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The way we design supply chains has to change - a lot It's been a while, apologies. We've been busy in Mongolia on our quest to find a way to restore nature systematically. In a way we've come full circle. When we started Good Growth we were convinced that the structure of business was at the very least problematic for nature. And now we know it's worse than that. The industrial design of super efficient supply chains is not just incompatible with nature, it destroys it. We've gone into the forces that are driving environmental degradation in the rangelands. And yes it's complicated. There are the effects of climate, the incursion of extractive industry, socio-economic and demographic changes, hearts and minds issues, difficult science. But the foundation of all the problems in the landscape is human. It's not just that we became disconnected from nature; we designed our business systems to treat nature as a resource we could exploit without consequence. We were wrong. It's a system flaw - all the 'good' things about the industrial business model we have relied on for so long, such as scale and efficiency are really not so 'good' when they penetrate, and then dominate, a landscape. So now we really do need to redesign business for nature. Single commodity supply chains wreak havoc on the landscape. There is a not-so-white lie peddled in environmental world - that there is such a thing as 'sustainable production'. It's a comforting idea for brands who operate traditional sourcing chains - they can pick and choose raw materials that are somehow 'sustainably produced'. It's nonsense. 'Sustainable production' is an oxymoron. It's the picking and choosing that causes the natural landscape to degrade. Time to spell out the reality. There is no such thing as 'sustainable production' - only 'sustainable landscapes'. It doesn't matter how certified, how organic, how carefully produced something is. If a single commodity supply chain penetrates a landscape it creates a massive environmental and economic distortion. Pineapples in Costa Rica, cotton in India, cashmere in Mongolia. The Environmental Damage In Mongolia, since the end of the Soviet era, market forces have driven goat numbers up and up. Progressively goats have become the dominant commodity in the landscape. More goats equals more money. At the same time the disappearance of alternative jobs has pushed more and more Mongolians into herding, with herder numbers estimated to have doubled from 90,000 to 180,000. Herd numbers and herd sizes are growing. But the goats eat everything. So the rangelands are being eroded and turned into desert. Larger herds don't just eat everything, they also are less mobile so congregate in one place 'like locusts'. It's a massive problem - but the root cause is the other end of the chain. The Economic Trap What's stopping the 60 to 70% reduction in goat numbers that's necessary to start bringing the rangelands back into balance? Money. More specifically income dependence on cashmere. In the 3 areas in Mongolia where we're focused the herding households are disproportionately dependent on cashmere for income. Over 170,000 hectares 75 families between them have around 5 tons of de-haired cashmere wool and another 10 tons of sheep wool, horse hair and camel wool. The cashmere is worth $500k to them, the rest $20k. Cashmere is the only game in town. The price of cashmere paid to herders doesn't change if their wool ends up in a luxury jumper selling for $1000 or a chemically coloured cheap sweater selling for a (mendaciously miraculous) $75. The only way to earn more money is to have more goats. The only way to insure against catastrophic weather events is to have more goats. The only way to protect against fickle buyers is to have more goats. Herding in Mongolia is a difficult way to make a living. Winters can be harsh, killing many animals. It costs money to send kids to school. Cashflow is always a problem - there are big gaps between paying out for livestock and earning money from sales of fibre. Herders need cash - which is why they are often at the mercy of cash buyers. They have an expression which is something like "better cash today than a higher price tomorrow". Single commodity chains create monocultures Cashmere has driven out all the diversity of value in the landscape. Healthy natural environments are diverse - yet human economic systems create monocultures. The camel, the sheep, the horsehair - all worth nothing compared to cashmere. So the number of goats keeps going up. No attempt can be made at regeneration without addressing this problem first. If we're not reducing the goat numbers we haven't got a hope of restoring nature. The only way to reduce goat numbers is to switch the herders away from an income dependence on cashmere. Their incomes need to be diverse to reflect the diversity of nature. Value needs to be diverse to sustain the diversity of nature. We need to be creating value for all of the natural materials in the landscape, not just a tiny selective bit of it. I am yet to see a sustainability program that even makes a decent attempt to address this problem. No amount of training and traceability and monitoring and capacity building is going to make any difference if we don't reverse the monoculture. "Sustainable production" has zero impact at landscape level. Millions of well looked after goats are still too many goats. Injecting a bit of green into your supply chain does not solve the problem. Unfortunately - despite all the good stuff they do - conservation programs often exacerbate the monoculture problem in the way they seek financial longevity by "linking" to (always) a commodity market - i.e. exposing the landscape to the ravages of single supply chains. It's a trap which they need to break out of - more on this shortly. And ESG - if we're being kind - just keeps score. Mostly it just points out "risks" to the current business model. The ONLY way to address this problem is to change the way supply chains act on the landscape. To reverse the picture above - create value out from and for the landscape not extract value from it. Pay more for less - in Mongolia that means pay more for fewer goats. Buy all the wool from all the animals and create diversity of value. Pay the herders upfront - shift the income risk from them to us. Link payments to herder directly to delivery of landscape stewardship. Create new value for the natural materials that are currently ignored. Long term commitment to the landscape. Diversifying value creation is crucial - and the fun bit. It means shifting product innovation into and driven from the landscape. So for us creating yak wool blankets, acoustic ceiling panels from camel wool, fertiliser pellets from - um - sheep dung. A bunch of products from one place in a value chain designed to create maximum value for that place. If we do all that we have a chance to convey place value all the way through the product value chain to the end buyer. Which would go a long way to reconnecting people back to nature - helping them to identify again with nature. One of the casualties of industrial chains is our sense of place and our sense of origin. (Those of you who were at Anthropy will know I am kind of obsessed with this - and think the world would be a much better place if all products retained the same kind of source of origin we get in wine. Come to think of it - supply chains would be a heack of a lot less destructive if they were modelled on the wine value chain which retains place value whilst delivering economy of scope). All of this adds up to brands shifting from off takers - buyers of (how they wish) "sustainable fibre" - to catalysts for regeneration. But to do that they have to change the way they buy - pay against environmental outcomes, and - crucially - collaborate with others at a landscape level. It's what we call 'collaborative landscape action'. Why does it have to be collaborative? Because there is no "sustainable production" - only "products from sustainable landscapes". And for a landscape to become sustainable all the value creation needs to be aligned to natural diversity. The opposite of a monoculture. The other thing I love about this reversal, is that it changes the role of the people who live in the landscape. No longer seen as simply "producers" they become stewards, custodians of the landscape. Regeneration requires a marriage I've come to think of successful landscape regeneration as a marriage between the people in the landscape and the brands that make stuff out of the materials in that landscape. There needs to be a reciprocal commitment from both parties to do everything they can to restore that landscape - which means the herders becoming stewards of the landscape and the brands committing - long term - to buy differently. The thing that makes the marriage work - and the bit which until now has been overlooked - is a new design of value chain. Landscape out, diverse, with place value reinforced and amplified throughout. It starts with a commitment to buy differently - but this is unbelievably hard. For a start most clothing brands have *no idea* what is really going on at the other end of the chain. Only 14% of clothing companies know even the country where their raw materials are produced or grown. That's really not OK. (Great report here). Then the big ones split their sustainability function from their procurement arm. These are two completely different worlds which desperately need to come together. A re-booted sourcing department that really is focused on sustainable landscapes would behave in a completely different way - collaborative, obsessed by value for the landscape - not from it, disdainful of certification programs that are input based, and above all paying more for hard reductions in livestock numbers. Perhaps the biggest shift would be long term commitment to place - multi-year commitments to the stewards of the landscape. No brand can do that on their own. But in aggregate they can. Roll on the revolution. Watch this space. #regenerativebusiness #goodgrowth

So how do we get people to buy seaweed, thick yak wool and soft brown sweaters? 'How to market' the things that we make in Good Growth? How do we get people to value things that come out of regenerating places? A lot of what we can make is relatively easy to explain (and sell) because it's just really, really lovely. Soft and warm yak wool travel wraps, camel wool rugs, top notch rice. But some of it's a bit unusual. At least to consumers brought up on a diet of fast fashion, bright colours, incessant new products, cheap finance and limitless stock. Some of our fibre products come from animals such as the wild guanaco - whose numbers have dwindled in Patagonia as sheep ranching has pushed them out. Creating economic value for guanaco hair (wild sheared at the beginning of summer) will stop them being treated as vermin (and stealthily turned into dog food by large European brands with zero-to-minimal morals). Others come from hair normally chucked away - like the long rough camel guard hair that gets shed every year and just lies around. (Every camel sheds around 5 to 10kg of hair every year - some of it is fine, much is coarse). We create value for this rough hair by making homewares with it - rugs, cushions, thick blankets. The more value we can create for each animal - by working with all the fibre - the less pressure the herder is under to increase animal numbers. (And can do more good things like stop the camels eating the young elm trees in the desert, which would help restore the water courses, which would rekindle a whole lot of biodiversity and life....) More from less. Fewer sheep and more guanacos in Patagonia. Fewer goats, more yaks in Mongolia. Each ecosystem is different, so the "ideal" mix is different in each place. But a key part of regenerating places is ensuring that the livestock in that place is both good for the place (encourages plant growth etc) as well as at a level that the place can support. We also have a struggle on eco-friendly colours for clothing. The multi-coloured world of Zara and Uniqlo has duped people into believing that (e.g.) cashmere can come in vivid reds and headache inducing bright blues. Vast quantities of chemicals are needed to dye clothing these vivid colours. Natural dyes and the natural fibre colours are much more muted - browns and greys. How to persuade people to ditch the electric red for a soft brown? And as we get into marine ecosystems we're beginning to work out how to create demand for seaweed products. Seaweed is kind of magic - it's brilliant for the sea (as long as it's the "right" seaweed species for the place) and full of good things and grows really fast. You can make human food, cattle food, cosmetics, and even bioplastics from seaweed. But....seaweed has an image problem. There are few (if any) good seaweed product brands out there. Partly because the whole category is a bit new, and partly to do with 'seaweed' as a category in itself. Persuading people to eat it on a day-to-day basis is a very tough call. (The name's an issue - "weed" really doesn't fly in a food context (same is true for "insects")). Buy-in not buying. Never turn sustainability into a product feature So here's the problem. How to market these products so that people buy into them for the good that they do? (Rather than just buy them). We find that at both ends of the chain - the communities who live in each place, and the "consumers" who buy stuff - the incentives are all a little screwed up and transactional. A depressingly large number of herding co-operatives exist not because there is some kind of widespread common interest in looking after a shared space, but because a co-operative is a pre-requisite for accessing various subsidies. And beyond the subsidy there's really very little enthusiasm from herders to do more in and with the co-operative. Two takes from this - firstly (and it's kind of obvious) a co-op is not the same as a community so, secondly, we should take care not to use co-ops as the base building block for each place brand. What we *actually* need are people who really do share a common interest in the health of the place. There's a similar kind of transactional trap at the 'market' end of the chain. So many brands seem to treat "sustainability" as merely a product feature. I hear big brands like Ikea and Unilever talk about their sustainable product ranges (and how fast they grow) - as if "sustainable" was merely an exciting market segment. But I don't think we should go down this product marketing route. Turning sustainability into a "reason to buy" just doesn't feel right. 'Natural dyes are better than colours that use napalm'. 'Seaweed's better than soya because it is wholly renewable and doesn't screw up land'. 'Yak's better than cashmere because goats eat everything and turn the place into a desert'. It's a cul-de-sac and it misses the bigger point - which is how to reconnect humans to nature. Maybe part of the problem is how we think about consumers and brands. Do consumers know what 'good' is? We met a big advisory business which was wrestling with what "good" actually means, and how their (mostly old school) clients should square new fangled ideas such as ESG with good old fashioned ideas such as making a profit. They have an idea which crystallises my discomfort. They want to get their clients to focus more on the realities of ESG by articulating what 'consumers really want from sustainability'. This idea - that there is somehow a consumer driven market for sustainable stuff - is superficially quite attractive. But it relies on three very dodgy assumptions brands somehow are just responsive to consumer demands consumers actually *know* a priori what they need and want somehow "consumers" have managed to navigate all the nuances and complexities and trade offs inherent to the whole "what is sustainable" question. I.e that they know what 'good' looks like and that they want it. None of this is true. Just look at the evolution of food retailing since the end of WW2 - we went from rationing and scarcity to superabundance and 3-for-2's in a couple of decades. All driven from the supply side. Check out Rustlers (impossibly cheap pre-packaged burgers and hotdogs). Did anyone, ever ask for them? Nope - it's a supply side innovation and the world and the human race are both poorer for it. Forget marketing products - we want a reawakening of values, a reconnection to nature Much of what we are doing in Good Growth is not radically new, it's radically old. We're drawing on a way of value creation that harks back to the pre-industrial era, before we all got swept away by globalised products and supply chains and efficiencies and economies of scale and product features and all the underlying elements of today's operating system that has so screwed up the planet. The issue we are grappling with, at root, is the disconnection of human beings from nature. We got dislocated. The eyes we look through no longer are sensitive or even cognisant of where things come from. The land, the time, the people who go into making our stuff. Product-ising sustainability completely fails to address this issue. It reinforces the basic problem of our dislocation from origin. Good Growth products are not (actually) the point of what we do (lovely as they are) - they are ways to create value for nature and specifically the regeneration of places. Nature-based stuff doesn't just happen. It grows, it gets made. It's slow. The time that nature takes to grow something is the very opposite of that Klarna "get it now, pay later" nadir that consumer-world seems to have reached. If we see nature at all, we no longer see nature for what it is, rather what we think it should be. Our mental picture of "good" nature is more Capability Brown than messy biodiversity. I was really struck in Georgia by how wonderfully messy and lovely and above all full of life the vineyards are. There are cover crops and bees and flowers everywhere. Nothing like the sterile Tuscan or French image of a vineyard that we have been fed for so long. We need to rekindle a different sense of time and place. A natural and wonderful and vivid world. To get people to be more connected to where stuff comes from means we must tell new stories - not just about how the stuff is made but the values which led to the stuff in the first place. Stories that articulate a different sense of time and place. An appeal to higher values. So sustainability marketing can never be product marketing. If you've never seen it take a look at this 6 minutes from Steve Jobs - brilliantly articulating why Apple needed to focus on values and beliefs rather than product features. What he says is the foundation of a pioneering brand. It's what made Apple great (sadly lost its way somewhat since for sure). If we're ever going to succeed at regeneration and sustainability we have to resist the urge to treat sustainability as just another product feature. What we need is to identify, amplify and reinforce a set of values that identify "nature" as a good thing, as a thing we want to be associated with, as a thing we believe we are part of. Regeneration as a set of values. That's the marketing challenge. Call it regenerative marketing. Now to find some people who can help us work out how to do it. #goodgrowth #regenerativebusiness #seaweed #apple #stevejobs #values #khunu #navygrey

I never thought about water much But I should have been paying more attention. It's at the forefront of how we have to rewire the way we think about - and brand - resources. We've been developing brand strategy for water in a region where it's scarce (the desert) and getting scarcer. And where demand for the stuff is on an ever increasing trajectory as population grows, industry develops and domestic agriculture becomes more strategically important. Water is said to be the most important resource on the planet in this century. But we tend to take it for granted. Turn the tap, there it is. But that miracle - fresh and abundant clean water for all - is getting ever harder to deliver. Especially in the desert. Brand and water The role of a brand for water (at a country level - I'm not talking about Evian) is fascinating - the opposite of the brand-to-flog-stuff. There is a globally widespread misconception that water - and the delivery of it - is somehow a "utility". That water is a "commodity" and that what matters for a water business is unobtrusive and fault free service for all at modest and uncontroversial pricing. But in a world of 8 billion people, where most of the population growth is in hot places, coupled with climate change and energy intensive industry and agriculture that "utility" version of water won't (um) wash. Water matters - a lot. So the job for brand in water is going to be the job for brand in all sustainability. And it's groundbreaking (but also really tough). Why? Because if you're responsible for water you don't want people to consume more, you want them to use less. And if you're in water starved places - of which there are many, especially around the Gulf region and Africa - then you need people to "value" water so that they pay enough for it. Which in most water starved places is a LOT more, maybe 10X or 20X current pricing. But....for pretty much all of us in every country on the planet we are somehow attuned to the idea that water is not only abundant (it won't run out) but also that it is more or less free. It falls from the sky and comes up from the ground. We even "spend money like water". But water isn't limitless and it isn't "free" - getting clean water to people costs money and requires ever more ingenuity and investment in technology. So how do you get people to value - more - something they already have? By a very long measure we don't pay enough for water. In some of these water starved countries (Kuwait for example) water is so heavily subsidised that the revenue barely covers 8% of the cost. And if the price of something is too low then it tends to get used unsparingly. Whilst there's a lot of angst about the vast quantities of water consumer by agriculture, it's also true that per capita usage of water in hot places with low water tariffs is super high. So paying too little for water means that it gets used not as a scarce resource but as an abundant one. Walk the pavements of Riyadh or Dubai (if you can find a pavement) and you'll see cafes with water misters where in cold countries you'd see outdoor heaters. You'll see pricey water being sprayed around and instantly evaporated. In places like Qatar this leads to per capita daily consumption numbers around 500 litres per person per day. In Saudi Arabia maybe 250. In Scotland maybe 150. The target level should be closer to 110 litres per person per day (if you are building a house in the UK it has to be designed for that level of usage). This doesn't mean every Qatari is having a bath in a swimming pool every day - these numbers mask other ills such as leaky pipes in water networks as well as water leakage inside houses which were never constructed with pipework to cope with 24 hours every day of constant water pressure. But water still gets sprayed around as if it doesn't matter. If it has been piped several hundred kilometres and then desalinated that's some expensive car wash. This isn't just a public attitude - it's institutional. In Morocco Government attempts to get locals to use water sparingly are completely undermined by the liberal drenching of golf courses in the hope of attracting tourists. So the role for the national water brand is to get people - everyone - to value something they more or less take for granted. And that they believe is already freely available to them. And that they already have. That's tough. The politics of pricing Policymakers are rightly a little bit scared about charging more. Water is a fundamental and for many seen as a right, something they are entitled to. Part of life. Being asked to pay a heck of a lot more for something you kind of believe you already own can quickly lead to unrest. So raising tariffs without a lot of disquiet is an extremely delicate trick. Look a bit further and it's easy to see how water (or its scarcity) could lead to conflict between countries. Groundwater, rivers and lakes cross national boundaries. So when water starts to run out countries start wondering how they can get hold of and keep hold of more of the stuff. It is often said that the next war will be fought over water, and it is easy to see in places like Jordan or Ethiopia how water (the absence of, or the hoarding of) could lead to a lot of trouble. At a rational level we do all know that water is not limitlessly abundant. And can not be free. We know that getting clean, sustainable water to everyone must cost a lot. It requires technology and networks that wear out. Some of the technologies (such as desalination) have environmental knock on effects (pumping brine back into the ocean screws up a lot of marine life) and are - long run - unsustainable. But we just don't think about it very much. Which is where the brand comes in. Water and sustainability brands The water brand has a whole different set of objectives: to help people not just value water more (and pay more for it), but also use less of it; to feel that to save water is for collective benefit of society, somehow a duty, and to overturn our very deep rooted ideas that water is somehow limitless and free forever. This challenge for water brands is we believe where "proper" sustainability branding is headed. As we develop Good Growth, I become more and more convinced that the business of brand has lost its way. Somewhere in the last 50 years it has become unquestioned that "brands" are simply about flogging stuff, and not a mark of origin. In the world of mainstream sustainability this idea (that brands are about flogging stuff) means that sustainability is treated as yet another marketing message - just another reason to buy more stuff. (This is why there's so much focus on nonsense certification schemes and recently a bandwagon of bullshit going into traceable supply chains). But injecting a bit of green into business as usual is not *proper* sustainability. It completely ducks the real challenge for sustainability brands: get people to use less and pay more Industrialised food is way too cheap (in price) and way too costly (to the planet). Fast fashion ravages the environment whilst flogging billions of throwaway t-shirts for pennies. But you will not see food brands saying food is too cheap, nor fashion brands saying that we really don't need 2 billion T-shirts a year (each requiring 766 gallons of water to make BTW) and priced in the single digit dollars. The language of brands in conventional "flog stuff" mode just won't allow for "use less and pay more" messaging. Which is why the sustainability brands of the near future will be incredibly disruptive - overturning pretty much every convention in brand world, lifting the lid on origin, where stuff comes from and how it gets to you, above all exposing the true cost of the product you buy. So I encourage you to think more about water - its value, its scarcity - even as you look out of the window and see it fall from the sky. Because how you get everyone everywhere to treat water as if it were money, to value it for its scarcity, is the kind of challenge that every serious sustainability brand is going to encounter. If brands are going to be a good thing - and not a relic of destructive rampant consumerism - this is the trick they have to learn. We have a long way to go. #goodgrowth #nwc #water #sustainability #brands

The pursuit of Silver Bullets and an obsession with standards are not helping with climate "What's the single most effective thing I can do to fight climate change?" This simple question was asked as we were planning, in our little village in Somerset, how we could collectively get together to make sure that the natural environment in this place was as enduringly healthy as possible, and that individually and together we were doing all we could to tread more lightly upon this earth. This effort has tapped into a wealth of enthusiasm to "DO SOMETHING" which seems to pervade every generation in the village. The urge to do that 'something' collectively, together, is a welcome legacy of the pandemic, during which we managed to do ourselves proud as a community. It felt good, we like doing things together, especially good things. But what things? What should we do? What should I do? The potential answers to this question - what's the single most effective thing I can do - are pretty much always (or should be) "it depends". But "it depends" is not clear cut. And boy do we like clear cut. Which is why the world of climate and sustainability suffers from excessive amounts of absolutism: we'd much prefer to seek out some climate change silver bullets: stop eating meat; switch all cars to electric; stick up millions of wind turbines*. Save the Silver Bullet Ben de Haldevang is a clever chap with lots of real world experience of trying to make transformations happen. His world of transformation mostly resides inside corporates, or more often when a couple of corporates are getting married or M&A'd. There is a "transformation" industry that loves nothing more than a framework and a process. A set of tools that can be applied anywhere and everywhere. But Ben has a written a book, Save the Silver Bullet, that is a compelling case for "it depends" being the right answer in any transformation. And with that to recognise that the context, the starting point, the framing circumstances, all come together to make a unique blend of challenges that every and any program manager needs to pay a lot of attention to, before deciding what the play looks like. You cannot know - a priori - what the best thing to do is. There is no simple, silver bullet answer. Read his book. It depends. Break out the livestream and the selfies - it's COP time. Whisper it quietly but COP has become a bit embarrassing. Not the proper COP full of big cheeses making pledges, but the army of COP groupies that have headed up to Glasgow to make their noise and to do their Ted Talks and to pronounce. The fringe COP. It's like Glastonbury met Davos for the TikTok age. My timeline is chock-a-block with the selfies and the livestreams of all the people who have decided to go up there, get on their soapbox, and to TELL US ALL WHAT TO DO. They are (for the most part) lovely and smart people who mistakenly have persuaded themselves that standing on a platform and exhorting everyone else to do things is a good use of their time. It isn't. I wish they'd use their collective energy and talent more productively. The time for platforms and soapboxes is over. It is super important that the politicos do their bit and sign their pledges and press hard on the legislative accelerator. Optimistic signs so far. But it is hard. We should leave them alone. An army of well meaning people banging their metaphorical drums we do not need. It's not simple and it's not standard As we've got further into Good Growth and setting up regeneration programs in different places, we have become acutely aware of the massive gulf between the pronouncements of this crowd and what is actually needed on the ground. Every place is different. What is needed in one place is not the same as what is needed in another. There are no simple solutions. It depends. But this version of sustainability - the one that has to adapt to circumstance, that eschews cookie cutter approaches, does not fit in a world that loves simplicity and standards and frameworks. In a world that loves a silver bullet. The sustainability industry (and it is fast becoming an industry) loves frameworks and standards. Convinced that we have to "make business greener". That the answer lies in "transforming" our current ways of doing business. That the power of business can cure all this. I used to believe the same, even made my living from it for a long time. But we've got it all wrong - we need a root and branch reset, not a bit of transformation. Crowbarring sustainability into the way we run business and finance is not going to work - business and finance thrives on standardisation, depends on standardisation. Accounting can be standardised all over the world. But you cannot standardise nature. Which is why ESG is so pointless. Which is why sustainability standards certification schemes are so worthless. Which is why our obsession with TELLING PEOPLE WHAT TO DO is so damaging. (Please, please someone just shut TED off until we've fixed the problems.) What we are trying to do in Good Growth is the opposite - to redesign business and finance to fit into nature. And that means we cannot standardise, we cannot silver bullet, we cannot "keep it simple". It depends. What is right for me is not what's right for you. My route to eliminating my impact on the planet is not the same as yours. What's right for the nature in this corner of Somerset is not the same as Somuncura in Patagonia is not the same as Khanghai in Mongolia is not the same as the Norfolk Coast is not the same as Lyme Bay etc etc etc. It depends. Always. #bendehaldevang #regenerativebusiness #goodgrowth #cop26 *everything in sustainability is a trade off and has a consequence. It always depends. Wind turbines use balsa wood in their sails. There isn't enough balsa wood. So it is being grown unsustainably to satisfy demand for wind turbines. Hooved animals are critical for biodiversity. When artificial meat companies make it their mission to "wipe the cow off the face of the earth" they are proposing a hyper-simplistic approach with pretty devastating consequences for the planet. Electric cars are better than others but that doesn't make them sustainable - for starters they require some rare metals to work. If everyone switched to an electric car (as opposed to say reducing overall journeys, leveraging different ways of moving around and radically reducing the number of cars on the road) we'd be swapping one form of unsustainable for another. Unfortunately lithium - which is what the batteries need (for now - lithium is the 8 track stereo of eco-tech) - is to be found in some pretty lovely places (as well as some pretty grim ones), which means that "in order to hit our sustainability targets" many of those lovely places now need to be dug up to sate the world's demands for battery cars.

A Good day for Good Growth We're thrilled that Kering and Conservation International's "Regenerative Fund for Nature" has chosen to support our model and our work in Mongolia. Today (3rd September 21) in Marseille, Kering announced the 7 projects the fund has chosen to support. It's a great honour for us especially as we know that in total the fund received 73 applications from 17 countries. It is also very pioneering for the Fund to support a new kind of enterprise such as Good Growth - a willingness and enthusiasm to break the mould is what we all need if we're going to restore nature. "A completely new paradigm" Together with our partners AVSF and WCS we proposed the development and rollout of a "regenerative toolkit" that brings together ecosystem science and community partnership under a unique “place-based” model. The project builds on the already successful work of our partners with herders in Mongolia’s South Gobi and Arkhangai. By integrating ecosystem regeneration, community partnership and product brands we create a unified system where every aspect is creating value for and from regeneration. Critical to the success of the model are the strong purpose driven brands who work with us to redesign the chains out from each place to be on a regenerative path from the get-go: navygrey and Khunu initially but more joining the fold soon. The teams at Kering and CI have been great at interrogating and getting behind this new model - we intend to make it replicable (so it can work in any ecosystem) and open to all. "The project was selected as it not only puts forth a completely new paradigm for fashion supply chains (based on regenerating a specific ‘place’), but also pairs this with rigorous rangeland monitoring and creating economic value for herding communities." We are convinced that to integrate business with the restoration of nature we have to redesign business completely. That means designing for place, and working with each place to create long term value for regeneration. The support of the fund helps us to develop and demonstrate the model in different ecosystems in Mongolia - we'll report all progress here. Good company It's also humbling to see the other projects that were selected. The full portfolio is here: The Good Growth Company (GGC): developing a toolkit that brings together ecosystem science and community partnership to support new approaches to building sustainable supply chains and sustainable grazing practices. The project builds on the work of its partnership with cashmere goat herders in Mongolia and covers 342,000 hectares of land. Organic Cotton Accelerator (OCA): transitioning conventional cotton farmers to regenerative as well as maximizing the adoption of regenerative practices by organic producers in India. An important part of OCA’s model helps to de-risk change on the ground for farmers through targeted payments. The project engages 50,000 smallholder farmers covering over 53,500 hectares of land. Fundación Solidaridad Latinoamericana: working with Creole and indigenous smallholder cattle producers in the Gran Chaco biome in Argentina to improve sustainable management of grazing lands while also restoring native forests and vegetation. The project covers 120,0000 hectares of land with the objective to improve 250 smallholder families' livelihoods. Fundación Global Nature: working with goat shepherds in Spain to restore traditional grazing systems and regenerate the environment covering 17,000 hectares. Initially, the program will focus on three regions where the restoration and conservation of high biodiversity value areas, including wetlands, is essential. The project will support producers in holistic grazing and biodiversity measurement tools. Additionally, funds will be made directly available to the most vulnerable farmers through a micro-grant program supported by the project. Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and The Wildlife-Friendly Enterprise Network (WFEN): bringing the power of regenerative grazing and holistic management approaches together with wildlife-friendly practices to enable co-existence with wildlife with sheep wool production in Patagonia. The project will cover 300,000 hectares of land across many different farms. Epiterre: focusing on increasing plant diversity in order to create positive ecological and social outcomes. The project targets extensive pasture-based systems covering 200 hectares of land in Southwestern France and features an innovative mechanism for payment for ecosystem services, with direct payments to small-scale producers. Conservation South Africa: aiming to enable 9 communal grazing associations, with approximately 280 people, to implement regenerative agricultural practices in the irreplaceable biodiversity of the Maluti Drakensberg Mountains on 11,000 hectares of land. The project will help restore and protect critical biodiversity, improve overall ecosystem function and enhance livelihood opportunities through improved market access to the wool industry in South Africa. It is also focused on empowering women who predominantly farm sheep with the potential for wool production, and yet are underrepresented in associations, trainings, and auctions. Link to the Regenerative Fund Link to CI/Kering press release Link to projects on a page #goodgrowth #regenerativebusiness #kering #conservationinternational #navygrey #khunu #wcs #avsf

Regenerative businesses don't have 'supply chains' Not in the conventional sense at least. As we start making our first products through Good Growth we've come to focus on what we really mean by "ecosystem out". A conventional supply chain sees an ecosystem - a place - at best as a "source of raw material". The design process starts at the other end of the chain, say in a studio in Milan, where the decision is made to make a wonderful cashmere cardy in beautiful colours. Then the search begins for the softest, whitest fine cashmere down. The supply chain takes that fine cashmere from the place, pays the market price (it makes no difference at all to the herder where their fibre ends up - they'll get paid the same), leaves everything else and moves on. They may come back next year, they may not. It depends on what happens in Milan. So....if we want to restore nature to places, to create value for regeneration, we really can't do this outside-in process. It is intrinsically extractive and wasteful. Instead we have to design for place, work with the natural balance (or better said the regenerative balance) within each place and create value for that balance. I love this part of Good Growth - it feels liberating to relocate design's position in the system from its currently - literally - dislocated position and instead put it into the ecosystem. The whole yak - and the goats, the camels, and the sheep The problem with the conventional supply chain is that it distorts nature - if the only thing that is valued in a place is cashmere wool, but the price is static irrespective of end product, then the only way the herders can increase income is by "raising output" i.e. having more goats. In some of the places we are working 90-95% of income comes from one commodity. Everything else has no financial value. The impact on the environment is devastating. So instead of focusing on just one 'commodity' we seek to work with everything there is in a place. If we can create value (financial and non-financial) for everything in the place then the pressure for herders to raise goats numbers falls away. The challenge becomes "what can we make with this?" Right now we have 270 KG of coarse yak fibre from one village in the Khangai Mountains to play with. This is the guard hair that is normally chucked away in the process of looking for the fine down. We know what we can make with superfine fibre, but the coarse stuff presents a big playground. Eco-wadding, big woven blankets, mix it with other fibres? For designers and textile innovators this is exciting. Whatever we make - however it gets sold - we will have created a financial return for the herders that wasn't there before. If we can make something place-identified and iconic (watch this space) then maybe we can make something very special for each place. The first products will be out in the world at the end of this year. But it goes further than that. The stories of regeneration and the origin of materials are in themselves valuable. So we're not just making place identified products, we're also establishing 'place brand companies' in each place that allow us to form a joint venture with the community in each place. A percentage of the selling price of each product gets returned to each place brand company - which transforms both the position of the herders in the system (from invisible providers of 'raw materials' to centre of the story) and their incomes. Relocating primary processing from monopoly (and monopsony) nodes in the system back into communities also generates new opportunities for livelihoods in each place. And beyond that....we're convinced there are even more ways to generate value for place, not just through products but through the telling of the stories themselves, through experience and relationships. Part of the investment thesis for the regeneration fund we are building is in these additional value add areas. And now for the camels Initially we are taking this design-for-place approach in a handful of places in Mongolia and Patagonia, focusing mostly on working with animal fibres spanning sheep, yaks, goats and guanacos. We've been asked to look at a new place for us, a big place, which doesn't offer a huge amount of opportunity for people needing to live there. Yet if the country is to avoid excessive migration from rural communities into the cities these kinds of places need to be attractive places to live and work. But one thing it does have is camels. Lots and lots of beautiful red Bactrian camels. So....in the next few weeks our designers and creators will be working out what we can do with the camel hair to create value for regeneration of that place. We'll ask the ecologists to advise on what other animals are critical to the ecosystem (there are goats and sheep too) and to start moving towards a view of what would be good to make. Once we have that (at least roughly - it will get more precise over time, this regeneration business is a long term endeavour) we can work out what the processing chain might look like, and what opportunities we have to locate small scale processing facilities in the place. (We have written elsewhere about how unhelpful "economies of scale" are when trying to regenerate). And if I get half a chance we will make those small scale processing facilities the eco-envy of the fibre world. Water and chemical free washing. We're pretty sure we can do it. A by product of this will be the creation of jobs in the place that just aren't there today - best of all jobs that create value for the restoration of nature in that place. None of this can happen without designing for place - it is, I am sure, one of the fundamentals of a regenerative business. A small change - but one that is almost impossible for a conventional product business to pull off. And of course it will manifest itself in place-identified product brands which will feel very different from the mass brands we are used to. Places. The foundation of regenerative business. #goodgrowth #regenerativebusiness #camels #yaks #productdesign #placebasedbusiness

We forgot not just who we were, but where we were The past year or so has been like waking from a dream. Once we started building the Good Growth Company we began to realise that pretty much everything we'd been taught - about economics and brands - was wrong. Good Growth means human wellbeing integrated with the health of the planet. Living with nature, not from it. The Good Growth system requires a reordering of priorities - relegating pursuit of profit (and scale) to a supporting role in the big game, the challenge of integrating human wellbeing with the health of the planet. For far too long the system we humans have developed for ourselves - irrespective of whether it got labelled as capitalist or communist or something in between - has pursued human wellbeing in a way that is disconnected from nature. We became compelled to extract - as producers and as consumers our system is hardwired for "more" - more stuff at lower prices, more volume at lower input. The moment we viewed the world through industrial eyes - as a supply chain with raw materials at one end and value added products at the other - was the same moment we severed our relationship with nature. But we did not notice. We forgot about place We moved our work out of homes and into factories. What had been done by hand was done by machine. Pursuit of economies of scale became a game without end. Globalisation prized efficiency of supply chain (a euphemism for low cost) and cared not one jot where stuff came from. The same thing happened in the Capitalist west and the Communist east. Industrialisation severed the connection to place and recast humans as in a machine. "Under Soviet rule, weaving families...joined the masses in collectivised co-operatives, or left their profession entirely. Weaving skills were lost under pressure from Moscow to mechanise and economise" - Caroline Eden, in (the excellent) Red Sands, writing about the artisans of East Uzbekistan. Each step taking us further from places, and further from nature. Until we came to live in a world where we were fully disconnected from places to become consumers and producers. What mattered above all was the product and how much it cost. Where it came from and how it got there was subsumed in the pursuit of efficient supply chains. And brands - which used to be a symbol of origin - changed to be primarily about consumers and products, about "growth" in the economic sense. This aberration subordinates brands to nothing more than a means to a financial end, brand merely as a mechanism to drive profit. And despite having peddled this professionally for a decade or more I now have to confess that it is a corruption. Place really matters - especially if we want to restore nature Place is a powerful concept. Place binds us together. In these pandemic times many of us have been forcefully reminded that what we share is the place we live. And that our wellbeing is bound up with the wellbeing of that place. (If you want to see what a shared love of place can do to unite a community check out the Isle of Bute and what's happened since the Syrian refugees arrived. Or the work of Sergei Shubin in Cardiff on the relationship between geography and the integration of migrants.) Restoring nature - and doing so in a systematic way - requires us to revive the concept of place and put it back where it belongs. Not something to be obscured in an opaque cost-myopic supply chain but as the force that binds human communities to nature. It is - when you stop to think about it - impossible to get to any kind of sustainable way of living on this planet unless we become much more aware and connected to the specific contexts and needs of each place. Places are not the same. The natural balance in each place is not the same. What is sustainable in one place is not the same as what is sustainable in another. This simple yet utterly forgotten fact makes a nonsense out of all our attempts to create "sustainable" standards for products. You cannot standardize sustainability. Yet our industrialised selves cannot help but try. Instead of trying to integrate nature into our globalised supply chains we need to realise that we need to integrate the way we do business into nature. And that means recognising the importance of place - and the imperative to restore and enhance the health of each place. Brands as expression of origin - time for the revival The Mongolians used brands on horses. They have done hundreds of years. The symbol signified where the horse came from and who had reared it. Over centuries these symbols persisted (and still persist to this day) to communicate the relationship between the producer and place. Not an expression of product and consumer, but of producer and place. An expression of origin. We used to know where stuff came from. It used to matter. But somewhere along the line we lost our way. Across pretty much every category you can think of "origin" has got lost. In clothing it is almost impossible to find out where the fibre came from before it got to the factory. The exception to this is wine (and some food - like cheese). Wine is pretty much all about story of origin. With the exception of the mega industrial brands there is an explicit understanding that the wine comes from place X, and that there is only so much of it to be had. Scarcity and place are central. If anything wine should make much more of place - the story behind wine is one of passion between people and the place where the vines grow. The health of the place and the prospects of the winemakers are intertwined. The wine is made in a way which helps them to look after that place. It is this kind of symbiotic story that we need now to weave (literally sometimes - check out Prickly Thistle) into other products that are restorative of nature. Places, people and products - the new role for brands in the regenerative world We have written about the necessity to reintegrate humans - and human wellbeing - into the places where they live. That means tackling not just the economic incentives that drive producers to become extractors, but also the timespan for enterprises and above all the degree to which we humans identify with our natural environment. (We are wired to believe that we're not only "other" from nature but above it). Every place is different. Every place has its own story. Each of those stories weaves a rich tapestry - of the natural environment in the place, and all the wonderful life that lives in each place. Above all each story can tell of people's love for the place and what they do to make it healthy - the regenerative story. So we are now creating not just place brands, but place brand companies that can act as the vehicles of integration. Community owned, these entities own the regeneration story of the place, carrying that story through as the central pillar of the final product. The business aligns and integrates the needs of the place (restore nature) with the needs of the people in the place (wellbeing). This transforms (say) the herders in the Chigertei valley from transactional sellers of raw materials to the centre of the end product story. The place brand company earns from the final sale of product - which completely changes the pricing dynamics. The stronger the regeneration story the stronger the brand. Reconnecting products to place is the job for brands and brand strategy now - done well it will restore human relationships to nature and give us a shot at combatting climate change and species extinction. But to continue to conceive of brands as mechanisms to flog stuff with no provenance would be to perpetuate the great mistake. We in the brand world have a lot of atonement ahead of us - time to start paying. #goodgrowth #chigertei #brands #placebrands #regenerativebusiness #regenerativeeconomics

The critical challenge for the Good Growth Company in delivering on our vision of environmental regeneration has finally come into view: we've got to deal with the humans. That means finding a way to integrate planetary health with human prosperity - because the way we humans have evolved to prosper is fundamentally at odds with a healthy planet. We prospering from the planet, not with it. Our way of living is killing millions of animals This morning we were on a call talking about the latest Zud - the occasional severe Mongolian winter event that wipes out a lot of livestock. In one particular region the local NGO reckons that out of 4.9m animals 3m will die this winter - with a devastating impact on incomes and livelihoods. (And that's before any Covid effect). But here's the thing - that region shouldn't have nearly so many animals. The herds have grown bigger as the relentless and inevitable consequence of a cashmere industry that can't get enough, itself a product of a market driven, growth obsessed economic model that can't get enough. So when the cold comes, there's not nearly enough food, so millions of animals die and the primary income stream for the herders in that place is wiped out. And - of course - they then feel compelled to start again and to rebuild the herds. There wouldn't be so many animals if nature had been left to do its thing. And if nature had been left to its thing the death and damage would be minimal. But we humans came and dumped our economic model onto that place to stretch it beyond its capacity to support so many animals - so this massacre is on us. (But of course the vast majority of us have no idea that it has even happened). So if we want to fix the environment (and we do) why not ignore the humans? "Alcohol - the cause of and the solution to all of life's problems" - H.Simpson It is very tempting to think (and I know many people who do) that we should keep humans out of any environmental restoration program, to think that one of the first steps to take in cleaning the place up is (and I quote) "to get the people out of the f***ing place and let nature recover". The lovely "Rewilding" (or better "Wilding") movement demonstrates what can be done when a distinct piece of land can be hived off and fenced off from human activity and - pretty much - given back to nature. And yet....it's kind of no coincidence that most rewilding projects are on land that really does belong to someone quite far sighted (and normally rich) so is land that can be 'reclaimed' from humans without too much disruption. And for sure such projects are a heck of lot easier for not having to worry too much about the people who live in (and from) the place. But.....these are exceptional places and not the commons. If we're going to restore the planet we have to restore the commons, and that means we cannot ignore (tragically) the way in which we the people make a living from the commons. So even if human activity screwed it up in the first place, Homer's right, humans must be central to the solution. We're not going to reverse climate change and species loss without addressing how we reintegrate and reconnect the way we live to nature. But how? Integrating human wellbeing and environmental health is the critical challenge for the regenerative age. This is not an exaggeration - I think this is the toughest and most crucial challenge in fixing the planet. We have to find a way - at both ends of the chain - of switching our mode of behaviour so that we are no longer consuming and producing at the expense of the planet. So what we mean by 'integrating human wellbeing with environmental health' is way, way beyond what most environmental programs call "community engagement". If you've ever been on a management training course you'll know what 'community engagement' feels like - turning up to the course is what counts most. Scandalously, several "sustainable" certification schemes lean heavily on participation statistics as a proxy for *actually* doing something about restoring the environment. (One "sustainable" badging outfit even promotes its program as a "sustainability standard" despite a self reported 13% attendance score for its training programs. And that's just attendance - not compliance). So if we're going to do it we should do it properly - and that means getting to the bottom of the 3 big issues that shape how humans end up screwing up the environment (even if they don't want to). 1 - "homo economicus" We have a couple of recovering economists in the Good Growth Company. It's not their fault but they do have a tendency to take a dim view of humanity - people only do what they do because they are fundamentally economic beings. This idea of humans as having no intrinsic motivations aside from moolah pervades our entire economics, business and government systems. We are "consumers" or "producers" - shopper-bots and producer-bots that sit at either end of economic chains. Defined not as humans but as economic inputs. The "homo economicus" dogma extends through the whole chain - processors will only process what pays them the most, herders will only engage with a program if you pay them. "Homo economicus" is nonsense of course as brave people like Kate Raworth are now pointing out - but the idea of us as only responding to economics has leached into every aspect of life, including sustainability programs and brands with their obsessions in linking behaviour to money or premiums. (For a take down of greenwash brands - and specifically in the case of Naadam the impossibility of their pricing - look at this article: https://shopvirtueandvice.com/blogs/conscious-shopping/ethical-sweaters) It is the casting of humans as economic beings that disconnects us (all) from nature. You don't know that millions of animals are dying - right now - in Mongolia because the brand selling you that sweater has no interest in you knowing that. They just want your money. This is a big problem. So if our version of fixing the environment starts with paying people to farm in a different way or to join our certification scheme then all we are doing is perpetuating the economic-human problem. For humans to prosper with nature as opposed to from nature we must not start with the money - we have to start with reinvigorating the relationship between humans and place. 2. Time Guess what - it turns out that nature doesn't run at the same pace as humanity. It takes an age to turn an environmental corner. Halting, then reversing degradation takes a timespan that is - in human terms - multi-generational. Changing and integrating the way humans prosper so that it's aligned with the health of the environment in which they live is not a quick fix - we reckon 3 or more likely 4 generations. There's a land future project in Australia that asked the current farmers on each piece of land what they hoped to leave for their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and - specifically - what they needed to do to their farm to achieve that aim. What they all wanted to leave was a "healthy" environment, abundant with good things. But when pressed for specifics about what that meant not one could answer - "healthy" in 100 years might mean all sorts of things. The place would have to adapt. How could anyone say that crop X or livestock Y was what would lead to "healthy"? What they needed was to become stewards of the place, to work with the place, to maintain and reinforce its health for generations to come. It's kind of obvious but of course the rhythm of business (5 year cycles if you are lucky) is nowhere near long term enough for this kind of endeavour. If we do ignore the long term realignment of humans in the place to prosper with that place, then the moment any conservation program ships out of any place all will revert to how it was before. Even philanthropy doesn't have the patience to fund programs for multiple generations. And of course this kind of long term view simply does not fit with the wham bam speed of equity investment cycles (of any investors - even impact investors). When "short term" in environmental terms means 3 or 4 decades then there is no prevailing equity model that has a long enough view to stay the course. Which is why we think the financing of the ecosystem work we are undertaking requires a financing model that is geared to the rhythm of nature. More on this soon. 3. Identity - the big one But scratch away at the root cause of the problem and something else comes into view. We humans, at a very deep level, consider ourselves to be "other" from nature. And not just "other" - fundamentally we believe ourselves superior to the natural world. We believe that we have sentience at a level no other species has. We believe (therefore) that it is OK for us to see other living things as existing for our benefit. This "otherness" is all pervasive. It is so deeply ingrained that we barely notice. In our language we use animal terms as pejorative ("pig"). We have religions that reinforce the idea that Man has "dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth" (page 1 of the Bible). This "otherness" is explored brilliantly in this WWF paper from 2009 (on eco-campaigning - but the analysis applies beyond communication). These three issues - that our economics compel us to extract from nature, that short-termism only exacerbates this, and that deep down we really do believe that nature exists for us and that we are somehow not part of it but above it - cannot be ignored. Love is all we need (plus a new economic model) Here's the good news - we absolutely can do this. We can do this because we are not actually economic beings (as Rutger Bregman points out in Humankind) more big soppy and sentimental love machines. When we fall in love with something we do all we can for it. The flipside of this is that when we don't love something - or feel "other" from it - we tend to treat it badly. And that's what's happened to nature. Our in built otherness and our miserable economic system has pushed us out of love for the planet. That we can fix - with a new economic system that operates at the rhythm of and for nature, and with a new relationship that makes us part of, not distant from, nature. So how? Here's the sketchy beginnings of an answer Any approach to integrating the wellbeing of humans in the place to the health of the place must: shift the economics away from extraction and turn them to regeneration be long term in scope - 3 or 4 generations, probably 100 years or so address the identity of the humans in the place to the place - undo the "otherness" We think we can use the business to align the interests of the humans in the place with the health of the place, and that this system can be designed to create a perpetual virtuous cycle between environment and human. It's complex and adaptive - and uses brands in a completely different way to change the consumer/market driven dynamic that has plagued us for so long. So instead of brands that forge an identity between buyer and product but at the expense of planet, we design brands that first and foremost forge an identity between producer and planet which then extend to buyer. From the ecosystem out. And then instead of seeing these brands as just ideas (or worse - marketing devices) we give them real form that can encompass the humans. We turn them into place companies that belong to the people in the place, where the strength of the brand and the prosperity of the people who own that company hang on the strength of the place the brand represents. How might that work? We make a brand company for the place Chigertei. That company is co-developed and co-owned with the herders in Chigertei and the Good Growth Company. It develops a place brand for Chigertei that tells the story of the people in that place, their love for the place and what they are doing to restore the place. We make products that carry the brand and the story of Chigertei - scarves and blankets through Khunu, jumpers with Navygrey, maybe a couple of special "Chigertei" lines with friendly brands who want to do good. A percentage of the final selling price (NB NOT the wholesale price or the raw material price) of the end product is returned to the Chigertei company in the form of a licence/royalty. The result is more income for the herders but crucially income which is tied to and derived from the strength of their ongoing relationship with the place - the stronger the regeneration story the stronger the brand We believe that these place brand companies can become the vehicle that reconnects buyers (let's please stop saying "consumer") back to nature through the story of origin owned by the humans in each place. And that this shifts the pricing dynamics for herders to the other end of the chain - the stronger the regeneration story, the stronger the connection with the buyer. Brand as identity - not as a marketing gimmick. Now that's an interesting thought. #regenerative #regenerativebusiness #goodgrowth #rewilding #mongolia #sustainability #identity

"We are a car company - we make cars" In the 80s when I was a teeny tiny teen I ended up working in the new fangled "espresso" bar at Next in London. Nobody in the UK had ever heard of espresso, the height of coffee sophistication until that point had been a percolated from the Wimpy. But Next was a "lifestyle" business. So we had an espresso bar, a furniture store, a jewellers, a hair dressers, even a restaurant. As well as clobber. If you had really wanted you could live your whole life as "Next Man" or "Next Woman". This was 1985 - Next was a brand full of confidence. It was cool. We even had Yasmin Le Bon modelling the gear. And then it wasn't cool at all. It was way too much. Who the heck wanted a Next hairstyle? The whole idea of "lifestyle brand" was about as naff as you can get. The brand extensions all got rowed back and in 1988 the mail order business kicked off and Next went back to being a clothing company. For as long as I can remember businesses and brands have defined themselves through what they make or what they do. But this won't work for regenerative business. There are a handful of exceptions such as Nokia and Saab who have shifted what they make in order to continue to exist. But these were product pivots - moving from making product x to product y. Occasionally the odd bit of brand faddism tried to shift this "what we do" model a bit. At the height of the codswallop around "experience brands" VW went though a funny turn, getting all excited about creating "fascinating experiences" that got to the heart (or the 'essence' - mandatory for any German brand) of what it was to be "VW". What all of this meant in practice was vast and lavishly lit showrooms (then called "experience centres") and a to-this-day odd installation called Autostadt - an auto theme park in search of a purpose. (Apparently this is the place to explore three wholly unrelated questions: "What motivates people to excel? What lies beneath the bonnet of your car? And who will determine the future economy?") WTF? I still remember the internal meeting when this tide was reversed. Something snapped and a big cheese declared that when it came to the brand we just had to remember that.... "We are a car company - we make cars." This identification with "what we do" is incredibly powerful. WE MAKE CARS. That's what we do. It is the reason for our existence. It became so ingrained, so unquestionable, that it ended up being distilled into a pompous tagline (Das Auto) and meant that the business could not even conceive of a world where MAKING CARS was no longer central. This mechanised rigidity not only relegates human creative passion to a mere input, it also means that it is impossible to contemplate even a tiny shift into an adjacent business area - renting cars? nope, set up a new brand; ride-sharing? nope, set up a new brand. It was this rigidity that almost killed Kodak, and which explains why so many of the industrial era businesses die so quickly. When the product becomes obsolete so do they. Regenerative businesses are not product businesses As we build up the Good Growth Company this shift away from product centric business emerges as a fundamental, possibly the fundamental, distinction between a regenerative business and an extractive business. Product businesses are driven by an internal logic that subordinates place to product - how can we make more? how can we make more, more cheaply? where can we get hold of more materials to make more stuff? This product centricity is at the heart of what makes so many growth obsessed businesses destructive - it drives behaviour that relegates nature (and all its places) to a source of "raw materials" for more product. Place is subordinated to product. If your measure of business success is "making and selling more stuff" then that business, by definition, cannot be good for the environment, and can never be "regenerative". The key feature of a regenerative business is that we work within the boundaries of the ecosystem, and specifically within the boundaries of what's good for that ecosystem. It's the opposite of the product centric, make as much as possible, industrial paradigm that has screwed up the planet so very badly. In our Chigertei pilot we have a mix of goats, sheep, yaks, horses and camels. Our challenge is to work out the best mix for the restoration of the place and to make products in that mix. We can't just make what we fancy. So the trick is to flex the product mix out of these core materials to support the ecosystem, to make the things that restore the natural balance in the place. A regenerative business must subordinate product to place. There's no other way. What matters is what's good for the place. Flexing product mix is the key to impact Financial incentives exert a powerful influence over landscapes. In the EU prior to 2003 pretty much all farm subsidies were hitched to intensive farming. It was almost impossible as a farmer to do anything other than intensive farming. This subsidy regime led to awful outcomes: my childhood soundtrack was often punctuated by discussion of the 'butter mountain', and "bugs on the windscreen" became a thing of the past. Intensive farming is the result of product centric business models that are disconnected from the natural balance of place. More milk. More butter. More flour. We have learned, especially through the work of Ibis Rice in Cambodia, that the depth to which we can engage a community is the key to delivering impact. If we can get upwards of 50% of the villagers engaged then we can start reversing environmental degradation. Get 70% engaged and we're flying. But engagement is hard if the farmers are treated harshly by the economics. If they are at the "raw materials" end of a global supply chain farmers get a very raw deal. They carry all the risk, have next to no pricing power, get treated as an input cost. If the price they get paid for commodity x (say rice, or the fine goat hair for cashmere) fluctuates because of demand volatility, or just (as in this year) a decision not to make so much cashmere, then they have no choice but to do what they can to keep bread on the table. They will produce what pays them. So the key to engagement is two fold - we have to shift the risk from them to us, and we have to make things that fit with the landscape. This means taking all the materials without quibble, and making sure we cover everything that the landscape can produce. So in Cambodia this means not just rice, but mung beans, cashew nuts and sesame seeds. If we have that broad mix we can work with all the farmers - if we're just a rice business we can only work with rice farmers. The key to getting from 50% to 70% is product mix. Scarcity is value creating There's only so much core material in a place. The world of wine gets this in a way no other category does. Appellation and vintages are signals of scarcity. There are only so many grapes, there is only so much wine. When it's gone, it's gone. Product centric industrialisation is all about super abundance. Regenerative business is all about scarcity. Working within ecological boundaries means working with finite amounts of materials. So we have to make a virtue - again - out of scarcity. We have to remember the way it was when we had to wait for the crops to grow, to wait for things to be made. And linking the place of origin to the consumer is key. Which means these are place brands not product brands The last piece of this jigsaw, the difference between regenerative brands and extractive brands, is that the truly regenerative brands are place based, not product based. Where they come from, the source of origin, is the thing that matters. This sounds like a big deal but it's not really. It's reclaiming something we lost but perhaps have started to recover during the pandemic. It's reconnecting us to places and their very special character, reconnecting us to what matters in those places. Place matters - time to restore it to where it belongs. #goodgrowth #regenerativebusiness #regenerativedevelopment

A glimpse at our pilot ecosystem in western Mongolia About 36 very bumpy hours in a Land Cruiser from Ulaan Bataar will take you west to the valley of Chigertei in the very far west of Mongolia. Or you can fly if you have no sense of irony. This is a place which is extreme. It can be astonishingly cold. And breathtakingly beautiful. It's ethnic Kazakh, so the people who live here are not really Mongolian, they have their own sense of identity which is very connected to the place they live. The whole area is designated as a protected area - because it's under threat. Degraded Barry Rosenbaum and the Altai Institute have been working in Chigertei, and the wider Deluun area, for the past ten years. He has seen first hand the degradation of the natural environment and its consequences. A perfect storm of factors is degrading Mongolia’s grasslands. From 1940 to 2014, annual mean temperatures have increased by more than 2.0°C, while rainfall has decreased and seasonal weather patterns have shifted. In the 1990s, Mongolia abandoned its communist system of government and with it, strict quotas on the number of grazing animals allowed. Since then, the country has gone from 20 million grazing livestock to 61.5 million. Mongolia's herders raise camels, horses, cows, and sheep, but the fastest-growing herds are goats, thanks mostly to the swift rise in global demand for cashmere. Mongolia is now the world's second-largest cashmere producer, after China, producing a third of the global supply, and cashmere makes up 40 percent of the country's non-mineral exports. Thirty years ago, cashmere goats made up 19 percent of all livestock in Mongolia. Today, their numbers make up 60 percent. Goats can be more lucrative than other livestock, but they're also much more destructive than the sheep they've replaced. As a result, overgrazing has caused 80% of the recent decline in vegetation on the grasslands. Most species of wildlife suffer from overgrazed grasslands. The consequences of increasing livestock numbers and change in herd structure with the resulting over-exploitation of land and plant resources, coupled with effects of climate change, has become the main contributing factor to the increase of species being categorized as endangered in Mongolia. For example, populations of Altai argali have coexisted with nomadic herders and their livestock for centuries, but today the impact of overgrazing by livestock on the habitats of this species is very high and have pushed Argali into marginal habitats. Argali are a primary prey species of snow leopards. When the numbers of prey species decline, the decline of rare predators is not far behind. Degraded rangelands can be recovered naturally within 10 years if existing rangeland management can be changed. Without change, it will be too late after five to 10 years. By then, Mongolia's grasslands will be transformed into an ecosystem that will be unusable, bringing an end to Mongolians' traditional way of life. Ecosystem out - the Good Growth operating system So how can we help reverse the degradation? We work with Barry and other scientists to build a system that restores the natural balance - that regenerates the ecosystem. We make it our business to put back what has been extracted. What we've come to is an operating system that is not driven from the market in, but from the ecosystem out. Everything is governed first and foremost by what's needed to regenerate the ecosystem. This changes pretty much everything. It's this shift that is the only innovation we've made. Instead of fixing on a product and then making as much of it as possible, we fix on a place and make what we can from the natural balance of resources in that place. We're working with the natural capital not extracting it. That's why we have a range of brands making lots of different things. This gives us a new operating context and so we need a north star to help us make these decisions. And that's where clarity on principles and priorities come in. The carrying capacity Right now economic incentives - especially cheap cashmere - are driving up goat numbers. No amount of "sustainable cashmere" initiatives will change that. If we're going to change the dynamic we have to start thinking about what's good for the place, not how much of one particular product we can make. In Chigertei Valley there are 180 families looking after just over 41,000 animals. Of these 18,000 are goats, 18,000 are sheep, about 3,000 are yaks, 2,000 are horses and there are 26 camels. If only the fine hair from the goats is perceived to be valuable then all that will happen is increases in goat numbers. So our job comes in 3 steps: First to work with Barry and other scientists to work out what the most helpful mix of animals should be. Inevitably this will mean fewer goats. Second to work out how to ensure that the families get enough money and security to be able to look after the regeneration in the valley. Much of the time they are under financial pressure - getting the kids to school, paying taxes, repaying loans - so giving them some kind of security will help them to work on longer term issues. And third put value into the rest of what's in the valley. This means creating value from the coarse hair of the goats (and also from the milk), in a "whole goat" approach, alongside creating value from the yaks, the sheep wool, the horse hair and - yes - from the camels. This means that we are working with what we have, with what nature gives us. We are putting a value on making a healthy ecosystem and on the regenerative work that goes into that. The aim is to create as much value as possible in the regenerative mix, by getting as creative as we can with the materials to hand. If of the 41,000 animals currently there, only the goats (and of them only a fraction of the goat), are being commercialised then we have - before we have even started - a whole host of materials that are currently being ignored. So designers and textile research people are working with us to create new uses for the fibre - horse blankets, rugs, cushions - as well as knitwear made by navygrey and Khunu. We may blend some of the fibres in a special "Chigertei" mix - we need to do more testing but if we can I would love that. And beyond fibre we can also do more to realise more value from the milk. Mongolian Artisan Cheese may be niche now.......you heard it here first. Exciting stuff. Lots of hard work. More soon. #goodgrowth #regenerativebusiness #chigertei #altaiinstitute

How we're approaching decision making in regenerative business Too much certainty is killing us Let's talk about certainty. Or rather incredible certainty. And why we all need a lot less of it. Do you remember the "you can't go wrong in a Volvo" ad? Making cars safer does not make them "safe". Helping drivers avoid accidents does not insulate them from accidents. Shit happens. So of course you can have an accident in a Volvo. Intimating that they are so safe that "you can't go wrong" only encourages drivers to believe they can't be harmed. It breeds risk. It's the same with schools and Covid - don't tell us they are "safe", tell us that they are being managed for risk and monitored, and that we all need to play our part in helping minimise risk. Government and business use too much misplaced certainty in the face of complex issues. We don't know everything so we cannot be certain. What's needed instead is humility and nuance allied to very clear priorities. The reason we're in such a mess right now is that we have neither. Misplaced certainty is undermining sustainability claims Delivering "sustainability" is not simple. What's good for the environment may not be good for people or cost too much. The only way to deal with these thorny kind of issues is to have a clear set of priorities and a shedload of humility. We don't know everything. So we cannot be certain. But businesses can't cope with uncertainty - it makes everything much harder and scary. So businesses tend to overstate with certainty things that are by no means certain. In particular making "sustainability" claims that don't stand up. "When you see the BCI logo or ‘On-Product Mark’ on packaging, it does not mean the product is made of physically traceable Better Cotton." Take Better Cotton - clothing with this logo may not *actually* have any 'better cotton' in it at all. Why? Because "physically tracing Better Cotton through the supply chain is time consuming and expensive". The premium paid for the item has - instead - gone toward compliance and training programs. This is a sustainability program focused solely on inputs (farming methods). Yes of course the focus on training and farming methods is a good thing but it does not mean that the T-shirt that you buy is made of "better cotton". It is overclaim and the sustainability industry is full of it. Fast fashion cannot be reconciled with sustainability. There is an obvious friction between trying to flog as much stuff, as fast and as cheaply as possible, and trying to work within ecological limits, To resolve the friction you need a clear set of priorities. What matters most? Flogging stuff or the environment? If it's flogging stuff then claims you make around sustainability are bollocks. Resetting our priorities: put finance back in its place. We live in a world in thrall to money. Somewhere along the line, probably in the 1800s, humans started to lose connection with place. We stopped making things by hand and started making things with machines. We moved from working at home to working in factories. We became industrialised. Little by little "what mattered" changed. "Productivity" meant making more stuff for less cost. Businesses started to pursue the bottom line in terms of numbers. And then sometime later, in the 1980s, the world went nuts for money. When I was at Uni the definition of a "good job" was one where you could make oodles of dough punting on stocks. Doing boring things like *actually* making things for real was quaint. Everything became about money. Bigger, better, faster. Make more stuff in order to make more money. As Mariana Mazzucato says - we financialised the real economy. And in so doing severed our connection to places and all sensitivity to what makes those places healthy. Where once we had worked with what nature gave us we came to see places simply as sources of material to feed our machine. We became extractive and we did not notice. Priority: environmental regeneration > humans as agents of regeneration > economics Time to turn back the clock, to relocate finance where it belongs, as an enabler of doing good things. And to reset our notion of "what matters". It's not easy - we have to unlearn a lot. So alongside humility and nuance we need some crystal clear priorities - a framework for deciding what the right thing to do is. For far too long "do good" businesses and enterprises have equated environment, social and business outcomes. Or at least pretended to equate them. But it's by and large bullshit. These aims can't be equal. When push comes to shove something has to give. And normally the only thing that doesn't give is the money. So a manager will bust a gut to hit a profit target, but won't bust the same gut to hit an environmental target. So for us in Good Growth what matters is the environment - first and foremost. The entire organisation is designed for and in order to restore natural capital. It is our reason for being. This is what we mean by purpose. Next comes humans - as agents of regeneration for the environment. We see our role as working with the humans in the ecosystem to improve their livelihoods, and therefore their capacity, to work in ways that restore that ecosystem. So much of this involves shifting the economic context in which they operate. And last of all comes a healthy commercial outcome. Of course we care about profit and business strength. It's just that we would never put financial outcome ahead of environmental outcome. This clarity has been liberating. And helpful. Here are a couple of examples of gnarly issues that this sense of priority helps resolve. 1. Why the heck are you operating in degraded places? The valley we are working with in western Mongolia is pretty degraded. On all the environmental measures - biodiversity, soil, wildlife - things aren't great. (More on this here - not only the valley but the 'ecosystem out' model). So why operate there? (We've been asked this question many times now) We're there because it's degraded. We're there because learning how to reverse degradation is going to be vitally important for all of us. We're there because this is where the challenge is. If we were a normal self interested business we would go elsewhere - where we can get hold of volumes of decent fibre for less hassle and less cost. We wouldn't regard it as our job to deal with the degradation. But it is our deal. We exist to restore the environment. 2. why not introduce more 'productive' animals? this one is a real dilemma. There are yak breeds, for example, that might have a higher yield of better quality fibre than the yaks in the valley. If we brought those yaks into the valley they'd produce more money for the herders. And surely that's a good thing right? But wait - we should be guided by what's best for the place, not what makes our lives easier or what makes more money. Introducing a new breed of yak might bring all sorts of bad environmental consequences - too many of the same species can cause havoc (more on this soon with vines). If our only consideration is our own commercial end then of course we'll bring in the more 'productive' yak. But if what we care about is the long term health of the place, of the ecosystem, then our decision is guided by what's right for the health of the environment. That's what really matters. We have designed the Good Growth Company so that the question of what's good for the environment sits at the head of everything we do. Of course there will be, and are, tensions between commercial outcome and environmental outcome. Which is why we need to know what really matters most. Planet first. Always. #regenerativebusiness #goodgrowth #environment

Much of what I have been taught to believe unquestioningly turns out to be untrue Increasingly I find that building the Good Growth Company is much like taking that pill in the Matrix, suddenly you become aware that the stuff you have taken to be true, the pillars on which pretty much every business you have ever been involved with operate, the articles of faith, the fundamental truths are....well....are not only simply not true, but more often than not the cause of a lot of the problems we face. What follows then is a kind of confession - stuff I used to believe but now cannot. I am fully aware that to many this will sound like heresy or lunacy - and that's fine - but I am convinced that we have to recognise how the underlying structure of our system, and the assumptions upon which it is built, must change. Good Growth is all about hard wiring regeneration into the core operating model of business. We're not interested in grafting on a bit of "do gooding" as a by product of business-as-usual, this is a fundamental redesign of the operating system. Much of this design - maybe all of it - involves turning conventional notions of capitalism upside down. How businesses get funded, how value chains are built, who owns what, how products get made, what products are made. There's a ton of theory on all of this - but not that many people trying to work out how it all works on the ground in real businesses. Depending on where you stand we're either creating a new version of capitalism, or a post capitalist model, or are completely nuts. I guess time will tell. The pilots we are building (initially fibre product from Mongolia and Patagonia) are explicitly conceived as vehicles to road test this new design. More of what we're up to can be found here. "It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth" So for me this design process is a bit like taking the red pill - only a bit less wham bam and a bit more creeping enlightenment. As we build up the model we find ourselves peeling back layers and layers of thought processes that had been so thoroughly drilled into us we never questioned them. The only thing we are doing in all of this that is remotely innovative is designing from the ecosystem out, not from the market in. Everything else is just hooking together bits of business system that have been fragmented for years - making it whole again (to quote Atomic Kitten). So instead of a market in approach where the source of origin is treated as the lowest point in the supply chain, we turn the whole thing on its head and make the source of origin the force that shapes the whole value chain instead of That one thing - designing from the ecosystem out, has a seismic, upending, impact on the whole system. It turns the operating system that I've been used to on its head. Here are just a few examples: 1. Brand valuation has nothing to with "value" Brand valuation is always something that I have been sceptical about, some kind of pseudo science peddled by Interbrand etc. Fellow sceptics in the brand world would often say that a brand's value was no more than what someone was willing to pay for it. But even that is to reduce "value" to "price" - to surrender all of the breadth of the term "value" to a narrow financial definition. It's this narrowing of what we mean by value (check out Mariana Mazzucato) that has got us all into such deep shit. If we can't put a price on it it can't be worth anything - right? So it comes as no surprise to find that the ways brand valuation works *actually* is merely a function of a financial view of a business. Pick apart any brand valuation model and guess what - it's actually a model of financial value. They are all predicated by and subordinated to the standard "price of everything, value of nothing" business model. Tellingly the unit in which the models are expressed is $. Even their attempts to measure "intangible" value are predicated on price premium and volume, whilst putting customer primacy, market share and customer loyalty into the mix over other factors. "Brand valuation" is an area where brand businesses are bringing absolutely nothing new. The lower the costs in the supply chain the higher the brand value. Simples. And nothing at all to do with brand value. So the more you screw your suppliers, and the people who work down the chain, and the places where your raw materials come from, and the environments which created those raw materials - the more you screw planet and people the higher the value of your brand. Interbrand has the "best" brands globally as Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Coca Cola. But in this context what the hell does "best" mean? Brand Finance can put Aramco straight in at #24 "following the largest IPO is history". None of them poster children for a better planet. 2. Lean supply chains are not a good thing "lean" was a gospel drilled into us all at VW in the 90s. The Machine that Changed the World was the bible. The Japanese were to be feared because they were so goddam efficient. They had Ninja like abilities called Kaizen to take out "non productive" cost or waste. Supply chains are not stronger for being leaner. As we have seen all too clearly in this pandemic, a supply chain cost optimised to the nth degree is a supply chain that breaks under pressure. Worse than wafer thin resilience is the damage wreaked on environment and communities. Supply chains that are designed to optimise costs don't pay any attention to the value that can be created at the source of origin, nor to the collateral damage wrought on environments and communities in the name of shaving a couple of cents off. There is nothing regenerative about lean supply chains - and no consequence at all for making them extractive. Which is why so many are so very destructive. Conversely value chains built from the ecosystem out are inherently value creative, and also (at least in design) regenerative from the get go. 3. Products are not defined by market needs Follow this 'ecosystem out' logic through and how you make decisions about what products to make changes. Once upon a time at VW we made a very small estate car on the basis that it was in a segment "not currently occupied by the competition". Unsurprisingly we discovered that the number of people who needed such a tiny car (people who didn't buy anything bulky at the shops, didn't have suitcases and had extremely small dogs) was vanishingly small. In the Good Growth model our product mix is determined by the needs of the ecosystem. Commercialising a regenerative balance in the ecosystem means taking the raw materials available (in our case initially fine and coarse hair from different animals, mostly yaks) and turning all of those raw materials into commercial products. Ordinarily the coarse hair is ignored by brands - it's not worth as much as the fine hair. But we can turn it into mattresses, sleeping bags, natural insulation in jackets, horse blankets, curtains etc etc. Clothing brands are not set up to turn coarse hair into blankets - so they ignore it. This means that the only way the herders can increase their income is by a) chucking the coarse hair away (about 75% of the yield) and b) having more animals. The upshot is an incentive to keep increasing animal numbers, with a consequent deleterious impact on environment and habitat. A little nuance that comes from this is that we don't attribute cost at the product level but rather at the whole animal level - the cost of raw material for a superfine jumper is pretty meaningless for us if it ignores the coarse hair from the rest of the animal. Businesses built on industrial principles inevitably seek to industrialise their supply chains around high margin products and ignore the rest. 4. Shareholders are not prime, and nor are customers In a previous life we had it drummed into us that "the customer always comes first". This phrase was on posters, on rulers, in training programmes, in meetings. It was a mantra repeated hundreds of times a day to justify whatever programme we were dreaming up. To question this idea was heresy of the highest order. In most places it still is. But it wasn't true then (actually we cared much more about what the German HQ needed), and moreover it really should not be our mantra if we want to build a regenerative model. What customers want or need and what is needed to regenerate the planet are not always compatible. So no - the customer does not always get what they want. We can only make so many cashmere stuffed mattresses, so if a hotel chain wants more we're going to turn them down. In my previous life we would have moved heaven and earth to get them more - we'd do "whatever it takes" to meet their demands. And it's precisely that "whatever it takes" reflex in response to customer demand that has fucked us all up so very badly. So our job is to find the right customers - which is a kind of inversion of the normal "marketing funnel" And of course - as is now beginning to be recognised - shareholders are not prime either. Flogging the company to grow in order to meet some hockey stick shaped growth curve, or some end of year profit target, is actually pretty dumb. Just because VCs fetishise exponential growth (aka scale) doesn't mean everyone else should. They aren't the people who create the value. 5. Environment over humans Last but by no means least we have to recognise that there are often conflicts and trade offs between profit and regeneration, and between meeting social needs and regenerating natural capital. In the old world a manager would bend over backwards to hit a profit target, but not so to hit an environmental or social objective. We're going to bend over backwards to deliver regeneration - whatever it takes. But of course - as will increasingly become clear as we head further into the Anthropocene - there will inevitably be times when what's good for the planet won't necessarily be good for the humans. In those cases we must always, always prioritise the needs of the planet. Black flowers. There's more of this to come We promised to make our process open - to share what we find as we find it. As I say - much of this may sound nuts, but if it does not, if it gnaws away at some unspoken thoughts or feelings you may have had for a while about what's not working, maybe you should get in touch. #goodgrowth #regenerativeeconomics #tomorrowscapitalism #anthropocene