Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein

What comes to your mind when you hear the word “failure?” Which sort of feelings does the sound of it engender within you? Not very good ones, probably.

As a society, we have been systematically wired and re-wired to abhor failure – F’s on quizzes, exams and science projects when you were younger were embarrassing…

“We’re here to put a dent in the universe.” Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs has passed away at the age of 56, having transformed the way we use and think about technology. Those of us working toward a more sustainable world would be wise to pay attention to how he did it.

I was working in the mobile phone industry in January 2007, when Jobs stood up on stage and revealed the iPhone to the world. Many of my colleagues looked on unimpressed – sure it looked good, but it was too expensive, too big, too slow for internet browsing, too hard to type on… in fact too just-about-everything. The consensus seemed to be that Jobs, as an ‘outsider,’ just couldn’t understand the complexities of the mobile landscape we all inhabited. What my colleagues missed was that Jobs wasn’t looking to find his own place in that landscape; he was planning to terraform it. And terraform it he did. Five short years ago very few people outside the industry had ever heard the term “smartphone,” but now it seems that every other handset you see is either an iPhone or an imitation of it.

What does all this mean for the business of sustainability? Well, Apple may not be known as a leader on environmental or social issues, but its winning formula serves as a great model for those who aspire to be. Jobs built an organisation that actively sought to shatter the status quo in every market it entered. The iPhone is just one of a number of successess – Macintosh, iTunes, iPad, and so on – that prove how a single company can really change the game if it thinks differently.

I’ve blogged recently on roundtable discussions that SustainAbility hosted in Washington, DC and London. We organized these sessions in order to connect some of our corporate and civil society partners in more intimate conversation than fits the conference circuit – smaller, more focused, more relaxed; all discourse, no presentation – and yet capable of creating more diversity and dynamism than possible when we only meet bi-laterally. A simple added benefit has been the experience of talking to people who are all of one place, in cities where we have offices ourselves. Our work so often takes us far afield, or into meeting environments built around destinations convenient to all but endemic to few, that it is easy to forget how both content and tone change when everyone has a common geography.

I am in the United Kingdom presently, spending time with colleagues at SustainAbility’s Holborn office in central London. I spent the two weeks immediately prior to this trip on a blissfully quiet vacation with family and friends. Plugging back in, I find myself somewhat reeling trying to comprehend the various forms of volatility which erupted while I was away: in the markets, on the streets of this city and in other urban centers around Britain, and in Libya, where the opposition’s final advance into Tripoli proved so rapid as to stun most observers, leaving online media scrambling to post headlines like Qaddafi’s Final Hours while such hours still existed…

On the heels of the launch of Appetite for Change, our team has spotted a number of developments and received interest in working together to transform our food system. And the overall theme of access to good food remains in the limelight, most recently with…

Although the concept of social entrepreneurship to many is much more appealing and sexy than mainstream commercial business, we need the power of both to push the field of socially responsible and socially innovative companies forward…

This past Friday, July 15th in Washington, DC, my colleagues Jeff Erikson, Michael Sadowski and I hosted a breakfast roundtable on leadership, trust and value. With guests from Areva, Chevron, the Environmental Defense Fund, Johnson Controls, the International Finance Corporation, Molycorp, the Nature Conservancy and WWF, we explored the intersection and interdependence of these topics as well as their influence on the sustainability agenda.

Cindy Gallop is a force. She is a magnetic, dynamic character that oozes positivity and passion in ways I have never encountered.

An ex-advertising queen, she recently founded IfWeRantheWorld.com, an incredibly innovative micro-action platform designed to turn good intentions into concrete action. Based on a crowd-sourcing principle, Gallop’s venture is meant to motivate people to do things by partaking in micro-actions that can effect great change in the world…

Lindsay Clinton tracks emerging themes in social enterprise, from this year's Skoll World Forum.

Here’s a message for corporate executives: your stakeholders are still searching for transformative sustainability leadership. Only 24% of experts and practitioners believe that corporate leaders advanced the sustainability agenda last year, according to the latest GlobeScan/SustainAbility survey. The rest of us are clamouring for more.

Lindsay Clinton is in Mumbai to round off 18 months of research on sustainable solutions to urban poverty.

Focusing on transformational system change may distract from the efficacy of cumulative incremental change.

Jennifer Biringer recaps her panel at the SoCap Conference, and links to the broader state of biodiversity.

Seven reasons why we think Better Place is one of the best examples of a 21st-century enterprise out there.

Today's business students set tomorrow's ground rules.

China now faces a disorienting triple crunch, and its responses will powerfully shape our world 15 years hence.

Sophia Tickell comments on events at the World Economic Forum...

The two top issues at the ‘New Champions’ summit in Dalian, have been entrepreneurialism and social responsibility.