infographic from an intern at Facebook, visualizing the connections in people’s social networks. Source.
In October, map geek Kai Krause caused a stir with the below image of Africa. He wanted to show how the standard map projections actually shrink the size of Africa – but most people took it simply as a statement about the relative size of the continent in the global community. Source.
It’s easy to forget that the the internet isn’t actually just floating in the air, but is underpinned by a massive network of fat cables, spanning the globe. Great to see the level of web infrastructure investment around Africa, with investment from NGOs like the Aga Khan Fund and the World Bank. Source.
Looking forward, this next one is a prediction of world GDP shifts in the next five years – not a massive surprise, but nice to see strong growth in many African countries… and China looks like it’s about to burst. Source.
The next map shows where the delegates at this year’s Cancun conference on climate change came from – and it’s a distinctly different shape, and that tells its own story. Source.
A quick look at this map of life satisfaction and it seems that rich Western countries dominate – but almost a third of the top 35 countries have a GDP per capita of less than $20,000. In fact, the country with the highest reported life satisfaction – and by some margin – is Costa Rica. Source.
It was the year of mobile, with an “unprecedented intensity of innovation”, according to Morgan Stanley. This map shows countries where penetration is greater than 1 phone per person. Source.
One big change in the following map on gay rights – India decriminalized homosexuality in 2010, good news for a few million people. Still there are millions criminalized for their sexuality. Groups like Stonewall focus on domestic rights, and it doesn’t seem a priority for the major human rights groups. Source.
Google Earth Engine launched in December 2010, with a mission to map the world’s water and forest resources. Full description on Google’s blog.
Finally, another beautiful visualization. In April the skies above London were clear blue – not a vapour trail in sight – as planes were grounded due to volcanic ash. This video shows the air traffic starting up again.
The votes are being counted, and I just heard Lord Mandelson say, “without wishing to sound glib, I think the public may have won the election”. Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The media and the politicians are enjoying the idea that this was “the people’s election”, but the Electoral Commission estimate that only 56% of 18-25 year olds are even registered to vote. Not everyone’s feeling it.
Still, it’s been more lively than anyone expected. Here are some images to celebrate.
Images from Tropical Inc, Billbored, The Sun and Political Scrapbook.
Filed under: Corporate Citizenship, Pepsi, Social Enterprise, Uncategorized | Tags: Apple, Cooperative, Corporate Citizenship, John Lewis, Microsoft, Nike, Ocado, Pepsi, Post Office
John Grant made an interesting comment a couple of weeks ago, in a talk to launch his book Co-opportunity. He said: “the line between ‘for-profit’ and ‘not-for-profit’ is being blurred. People are going, well, it’s either doing good or it’s not doing good”.
It makes sense. Profit is not longer a dirty word for consumers. The question has shifted from “is this company making too much profit” to “is it making the world a better place?”. Nobody blinked when Apple announced their most recent results – an astonishing gross margin of 40.9%. Why? Because it feels like Apple enriches the world we live in.
In the UK, there are plenty of brands that people are happy to see commercially thriving: John Lewis, Post Office, Ocado, Cooperative. And there are plenty of brands that get slammed for making profits; the utilities and the banks. The difference? People think the former are making a positive social contribution.
Profit, or not for profit…? The question reminds me of Bill Gates’ famous “Creative Capitalism” speech at Davos. He said, “as I see it, there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest, and caring for others”. History has been largely been a struggle between these two forces; Gates’ wants to bring them together into a force for change.
That was in 2008. Since then, the vision of St. Gates is slowly becoming a reality. At mega-corp level, the likes of Nike, Microsoft and Pepsi are increasingly engaged in pro-social ventures (see earlier post), with initiatives like Girl Hub, Unlimited Potential and Refresh Everything. Early days, but a far cry from sweat shops and Britney Spears.
Then there’s the boom in social enterprise – a sector that deliberately blurs the line between profit and not-for-profit. Interesting to see the tug-of-war over social enterprise in the current UK election, with Labour’s proposed Social Investment Bank, and the Conservatives’ Big Society Network.
It’s a beautifully mixed-up picture: big corporates adopting some NGO-like behaviours, not-for-profits adopting the methods of market capitalism. But what’s it all got to do with us?
Last week I was invited to speak at the annual away-day of corporate communications firm Brunswick. They’re the leader in their field: managing corporate reputation, investor and press relations. I had a pretty simple theme: there was a time when big corporates could manage their key relationships in convenient silos – investors, employees, governments, regulators, consumers, customers – but that doesn’t work any more. Big corporates need to think about managing heir relationships to society as a whole.
This seemed to get a pretty positive reaction. I think people liked the challenge: society as a whole doesn’t care if companies make profit; all that matters is that a company makes a positive impact. Maybe our clients will like the challenge too.
Image from Psalm.
Filed under: Politics, Public Opinion, Uncategorized | Tags: Politics, Public Opinion
I fell asleep during Thursday’s debate, it seemed all fairly predictable. I took the transcript and ran it through Wordle (I’m surely not the only saddo who thought of doing this, but I couldn’t find anyone else). Here’s how the three leaders look. Interesting that Clegg and Cameron are quite similar, but Brown looks very different. Their biggest word is “think”, compared to Brown’s “got” – their personal opinions against his imploring certainties.
Here they are – Clegg, Cameron and Brown:
Man of the match Clegg likes “another”, “other”, “alternative” – and clearly viewers liked these words too, judging by the response. He says “actually” a lot, and “system”- telling us how it really is.
Brown talks about “risk” and “cuts” a lot. If all campaigning is basically about either hope or fear, Brown was playing the fear: “protect” and “secure” are also prominent.
Cameron talks about “waste” instead of “cuts”. This reminds me of a project we did on climate change, working with Linguistic Landscapes: “stop wasting energy” turned out to be far more motivating than “save energy”: waste is one of the most negative words in the language, something to be avoided.
Some words were conspicuous by their absence: nobody talks about “welfare” anymore, nobody has anything to say on “climate”, and “Big Society” didn’t make it in.
In the US, pollsters like Frank Luntz have made their fortunes by fine-tuning the words politicians use – for example, shifting the debate from “estate tax” to “death tax”, or from “drilling for oil” to “exploring for energy”. Many people are instinctively suspicious of this kind of thing – maybe because Republicans like Luntz have been the masters of this art. I think that language matters, helps us to link policy debates to our underlying values.
The Orwell Prize takes place this week, recognizing the best political writers. Orwell is now synonymous with political doublethink, but he was passionate about the role of words in politics, writing that they should be “an instrument for expressing and not concealing or preventing thought”. This comes from his famous essay Politics and the English Language – and from what I saw of the sleep-inducing leaders debate, his comment on political speech still applies:
The concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less of words chosen for their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.
Filed under: Advertising, Drugs, FRANK, Politics, Uncategorized | Tags: Advertising, COI, effectiveness, FRANK, Mother, Politics
By the way, there’s an election on – and both parties will spend heavily on their campaigns: in 2005, they each spent just short of £18 million, and this time the Tories are already on their second national outdoor advertising campaign.
Nice to see they believe in the power of communications. So why are both parties pledging to cut government advertising budgets? The Tories will cut 40%, whilst Labour say they’ll cut 25% in two years time. Here are some of the lines being trotted out:
“Government is the UK’s biggest advertiser”
Shock horror: government ad spend was £207.9 million in 2009 overtaking P&G as the UK’s biggest advertiser. And why not? P&G spent £155 million in 2009, persuading us to buy Pampers instead of Huggies. Government communications deals with public health, climate change, drink-driving, etc. Wouldn’t we expect government to spend at least as much as P&G?
“We need to get tough on government waste”
Cutting communications budgets fits into the whole “finding efficiencies” narrative. This is massively short-sighted: spending on communications should be able to save the government money:
- The NHS spends £1.7 billion each year treating smoking-related conditions. Doesn’t it make sense to discourage people from smoking? The government spends on average $8 million a year on anti-smoking ads (with a 2008 burst of £28 million). Prevention before cure – does this sound like waste, or common sense?
- The NHS spends around £1.5 billion each year treating conditioned linked to obesity. The government is spending £75 million over three years on anti-obesity advertising. Sounds sensible to me./li>
“We need to reduce the deficit”
The Tories’s 40% cut would save around £80 million. This barely covers a few hours of the national deficit (currently running at £500 million a day). To put it in perspective, the money government would save covers the cost of widening a mile and a half of the M6 (costing £56 million a mile).
“We need spending cuts to boost the economy”
This is obviously the Tory philosophy – but there’s evidence that government advertising has a benefit to the economy.
- The Home Office spent £28.4 million over four years on its Vehicle Crime campaign, and econometric modeling shows this saved just over £590 million in the cost of crime (source: IPA effectiveness paper).
- Our own work for FRANK uses highly targeted communications to heavy drug users, getting them into treatment before they become problem drug users – saving up to £100,000 for each individual (the healthcare cost of a long term heroine user) as well as preventing broader social and economic harm.
Of course, it’s a few easy headlines: cracking down on waste, spin, nanny-state, etc. The Daily Mail love it, with a steady stream of stories like Celebrities paid £325,000 to appear in government advertising. The reality is, communications work – they’re an important policy tool, and the politicians know it.
Image from Adbusters
