In Bed With Jeremy Northam

All frequent flyers have their own tricks to fight jetlag. Mine is to use audiobooks. It might result in having to listen to the book many more hours that planned but it works well with me. It fills your mind and in contrast to a book, you don´t need to have the lights on.

I have just finished listening to ”Brideshead Revisited” excellently read by Jeremy Northam, one of my favourite British actors. According to a review of this and its predecessor read by Jeremy Irons, both have their merits. Could it be attributed to the fact that both actors attended the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School?

However, the very best audiobooks according to my taste are the dramatisations such as the Paul Temple mystery series, for example The Madison Mystery, Dorothy L. Sayers’ Unpleasantness At The Bellona Club and Elisabeth Kostova’s The Historian. Then you bring a full cast to bed and not only a Trollope!

Feast or Famine?

As a vegetarian, I thought it would be a good idea to attend the Land introductory session at the Tällberg Rework the World conference. Here several projects were presented, addressing better use of land such as the Jagritikullu initiative empowering women through providing better energy sources for cooking and Idesam focusing on deforestation in the Amazon. But what really caught my attention was this video from the  Multimedia Institute on the Environment University of Minnesota because it had such a powerform format and message. I'm happy for our decision to serve vegetarian food at the FOKUS Innovation conference June 16-17 in Göteborg!

From Good to STaR

After visiting Boston, I picked up a Harvard Business Press book while waiting at Dulles for the plane to Frankfurt. It turned out to be a very lucky choice indeed: "Strategy for Sustainability - A Business Manifesto" by Adam Werbach. In this book several of my favourite theories are joined in a neat way. So if you like Jim Collins, Martin Seligman and Marcus Buckingham, this is an excellent summer vacation companion.

"There is only one bottom line - the profitability of a corporation. If what a company is doing for sustainability doesn't lead to sustained cash returns, then the company's strategy probably needs to be rethought."

Here you can learn more about Goldman Sachs "GS Sustain" that shows relationships between cash return and sustainability, how to set your own Personal Sustainability Project, how to work with models such as STaR and TEN in order to set your North Star goal, how to avoid green blindness, structure your networks, and use MacGyver as a role-model in product design.

The book is filled with examples from companies like Nike, Walmart, Seventh Generation, McDonald's, Boeing, Clorox, Dell,  and Proctor & Gamble. Most of them large established companies focusing on consumer products. I hope his next book will focus on how to help small startup B2B companies, but I'd be surprised to find them on Saatchi & Saatchi S's client wish list.

Economic Gardening

At the NBIA 2010 conference, one topic was “economic gardening” . This concept was developed in 1989 by the city of Littleton, Colorado an alternative strategy for economical growth. It initially was based on research by MIT’s David Birch, who suggested that most new jobs in any local economy were produced by the community’s small, local businesses. With concepts like “seed financing” working with startup companies and incubators fits quite well into this metaphor. So does the notion of an innovation ecosystem.

With its emphasis on helping small companies to grow, “economic gardening” is in stark contast to the previously more dominant strategy “economic hunting”. This concept focuses on trying to capture successful entrepreneurs from outside and bring them to the community.

To quote Mike Chitty, which tribe do you belong to – The Hunters or The Gardeners?

From Boston

The picture is taken in Boston, a wonderful city where both flowers and businesses seem to thrive.

What's In a Name?

Friends of mine have recently launched ventures with very appropriate and exciting names. One of them is Sharea, which can be described as a combination of file sharing and a potluck supper. People are invited to come to a certain place (area) and provide something (share): a story, instructions or advice. No entry fee, as long as you provide knowledge or creativity. The first Sharea event will take place in Göteborg 21 May and already more than 100 people have signed up. True to its inherent characteristics, the concept is placed under a Creative Commons licence, why it can be replicated throughout the world. Awesome!

Another is TrampolinStory, focusing on digital storytelling. One very special kind of story, often used in organisations is the springboard story, and in combination with digital storytelling it becomes even more powerful. According to Steve Denning

“A springboard story is a story that enables a leap in understanding by the audience so as to grasp how an organization or community or complex system may change.
A springboard story has an impact not so much through transferring large amounts of information, but through catalyzing understanding. It enables listeners to visualize from a story in one context what is involved in a large-scale transformation in an analogous context."

The third is Recorded Future, introducing the first temporal analytics engine. It makes it easier to relate temporal concepts like “tomorrow” and “next week” to specific dates in order to see trends in data regarding historical and future events. Since predicting the future has always been high on the agenda for humans, the idea of even having it recorded must be thrilling.

All these three ventures make use of video to explain their business. Still, the name says a lot too.

Justified Poems

When travelling on the underground in London last week, I found my eyes drawn to Anne Stevenson’s poem “It looks so simple from a distance...”. Apparently the London Underground has paired up with a bunch of culture institutions bringing poetry to the commuters and done so successfully since 1986. I say successfully since according to their website, the ninth edition of the book, "Poems on the Underground", has sold more than a quarter of a million copies since it was published in 1999.

I suppose that this mix of providing free samples on the underground and on the web together with selling books is a great example of Chris Anderson’s theories regarding how to give things away in order to make money.

The series “Science Poems on the Underground” celebrates 350 years of the Royal Society. They have a really clever way of integrating scientific papers into modern media.

Planning a conference on innovation and sustainability, I might just look for inspiration here... Perhaps a competition on innovation poetry rather than business plans?

Cognitive Proximity

Last week there was an article in SvD commenting on the fact that now more than 50% of the top Swedish female business board members think its time to introduce a law regulating the proportion of men and women in boards. This is a rather big increase since last year when 68% still believed that this inbalance and misuse of resources will adjust rather quickly by itself.

I think that the majority of the comments made to this article are written by men. And the arguments are the usual suspects. One of them I find particularly interesting, since the consequence of the argument is really not a compliment on the intelligence of male board members. The argument goes like this: To have boards requested to consist a certain amount of women is not a good idea, because the women recruited would feel bad about being incompetent and not being able to contribute. This argument is based on a number of interesting assumptions. First, that there is an absolute and universally agreed definition of what competence is needed for each bord of directors. Secondly, that all the men already in all the present boards have this competence and should not be replaced. Thirdly, that very few women have this competence. And so on. But it is also based on a notion of feeling sad for the men still on the board because they will have to take on a totally incompetent woman. Like they would pick just anyone from the street just to fill the quota!?! That I would find insulting if I was a man.

Of course there are plenty of women more competent than many of the men now holding positions in boards. One of the reasons why is that boards seldom review what competence is needed for the company right now, because it is only natural for people to hang on to power. This means that if boards are forced to take on more women they will take the trouble to go looking for the competence needed, and if they take on a broader perspective on knowledge and look a little bit further than they usually do they will find plenty of people to choose from. Sometimes they can be found in a neighbouring country, which is even better from a diversity perspective. This is what has happened in Norway and Finland, who has already started to pick competent Swedish women to their boards.

So, of course there will be a competition for the best, as it always is. And then boards and chairpersons need to work on how to attract the women they want. That will be a challenge since for example tools like www.styrelseplatsen.se that support board work also relentlessy reveals who is active or not in reading, commenting, adding material and so on.