Keppel&Co

Most of what we've been taught about business, markets and economics is untrue. Time for the red pill.

"If there is a battle between the planet and mankind, the planet will win" "what's the exit strategy?" is a big question without any kind of answer right now. In a few short weeks the majority of the world's population have been forced into a different way of living. Will things ever "get back to normal"? Should they? I very much hope not. Right now all the rhetoric is about fighting the virus, conquering this thing, defeating it. Humans have for way too long seen themselves

From next week my partner and I can no longer live together. I am not a citizen in this bit of Asia and do not perform an "essential" job. I need to go back to where I came from. If I get sick here I will take a hospital bed away from a citizen. I was welcome to spend money to gawk at gardens in the sky or eat overpriced dressed up food. Not welcome to spend time with a loved one. Consumption and entertainment get into the GDP, money transactions count; relationships are usel

For a while now, International Finance Institutions have been trying to integrate their activities better with the wider economic and financial system. Their efforts to better align social and environment objectives with private sector and non-government objectives mirror the principles of Triple Bottom Line (People, Planet, Profit) coined by Volans co-founder John Elkington in 1994 - TBL was intended to pull Planet and People into the Profit focus of businesses; IFIs have be

Get married for love For much of my working life I've wrestled with the problems of partnership - or rather the wrong partners in business. I think collaboration is one of the most powerful forces in business but all too often I see businesses make terrible choices in which partners they collaborate with. One of my favourite brands was a little Norwegian electric car maker called Think who made ahead-of-their-time electric city cars. The Norwegians loved it - but as in many a

Can we politicise consumption - to distinguish between buying stuff that restores natural and human capital as opposed to depletes it?

There are far too many animals in Mongolia - it's turning into a desert And a system narrowly focused on "fair" pay for herders makes it worse On 10th January at the Volans "Tomorrow's Capitalism" event we referred to the damage caused by mass market knitwear and cashmere. Cheap cashmere mean that the only way herders can increase their income is by increasing the number of animals. This has led to a mass of livestock that is completely out of whack with the ecosystem. Paying