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Our economy is intrinsicially extractive. Every year we make more stuff, we consume more energy, the planet gets sicker. For my entire life "growth" has meant "more". More volume, more market, more share. The route to business success was to produce more. Daring to question this fundamental was heresy. Consumer led is a myth, volume is all production push I know first hand the stress of a volume obsessed organisation. For a few years I was responsible for the sales numbers at a big car company. That car company wanted to be "Number One" (aka bigger than Toyota). Every year we would set a target based on a heady cocktail of analysis, ambition and wishful thinking. That target drove production numbers. Except it didn't. The relationship between market forecast and production was the other way round. The market was a function of production numbers. It worked like this. We'd all guess what the market was going to be. Generally "last year + X%". Then we'd decide what market share we were going to take. Generally "last year + Y%". Then we'd end up with a production number and voila. The cars would get produced. And what gets produced gets sold. Always. Somehow. That's the market. The sale might not be a "good" sale in the sense that we had to pull some tricks to get the vehicles accepted by the buyer. Occasionally the sale wasn't a "sale" at all. More an internal stock movement for the sake of numbers. December was always very busy (looking right at you Tesla. I wrote that playbook) The difference between a good year and a bad year was how much we had to push in order to make the numbers. We're writing cheques the planet can't cash As I got into brand world and then sustainability world I realised that production push is at the heart of how we are screwing up the planet. "More" has become the only way to grow. And since 1970 we've been taking more out of the planet than can be sustained. Our material footprint is larger than ever. We don't see this because "materials" don't feature in our numbers. In the past 6 years we've consumed more resources than we did in the entire 20th Century. Every year since 2012 we've consumed more in 12 months than we did since the dawn of humanity to 1950. 'More' is addictive For anyone in business right now "more" is the only game in town. Nobody ever asks "how do we make and sell less stuff?". It's the Voldemort of topics. But it's a discussion that needs to be had by every business on the planet. And the good news is that - in reality - "less" might actually be not just better for the planet, but also better for business. If we're going to fix the planet we need to define a new game. And that means redefining value in order to unhook ourselves from volume. 'More' is a waste of resources, it's bad business We make too many things. More things than people need. Most cars stand idle 95% of the time. When they are moving, they mostly have only one person in them. Much of the time that they are on the move they are circling around looking for somewhere to park. We say we have a housing shortage in the UK yet 1m homes stand empty. Our new housing targets don't recognises retrofitting offices as homes. We are wasting carbon we've already put into the built environment. Clothing companies make double the amount per person compared to the 1970s. 16KGs of new clothes for every man, woman and child on the planet, every year. 110 billion items. Most of it isn't worn. Tonnes of it goes to landfill. Which is a shame because all of that growth, every bit of it, was in synthetic fibres. (More on this here "Does clothing have an opioid problem?") We make 23 billion pairs of trainers every year. And send 22 billion to landfill. Even music suffers with this non-useful consumption. Of the 185 million tracks on streaming services 46 million have never been listened to, by anyone, ever. Something is very wrong. We're making more than people can consume. We're wasting vast amounts of materials and energy making all the stuff. And then we're spending precious time and resources in businesses trying to push the stuff out. The planet suffers. Business suffers. And people suffer - it is stressful being inside a company pushing volume. And nobody is ever, ever happy, even when all the targets are hit. We make too much. But we don't have any playbook for making less. So how do we get off this addiction? The clothing example highlights one of the big problems we've got ourselves into. If we were to maintain volumes but switch out of synthetics the effect would be to put even more massive and destructive pressure on nature. From our work in Mongolia we see first hand what happens when single commodity, volume unconstrained supply chains penetrate the landscape. Too many animals (50m too many), overgrazing, desertification. As Textile Exchange says in the Future of Synthetics : "....a total shift away from synthetics to land-based raw materials – particularly at current production rates – could lead to an overreliance on and depletion of natural ecosystems." (my italics) So the first step in fixing clothing is reducing volume. Probably back to 8KGs per head or less. So a 50% across the board reduction in volume. Until that happens the clothing sector hasn't got a prayer in meeting its environmental ambitions. But even talking about volume reduction is a no-no. Everyone knows it's the problem but nobody says it. (Out loud). It's really hard. It would involve an upending of supply chains and a transition that would take at least 3 years. But it's got to happen. My hunch is that the small but growing number of eco-aware brands that are more of the pioneers in this space will grasp this mantle pretty soon. This is the trap we are in. Every supply chain in every sector is geared to current volumes. Halving clothing production or halving car production overnight would wreak havoc on workforces and livelihoods. Conversely swapping all the volume for "green" volume would wreak havoc on ecosystems - whether it's lithium or natural fibres. We can't reduce volumes without screwing up people, we can't keep the volumes without screwing up the planet. So the transition has to be planned and managed. At the heart of it is a new way to create value. Once that's in place then volume reduction becomes possible. The revolution is coming. It may already be here. The route out lies in the seeds of these problems. There is a fundamental change coming to every business, everywhere, in how wealth is created and how value gets assessed. Over the next 4 to 5 years there will be ever more focus on the relationship between all organisations and the planet, driven in part by ground-breaking initiatives such as the Taskforce for Nature Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and Science Based Targets for Nature. The upshot of this shift will be a redefining of what a business does and how it does it. There will be much more emphasis (and opportunity) at the originating end. Competitive edge will shift from the market end to the producer end. Some of this will be slow, some will be fast. But already there is a growing cohort of brands that are pioneers of the new way of doing things. At the heart of the shift is a fundamental change in how businesses create value. Out go business models built on extraction, in come business models built on planet friendly value creation. This is overturning centuries of orthodoxy on how to grow. Wine - lots to like It's hard to find any sector that has contracted. But one has and it's thriving. Wine is a product that clearly is dependent on agriculture as well as consumption. Overproduction destroys margins. Underproduction drives up prices. Overall hectares have decreased (mostly driven by EU action) and overall volumes have decreased. Wine is very useful glimpse into a different kind of value model. In wine there is more or less an inverse relationship between volume growth and profit growth. Attempts to introduce commodity, economy of scale practices to wine have tended to produce high volumes, low prices, big distribution costs, and massive volatility and flaky profits. Essentially there are two markets - a volume/commodity one which is cutthroat, and a storied, explorer one which is where all the margins are. Commodity wine is 70% of the volume (and the cost) but only 30% of the revenue; story wine is 30% of the volume for 70% of the revenue. The better you are at being in synch with nature and the land, the more likely your wine will be valued. Of course there are still massive distribution challenges but the 'value' of wine is decoupled from volume maximisation in a way that points to a different form of value for business. So what does a new value creation system look like? I've been working on this shift in some form or another for the past few years. At its heart is an alignment between our instinctive, intuitive sense of value and how we think about and measure economic value. Economics doesn't like intangible, context specific concept. But this new system is all about recognising and amplifying new forms of wealth. Some of the key learnings from my journey: Nature wealth 1 At Good Growth we've worked with herder groups on shifting their volumes of livestock to be in synch with nature. The income uplift from this comes initially from two sources - one off livestock sales, and over time multi-fibre revenue streams. Basically at present only cashmere is valued by brands - and even then only selectively. So all the other animals (that are critical for the diversity of the system) get ignored. The sheep, the camels, the horses etc. In total only 5% of the fibre weight generates 95% of their income right now. It's early days but this year one group reduced numbers by 40% and at the same time doubled their income. We may not be able to replicate that everywhere but "more from less" is a really exciting path to pursue. Nature wealth 2 The Landbanking Group are working on a plan to turn nature (more specifically nature uplift) into a fiduciary grade asset class that can be recognised on the balance sheet. This is much needed as currently our system only recognises natural value by ripping it out. There is a good (hour long) video of Martin Stuchtey discussing this. Worth your time. Nature wealth 3 If Nature can be on the balance sheet then actions and investments for nature could yield very high returns on investment. Here are two examples: Regenerative sheep wool - South Gobi sheep wool is so cheap it has scarcely any financial value. Moving it around costs much more than the value of the wool as seen through conventional supply chains. But....seen through the landscape lens there's a different story. It hasn't rained in the Gobi for 2 years or more. Food is scarce. Any weather events (and there are many) mean that additional fodder needs to be shipped in from elsewhere. Sheep wool is an excellent moisture retainer (and natural fertiliser) and can be used to stimulate grass growth in the area. Harvesting all the sheep wool and putting it in bags doesn't cost much at all - maybe $10k, maybe less - but the ecosystem payoff is huge. If tiny landscape investments like this could be recognised as generating "nature uplift" then we have something that begins to mirror and work with nature and diversity. Horsehair - Mongolian horses are not pets. They roam the rangeland and have very strong opinions. The herders love them and they occupy a special place in the culture. For years horse tail fibre has been used to make the iconic Mongolian horsehair fiddle which you'll see in traditional form as well as "let's rock" form with people like the Hu. (Volume up, headbanging mode engaged). Horsehair as a fabric (horsehair canvas is used to make high end men's suits - it's the inner lining) more or less became a China monopoly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Chinese horsehair is gathered not from live horses but as a slaughterhouse by-product. Gathering horsehair tail from live and feisty horses is no easy feat. But each horse is worth three goats so the income is pivotal in enabling livestock reduction. Furthermore a luxury suit made from live and loved horses is a lot better story than a luxury suit made from synthetics. $80k buys enough horsehair for 12,000 Italian men's suits. (There's other stuff that goes into the suit). So relatively speaking a tiny financial outlay generates a huge nature return (not to mention the cultural payoff). Origin value - the thing that makes wine work is origin value. Cheese is similar. Knowing where it comes from, and knowing some of the story, adds to the value of the product. I saw this first hand when we did the strategy for Teliani Valley. That clothing doesn't celebrate and amplify origin value is a mystery to me. There's a lot about the factory but nothing about the fibre. This is a missed opportunity on a grand scale. But it's not just clothing. It turns out that materials that we take for granted, like sand and glass, also have massive origin value potential. A long time ago factories helped to disconnect us further from nature and places. Origin stories and origin value can help reconnect us. (But an origin value supply chain looks very different from a volume maximisation one_. Connection/Identity Value - this is where brand strategy has largely failed. Brands build strong connections between people and things - landscapes, places, products, other people. It feels good and reaffirming to make a choice that connects us more. That connection value has an economic value - but it is context specific and can't be easily measured. But it's there. In Real Estate the new developer Biograpi shunned the orthodoxies of Tbilisi's apartment market with its focus solely on $ per square meter to speak more directly to the communities and stories that for Georgians are at the heart of home. Instead of a purely space maximisation approach each development is built around an origin story and designed to foster connection. The company put the soul back into development - and the one thing Georgians love is soul. The company - a new entrant - gained a massive advantage in a very undifferentiated market. A collaborative endeavour It is not the fault of people who work in companies that we are in this mess. The prevailing and powerful economic system that has done so much for us has run out of steam and needs rewiring. It's a system issue. But they absolutely can help in working with us to define new ways to create value. If we can make more money whilst making less stuff we will have made the breakthrough that the planet needs.

We make too many clothes. All the volume growth in clothing is synthetic We dig up way too much stuff. It's 50 years + since humanity first started overshooting and since then it's got worse every year. Unfortunately we don't count all the stuff we dig up because both GDP and Material Flow statistics don't pay any attention to all the waste. So the 20 tonnes of rock that gets dug up to get enough gold for your wedding ring does not count. Anywhere.* Clothing companies are overproducing like crazy In 1975 clothing companies used to make just under 8kgs of new stuff for every man, woman and child on the planet. In 2025 they are due to make 16kgs of new stuff per head. These numbers take into account none of the other stuff that has to be used making all these clothes - the water, the energy, all the 'raw' waste. The total amount has quadrupled in the time the global population has doubled. 16KGs is a lot of clothes. A big chunky knit might be 0.5KGs. So someone, somewhere is buying a heck of a lot. Or are they? People aren't wearing more layers of clothing - so if these numbers are right then the total amount that is being stuffed into wardrobes is massively up. And/or being thrown away. Or both. Clothing companies are obsessed with volumes I've spent a lot of my life looking at growth in different sectors. Clothing has a volume growth addiction like I have never, ever seen. It's a collective obsession. As if the only route to success is by producing more and more stuff. Production push - what gets produced gets sold This is not a demand led phenomenon. The volume per head inflation is a specific peculiarity of clothing. But it does bear the same hallmarks as the automotive industry at its most volume obsessed. Nobody wanted to lose market share. Everyone agreed that next year's market would be "this year's + X%". And so planned production to meet that number. What gets produced gets sold. Somehow. Always. I know - I was the guy who had to make all the sales before year end by hook or by crook. Sometimes that meant recording "sales" even when really they weren't bought. Sometimes it meant a mad scramble in the last week of December to shunt unsold stock to special channels where it could be recorded as sales. December was always a great month. For numbers. Polyester When you unpack the numbers all of the per capita growth in clothing, all of it since 1970 has been in polyester and other synthetics. "Natural" fibres have remained steady at 5KGs+ per head whilst synthetics have rocketed to just under 12KGs. Volume vs "sustainable materials" Nobody needs 16KGs of new clothing every year. But there is no discussion in clothing world about stepping back from the volume brink. Every forecast I've ever seen for apparel only goes in one direction. Which, in the context of the climate and biodiversity challenges, is pretty amazing. Instead there is a heated debate about whether material X or material Y is better for the planet. And in the extremely odd maths that is used to answer that question polyester ends up being "better" than "wool". By a lot. What this diagram communicates is that wool produces 34X the amount of GHG emissions for every 1 tonne. Whereas polyester produces only 2.6X. Ergo every tonne of polyester is "better" than every tonne of wool. The danger of simplistic numbers There are at least two issues with this. The maths seems not to count all sorts of vital stuff such as impact on environment and impact at end of life. And - perhaps most obviously - a material simply cannot have a linear footprint relationship. The idea that XYZ material per se is or isn't "sustainable" is nonsense. Unless we're looking at landscapes you can't tell. It depends - always. Depends on the place. Depends on the farming system. Depends on intensity. An intensive farm using tonnes of chemicals is going to have a much higher GHG footprint than say our Mongolian South Gobi herders whose footprint is negligible (or maybe even less than negligible - we're on the hunt for emissions). Context matters. I know that behind these numbers there is a strenuous attempt at context - but in this telling polyester looks "better" than wool. Clothing has become so massively fragmented and globalised that at the brand level all that can be seen are materials. Context is lost. Landscape context is lost. Volume is the key problem The debate about Material X vs Material Y is not the point. I can't get involved (except to point out that natural fibres are getting a raw deal on the analysis). The key issue. The big problem. Is that there's just too much stuff being produced. None of us need all that stuff. The inflation in clothing volume is entirely driven by synthetics. So weaning us off synthetics at such high volumes is a fundamental part of the answer. But it's complicated. Textile Exchange have produced a report on the Future of Synthetics that points out that simply switching the same volume from synthetics to natural fibres would be devastating (my italics): "....a total shift away from synthetics to land-based raw materials – particularly at current production rates – could lead to an overreliance on and depletion of natural ecosystems." So climbing down from the production rate is the necessary first step to avoid yet more damage. Weaning us off synthetics is much, much harder than getting us hooked. Production led markets are all about push. This market is all about the growth of synthetics. It's easy to get hooked on synthetics - every history of every synthetic has the same trajectory. The original excitement (all that performance, none of that cost), the exponential growth (cheap stuff!), and then the hangover and the realisation that maybe it wasn't such a great idea for human and planetary health. But by then it's too late. Fentanyl has taken off like widlfire, single use plastic is the norm, 50% of all clothes are synthetic. Maybe a 8KG world is better for everyone There is a way out of all this. But it's not going to come from mainstream clothing companies who are as much a victim of this economic trap as anyone else. Instead it will be a few pioneering folk reimagining value systems and demonstrating a new paradigm. A better system for everyone, creating more integrated value, and operating at volumes that meet the constraints of the planet. More on that new paradigm soon. But in the meantime let's end with this thought. It looks to me as if the whole industry was more stable, more profitable, and less 'rollercoaster' when only producing 8KGs per person. Revenues may be up but a production push model only introduces extreme volatility. Unsold stock (and there will be a lot of it) is the prime determinant of whether you thrive or suffer. Which is why everyone who works in clothing seems to be very stressed. All the time. Maybe the people who suffer most from the push are the brands themselves. #apparel #synthetics #opioids #goodgrowth #textileexchange #materialworld *read "Material World" by Ed Conway. Amazing.

Fast Company on cashmere and Mongolia. Grateful for the shout out for Good Growth. Our perspective comes from seeing the apparel chains through the lens of the landscape. Unfortunately it's really very hard for supply chain owners to see that end of the chain. So the landscape impact is shrouded in opacity. There's so much good the apparel industry could do for the regeneration of landscapes - not just by relieving volume pressure and raising prices, but also by recognising and working with all the other fabulous (and diverse) materials in the landscape - from sheep, camels, horses, yaks...diverse chains to foster and encourage biodiversity. #cashmere #goodgrowth #fastcompany #biodiversity #sustainability

Sheep 11458 by Alice Robinson. I love it. Her Royal College of Art MA project focused on making as much as possible from just one sheep, numbered 11458. Alice made all sorts of stuff from this one sheep - knitwear, shoes, gloves and more. All from one sheep. https://www.rca.ac.uk/showcase/show-rca/alice-robinson/ This is the way to reduce livestock numbers and the blight of overgrazing. If we create more value from everything nature gives us, then there's no need to have so much intensity and so many animals. Less overgrazing, more room for nature to rebound. It's the economic side of 'wilder farming' Value chains that work for the benefit of nature, not for extractors. This is essential for restoring the rangelands - we have to change the economics for herders so they can make more from less. Very smart stuff. We need much more of this. #sheep11458 #goodgrowth #alicerobinson #wilderfarming #keppelandco

Heaven knows we're all miserable now One of the most joyous sights and sounds of a fabulous Glastonbury was Rick Astley and Blossoms giving a whole lot of love to some Smiths songs. Would have been fabulous to be there (we live so close it's almost a crime that we weren't there) but this year the BBC did an amazing job of covering the whole thing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0ft6w7z/glastonbury-rick-astley-blossoms-perform-the-smiths A bit of simple joy is what we all need nowadays, but heaven knows it is hard to find. Burn Down the Disco. Sustainability world is full of relentless misery. I've written before about how Brand world has comprehensively failed to get to grips with sustainability It's a real shame because when brand world does get to grips with something it can be a powerful force for good, fashioning galvanising narratives that stimulate big movements in how we all think and act. There's another world which is - I think - disappearing down a needless pit of misery. It's what others and I tend to call Sustainability Inc. If Brand World is Dopey then Sustainability Inc really is Grumpy. (Sidebar - Brand World is supposed to be all about long term strategy but suffers from attention deficit disorder on an industrial scale. Having failed to grapple with climate and biodiversity Brand World is right now in the throes of an wheel spinning obsession with AI. All noise no insight.) For those unfamiliar with Sustainability Inc it is essentially the advisory arm of Sustainability World. There are commentators and advisors and convenors and platforms and (yet more pointless) frameworks galore. It is all very connected, the same people crop up persistently, and it is NOT HAPPY. Take a peek at Sustainability Inc and you will come across a narrative that is obsessed with 'polycrises'. It does a good job in calling out greenwash and inadequate legislation, but with a few noble exceptions is way too deferential to corporate sustainability strategies (corporates providing most of the funding for Sustainability Inc hence shy to bite the hand that feeds etc). The result is pretty miserable and (this has got worse in recent times) unattractively finger wagging. There's something very off about lots of (smart? privileged?) people telling other people what they should do. (This spills over into deep cultural schisms as well - google up decolonisation+sustainability for a glimpse of sustainability world's own "Hang the DJ" moment) For most 'the music they constantly play says nothing to me about my life'. The whole thing makes Morrissey look like a bundle of laughs. (Noble exception - Roger Atkins on EVs. His relentless optimism looks and feels very different from the rest of Sustainability Inc because it is). There is a light that never goes out - true value The big opportunity is for these two worlds, brand and sustainability, to get together and to start being properly useful by lighting the way to a bigger better understanding of the value of sustainability. There's way too much shade and not nearly enough light. And the reason for that is that both worlds have forgotten what "value" really means. They default to the narrow and miserable version of value as defined by economists. And that has meant that sustainability is constantly pitched as a trade off between economics and environment. With several misguided assumptions being steadily baked in: economies have to make sacrifices in order to do good things for the planet companies have to do the same and so do individuals The narrative is all about what we have to lose. But that's bullshit. Reconnect to value and we have much, much more to gain. Stop me if you think you've heard this one before Sustainability is the platform to reconnect to a much greater concept of value. Specifically - because I really care about it - restoration of nature and biodiversity can become the galvanising force for our times. "The overriding purpose of our time is to work out how to reintegrate ourselves frictionlessly back into the miracle of nature" (Ben Goldsmith in God is an Octopus) What does that mean? Rediscovering what really matters. Value can't be measured. Real value. The value of waking up with a purpose. The value of feeling at one with the world. The value of being part of something magical and wonderful. The value of being close to and part of the natural world. The intrinsic value of nature. The value of landscape. The value of origin. The value of story. The value of community. Our economic system has hollowed us all out. Made us into consumer and producer bots. Reduced the notion of "value" to a number. We've forgotten who we are. We have a chance, right now, to revert to a much more enduring, much more fulfilling concept of value. Value that can't be taken away with an interest rate hike. Value that endures. What I call 'identity value' but others may have different names. This is the stuff that glues organisations together (the magic that make people want to work together). This is the stuff that makes organisations endure. This is the stuff that makes us happy. It's a much bigger, better, more resilient version of value. And it can't come too soon because the vessels of economic value are failing us. Whether it's reserve currency or stockmarkets or house prices or GDP or savings or bottom lines or tech valuations or any other kind of metric that is a proxy for "economy". The industrial system we have all grown up in has hit its limits and gone way beyond what the planet can sustain - there's no way to extract more without wreaking real damage. So we have to forget about that narrow "give me more" version of value that industrial economics demanded and rediscover what really matters. And that's where the worlds of brands and sustainability can usefully come together. In recognising and articulating the value of living sustainably, at one, with the planet. And then turning that value into a value system beyond economics, a value system that is a guiding light for not just their corporate clients but for us all. For many of us the Smiths had become hard to listen to. We still loved the music but the misery and the baggage was all getting a bit too much. Rick rescued the music from the misery. I want brand and sustainability world to do the same for 'value' Let's all be more Rick. #rickastley #smiths #value #brandstrategy #sustainability #goodgrowth #glastonbury #bengoldsmith

A sustainability-lens on brands helps redefine what we mean by "value" Brands - and branding people - are having a miserable time with sustainability. What should be a gift has become a missed opportunity. Instead we get diversionary tactics ("recyclable coffee on airlines!"), 'sustainable' production nonsense ("carbon neutral coffee!") and an obsession with risk management in the booming ESG industry (meaning managing the financial risk of doing something good). No value creation. No North Star. No impact. A bunch of violin-playing tactics adding up to sweet FA whilst vast swathes of the world are on fire. But rethinking business - and especially brands - through a landscape lens highlights just how vast much of a reset opportunity 'sustainability' really could be. Maybe brand world doesn't really understand "value"? Brand strategists strive to link their strategies to some kind of measurable outcome. 99 times out of 100 that will be a financial or a growth metric. Read a strategic case study from any major brand shop and there will be a scattering of soul destroying statistics thrown in which say "we helped this brand to grow" - sell more stuff, get more customers. There are numerous proxy metrics for this kind of 'result' - from the abject ('online mentions') to the lazy ('30% growth'*) to the indefensible (all the brand valuation nonsense). Whether it's portfolio extension or retaining market leadership or redefining categories for brand world "winning in the market" has become the sine qua non of brand strategy. (*"since 2000") This does a massive disservice to "value" because it subordinates brands to the narrow definition of "value" in the economic sense. "Value" meaning Financial Value. And nothing more. Value that can be measured. As if only value that can be measured counts. There is a ferocious debate triggered by all this - essentially that "growth" as defined by narrow financial value metrics is a *bad thing* because it drives extraction (which is true) and that therefore "de growth" is a *good thing* (which depends on what the hell you mean by "degrowth"). I'd much rather we stopped abusing language and rescued the word "growth" from meaning just "economic growth". It used to mean so much more, and still should. What does the world need from you? As I get deeper into 'how business can do good' I feel just how diminishing and small that metric version of "value" really is. For brand world to have become so fixated on "value" only insofar as it affects business metrics is to throw away the very thing that makes brands so very special in the first place. My favourite bit of kit from Wolff Olins was a simple question intended to get to the heart of the relationship between a brand and the world. "What does the world need from you?" is a disarmingly simple question. And if you really try to answer it fully (as in what does the "world" need from you) then you open up all sorts of possibilities. But inevitably most of the time brand strategists don't get to that big question - defaulting instead to a very small concept of 'world' as 'customer' or more often than not 'justification of business model' leading to embarrassing self serving nonsense ("a world where healthcare has no limits" WTF?) Humans have lost touch with what is really valuable I've been working in environment/sustainability for a few years. It's a massive area - complex, frustrating, fragmented. Climate change and biodiversity loss are such vast challenges that it's all too easy to feel overwhelmed by them. Getting over the 'awesomeness of the problem' and into what we, specifically, can do about them is in itself a massive journey. At the heart of it all is the disconnection of humankind from nature - the "othering" of nature and the planet by humankind. Since the beginning of human time we have deemed ourselves to be above, different from, superior to, "have dominion over" all living things. (maybe the fear of AI is no more than a fear of getting knocked off our self appointed perch as apex species). Our economic system is a product of this fundamental belief in our superiority - that the world is there for us, and that we are somehow above it. Hence our limitless extractive behaviour. And then our recasting of ourselves as economic beings. Cogs in the machine. Humans as valuable only insofar as we consume or we produce. And then industrialisation is what really severed the link between us and planet. We left our communities to go into factories. We lost touch with the communities and the places we came from. We lost touch with nature. We forgot what matters. We lost our soul. We forgot what value really means. Sustainability is an opportunity for brands to recapture what value really means Take the strategy question - what does the world need from you? - and really try to answer it from the planetary perspective. An endless set of value creating opportunities are revealed. Instead of looking at a brand from a customer perspective, look at it from the landscapes where that brand has impact. Like this place.... This place is Bayan Ovoo in the South Gobi - specifically some of the 50,000 odd hectares of pasture used by the Shurkhan Zalaa herder group. The landscape has deteriorated significantly over the past 30 years - a combination of climate change (unpredictable rain, terrible winters) and overgrazing caused by excessive animal numbers driven ever higher by the demand for ever higher volumes of cashmere. Good Growth is working with herders and brands to reverse these effects. (You can get more of a picture of the place here). Brands have got used to treating sustainability as a challenge, as a problem to be solved, as a risk to be managed. But it's so, so much more than that. These landscapes are where the unvarnished impact of supply chains on nature can be seen. And the opportunities. Starting at this end - at where your brand hits the planet - is where small changes in how brands interact with landscapes can shift them from extractors to catalysts for regeneration. It's a huge opportunity for brands to do something really good. Redefining value Sustainability - impact on landscape and especially biodiversity - provides us the opportunity to recapture our souls. The chance to escape our benighted existence as consumer-bots and producer-bots. To rediscover a much bigger - and better - notion of value. The intrinsic value of place. The value of beauty. The value of wonder. The value of origin. The value of story. The value of oneness with the world around us. Part of the world, part of nature, not distinct from it. Identity value. Value that cannot be measured. I believe this is a completely new playbook for brands Sustainability as value creation platform. Value beyond - way beyond - the financial. Story of origin as a means to connect to places Human connection to the world. (Not the market). I love this idea. The practice of brand building as the practice of reconnecting to what really matters. Brand building that rekindles a healthy relationship to the planet. Brand building that takes us out of our confected existence as economic beings and reinstalls us where we belong - as part of something much bigger and much more wonderful. And it shifts brands from wrestling with sustainability as a problem and instead treating it as an opportunity to create real value. More soon. #brandstrategy #sustainability #branding #goodgrowth

As humans we find it hard to relate to the planet at large but we are really attracted by places. Places give us a sense of belonging, of shared interest, of community. Brands that negate or disregard place of origin miss all of that. The sad thing is that for many brands they really don't know where their materials originate from - so they talk about factories and process and manufacturing but they can't talk about origin. Yet the things we love come from somewhere, not from anywhere. (I'm a big fan of wine and cheese as an analogy for how to build a value chain that preserves and amplifies origin value). Origin is an amazingly deep well of value. One of my very favourite brands to work on from recent times was the residential development brand "Biograpi". It's all too easy to treat real estate as a soulless money making exercise. Packing people in. Flogging boxes. But the Biograpi team wanted something different from the outset. They had a sense that something had been lost. A connection to the past, a connection to culture, above all a sense of places to live as places to LIVE. Biograpi is Georgian. If you are lucky enough to visit Georgia you will find a people that thrive on community, on connection, on sharing and above all on stories. (Some say the loudest noise in the world is a Georgian on the phone). Georgians aren't happy living in boxes. They are at their happiest gathered around makeshift tables, swapping stories. The culture is shaped by centuries of story telling. All their heroes are poets. And much more than that, every Georgian is specifically shaped by their specific place of origin - the food they love, their names, the way they talk, the colours they love, the sounds and sights that resonate - for a Georgian the region they come from, the village they come from, is at the core of their identity. Designing spaces for Georgians means embracing this noisy story telling culture. It means creating spaces for community to grow and thrive. Spaces where people from different regions can come together, share their stories and build new ones together. In economic terms it means sacrificing space for community. Avoiding the temptation to sweat every cubic millimetre of the asset and instead embracing the space that people and nature need to come together. A place bound by stories. All of which creates value that matters, but value that cannot be measured. #biograpi

The word of brand is terrible at dealing with sustainability. Google "sustainable brands" or "sustainable branding" and you'll be met by an incoherent mishmash of tactics. It is a massive miss from the "brand" industry - where I have spent a good part of my life. Grappling with sustainability is complex and important for us all. So it *should* be the perfect platform for the people in brand to help steer organisations to a brighter future. Because that is what brand strategies do: cut through complexity to get to the core of what really matters and specifically how an organisation relates to the rest of the world. Sustainability ought to be brand strategy on steroids. But instead brand world has comprehensively failed to pick up the ball. There are 3 areas where it's going wrong. Treating sustainability as a marketing task; overhyping damage reduction as 'sustainable' production; running scared of risk. 1. Parking "sustainability" in the marketing function is a cop out Any effective sustainability strategy has to address, at a bare minimum, how the organisation makes stuff and what it makes. Even better it should encompass how resources, especially finance, are deployed. And best of all it ought to focus on the impact the organisation has on the outside world. Marketers aren't allowed near *any* of that. So if you don't give a crap about sustainability make it the responsibility of the marketers. Then make the brand look even more out of touch by compelling your marketers to go find good things to say at the periphery that demonstrates some kind of progress. So, for example, despite aviation contributing 2% of global warming and being light years away from getting its act together we get to see this kind of nonsense: 2. Hyping supply chain actions as "sustainable" when they aren't In generations to come the misuse of language in sustainability world is going to be a big part of the post-mortem (assuming we get to have one). Top of the nonsense tree are "sustainable production" and its cursed child "sustainable consumption". There is nothing wrong in cleaning and greening up supply chains. Our globalised system has made them so opaque that all sorts of nasty things have wormed their way into them - from excessive use of chemicals to exploitation of workers to polluting factories to large scale money laundering (really). But 'cleaning stuff up' is not the same as 'sustainable'. And because a lot of the supply chain is out of reach and out of sight for most brands they rely on 3rd party certification of what goes on at the 'other' end. That's where it goes wrong. The supply chain improvement work that is - at best - work-in-progress get translated into hyperbolic kite-marks that hoodwink consumers into thinking what they are buying is "sustainable", when it isn't. It might be "less bad" but that does not equal "sustainable". There's a huge amount of effort going into establishing a set of market facing certifications that are simply not good enough. As an example take a look at this: Read down the list of recommendations. There is a blizzard of different certifications and self audited or just plain asserted promises. Then look at the prices for most of them. Raw cashmere is around $35 per KG, washed and initially processed between $80 and $100 per KG. A $50 cashmere sweater is either a miracle or someone is getting thoroughly exploited. So let's be clear. Adding a bit of circularity and recycling to your process is a good thing. Removing some chemicals and nasties from the grubby bit of the chain is a good thing. But...if your business model is "make large volumes of stuff as cheaply as possible" no amount of recycling is going to undo the damage your supply chains wreak on the landscape. Production systems are extraction systems. Mass production systems are mass extraction systems. There is no such thing as "sustainable production" unless it is governed by and within the constraints of nature. And arguing (as some of these brands do) that flogging mass extractive cheap cashmere is "democratising luxury" is not only lazy, it's offensive. If the price of democratising luxury is the desertification of the rangelands through overgrazing then let's not democratise it. Also - a major bugbear of mine - check out the language. Goats are "hand combed" - sounds lovely doesn't it? Sounds like a massage? But do it too early and it's painful. The cashmere isn't ready to come away. So click on this to see (and hear) what hand combing in action is really like. (Do not click on this if you are sensitive). 3. ESG, risk minimisation and compliance The clearest sign that brand world hasn't got its act together on sustainability is the capture of the topic by reporting and finance. Somewhere along the line sustainability has become a compliance issue. A risk to be dealt with. "ESG" (a mini industry now with multiple factions) is not about fixing problems but reducing bottom line risk. This is wrong for all sorts of reasons - it seeks to standardise something that cannot and should not be standardised; it subordinates sustainability (and especially nature) to finance; it isn't embedded - so when push comes to shove missing your financial goal will get you fired, missing your sustainability goal won't. Producing (admittedly) very beautiful impact reports every year is a lovely thing - but we need the people in brand world to do a heck of a lot more than that. Otherwise what are they for? This is all a massive miss. First up - don't get me wrong. Greening up supply chains and making your impact transparent is all a good thing. I'm just saying that now - a decade or so on - it's not nearly enough. Second - brand people need to stop screwing around trying to turn sustainability into a branch of marketing. Do what you do best and get back to fundamentals. If brand is going to be at all useful in the next few crucial decades it needs to get into the weeds of the whole business from end to end and start with how that business impacts the outside world. (And 'sustainability branding' needs to be hurled out of the window.) Third - and most important. Stop treating "sustainability" like an unexploded bomb. Yes it's hard and yes it's systemic and yes it's important. But it is NOT simply a risk to be managed. It is a once in a generation chance to reset and to get on the front foot. Sustainability is an opportunity Because brands are running scared of sustainability they are missing all sorts of opportunities to do good. Not by treating sustainability as a product feature but by treating it as the foundation for the whole brand. A reset in how the brand - the whole brand - interacts with the world. Take my cashmere example for instance. The goats are getting combed at the wrong time. The cashmere isn't ready to fall off their skin yet because they still need it. It's still cold. But global cashmere operates on fashion cycles not natural cycles. So supply chains need that unwashed cashmere to be washed a good couple of months before the goats are ready to shed. So they get combed at the wrong time. And it hurts. Now - it takes no effort at all (but a major mind shift) for a cashmere brand to say that they will time their season for when nature makes it best for the goats. This would be a major shift - pioneering, market leading - and good for everyone. Seasons dictated by nature not whim. Then applying this across the whole business becomes an operating principle. Do no harm. Brands can do this if, and only if, they look at the whole process from the landscape out. Doing what's right for nature and the landscape and flexing their processes to fit those priorities. That's real sustainability. Doing the right thing for the planet. Value - at an enterprise level. What I'm talking about here is whole organisation brand strategy. Not treating sustainability as a production challenge or a product feature but as an operating principle. Being prepared to change how we do things, how we make stuff - and crucially - being prepared to change what we make - for the good of the planet. That's the future. It means brands defining themselves not by the products they make but by their relationship with the world. Taking a landscape approach is the next frontier. It lifts organisations out of their world, which is their chain, and puts them out in THE world. Which is what we all now need to take care of. The brands that do so will find myriad opportunities to do good. Doing simple things that make everyone's lives, and their own brand story, better. #brands #sustainability #greenwash #goodgrowth

The end of unfettered growth? So we do live in a finite world after all. But our economic system and its offspring, the branding and marketing orthodoxy of the past 30 odd years, has operated as if we don't. We have fetishised economic growth with no concern about extraction. And like the faithful hound that it is, brand and marketing world followed the growth fetish, contorting itself into the weird shape it is today - obsessed with a battle for consumers and paying no attention to the other end of the chain. Which is weird when you take a step back. Read any history of either marketing or branding and you'll see that it is always described as having a critical role throughout the value chain - shaping not just how stuff gets sold, but crucially what gets made in the first place and how. Brand was always rooted in origin. A brand was literally a sign of provenance. Good brands came from good places and good people who did good things in good ways. So what happened to shunt branding and marketing into a subdivision of sales? From ration cards to strawberries at Christmas I was a kid in the 80s. Heady times when everything was possible, and we were told that we should all demand and expect everything. Big phones, red braces, fast cars, Brummies on yachts, strawberries whenever we wanted. Greed was good. It was horrible. How did we get there? From scarcity to superabundance Rewind 7 or 8 decades. Post WW2 people were still used to scarcity - there was hardly enough of anything so people planned and shopped according to what was available. Gradually, through the 60s and 70s more choice entered the market, and shops started competing for customers, mostly through expanded ranges and on the basis of choice. Check out this from Safeway in 1983 - when "choosing your own fruit" was a new thing. Then in the 80s everything went mad. Suddenly we could all have whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. Avocados on Christmas Day. Asparagus all year round. Tomatoes in every possible shape and size. But this superabundance wasn't because nature had suddenly got a touch of the Wonkas, and was producing more and more stuff. It was because we had perfected the industrialisation of global supply chains. Hyper efficient procurement duped us into believing in superabundance and permanently shifted our expectations. We all lost track of seasons and scarcity. We got disconnected. We deserved everything we wanted. Give me it. Now. And marketing - from that moment on - became all about consumption and consumers. Bigger, cheaper, faster. The game was market share and share of wallet. Get as many people to buy as much as possible from you. Woo them with abundance, choice and low, low prices. Drive down costs by ruthlessly fragmenting supply chains into transactional units. Here comes the real cost An economic system that fetishises growth whilst disregarding natural constraints was always going to have an unhappy ending. Now we can see it. The cost to nature is enormous. Crop production has increased 3x since 1970 23% of the global terrestrial area has reduced productivity 75% of the land surface is significantly altered 85% of the wetlands area has been lost 66% of the ocean is experiencing change Sea levels are up 16-21cm since 1900 At least 20% of native species are already lost in each biome 1 million species currently face extinction From what we can see in our work in Good Growth all of these extractive trends are accelerating, especially in the past 4 to 5 years. Where barely 4 years ago there were trees there are now sand dunes 20 m tall. Yes, we have no tomatoes Now there are signs all around us that we've reached the end of superabundance. That a system that relentlessly drives down costs, industrially sweats landscapes for raw materials and constructs its chains on purely lowest-cost transactional terms won't cut it anymore. Sometimes it's difficult to see the change clearly until something in the day to day shifts. I think that just happened. In recent winter weeks Brits have been struggling to get hold of their out of season fruit and veg - which they have grown so used to having. Suddenly there were not enough lettuces, tomatoes, strawberries on the supermarket shelves. Many things were blamed - not enough immigrants, too many immigrants, not enough Brexit, too much Brexit, the French, Putin, and of course the weather in Spain. Soon enough social and mass media was awash with images of Dutch and German shoppers laden down with huge quantities of tomatoes. The EU was swimming in fruit but the UK was not. Clearly a Brexit issue then......but no....not Brexit. No it turns out that UK supermarkets simply don't pay producers very much for lettuces. About half what the Spanish pay. So when there is a lettuce shortage in February the producers are loyal to the people who are loyal to them. You don't pay, you don't get So now a quarter of the 7000 NHS staff who last year applied for posts in other countries are heading to Australia. And there's a massive queue behind them. Australia now has 4 beds per 1000 head of population. The UK has 2.5 beds per head, down from 6 in the mid 80s. But the UK still pays health staff roughly 30% less than the Australians do. So the exodus continues. This is not a blip There's a lot of moaning about food inflation - but food prices have been way too low for too long. Given what we now know about the damage industrial supply chains wreak on the planet, not to say the stupidity of shipping out of season asparagus around the world for a few people who don't mind their veg tasting of cardboard, we ought to be rethinking not just the nature of consumption (when it's disconnected from nature) but also what is going to be a winning competitive strategy for the next 50 years. Loyalty to landscapes, loyalty to producers - the new competitive arena The thing that got lost in the greed-is-good frenzy was any kind of relationship with the origin of the chains - the producers. If there aren't enough doctors, and you don't pay doctors a competitive wage, then you'll be short of doctors. If there isn't enough lettuce, and you pay 70 pence per lettuce vs the Spanish paying €1.50 - don't be surprised when you don't get any lettuce. This points to a correction - maybe a reversion - in what we mean by brand and marketing. Instead of myopic focus on selling stuff the role of "marketing" in a fundamentally constrained world is shifted to run through the entire chain. And specifically to foster connection between origin and buyer, to establish and reinforce "identity" between buyer, producer and (let's really hope) the landscape and nature from whence that product comes. And competitive edge will no longer be about how much you can beat up and impoverish your producers, it will be about the long term reciprocity of relationship between you and them. There will be more on the mechanics of this new kind of relationship soon over in Good Growth. It changes the role of brand building and marketing. A return to valuing and appreciating scarcity. Not just communicating value but creating value. Not just how value gets articulated through the chain but also in how innovation works. It means there is - again? - a fundamental role for marketing in product range and design. Innovation driven by natural constraint not by market preference. But at present none of marketing and brand world functions or even thinks like this. From the way brands are managed within business (just sell stuff) to the structure and business models of agencies to the mix of skills needed. So we're going to build it. I am excited because this feels like a return to genuine value. The value of craft. The value of identity. The value of slow and seasonal. The value of nature. #branding #marketing #degrowth #goodgrowth

But where are you really from? This now infamous question caused a kerfuffle late in 2022 in the UK. An elderly lady-in-waiting and Godmother to Prince William asked it insistently of a visitor to Buckingham Palace. The woman was British born and of some kind of mixed Caribbean and African heritage. She lived in Hackney. Whilst the row was all about implicit racism being institutionalised in the Royal family/Britain the question is actually one that a lot of people find hard to answer. Me included. I get asked it a lot - I live in Somerset UK, was born in Windsor, but grew up in Sydney before going to various schools. I'm have NO IDEA where I am from. We lived in all sorts of different places. When we get asked this question it is some kind of inquiry into "who you are" - with the idea that "who you are" is somehow inextricably linked to both the place you grew up and the DNA of your ancestors. But more than that it helps us categorise - we love putting people in boxes and a super quick way to do that is to link someone to a place. At Anthropy I saw David Goodhart talking about "somewheres" and "anywheres" which is an interesting tribal split. People who have depth of roots attached to places vs people who don't, the latter seeing themselves as more cosmopolitan. David argues that a lot of what lies behind cultural schisms such as Brexit can be correlated to 'somewheres' vs 'anywheres'. On his read I think I'm an "anywhere". Place really matters Despite my inability to answer the question with any conviction - I do see roots as being important. Part of the logic of moving down here to the countryside was for our kids to have a sense of "being from somewhere". A lot of the value we see as central to Good Growth - value creation for nature - is anchored in place. Reinforcing and articulating place value all through the chain is a way to avoid the commodity chains that are so destructive for nature. Conversely place is a means to reconnect us humans back to nature. Most products don't pay much attention to origin, and in some sectors product brands are very disconnected from place of origin (only 14% of clothing companies know which country their raw materials come from). Check out "radically low priced" clothing company Quince for example - their explanation of the supply chain *starts* in the factory..... Introducing place of origin into chains is a way to square the circle of disconnection, reconnect consumers to nature. Telling stories of place In 2022 we worked with Wissol Group in Georgia to create a new residential business. At the heart of the proposition is the creation of new communities within the city. Most Georgians have an incredibly strong sense of identity that is drawn on where they originate from. Origin affects how they talk, their names, the food they like, the way they behave, the stories they tell. As people move from the regions into the city this sense of identity gets lost, and can get extinguished within the anonymous 'could be anywhere' apartment buildings. Wissol will build community spaces and more importantly bring stories together in each place so that everyone can bring their identity with them whilst building a new community together. (This place making proposition is ground breaking and a game changer for a people that thrive on connection). Stories matter in Georgia. Through centuries of occupation and incursions the Georgian identity has survived and thrived through story telling. Every statue in Tbilisi is a poet. And every poet is a rebel. To develop the brand we did incredibly deep diving into the way stories are told. In Georgia most stories are not written - there is an oral tradition, songs and also visual story telling through colours, motifs and patterns. I've talked before about the amazing power of collaboration in developing brands for Georgia - this would not have been possible without a ton of detective work from Rusa Shamugia of Wissol working closely with Charlotte from the Modern Studio. Working together we unearthed the stories of each of the places, the long history and cultural significance, as well as the symbolism and visual cues that underpin Georgian identity and the specific regions within Georgia. One of the places had a spooky leitmotif connection to Abkhazia, the northern breakaway region that is under Russian occupation and a source of immense emotion to many Georgians. It is an incredibly complex and multilayered story that has resonance to a lot of what's going on today. In many ways the Abkhazia story is a story of regional identity subjugated to but never defeated. There are specific colours and legends that belong to that part of the northern Caucasus that do belong nowhere else. Visual storytelling I am very excited for this brand, which will launch during 2023. Layering stories into places and building places through stories is exactly what we need to be doing across all the brands we build. Too often origin is ignored or treated as an afterthought, whereas it really matters for identity and value creation. Stories matter. Maybe the question should never be "where are you from" but "tell me your story" #wissol #storytelling #brandstrategy

The NHS is amazing - but it's not at all normal I've worked a lot on healthcare over the years. The strategic challenges are complex and meaningful. How to de-stigmatise mental disorders? (Both in the public sphere and within healthcare profession). How to encourage medical students to join the less sexy branches (i.e. not become a surgeon)? How to introduce patient choice into a system where the doctor has always been head honcho. The role of 'brand' in healthcare is both fascinating and wide ranging. Public discourse on health is shifting all the time, not least because we are all living a lot longer. The pressures on the system are vastly different from those of say 70 years ago - when the health service was pretty much a "stop people dying" service. Polio, smallpox, tuberculosis, diptheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella - and many more - were rife. It is surely a major achievement that for most of us these diseases are no longer a major worry. Brands in health systems are crucial for shaping how people think not just about their health, but the health of the entire population. With an ageing population expenditure on healthcare has to go up steadily in order to maintain even some kind of status quo in provision. And of course brands also play a crucial role - or should - on how the people who work in health systems feel about the profession. This - more than most - is a calling not just any job. That vocational pull means staff are inclined to work inhuman hours, often for little money, because they feel it's important. But now something has broken in the system. We have strikes amongst people who really never want to strike - nurses, ambulance drivers - the people in the frontline. This isn't just about pay and conditions, it's about whether we value this free-at-the-point-of-delivery health system enough to see the value in continual investment to keep pace with the plethora of new "living longer but necessarily well" health needs. Healthcare as a business I spent a lot of 2022 in Georgia working on healthcare. Georgia is interesting in itself given the shadow cast by the Ukraine war, but in a health context you couldn't get further from the NHS model. It is a different world. We have no idea how lucky we are in the UK to have such a thing as the NHS. At first contact you would find all the fears that most Brits have about the business-ification of health realised. Dropdown menus and productisation are rife. Everything costs money and you don't get to see anyone until you've paid. Dig a little deeper and the picture gets even more interesting. Too many doctors, not enough nurses. First up, there are loads of doctors. Way, way too many doctors. In a country which should need maybe 12,000 doctors the system was planned around 45,000. This is a legacy of the Soviet era, during which it was assumed that Georgia would be a hotspot should there ever be a conflict with Nato. So the capacity uplift was built for a war that - so far - didn't come. As a result there are many pretty large scale hospitals dotted around, with low occupancy, and doctors actually competing for patients. That's right - doctors are kind of celebrities (some are anyway) and have their own media profiles. A big hitter doctor can bring a lot of patients with him (normally him) so hospitals compete to attract these 'superstars' as they bring revenue. There are hardly any nurses. And the profession is so badly paid (not to mention undervalued generally in society) most capable women (normally women) head off to become nannies abroad. (This causes its own social ills - a lot of kids being not-very-well brought up by the husband who stays at home (if they are lucky) whilst their mother is abroad). Zero trust One impact of hospitals competing for patients is that there is a lot of advertising of different doctors and services, including (which I still can't get my head around) certain procedures "on discount" for this month only. When the health system is after you for your money, Georgians (never the most trusting of institutions in the first place) are rightly suspicious. This has two consequences - one is that nobody goes to the doctor until it is an absolute necessity (i.e. you are near death) and second that for the most part you go to someone you know or who your family knows - your cousin. In a country where there are way too many doctors, everyone knows a doctor. Georgians aren't healthy This exacerbates the problem that - for the most part - Georgians aren't very health conscious. Tbilisi has astounding traffic, nobody walks anywhere and I haven't seen anyone on a bike, ever. There is a lot of heart disease and also - unsurprising in an economy with no social safety nets at all - a lot of hypertension. There is no culture of "check up". You don't go to the doctor until you absolutely have to. There's really no functioning primary care system aside from the polyclinics that are a legacy of Soviet times, themselves a business. It's an unintegrated, highly fragmented, completely opaque, lottery. It is the spectre of such a commodified health system that lies at the heart of the UK strikes. The vision of what could be. And yet - barring a couple of specific Georgian idiosyncrasies - health as a business is the norm Business is fundamental to health (in most places) Most countries don't have an NHS, and could never afford one if they started now. In Georgia at least, and in most other places where the state provision is non existent or inadequate, the only game in town are health businesses. My client was the biggest health business in Georgia, maybe 20-25% of the totality. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union healthcare was disorganised for a couple of decades before some semblance of state support came in through insurance schemes in the early 2010s. But these schemes were not universal and funding for them has been frozen since 2013, so in reality state funding of healthcare - such as it is - has been in real terms decline more or less ever since it started. Which means all of the legwork for developing the system, all of the educational provision, all of the training, all of the infrastructure, all the long term planning falls on the shoulders of the businesses. This is really uncomfortable. The first thing that the first hospital director I met said to me was: "I have never got used to the idea that healthcare can be a business" For the vast majority of vocational, purpose driven, people working in healthcare the idea that it is a "business" is disquieting. Sometimes the influences of "business" insinuate the fundamentals of "health" - when "patients" become "customers" something is wrong. But.....there is no way that the health system in Georgia is going to improve unless business gets sufficiently organised to invest in its future. Business - the profits from business - are fundamental to the future of healthcare. This was the heart of the brand shift that was needed - an inversion of the normal fear about business in health. Instead of thinking about the health system being squeezed for profits, thinking that a healthy commercial enterprise was critical to investing in healthcare. Subordinating business to health and for health, not subordinating health to business. Purpose: the power of business in healthcare There's no doubt that in the Georgian system there are a bunch of people operating who are in it only for the money. But as the sector evolves there is a consolidation towards a small number of significant players whose interests align with those of the population. This was demonstrated in no small degree by the Covid response that was driven by the business. Only they had the resources, the speed, the sense of purpose and the 'togetherness' to mobilise a response to the pandemic that spanned the country. Only a business in healthcare had the ability to act universally and for the social good. This was a demonstration of a way of working that really was the power of business in healthcare - not for profiteering but for getting good things done, fast. It has had a profound impact on the identity of the organisation - it has shown them who they really are. The trick that's needed to do that for the long term is embedding that universal purpose into the organisation in such a way that the business side and the care side feel integrated and symbiotic. That requires crystal clarity on the difference between customers and patients, and also the ability to develop revenue streams that "pay for" the general provision. What's fascinating, and why I love healthcare as a strategic challenge, is that the world of "healthcare" offers lots of opportunities to develop revenue streams (cosmetic surgery for example) which can fund "disease fighting" and "disease prevention" provision. The new business will emerge during 2023. The whole experience has changed some of what I think about healthcare in the UK. We're incredibly lucky to have an NHS, but maybe we shouldn't be so scared about "business in healthcare", after all. That said, give the flipping nurses the pay rise they deserve. #brandstrategy #healthcare #georgia #NHS

Good Growth is one of 7 projects under the "Fund for Nature" which is administered through Conservation International. As part of my work on Good Growth I spent a week in Ghana with some of the Conservation International crew and a bunch of other 'pro-nature' projects. A lot to learn. Not just from the experiences of all the conservation folk but also by seeing first hand some of the stuff that was going on in Ghana. This is NGO world. Tamale, where we were based, is NGO central*: high density Land Cruisers, Graham Greene bars, people with colourful pasts and dark secrets. NGO world is not my world - but I really like being amongst so many people doing so many good things. And of course there were elephants. The effort that goes into conservation is immense - and the issues are complex, whether it's protecting sea turtles in Colombia or finding a future for the rangelands in Botswana. Making conservation sustainable is hard We were in Ghana looking at how to put in place effective 'conservation agreements' - a mechanism that binds communities to specific conservation activities in return for a package of benefits. So it might constitute an agreement not to poach in return for several valuable things for that community such as funding a school teacher for example. Getting a conservation agreement in place is a tricky thing anyways. But it's made harder because of the donor funding that goes into making such an agreement in the first place - which is finite. There's a process to conservation agreements that looks a bit like this: do a feasibility assessment design the conservation agreement and get it in place and agreed implement monitor seek financial sustainability...... This is an uncomfortable sequence. Bolting in financial sustainability later on is always going to be hard. If, like me, you're focused on how regeneration can be 'scaled' (wrong word but "done in many places" is what I mean) then replicability and viability are key factors upfront. Not later. The commodity trap The pursuit of financial sustainability normally leads to some kind of product, which needs to be "linked" to market in order to establish some kind of income certainty. And 9 times out of 10 that means some form of commodity chain.** Which is where trouble starts. Commodity markets look like big and attractive. Big yes, but good for nature they are not. Shea butter We spent a day in a community that has started a shea nut butter processing enterprise that is linked to their conservation activity. Shea butter is normally a cosmetic - but (I didn't know before) you can also eat it (apparently it's good for malaria). Shea butter is sold by people like Space NK and Lush. They sell it for a lot of $. Before we went around the plant there was a meeting with the villagers who make the butter. There was a bit of a formal discussion and then at some point one of the women who makes the butter stood up and said "we're not being paid enough". It was all a bit uncomfortable. We were told that she probably didn't fully understand the 'factory model' on which payments were based, and that she was not paid for her time, but for her output, i.e. by the kilo. But she was right. Not only are they not being paid enough, but the payment mechanism is contradictory to the conservation aim. An output based mechanism incentivises more output. Grow more shea trees, harvest more shea, produce more stuff. The shea butter process is troubling. All the hard manual work is done by women. Men seem to be either supervising or involved in the other business of the village. The end to end process of making the butter (and soaps) is all there. Growing the trees, harvesting the fruits, drying, roasting, sorting, mashing, stirring, separating, cooling, bagging. This is end to end processing. Finished product. For which they get $1 a kilo. Yet brands like SpaceNK and Lush are selling it for $26 for 120ML: $208 a kilo. Boots are selling non organic generic shea for £8/250ml: £32 a kilo. Either end that's a jaw dropping mark up. The Ghanaian shea is organic, high end. Even if you take into account logistics and packaging and branding and store rental costs. Each woman has "her" batch of nuts. So not only is there origin value coming from that particular village, but with a few tweaks you could pretty much associate finished product with a named person. All that story value is all lost though. By the time the product is boxed up all that remains is batch numbers and certification. These people deserve a lot more than a dollar - a chain designed to amplify and reinforce origin value would be a very good start. Tell their story through the product. That's not a commodity chain - that's a value chain. Production vs sustainability The introduction of a single commodity supply chain is a threat to the landscape. There's no cap on how many shea trees they plant. Without any checks or balances this could end up as a monoculture. The payment system is output based. Transactional. The more you make the more you get. So the incentive is to plant and harvest more and more. And if you're only paying a dollar they are going to need a lot more trees. This highlights a critical issue - the 'production' contract and the 'sustainability' contract are not integrated. This is a problem everywhere - the people who sign up to the conservation agreement and the people who sign up to the production agreement are not the same people. There's also too much income risk for the community. There is no commitment to buy for the long term. This is exposing a fragile community to the vagaries of single commodity supply chains. See what happened when Green and Blacks wound up in Cadburys, then Kraft..... "we've got to balance production and conservation" It's an expression I really don't like. This gets back to the fundamental issue of human disconnection from nature, the idea that nature is a resource that we can use at will and without consequence. This notion leads to my bugbear - the idea of "sustainable production" - which is massively comforting to procuring businesses. But if you stop to think about it for even a second.. It's hard to confront this, especially for the conservation organisations who rely on the donor funding that often comes from those very same procuring businesses. With money comes great power. And speaking truth to power ain't easy. (For what it's worth there's not enough confidence in conservation world in articulating the value they deliver - these people do very good things). We can't keep giving business a pass if we're going to fix the planet. Too many animals or too little grazing? Balancing production and conservation changes the lens we use. Back to Botswana who have a degraded rangeland (just as we do in Mongolia). In the same story as we have heard in many places, farmed animal numbers have grown by a lot, which has put more and more pressure on the landscape. So now there's not enough grazing for the livestock. Bush has encroached onto grasslands. To help make sure there's enough food for all the livestock a massive program of bush cutting needs to be put into place and funded. But if you look at it the other way round - not through the production lens, there's too much livestock for the grazing. We're over exploiting the landscape. That's the real problem. Value chain design needs more creativity and resource Of course a big part of the answer is in designing value chains specifically for nature. Diverse, integrated with environmental imperatives hard wired in, built on reciprocal long term commitments and not on transactional fragility. Production subordinated to nature. But these kinds of value chains are not where attention and resources are focused. Donor money goes into the landscapes, and investor money goes into brands and products, but the bit in the middle, the bit that is transformative for nature - and for value creation - gets zip. What's needed for successful value chain design is not pushing all the responsibility onto the overworked conservation people - what's needed is for finance and business to get involved. Get collaborating. Stuff I take out from all this: value chain design is the key to delivering sustainable environmental restoration. - but designing chains specifically to create value for nature is not easy. Directing the right funding - and people - at this crucial bit of the system would be transformational for nature, and us all. conservation is intrinsically valuable but a) doesn't articulate that value strongly enough (this is an emergency) and b) shouldn't be left to deal with the 'sustainable finance' part of the problem people living in fragile ecosystems need to be protected from commodity chains not pushed into dependency on them. This last one bothers me most - we can't be happy in a world where all the effort and risk earns just a single dollar on a product selling for $200. #goodgrowth #conservation #regenerativebusiness *According to Google there are 32 NGO's operating there but I'm guessing that this is an underestimate as the one that was hosting us - noe.org - is not on the list. **there's also a bit of wishful thinking on carbon offsets, but that's a whole other story