In a blog posted in the fall of 2012 entitled, What’s the Big Idea, Chris Guenther and I explored the degree to which vision (a Big Idea) enables sustainability performance and leadership and vice versa. We concluded that it does to a very substantial degree, and that the current era is one suffering for lack of the kind of rhetoric that, when backed by appropriate strategy and operational excellence, paints a picture of the change required and provides inspiration that it can be realized….

“How might our businesses serve our humanity, and how might our humanity serve our businesses?” (Raphael Bemporad, BBMG speaking at Sustainable Brands, London)

Sustainable Brands finally came to London, in November, a long way from its most recent home in balmy San Diego. The organisers may not have brought us sunshine but the event did bring a strong call for more humanity, heart, purpose, bravery and honesty in brands and business….

The momentum around fair and responsible tax practices continues to build. I was struck by a recent comment from Britain’s highest paid executive who decided he should support responsible tax practice by disclosing that he pays all UK taxes with minimal tax avoidance (i.e. the legal ways of reducing tax bills). He believes, he says, ‘that if you want to be accepted in society you have to be seen to be paying your fair share’. His disclosures come hard on the heels of public denouncements of aggressive tax avoidance by David Cameron as ‘morally wrong’ and by a Treasury minister as ‘morally repugnant’. Nor is this issue restricted to the UK. Personal tax affairs feature strongly in the US Presidential elections. And the French billionaire CEO of Louis Vuitton was widely pilloried for seeking to shift his domicile to Belgium – allegedly to avoid the new 75% tax rate….

In 2001 the International Business Leaders Forum and SustainAbility analyzed the power of corporate boards and identified steps for “mobilizing board leadership to deliver sustainable value to markets and society”. Boards operate with little transparency, so it is hard to tell which, if any, boards adopted those recommendations and the opacity of board activity limits our ability to characterize current good practice. However, it is terribly obvious when boards trip up, and the last decade has been characterized by momentous failures of corporate governance and corporations themselves….

There are two distinct narratives on how and why we started SustainAbility in 1987. The first is that we knew what we were doing, the second that we didn’t. And neither is quite right.

Julia Hailes had joined me at a pioneering social enterprise, Earthlife, to work on two projects: Green Pages and The Green Consumer Guide. I had raised funding for the first, but then discovered two things: first that there was a financial black hole at the core of the Earthlife Foundation and, second, that the money I had raised had been swallowed by that black hole. Looking back at the period, I think Earthlife was one of the crucial inflection points in my life — and, like a neutron star, it projected new thinking and talent out through a wider universe. SustainAbility emerged phoenix-like from that period….

I was in Austin last week for a Sustainable Life Media (SLM) double-header. First a meeting of the Sustainable Brands Advisory Board, then the SLM Corporate Members meeting.

Hosted with aplomb by Dell, sessions included a tour of the Dell Social Media Command Center (a fascinating, real-time window into what everyone, everywhere is saying about their Dell experience), and an inspiring visit to the new LEED Gold certified offices of Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG Foundation, with both proving there is more going on in Austin than music, football and great Tex-Mex like Guero’s (though those are fine too, with Guero’s servings proving again that everything is bigger in Texas).

For everything packed into the two days, I left thinking about a presentation by Simon Mainwaring, the best-selling author of We First …

Copyright (c) Kyra Choucroun

Despite years of thinking about the traditional model of economic growth, it wasn’t until I drove through rural Ghana that it truly hit me just how spectacularly it has failed to deliver on the promise of global prosperity.

In my last blog I challenged the widely held belief that infinite growth is both necessary and viable. That piece generated a flood of responses, from howls of protest at one extreme to speaking invitations at the other. And it was one of those invitations that led me to Ghana in the first place, to share my views on how Africa can play a part in tackling the world’s most complex challenges at a youth-led conference in Kumasi.

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…

Image: AFP via sacbee.com

The past week has been, in many ways, a watershed in post-independent India, with millions of Indians – young and old – taking to the streets in a public demonstration against corruption. The crowds have been unprecedented – I certainly do not remember anything like this since the late 1970s – and has cut across geographies and classes. And the man who has galvanized this is a 74-year old Gandhian called Anna Hazare (pronounced Ha-zaa-ray), a retired army soldier whose public contributions started in his small village in western India but who gradually became a relentless crusader against corruption in public life. Will this be a defining moment in India’s democracy? Are there lessons to be learnt, including for corporations in democracies? But I am getting a bit ahead of myself…

In early July, after nearly a year of drafting and several rounds of consultations with business and civil society, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India announced the adoption of the National Voluntary Guidelines for Social, Environmental and Economic Responsibilities of Business…

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…

A particular remark has been ringing in my ears for two weeks: “We have an economy where we steal from the future, sell it in the present, and call it GDP.” Those are the words of Paul Hawken, who, in my opinion, has come up with the most accurate definition of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) so far.

When I heard it at TEDxOxbridge, I thought: Bingo! We’re finally weaving growth into the debate, and acknowledging that our obsession with stellar GDP and economic growth is simply an “intergenerational Ponzi scheme” biding its time.

In 2009, author Daniel Goleman wrote a book called Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. In it, he argued that we were facing an age of radical transparency – the underlying concept being that decision making will soon be public, and has to be transparent from the beginning of the process.

Yet, we are in an era where there are many companies, private or otherwise, that pride themselves on being secretive. Private, family-run companies like Ferrero, ALDI, and Forever 21, and publicly traded companies like Apple, thrive on secrecy. Yet there other companies that, by virtue of their private ownership, could be more secretive but choose not to be…

More on the similarities and differences between Creating Shared Value and Sustainability.

I recently attended the announcement of CR Magazine’s “100 Best Corporate Citizens List” at the New York Stock Exchange, for which the closing keynote was Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School. Professor Porter provided an overview of his (and Mark Kramer’s) Creating Shared Value concept, which prompted me to read their recent Harvard Business Review article in earnest.

Why energy rationing, not seen in the UK since WWII, may be exactly what's needed to jumpstart climate action.

We kicked off our 2010 Engaging Stakeholders members workshops with a discussion on sustainability leadership.

Business seems unprepared as fair tax follows fair trade into the spotlight.

Reflections, observations and trends (in no way exhaustive) from 2010.

And why companies who fail to prepare for a Gen Y world are preparing to fail.