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"If there is a battle between the planet and mankind, the planet will win" "what's the exit strategy?" is a big question without any kind of answer right now. In a few short weeks the majority of the world's population have been forced into a different way of living. Will things ever "get back to normal"? Should they? I very much hope not. Right now all the rhetoric is about fighting the virus, conquering this thing, defeating it. Humans have for way too long seen themselves as the masters of nature and the gut reaction to the virus is to hide away, summon the troops, and beat the crap out of it. But what if we can't? What if we have to learn to live with this kind of threat? In Edge of Darkness (the best ever TV series in the world ever btw - NB not the atrocious Gibson film) the ghost of Emma Craven has a word with her dad about Gaia - the idea that the planet will look after itself if mankind (or anyone else) becomes too much of a threat. "That is the power of Gaia. The planet will protect itself. If man is the enemy, it will destroy him." Something better change It is hard for any of us but the Trumpiest to avoid the idea - at least a bit, and maybe a lot - that our way of life, our unfettered consumerism gorging on limitless products churned out by business systems and cultures that unquestioningly fetishise planet busting growth, might, just might, have something to do with this crisis and that this little virus might well be the harbinger of the black flowers. Which is why I am more than a little uneasy about the magic money trees that have been unleashed with the aim of preserving the status quo, keeping us all afloat so that we can "get back to normal" once this is all over. This mobilisation of the state is breathtaking. A heady reminder that when it comes to the big stuff - climate change, war, preservation of the human race - the state can get stuff done at a speed and scale that business cannot. So if we end up with a consumerism that is more localised, and states acting more globally to tackle the big stuff, that might be a great outcome. But it's not going to happen on its own. This is the time for new models to take root - otherwise there's a danger that we will learn nothing from this and pour all our energy into recreating the system that caused the problem in the first place. The one thing we don't need after all this is a return to 'business as usual' - time for a reset. Shared interest matters much, much, more than we ever knew The one big thing we want to see is that every business system, every supply chain, from now on is built on partnership and shared interest, and not on a purely transactional model. What does that mean? As so often in our quest to find the truly regenerative business system, the world of wine is very instructive. There is a very strong connection between the business of wine and the finite resources of the planet. It's a sector whose rhythm is shaped by the seasons, and where natural events have a direct impact on the product. People who work in wine are close to nature in a way that people who work in finance are not. Secondly wine is a case study in source of origin chains - the value (in the fullest sense of the word) of wine is intrinsically connected to who made it, where and how. Sure there's a high volume low price industrialised bit, but even there origin counts. So the partners in the chain matter - for a small artisanal producer the distribution and retail partners they work with can make or break them. And not only that but the word of wine journalists and critics also makes a massive difference. They are all part of a system that links the source (grapes - harvest - winemaker) to the ultimate consumer (you and me). What connects that system up really matters - if all the links in that chain (processing, distribution, import, retail, reviews, recommendations etc) are built solely on a disconnected, dispassionate, transactional basis then the connection between source of origin and consumer will be weak if not totally severed. But if every link, every part, was bound together through shared interests and shared values than that connection will be much, much stronger. A while back I came across this really intriguing debate amongst wine writers and critics - should morals come into what products get recommended? Or should wine be 'judged' purely on the basis of the product? It was a really intriguing question - and one that I think is central to our post-Covid future. The answer to Jamie Goode's question is yes. Of course yes. Of course morals matter. Not in the sense that wine critics become all powerful arbiters of what 'good' is - that would exacerbate a power imbalance which does nobody any favours. But absolutely yes in the sense that partners in a chain share the same values. Of course critics and sellers and producers should exercise a judgement on who they are happy to work with, to endorse, based on morals. Only people who share the same values should be happy to be part of the chain to sell that product. And vice versa - producers should never team up with sellers who espouse different values. Divorcing the product from the people that made it - and everything they stand for - is at the root of the problem of globalised consumerism. It severs the link between consumer and producer. It is core to the problem we now face. We've lost touch with nature and where things come from. In these Covid times, in this corner of Somerset, local people are reconnecting with local producers. Local deliveries of milk, meat, veg have been set up. We are - joyfully - rediscovering the wonderful people and producers who have been on our doorstep all along. The longer this goes on the stronger these binds will become. Hallelujah. Real value is much more than price, and connection is at the heart of real value. So time to make it clear. In business, in supply chains, in what and how we buy stuff - shared value matters much, much more than driving out cost. If there's one thing we learn from this let it be that - and let us use this moment to start building systems and chains that explicitly are designed around shared value first, creating more value through the chain second, and driving down cost only after all that. Let's go to work. #goodgrowth #tomorrowscapitalism #aftercoronavirus #jamiegoode #regenerativeeconomics

From next week my partner and I can no longer live together. I am not a citizen in this bit of Asia and do not perform an "essential" job. I need to go back to where I came from. If I get sick here I will take a hospital bed away from a citizen. I was welcome to spend money to gawk at gardens in the sky or eat overpriced dressed up food. Not welcome to spend time with a loved one. Consumption and entertainment get into the GDP, money transactions count; relationships are useless. Thats the way we live - transactional, temporary, veneerism. We entertain ourselves in idiotic fifteen second bytes. Anything longer is a drag. Who cares that the guy making a fool of himself on video lives in his own excrement? Or taking a break from skinning dogs while they are still alive. Our lives are measured in finger-flips - independent momentary interactions with nothing beyond the fifteen second frame. All that matters is advertising revenue. How did we end up here? We jump up and down frothing at the face while a clown mouths off about a Chinese virus. But we happily buy cheap Chinese shoes. Don't even know the shoes are Chinese but we know the virus is. We don't care that the shoes turned a river red or that the factory used to be a village. As long as our shoes are cheap and our clothes trendy. My consumption decision stops at the store. Once in a while I might notice something with a sticker that says, "We are nice people", I gladly toss it for something cheaper or trendier. And now the "Chinese" virus is killing us and mass slaughter of wildlife distresses us? Now we forward WhatsApp messages to stop wildlife trade and cute videos of dolphins swimming in Venetian canals? Those Chinese slaughtering exotic animals are bad; that's what caused the virus? And suddenly we are all custodians of the environment? We forget that the Chinese can afford pangolin scales and rhino horn only because we wanted cheap shoes and toys? Globalisation was supposed to bring the world together. But this globalisation is not sustainable. This transactional, short-term, blinkered globalisation is hastening our collective demise. Where are the communities that the wise men say are essential to our wellbeing and survival? Communities bound by consumption enslavement and whatever skullduggery as long as the government says it is within the law? That sense of identity that supposedly keeps us sane? Does that come from wearing identical t-shirts and chanting racist chants while bulked up freaks engage in acts of physical self-abuse and violence? The sense of purpose that supposedly makes life worth living? Shop till you drop? Globalisation without a sense of a global community is a disease. Without a common purpose, a sense of identity, and reciprocal obligations we are parasites on the planet and on each other. We cannot survive as a species unless we rethink our value systems. Humans have tried to find purpose in their lives since times immemorial. We don't have to ponder the philosophical or spiritual "who am I?" or what ever to see that unless we make environment and social good the core of our value systems, unless we put at the center of our existence the safeguarding of our planet and our collaborative evolution as a species, we are guaranteeing our own extinction. We won't have any philosophical questions to ponder. We will all be dead. Stewardship of the environment and empathy for our fellow humans is the most urgent human purpose. So what? Hold hands and sing songs? Teary-eyed at pictures of children holding baby goats? No. Have all of us turned us into complete idiots that we ignore science for bullshit?Feel good brand bullshit is hoodwinking us while we merrily buy and discard without any idea of what we are really doing. Have we decided that collective idiocy and disregard of science is the new black? We have the power to make a difference but while the pundits and the bureaucrats slather themselves with science-based targets and SDGs we smoke brand bullshit. Who is going to insist that brands and corporations step up and translate the science into real changes? Change the way they operate, change the way they account for their business outcomes, change the way they are governed, change the way they pay their managers? It does not take a genius to see where to start. Isn't it obvious that science has to be the driver and we have to start where our raw materials are produced? How can we believe that our supply of raw materials is unlimited? We are happy to massage our consciences with easy badges without a thought to carrying capacities, optimal herd mixes, wildlife ecology, and ecosystem health and the real needs of the communities that produce them. What is that price premium actually doing on the ground? Fair-trade is not fair for the planet. Its not fair for generations that will come after us. Science has many of answers, some need to be found. But we are happy to ignore science and instead to rely on nice-looking labels to tell us its all okay. And we are happy to believe that we live in our own little bubble. Do we know how our consumption decisions go? Our ill-informed concern has easily transformed into not-in-my-backyard attitudes that are drowning third world countries in garbage while we beam at our immediate "footprints". We export our sins. Claiming zero carbon footprints while suffocating entire towns in India is hypocrisy of criminal scale. Todays supply chains are very effective at insulating us from the environmental and social damage of our consumption. What do we do other than use a transactional and abstract "price" to believe that everything is alright? "Fair-trade", "returning 2% of profit to the communities", "donating one pair of shoes for every ten bought" - we have to stop this nonsense. Our perverse consumption decisions are destroying our world - killing the environment and destroying our communities - what does the extra 2 percent do? And then the way we deal with each other. Our lives are an endless series of transactional short-term engagements. "Get out of our country when health becomes more valuable than the money you spend gawking at our gardens in the sky" is a terrible way for humans to behave with each other. Reciprocal obligations develop over time. It is unrealistic to expect that suddenly we will all start holding hands and singing songs. But we have to start somewhere. And a good way to start is with an appreciation of the folks who produce the raw materials that finally feed and clothe us and the ecosystems that they come from. It is time to stop seeing raw materials as nothing more than anonymous inputs into trendy products and communities as nothing more than the value of their surplus labor. Sometimes we need them, sometimes they need us and this cannot all be written into a contract. We are humans. We need to start behaving like humans not like some code that executes on the basis of rules. We have to stop believing that we are meant to be greedy selfish assholes who care only about ourselves. And we have to stop believing the bullshit that draconian governments and unscrupulous corporations pump into our heads. We have to stop and look around. We are happier when we have a purpose that goes beyond catching the 7.20 am bus to downtown. We feel better when we help each other, when we are kind to animals. Why do we have to make that only a weekend distraction? Who does not feel better joking with the coffee lady while she makes your coffee? Why not make relationships a central point of our existence? Who says we need relentless growth to survive as a species? This is bullshit and it is time we used our brains to think for once. Unless we do this we are all fucked. #coronavirus #goodgrowth #tomorrowscapitalism

William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral is a great novel. In it a character from the past has to pretend to be, in the present, a "neoprimitivist curator", something that she could never even have comprehended - simply because of when she was from. So they implant into her present day avatar a cognitive bundle to enable her to sound something like a neoprimitivist curator. “You’ll spout a reasonably high grade of facile nonsense”, she is told. “Will I know what it means?”, she asks. “It won’t mean anything. . . Were you to keep it up, you’d shortly repeat yourself.” “Bullshit baffles brains?” And this brain-baffling bullshit has started showing up more and more as the Instagram generation discovers environment conservation as a market niche. A cashmere brand claims it is helping herder communities in the middle of the Gobi desert by building jogging tracks; a high-profile founder claims her brand understands “fully the carrying capacity of the region”. Almost twenty years in Mongolia I have yet to see a cashmere herder out for a jog and not even a rangeland ecologist has ever claimed a "full understanding" of the carrying capacity of a region. So what's going on? Brand Bullshit. We are seeing more and more bullshit artists setting themselves up as creators of a new and better world. In reality its not about this at all. It is about bullshitting their way into what they see is an underexploited market niche. But there is a reason that the “market niche” of environment conservation and social wellbeing is underexploited - doing it right is bloody hard and its impossible to do right if you are on a venture capital hunt. But although the purveyors of this bovine dung are false messiahs, the sins they are claiming to be dying for are real and important. When the bullshitting do-gooder says she understands carrying capacities, she knows overgrazing is desertifying grasslands. And when the daring duo cashmere cowboys yodel about their jogging tracks bringing communities together, they know that communities in the Gobi are disintegrating. The textile industry and its supply chains are wreaking havoc on ecosystems and communities around the world. So what to do? How to go beyond the brand bullshit? The real versions of what the brand bullshitters are claiming to be do exist. Researchers at the Wildlife Conservation Society, for example, have been studying Mongolian grasslands and trying to figure out optimal herd mixes, carrying capacities, rangeland health indicators, and management plans. The South Gobi Cashmere Project partly funded by Kering and supported by WCS has been trying to build commercial herder enterprises around science-driven sustainability standards. The IBIS Rice project supported by WCS has crafted a product based on science-based land use plans. Wildlife Friendly protects wildlife by certifying enterprises that assure people and nature coexist and thrive. This is real work. It takes more than a motorcycle ride across the Gobi or a homestay with a herder family to figure out. Making these real solutions financially viable is what it will take to go beyond the brand bullshit. And it is hard work. And this is what the Good Growth Company is about. We start with an outline map of a business system that can deliver good outcomes. This could be a local-global chain that connects threatened Mongolian grasslands and herders through specialty manufacturing hubs in Scotland through small brands to conscientious consumers or it could be artisan wines from fragile slopes in Georgia through specialty retail to US consumers. And then we work with partners who know what they are doing to understand what ecosystem balance means at key locations in the system. This could have quite different components at different places - from wildlife habitat protection, and children's education in a Mongolian valley to community-owned spinning facilities in Scotland to activity-oriented consumer groups in the US. And only from that understanding determine the parameters of the system including the mix of inputs, the type of products, the type of connections. And the design of a business system - structures that foster long-term symbiotic partnerships based on reciprocal obligations, fair distribution of value, and a sense of community and a shared identity; financial products that are directed at the whole system rather than only a part of it and which are structured to maximise regenerative returns; and a strong brand narrative that ties the participants together - is all directed towards balance at each node of the system - regenerative from the get go, not just "lets try and get there at some point in the future." Sounds hard? It is going to be bloody hard. And what it will look like will probably be quite different from what each of us has imagined. But this is the only way to get around brand bullshit. #brandbullshit #fakegood #goodgrowth #WCS

For a while now, International Finance Institutions have been trying to integrate their activities better with the wider economic and financial system. Their efforts to better align social and environment objectives with private sector and non-government objectives mirror the principles of Triple Bottom Line (People, Planet, Profit) coined by Volans co-founder John Elkington in 1994 - TBL was intended to pull Planet and People into the Profit focus of businesses; IFIs have been trying to pull Profit better into their Planet and People focus. But IFIs will have to do much more if they are to remain relevant. In 2018 John Elkington recalled Triple Bottom Line because it had done little to trigger the kind of systemic change that is needed to make capitalism sustainable. Instead most adopters were using TBL as little more than an accounting tool. With the backing of organisations like Aviva Investors, The Body Shop International, Covestro, Unilever and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, Volans’ Tomorrow’s Capitalism Inquiry is exploring how the principles of the Triple Bottom Line can be applied to accelerate the emergence of an economic system where companies thrive because of – not in spite of – their commitment to creating economic, social and environmental value. International Financial Institutions need to be part of this systemic inquiry. Unless IFIs help trigger the sort of economy wide transformation that Tomorrow’s Capitalism Inquiry foresees, their goals of poverty reduction and environment protection, are going to become more and more difficult to reach. They will become increasingly irrelevant trying to address the negative outcomes of systems over which they have no influence. They would have missed the opportunity to contribute to the way tomorrow’s economic systems will be shaped and to define for themselves a role in them. IFIs are uniquely positioned to act as systemic connectors - pulling together the public resources, private investments, philanthropic capital, and non-government initiatives that will be needed to trigger systemic change and influence evolution. IFIs must participate in Tomorrow’s Capitalism Inquiry to make sure that they remain relevant, influential, and effective. #tomorrowscapitalism #volans #goodgrowth #greenswans

Get married for love For much of my working life I've wrestled with the problems of partnership - or rather the wrong partners in business. I think collaboration is one of the most powerful forces in business but all too often I see businesses make terrible choices in which partners they collaborate with. One of my favourite brands was a little Norwegian electric car maker called Think who made ahead-of-their-time electric city cars. The Norwegians loved it - but as in many aspects of life they were a long way ahead of anyone else. So Think struggled commercially, got sold and resold a couple of times, and ended up with a bunch of owners who wanted them to "get much bigger". So they cast about for a distribution partner who could help accelerate their entry into other markets and - inexplicably - settled on a tie-up with a kind of cash'n'carry warehouse store brand called Migros. (Photo by Eduardo Soares on Unsplash) On paper maybe there was some logic to it - we need sales, you've got shops; you need a bit of eco-cool, we've got that - but it's still very hard to see how this marriage came to be regarded by anyone as a good idea. Needless to say it did not work - and Think is no more. I was always taken aback by how much care a business would put into choosing its CEO or key staff - checking for alignment and shared values - compared to how very little of that soft stuff they would think about when it came to key partnerships in critical areas like 'selling our precious product'. If businesses chose partners based on a common way of thinking, shared interests, and not on a knuckle headed "you're big" they'd all be a lot better off. Distribution partners - repent at leisure Who sells your product can make a massive difference to your whole business - and not in a good way. And all too often it's super hard to spot. As we have been developing the Good Growth Company we have been looking with a critical eye at every aspect of business chains. The conclusion we come to is that partners really, really matter. So much so that I'd say with confidence that the critical factor in building any good growth business is finding and choosing and engaging the right partner at every point in the chain. One wrong partner in a critical link and the whole system gets screwed up. This can mean: investors - so many good businesses have been and continue to be ruined by taking money from the wrong folks and being forced to dance to a different tune supply chain - the wrong processor can wreak havoc on small producers in pursuit of economies of scale. Primary processing becomes a transaction based on scale rather than a value add step in the chain. (For example the gigantic washing machines used to wash wool - these become mini-monopolies in the chain and act as such) distribution - especially for products that derive a lot of their value from story of origin. If you end up with a distribution channel that does not support that story not only does the value you create get lost, but worse the distributor starts to influence how you make the product. I think distribution exerts a malign influence on brands that many are unaware of A lot of our effort is going in to trying to align and 'unfragment' these chains to get everyone pointed in the same direction - it's surprisingly hard. (there's a lot more about this stuff here) "But we're really big" I've been having a lot of fun working with the wonderful folk who make wine in Georgia. Wine is category where producers make a fabulous product, and should be able to exert significant influence over how that product gets sold, but all too often do not. One of the striking oddities in wine is how much influence (good and bad) the distribution partners can exert over the product and the strategy. From China to Russia to Japan to Germany to the UK the in country distributors wield massive influence over where and how the product gets sold. In the US especially there are a plethora of wineries and in relative terms not many distributors. The maths means that each distributor is being courted by many wineries. The rules - a hangover (sorry) from Al Capone's time - are rigid and insist on strict controls in each state. Meaning that for wine producers looking to import into the US middle men are baked into the equation - each wanting a healthy margin. So the commercial equation is especially tough. The local producers (of whom there are many, and who themselves struggle with overcapacity and a younger population more interested in cannabis than the grape) can avoid many of these margin takers by selling a healthy proportion direct. A decent Napa winery will sell 65-70% of their product direct to people visiting or who have joined their club. Not so for importers. 100% of what they sell goes through the importer-distributor-retailer system, and in a different way in each of the 50 states. They have to find distribution partners who can work in the right channels and present their brand to the right kind of customer with the right story. But this is cripplingly hard: In wine there is a high volume price driven channel which sells off the shelf, and a hand sell channel through independent retailers which allows for stories to be told. They are very different channels catering to very different segments. Wines from unfamiliar places with unfamiliar grapes don't do well in supermarkets. Yet too many distributors try to push them through that channel - at tiny or negative margins - and with monstrous marketing costs. It's a killing zone for brands When asked why any producer would want to do this - sacrifice any hope of making any margin, send additional funds to the sellers for shelf promotions, be told to make the wine cheaper to be able to duke it out in the ferocious price war - the answer is: "because this is a really big market" Which is nuts Size really does not matter - what counts is shared interest At the same time as I was first wrestling with the weird asymmetrical influence that distributors exert over producers in wine (asymmetry of margin vs risk especially) this refrain of "because we're really big" was getting a regular outing in the Brexit and free trade agreement discussions. One of the oft repeated assertions in the UK was that the EU, specifically the Germans, would want to treat the Brits kindly "because we buy a lot of cars". Another - fascinatingly repudiated on the BBC World Service - was that Commonwealth countries would want to switch trade to the UK post Brexit "because we're a really big market". "Why would we want to do that?" .....came the retort from a group of economists and trading folk from various places in Asia and Asia Pacific that had had some kind of colonial connection with the Brits a long time ago, but who had been busy over the past 40 years or so forging strong partnerships with their geographic neighbours..... "we want to trade with people who share the same values as us, who care about the same things" Don't we all? #goodgrowth #postbrexit #tomorrowscapitalism #distribution

Artisan wines Last week the Teliani Collection of small batch artisan wines was launched in the wonderful depths of the not-quite-yet-open wine museum in Tbilisi. It was a lovely event with loads of cool Georgians, super talented winemakers and a host of smart people. I love this project because everyone wins - the would be winemakers get to turn their passion into a profession, giving them an incentive to restore the land and the stock of grapes, the wine business of Teliani Valley gets kudos for lending its expertise and effort into bringing these wines to the world, the wine lover gets to taste super rare wines they could never get elsewhere. Pretty much everyone involved in making and bringing the wines into the world was in that room - including the sons and daughters of the makers. The people who made the wine and the people who drink the wine were all in the same place - swapping stories, sharing together. Wine bits and bobs The not-quite-yet-open museum is a lot of fun - full of wine bits and bobs going back to 6 millennia BC. It seems that the kind of "let's all get together and share" culture around wine has always been a thing. Amongst my favourite things were this kind of aroma-tron - you puff the puffer and the wine aromas are intensified, so even a heathen like me can appreciate the nuances and subtleties: And also these are apparently drinking cups from a very long time ago (second millennium BC) called a "communicating vessel". (There's a similar thing down in Somerset for cider which is a Wassail jug, it has three handles for sharing): Making buying stuff a political act One of the challenges we have been wrestling with as we develop Good Growth, is how to connect the buyer, the consumer, much more closely with the regenerative impact at the head of the value chain. The point of these chains is that they do good - everything is designed to restore and not deplete the stock of natural and human capital. The act of consuming this wine or any of the products in a Good Growth chain is - by definition - an act of regeneration. I am really struck by the strong connection and alignment between the makers and the consumers - part of the value for both is in the shared interest in restoring and reviving environment and livelihoods. That's what I felt in the wine museum. I think there is a massive and important distinction between consumption that is extractive - that depletes natural and human capital - and consumption that restores it. This is important because when you start applying the regenerative/extractive lens to consumption it becomes a heck of a lot easier to work out what's good and what's not. For instance I now have a much clearer idea of what makes me uneasy about battery electric vehicles - the batteries can't be made without extracting a very precious and finite resource. In clothing and fabric especially the distinction between a product that is regenerative and one that is extractive is crucial - much more crucial than any of the standards and marks that are floating about at the moment and which focus on standardised inputs not actual outcomes for the environment or for humans. It calls into question what we really mean by "luxury" and whether it can ever be a good thing (I think not), and whether the debate around "fast fashion" should focus less on the fast and more on the fashion. Can we find a way to signal very clearly whether buying a product is regenerative or extractive? It would be a breakthrough. I think we can, so we're going to try. Watch this space. #goodgrowth #regenerativeeconomics #tomorrowscapitalism #telianicollection #regenerativeconsumption

This is the first of a handful of small batch artisan wines. It's a project with masses of potential. Georgia is a nation of winemakers and would be winemakers. Many thousands make wine as a hobby in the villages and mountains that are a long, long way from any kind of market. Commercialising this passion and making it possible for the makers to earn a living is the point of this project - and in the process a few lucky wine drinkers get to taste some extremely rare wines. This wine was bottled in the village with a small bottling unit and then brought to market by Teliani Valley as part of an artisan series. There are 7 winemakers featured so far. The rare dark pomegranate red Asuretuli Shala grape was discovered growing wild in the woods around Asureti by German settlers in the early 19th Century. It only comes from around this small village in southern Georgia. The wine - Asuretuli Shala - is small volume and rare (this bottle is one of 750). Levan Bandzeladze is a 37 year old auditor who has been making wine as a hobby in nearby Bolnisi since he was 18. Through this program his wines can reach a market of wine enthusiasts who until now would never have had the chance to taste this wine - and provide Levan with the chance to turn his passion into a profession. #goodgrowth #telianicollection #artisans #wine

There are far too many animals in Mongolia - it's turning into a desert And a system narrowly focused on "fair" pay for herders makes it worse On 10th January at the Volans "Tomorrow's Capitalism" event we referred to the damage caused by mass market knitwear and cashmere. Cheap cashmere mean that the only way herders can increase their income is by increasing the number of animals. This has led to a mass of livestock that is completely out of whack with the ecosystem. Paying herders "fairly" only exacerbates the problem. Two things need to happen: We need to recognise that a $60 cashmere sweater is a planet threatening abomination. Any brand purporting to do good whilst it's flogging cheap cashmere is greenwashing, no matter how much it crows about fair pay Herders need to earn much more, much for what they do for the environment. We need to pay the herders for the value they create - which is not fiber treated as a commodity but the the role they play in maintaining and nurturing the eco system. For centuries they have managed the right number of animals for the environment - but in the past few decades mass market brands have screwed this whole balance up by driving down costs and - directly and indirectly - caused a huge increase in herd numbers. Creating the desert. Our partner in the Altai Institute, Barry Rosenbaum, writes: Essential to the identity and economy of Mongolia, the grasslands are under increasing threat from overgrazing and climate change. Multiple studies over the past decade have shown that the once lush Mongolian steppe, an expanse twice the size of Texas that is one of the world's largest remaining grasslands, is slowly turning into a desert. An estimated 70% of all the grazing lands in the country are considered degraded to some degree. Overgrazing has caused 80% of the recent decline in vegetation on the grasslands. Since the 1990s, the country has gone from 20 million grazing livestock to 61.5 million. When animals eat more plants than can grow back naturally, the landscape begins to shift in subtle ways, as plants become sparser and patchy, and dead areas emerge, accelerating soil erosion. During the same time period, annual mean temperatures have increased by more than 2.0°C, more than double the global average. 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. 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. So the first Good Growth products are designed in a system that reverses this stupidity. Watch this space. #altaiinstitute #uniqlo #chigertei #goodgrowth #tomorrowscapitalism #volans #regenerativeeconomics

Is 'growth' always a good thing? (original post now updated with a little coda on how the concept evolved - June 21) I've been in 'growth' my entire working life. It's been the goal of (just about) every organisation I've worked at or advised. They've all wanted to grow: grab more market share; break into a new category; drive up margins; scale new propositions; hire more staff; have a bigger footprint etc. When I first arrived at VW the brand had been on a 7 or 8 year run of growth in a rising market (which came to a shuddering halt pretty much the same day I started). 'Growth' was expected. Every forecast, every plan, every budget was predicated on the idea that growth would continue. So when it didn't, a lot of things went wrong very quickly. The experience of 'not growing' was shattering to an organisation that knew only growth. That combined with a rapidly shrinking market caused a world of pain - a whole industry producing too many cars chasing too few customers, but unable to countenance the idea of shutting factories. The next 3 years was spent on a quest to recapture the magic growth formula - to get back to that (much more comforting) position of continuous growth. The business, and everyone leading it, was programmed to seek and expect growth. (I once got into a heap of trouble for suggesting that a particularly unloved product had reached its 'natural' level of sales and that expecting it to find more customers would be counterproductive. That kind of chatter is heresy in an organisation wired for continuous growth - I was put on triple rations of kool-aid until I'd recovered my senses). Since VW I've been struck by how deeply the pursuit of growth pervades every business. I've only ever had one client that was seeking to become smaller - and that was because they'd been compelled to by regulators and the state after a gigantic screw up that we're all still paying for. It absolutely was not what they wanted. They found the whole process of shrinking deeply humiliating. Another client had set themselves the target of being the biggest in their category worldwide - the biggest by revenues, by market share, by margins, by staff, by every metric you can imagine. And they got there - they ticked every box, they climbed all those mountains. But there was no jubilation - being the biggest, even though they'd longed for it for so long, was curiously unfulfilling. It just brought a whole set of new anxieties about staying the biggest and a sense that somehow they had missed the point. Burns up natural capital Conventional growth causes untold damage In a world of finite resources growth models that deplete those resources extract a cost that will be felt for generations to come. Nowadays business is getting better at recycling but the waste is still pretty appalling. Taiwan manages to recycle 77% of industrial waste - the US only 44% (household waste is even worse in the US at a mere 26%). That's a lot of waste being generated by business. Not to mention the waste generated from a use-and-dispose consumption model that assumes obsolescence in products. Cars, computers, phones, fridges, TVs - all these items are expected to wear out, are designed to be worth less every day. The business models of selling something means you only earn from selling more of that thing. You want people to need a new one (and by implication dispose of the old one). The traditional car industry earns not a lot from older cars as they seep out of the franchise service network. In fact car makers capture only a fraction of the lifetime value of a car. Which is why mobility and -as-a-service business models are exciting, as they realign incentives away from flogging new stuff to keeping existing products going. Burns up human capital But it's not just environmental damage that raises questions over growth. Over recent times I've come to question whether size - being big - is in itself a good thing. Now there is no question that big organisations can be a powerful force for good. In a world where many challenges are transnational, big business has an advantage in mobilising across borders. When a global business is clear on its purpose it can - if it really wants to - do amazing and positive things. There are numerous examples of this from unexpected quarters - some of the work GSK did in Africa with rural pharmacies, PwC's work to strengthen tax systems in emerging markets, L&G's investments in housing solutions for the future. But so few do. It's hard. And the need for the big machine to be kept going almost always blows these good intentions out of the water. I'm convinced of two things. Firstly that small, radical, agile businesses can have enormous beneficial impact on the world, that being big is not a prerequisite for impact. Secondly that the process of scaling, the process of growth, is in itself a problem. Something happens during the scaling/growth process that comes at a considerable cost - to impact, to returns, to purpose, but most of all to humans. I've lost count of the big organisations I've worked with whose "big purpose" intentions got sidelined by short term pressures. Some of this is down to baked in expectations around investment - all the discussion is around how big you can get and how fast, not how much growth is right. Investment models encourage unbridled growth - but recently I've met more and more investors that question the consequences. Some will express regret that the thing they loved in the pitch - the ethos, the culture, the belief, the principles - somehow got diluted during the growth process. Brand practitioners have long tried to counteract this dilution of ethos/values by codifying in some way the 'culture' - creating various tools to help attract the right kind of people in the first place, and then to 'align' them to the organisation's values. It rarely works - the culture of a business inevitably changes as it grows. That "we can change the world" pioneering spirit is hard to preserve as you move out of the attic and up into some swanky offices in glass and metal land. Many years ago I went to Silicon Valley just after the dot-com bubble burst with Leaders Quest. Some of the most forward thinking people there - who had time and reason to get philosophical about this stuff - were coming to the conclusion that there was a limit to the size at which an organisation could continue to act in a human way, that beyond around 30 people it became industrialised, codified, process-driven. More machine-like than biological. This mechanisation doesn't just make it harder for organisations to retain their human characteristics but also can create real harm by industrialising processes that would be better off staying at human scale. Take food for instance - we've seen some tragic consequences of complex food chains recently. The horsemeat scandal, and most recently the death of a Pret customer near here in Bath. The latest Pret death is entirely down to stupidly long and complicated food chains - the sandwich contained a supposedly dairy free yogurt which wasn't. The yogurt was labelled dairy free. The yogurt supplier blames someone further down the chain - etc. Getting at the truth of what's actually in your sandwich is nigh on impossible given the multiple links in the food chain. The tragedy for the Pret brand is that they are supposedly prepping their food on site - in other words the distance between consumer and the people making the food is short - but their underlying supply chain leaves them just as vulnerable to this kind of contamination as any other food chain. But there may just be a better growth model Over the next 18 months or so we will be developing a "good growth" model, for real, with a handful of small businesses with great potential, combining investment, brand development, organisation design and supply chain development. We believe that it is possible to design a business that does good things for people and the environment, that is good for all stakeholders including investors, and which grows in a way that preserves the human scale. So the three principles thus far are: social and environmental benefits hard-wired into the business model multiple stakeholder value (staff, investors, customers, society, environment, supply chain) also hard-wired into organisation design growth achieved through replication not scaling - human sized units that share some common resources It will evolve, and we will learn. When we have some new insights they will appear here. More later. Coda - How Good Growth evolved. June 2021 2 years and a bit from writing this original thought a lot happened and we learned a lot. "Good Growth" means the full integration of human wellbeing and environmental health. Finding ways for people in places to live well in synch with nature. The business system that enables that integration is rooted in place - recognising that each place is different, that value for creation for each place is specific. Underpinning this "each place is different" idea is a repudiation of "standards" as having any place in regenerative business. So the business system does not seek to integrate sustainability into supply chains, but rather to redesign the entire system from ecosystem out. Greening up business-as-usual isn't going to cut it. The only way for business to be sustainable is to integrate into nature. It's a top to toe redesign that puts place at the head of the system. Now (June 21) we know that the design works, and that Good Growth is a system that can be applied in multiple places. The organisational element of the place brand company in each place enables the system to work everywhere. Following the "replicate don't scale" mantra which flows through the original piece, we are now taking Good Growth to 50 places around the world, spanning 12m hectares from 2024. To enable that we are building a regeneration fund with the fabulous partners we have encountered on our journeys. By mid 2020s the system will be operational in rangeland, forest and marine ecosystems. Lots to do. More later. NK-P 210619

Many brands are being dishonest when it comes to doing good. Time to call them out. There's a spectrum - hiding bad ingredients on labels, omitting or obfuscating, meaningless self-certification schemes, claimed sainthood. A plethora of ethical consumption apps threaten to make it worse. What's in your cornflakes? I have a confession to make. I don't read labels. I've never read labels. Somehow I've just assumed that I knew what was in the product, or how it was made. Which puts me to shame because it turns out I'm not omniscient after all. We've - better late than never - embarked on a quest to rid palm oil from our lives. Palm oil is bad for a whole host of reasons - rainforests, Orangutans, health. And it's everywhere - it's wormed its way into our foodstuffs over decades - getting rid of it is no small task. Which is where the labels come in. It should be easy to spot what's got palm oil in and what hasn't. But it's not. Some products list it as an ingredient - Nutella (main ingredients: sugar, palm oil....somewhere down the list 'nuts') - others do not. Some of the naughty people are using 'alternative' names such as the innocent sounding "vegetable oil" or the not-at-all encouraging "sodium kernelate". Rootling out palm oil has become an obsession - and I'm flabbergasted by how very hard it is. To help me I've got the Giki app and subscribed to Ethical Consumer, but so far all they have done is to reinforce how very little I know and how very hard it is to know what's right. So far we've worked out that a lot of what we had in our food cupboard, and until now thought was OK, is not. Peanut butter, cereals, some brands of 'butter' (yes butter)... The ethical apps have helped a bit - but they also raise a whole host of other questions - where was it made, is it recyclable (really), do the parent company operate in dodgy places - which are both worrying and not-at-all easy to answer through a simple tick box exercise. Next problem - when "outdoor bred" means "mostly indoors" A long time ago I worked with farmers on marketing-y type issues. Many of them were keen on pursuing "organic" as in it could mean higher prices and margins. But "organic" then, and still today, means a host of different things. Most people - me included - do not have a proper understanding of what "organic" actually means. We have a vague, uninformed view, that "organic" means good, probably means no chemicals, probably means nice life, probably means healthy. But it hardly ever means all or even some of this stuff. As shorthand "organic" is a very non-specific and unsatisfactory shorthand term. It means very different things in different categories. Standards vary wildly across different jurisdictions. It's not simple. 'Organic' chicken can live indoors pretty much its entire life but still be labelled 'organic'. There are massive differences between the US and the UK (as the latter is about to find out if the much vaunted 'cheap food for everyone' post Brexit trade deal ever gets done). For example: in the USA, there are currently no federal regulations to control or safeguard the welfare of animals used in agriculture. At all. Decoding labels today requires a knowledge of what's not on the label. Phrases mislead - take pigs for example.....pigs that are "outdoor bred" actually don't live outdoors, they're born outside and then raised inside. "Outdoor reared" means half their life outside (but not necessarily with access to pasture). It does not mean outdoor reared. Using different names is misleading. Using phrases like 'outdoor bred' is..well....dishonest. Marking their own homework - self-certification schemes A while back Green & Blacks was bought by Cadbury, which in turn was bought by Kraft. A small brand with high ethical standards and a strong commitment to a fair supply chain bought up by food giants used to controlling their supply chains from a cost perspective. For a while Craig Sams managed to get them to stick to the high fairtrade standards that were at the heart of the brand, but at some point 'fairtrade' - i.e. an externally audited standard - became an inconvenience for Kraft. Instead they decided they would create their own - self-certified - scheme: Cocoa Life. For most of the range...but not for all. So now Green and Black's has two ethical badges - but are they as good as each other? And if they were...why would they need both? Kraft's not the only one to seek self certification. Sainsbury have also introduced a confusing 'Fairly Traded' self certified brand that replaces the independently audited fairtrade scheme. They got some stick for it - quite right too. Do I trust Sainsbury enough to believe that their own scheme is as rigorous as the original Faitrade scheme? Of course not - even a cursory glance at their record shows that Sainsbury is not be trusted at all when it comes to doing good. Fake good A notch worse than suspect self certification schemes are the brands that make a big deal about being good, about doing good, without actually doing good. There's an ever growing market of time-poor well heeled 'ethical consumers' who feel reflected virtue by shopping from a host of brands that are parading their 'good' credentials. A batch of poorly researched and undercooked ethical apps are making things worse - swallowing the bollocks and giving these brands ethical ratings they do not always deserve. Most people - like me - either don't read the labels properly or don't have the time and ability to do their own research. We are more than willing to go with what the app says - but if the app hasn't done its homework or is incomplete they can create confusion. CoGo for example is a great idea but launched way too soon with (at best) very patchy data. These apps need to be very good from day one. So the apps - rather than make it easier can end up making it worse. And working out whether a brand is really doing good or not is far from easy. Take for example Tom's Shoes. Many people seem to love the 'giving away shoes' story. But stop for a moment and think. Does it actually help these communities to foist free shoes on them? Does "giving away" shoes constrain the ability of local shoemakers to develop and grow? Does what looks like a nice thing to do (through our western consumerist eyes) actually screw up the very people Tom's purports to help? Or Naadam - the "sustainable cashmere" brand started by a couple of mates. Now first of all "sustainable cashmere" is a very, very hard thing. Even the smartest, most forward practitioners admit that they are a very, very long way from achieving sustainability in cashmere. But not Naadam. They claim "real sustainability" and superficially it's a great story but.... ....when you look at what they actually do to pursue sustainability it's really not very much. There's no rigour or auditing - it seems more hope than strategy. Perhaps the most worrying aspect is the puff around Naadam park - a park with gazebos and a soccer pitch for the nomadic community they work with. Naadam are so pleased with this they've entered it for an ethical award. Nomadic herders don't want - or need - gazebos and soccer pitches. They need funds for their kids to go to school. They need help in managing pastures. They need help in getting further up the value chain and realising more stable livelihoods. Fake good is no good Doing good is hard, really hard. Working out what is really needed to make a difference involves detailed and ongoing research and monitoring. There are endless tradeoffs to be made. What's right one year is not the next. There are very direct contradictions between social and environmental good. Doing good is not - and never can be - a marketing campaign. It's hard, hard work and needs to be built into the operating system of the brand. The brands that are trying hard don't make a song and dance about it - it's serious business. What Kering are trying to do with cashmere is an example of a brand that understands - and is humble about - just how hard it really is. Kering wouldn't build gazebos and soccer pitches. There are others - like Patagonia - but the most impressive and progressive brands tend not to be mega-sized (check out Veja for trainers). It's hard to be good when you're big - take a closer look at Unilever. Their scale compels them to do things that are 'not good'. Working out what's right cannot be done through badges. Apps that oversimplify what is a very complex field aren't helping. Brands that rush to claim "good" or "sustainable" credentials are using "good" as a marketing tactic. It's fake good. I like all (not quite all) these brands I've mentioned here. They are in some way or another trying to do the right thing. But they've all turned doing good into a marketing thing. Inventing badges or schemes. Coming up with bullshit like gazebos and soccer pitches. They of all people should know it's not that simple. We as consumers should know it's not that simple. We all need to work a lot harder at understanding what is - really - good. And then do it. #fakegood #goodgrowth #tomshoes #palmoil

Last year I did something I suspect I will never do again in my life. I took a shower in an aeroplane. It was amazing to step off the plane in London properly scrubbed and ready for action. All on the back of some quality sleep in my bedroom-cubicle type thing with an ensuite bathroom. The plane was an A380 – that massive double decker behemoth that this week ceased production due to lack of demand. I’m kind of sad but not sad. Being on an A380 always felt a bit like being on an ark to me – it was so big you could imagine living on it whilst far below the environmental apocalypse came and went. The plane itself quite possibly would have caused that apocalypse, it is a testament to peak globalisation – carting vast numbers of people across continents whilst burning eye watering amounts of fuel and emitting who knows what into the atmosphere. The A380 is no more because there’s not enough demand and it’s too fuel inefficient. There doesn’t appear to be a second hand market for it either – which goes a long way to explaining its demise after just 14 years compared to the 50-and-still-going-strong that the 747 has clocked up. The A380 is a superjumbo product from a superjumbo business – Airbus. Brought into the world to be as big as it could be, to capture as much share as possible, no matter how adverse the economics of gigantic planes. Airbus is somewhat rare in being a European super company – a mega business created from numerous collaborations in order to be able to compete against other mega businesses, mostly Boeing. It was thought that Europe needed a mega-champion to punch its weight in a world of very big businesses – that to compete effectively in some industries it was important to be really big, even if that meant creating a near-monopoly. This week a similar plan to create a European champion – or Railbus – by merging Siemens and Alstom was nixed by the competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager for the opposite reason. It was more important to avoid the creation of monopolies than to create another mega-business for a mega-world (in this case to go up against the Chinese version). This has not gone down too well in French and German circles, where many subscribed to the view that size really mattered. “If we want to be able to face competition with Chinese giants, we have to gather the European forces,” Bruno Le Maire, the French economy minister, told the FT last year. Monopolies – rarely a good thing Fans of exponential growth such as Peter Thiel like monopolies. To him they’re a good thing – an indication of providing real value. Google is successful and valuable because it’s so big. It’s an example of a good monopoly in that it isn’t a rent seeker. To survive it has to keep innovating. But it’s all too easy for monopolies to be rent seekers. They have a vested interest in incumbency. They don’t have to pay much attention to what customers want (or need) to survive. They can treat suppliers like crap. They have too much power. It’s very hard for them to do good. Which is why in forming the Good Growth approach we are very keen to ensure that monopolies are taken out of the supply chain. When monopolies in the supply chain wield too much power – producers suffer. Monopolies are a by product of this dash for growth that I’ve been banging on about. They are a consequence of the idea that big is beautiful, that growth means ‘get big’. But is it not time to reclaim the word ‘growth’? To recognise that ‘growth’ does not necessarily mean increase in size? That growth can mean increase in value? For everyone….that growth can be good. We think that growth can be pursued in a way which delivers value to everyone, and in so doing creates positive impact for producers. That this can be designed in from the start. A key part of this is to reject the “get big at all costs” approach that results in damaging (and potentially destructive) monopolies, instead to focus on a growth path that delivers impact and commercial value in lockstep: In other words recognise that size – in and of itself – does not necessarily deliver value. And that pursuing a growth path that recognises that value is created by meeting needs – customer needs, producer needs, investor needs. That seems to be what’s happening in the airline industry….smaller, more efficient planes are what’s required, what needed, what’s valued. Ditto in food retailing – about the same time as the A380 was deemed a good idea most supermarkets developed an obsession for big, out of town, boxes. Cavernous warehouses masquerading as shops – now empty mausoleums to the pursuit of scale. Today it will be announced that Honda is going to shut its plant in Swindon. That will cost a lot of jobs of course but indirectly it will wreak havoc on the supply chain that has grown up to serve that plant. Within the Swindon area that Honda plant was pretty much a monopoly as far as those suppliers are concerned — their livelihoods depended on it. Which means their survival depended on it. Structuring supply chains to the benefit of all This asymmetry of power in supply chains is a massive problem. In agriculture especially it causes untold damage – economically, socially, environmentally. Industrialisation and monoculture drive out craft, turn farmers into labourers, and create real risk of poverty. A decision to switch production (say when Kraft/Cadbury swapped out the chocolate producers for Green and Blacks) can devastate a community. When we set out to design a better approach to growth, one that hard wired ‘doing good’ into the business, we realised that to succeed we had to address both how investment worked, and how supply chains were structured and valued within the business model. Treating supply chains as a cost to be managed creates the monopolies that lead to social and environmental ills at the producer end. Which is why the Good Growth approach adopts supply chain structuring as one of the five key pillars of how we work. Business can (and should) be designed in away that treats the supply chain as a source of value – economic, brand, impact value. More on the others soon. For more thoughts on Good Growth head over here. #goodgrowth #airbus #honda #peterthiel #railbus #swindon #380

Is ‘growth’ always a good thing? I’ve been in ‘growth’ my entire working life. It’s been the goal of (just about) every organisation I’ve worked at or advised. They’ve all wanted to grow: grab more market share; break into a new category; drive up margins; scale new propositions; hire more staff; have a bigger footprint etc. When I first arrived at VW the brand had been on a 7 or 8 year run of growth in a rising market (which came to a shuddering halt pretty much the same day I started). ‘Growth’ was expected. Every forecast, every plan, every budget was predicated on the idea that growth would continue. So when it didn’t, a lot of things went wrong very quickly. The experience of ‘not growing’ was shattering to an organisation that knew only growth. That combined with a rapidly shrinking market caused a world of pain – a whole industry producing too many cars chasing too few customers, but unable to countenance the idea of shutting factories. The next 3 years was spent on a quest to recapture the magic growth formula – to get back to that (much more comforting) position of continuous growth. The business, and everyone leading it, was programmed to seek and expect growth. (I once got into a heap of trouble for suggesting that a particularly unloved product had reached its ‘natural’ level of sales and that expecting it to find more customers would be counterproductive. That kind of chatter is heresy in an organisation wired for continuous growth – I was put on triple rations of kool-aid until I’d recovered my senses). Since VW I’ve been struck by how deeply the pursuit of growth pervades every business. I’ve only ever had one client that was seeking to become smaller – and that was because they’d been compelled to by regulators and the state after a gigantic screw up that we’re all still paying for. It absolutely was not what they wanted. They found the whole process of shrinking deeply humiliating. Another client had set themselves the target of being the biggest in their category worldwide – the biggest by revenues, by market share, by margins, by staff, by every metric you can imagine. And they got there – they ticked every box, they climbed all those mountains. But there was no jubilation – being the biggest, even though they’d longed for it for so long, was curiously unfulfilling. It just brought a whole set of new anxieties about staying the biggest and a sense that somehow they had missed the point. Burns up natural capital Conventional growth causes untold damage In a world of finite resources growth models that deplete those resources extract a cost that will be felt for generations to come. Nowadays business is getting better at recycling but the waste is still pretty appalling. Taiwan manages to recycle 77% of industrial waste – the US only 44% (household waste is even worse in the US at a mere 26%). That’s a lot of waste being generated by business. Not to mention the waste generated from a use-and-dispose consumption model that assumes obsolescence in products. Cars, computers, phones, fridges, TVs – all these items are expected to wear out, are designed to be worth less every day. The business models of selling something means you only earn from selling more of that thing. You want people to need a new one (and by implication dispose of the old one). The traditional car industry earns not a lot from older cars as they seep out of the franchise service network. In fact car makers capture only a fraction of the lifetime value of a car. Which is why mobility and -as-a-service business models are exciting, as they realign incentives away from flogging new stuff to keeping existing products going. Burns up human capital But it’s not just environmental damage that raises questions over growth. Over recent times I’ve come to question whether size – being big – is in itself a good thing. Now there is no question that big organisations can be a powerful force for good. In a world where many challenges are transnational, big business has an advantage in mobilising across borders. When a global business is clear on its purpose it can – if it really wants to – do amazing and positive things. There are numerous examples of this from unexpected quarters – some of the work GSK did in Africa with rural pharmacies, PwC’s work to strengthen tax systems in emerging markets, L&G’s investments in housing solutions for the future. But so few do. It’s hard. And the need for the big machine to be kept going almost always blows these good intentions out of the water. I’m convinced of two things. Firstly that small, radical, agile businesses can have enormous beneficial impact on the world, that being big is not a prerequisite for impact. Secondly that the process of scaling, the process of growth, is in itself a problem. Something happens during the scaling/growth process that comes at a considerable cost – to impact, to returns, to purpose, but most of all to humans. I’ve lost count of the big organisations I’ve worked with whose “big purpose” intentions got sidelined by short term pressures. Some of this is down to baked in expectations around investment – all the discussion is around how big you can get and how fast, not how much growth is right. Investment models encourage unbridled growth – but recently I’ve met more and more investors that question the consequences. Some will express regret that the thing they loved in the pitch – the ethos, the culture, the belief, the principles – somehow got diluted during the growth process. Brand practitioners have long tried to counteract this dilution of ethos/values by codifying in some way the ‘culture’ – creating various tools to help attract the right kind of people in the first place, and then to ‘align’ them to the organisation’s values. It rarely works – the culture of a business inevitably changes as it grows. That “we can change the world” pioneering spirit is hard to preserve as you move out of the attic and up into some swanky offices in glass and metal land. Many years ago I went to Silicon Valley just after the dot-com bubble burst with Leaders Quest. Some of the most forward thinking people there – who had time and reason to get philosophical about this stuff – were coming to the conclusion that there was a limit to the size at which an organisation could continue to act in a human way, that beyond around 30 people it became industrialised, codified, process-driven. More machine-like than biological. This mechanisation doesn’t just make it harder for organisations to retain their human characteristics but also can create real harm by industrialising processes that would be better off staying at human scale. Take food for instance – we’ve seen some tragic consequences of complex food chains recently. The horsemeat scandal, and most recently the death of a Pret customer near here in Bath. The latest Pret death is entirely down to stupidly long and complicated food chains – the sandwich contained a supposedly dairy free yogurt which wasn’t. The yogurt was labelled dairy free. The yogurt supplier blames someone further down the chain – etc. Getting at the truth of what’s actually in your sandwich is nigh on impossible given the multiple links in the food chain. The tragedy for the Pret brand is that they are supposedly prepping their food on site – in other words the distance between consumer and the people making the food is short – but their underlying supply chain leaves them just as vulnerable to this kind of contamination as any other food chain. But there may just be a better growth model Over the next 18 months or so we will be developing a “good growth” model, for real, with a handful of small businesses with great potential, combining investment, brand development, organisation design and supply chain development. We believe that it is possible to design a business that does good things for people and the environment, that is good for all stakeholders including investors, and which grows in a way that preserves the human scale. So the three principles thus far are: social and environmental benefits hard-wired into the business model multiple stakeholder value (staff, investors, customers, society, environment, supply chain) also hard-wired into organisation design growth achieved through replication not scaling – human sized units that share some common resources It will evolve, and we will learn. When we have some new insights they will appear here. More later. #industrialwaste #goodgrowth #circulareconomy #volkswagen #purpose #pret #leadersquest #gsk