Bilderberg Hotel in the Netherlands, name-giving location of the first conference in 1954

Thursday 6 June, 2013

Dear Bilderberg members

For 59 years you have been meeting regularly to discuss the issues that most affect Europe and the USA. Looking back to the mid-50s, your original inspiration, to promote an “Atlanticist” approach to help bridge the gaps between the two continents, was no doubt well conceived as the wearisome post-war recovery period dragged on.

But it was not this aim that was most prescient. Your founders realized the potential of a cross-sector approach to international challenges. This approach brings policy makers, business, and civil society together in ways not possible in the normal discourse. As we look to the challenges the world faces now, it is clear that this is the very type of collaboration that is so badly needed – one that cuts across traditional boundaries….

The GRI Global Conference was a three day event with a mix of plenery, panel and round table sessions

The GRI Global Conference held in Amsterdam last week brought together sustainability practitioners, finance professionals, consultants, and academics for what many had been eagerly awaiting – the unveiling of the new G4 reporting framework. Beyond discussions of the new reporting requirements, all present were keen to share ideas about how companies, governments, and investors need to act collectively on urgent issues such as climate change, supply chain accountability, and labor rights. After three days of debate the message was clear – there is a need for all actors who are a part of the sustainability puzzle to move beyond disjointed incrementalism towards enabling systemic, transformational change worldwide….

Companies like Whole Foods have developed successful business models to meet particular environmental and social needs but it is not necessarily as straight forward for mainstream brands.

“Innovation is most powerful when it’s activated by collaboration between unlikely partners, coupled with investment dollars, marketing know-how and determination. Now is the time for big, bold solutions. Incremental change won’t get us where we need to go fast enough or at a scale that makes a difference.” — Mark Parker, CEO, NIKE, Inc. at the LAUNCH 2020 Summit

I recently finished Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey and Raj Sisodia, and came away with new perspectives on, and examples of, strong private sector leadership on environmental and social issues. The authors’ examples from Whole Foods – generous employee benefits, transparency and equity of salaries, etc. – are impressive and might be enough to soothe customers displeased by Whole Foods’ CEO Mackey’s candid views on topics such as health care, climate change and unions.

Like others before them (see my blog on Creating Shared Value), the authors attempt to differentiate their concept with others such as sustainability, citizenship and CSR. Yet Mackey and Sisodia essentially offer the same thesis: companies that consider and manage a broad array of stakeholder interests (beyond meeting the needs of shareholders alone) will perform better financially over the long run. This viewpoint is now more or less commonplace amongst large, global companies, a development we should celebrate….

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….

Image: USFS Region 5 (Flickr)

“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is now.” Chinese proverb

If planting a tree is a metaphor for taking action on climate change, the old Chinese proverb is wise advice for our present day dilemma. We are, of course, a couple of decades late in taking meaningful steps to transition to the low-carbon economy necessary to safeguard the quality of life and economic prosperity that businesses, governments and individuals strive to achieve and maintain. But just because we should have begun long ago does not mean we should not take action now. Indeed, urgency has been added to necessity, and adaptation has been added to mitigation, as the implications of a warmer world are becoming clearer with each passing year….

“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….

When we wrapped up phase four of Rate the Raters in July 2011, we expressed our desire to further understand how ratings were creating value for and being used by companies, investors and other key stakeholders. Throughout our research, we’ve heard a good deal from companies about the pain caused by ratings, and so we were keen to ascertain how much (if any) of this pain is worth it. We thus set off in phase five to explore this question of value, and spoke with individuals responsible for ratings at nearly 30 companies in the process….

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….

Two decades ago, business and NGOs sat poles apart, wary of each other’s intent and aims. Twenty years on — and with the realization of the need for collective action on environmental and social issues that play out across geographical, political, market and ecosystem boundaries — we see a shifting landscape. But has this move towards a focus on partnerships and collaboration overshadowed …

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….

At the end of the Rio+20 Summit Ban Ki-moon agreed to meet the 9 ‘major groups’ who have a formal role in the preparatory process and the conference, they include business, trades unions, scientists and young people’s NGOs. In practice, only four representatives of the groups were invited to speak. I was struck by the pointlessness of this process, …

If you’ve been watching any of the news coming out of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, you would not be blamed for thinking that it will ultimately fail. Many have decried the final Rio outcome document as weak and watered down. Several leaders have spoken out against the final version expressing dismay that it does not offer a more ambitious agenda. United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said in his opening remarks to the general assembly earlier this week, “Let me be frank: …

Having pretty much recovered from having my iPhone, iPad and laptop stolen (and having also pretty much recovered from one of the worst bouts of flu in my life), today in Rio was, on balance, a great day. People often ask me whether I am optimistic generally on the sustainability front and I find myself repeating that I wake up an optimist and go to bed a pessimist. And so it looks today.

Written with Dan Hendrix, president & chief executive, Interface, and Chris Coulter, president, GlobeScan.

One hundred years since the sinking of the Titanic, it is still debated why that fabled and fated ship hit an iceberg and went under. But surely the root cause was the widespread belief that she was unsinkable.

Twenty years since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro — which did so much to elevate environment and development on the global policy agenda — we fear a similar fate for our planetary ship. …

In the past few months, certain media articles have left me wondering what impact the mixed economic fortunes of various leading nations will have on sustainability leadership emanating from them.

Let me start by stating the obvious: The current trajectory of our society’s consumption of natural resources is not sustainable. I know it, you know it, NGOs know it, and policy makers and business leaders increasingly know it.

Yet as the world prepares for the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development in June, two questions loom large:

1. Why haven’t we made substantive progress towards sustainable development over the last 20 years?

2. What do we need to do differently over the next 20 years to transition to a sustainable economy?

“Fair” is in the current ether.

There is the Occupy Movement, raising questions about the fundamental fiduciary responsibility of corporations and government, whether they are acting (or capable of acting) in the best interests of the public, and how to hold them accountable in any event.

There is the ongoing Arab Spring, where another form of citizen power (itself a key inspiration for Occupy)…

This is the first in a series of posts about and from COP 17. Others in the series can be found here: two, three, four, five, six, and seven.

Durban will briefly be in the climate spotlight just months before the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit. Few of us at Rio in 1992 would have believed that so little progress would be made in the intervening years. At the time, I had four children of school age. Frankly, the UN process has served neither them, nor my four grandchildren, well since. Climate procrastination has put future generations (with over two billion ‘climate innocents’ to be born by 2050) at severe risk of increasingly dangerous climate disruptions. We have seen how national and international governments and institutions responded to the 2008 financial crisis in just two crucial days, but also how, in two crucial decades, they have achieved very little on the much deeper climate crisis. Nature neither defers decisions nor haggles; nor, as widely observed after the financial crisis, does nature do bailouts.

Last week we heard Clive Bloom – Emeritus Professor of English and American Studies at Middlesex University and author of Violent London: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts – _commenting on BBC Radio 4 about the systemic issues that underpinned the devastating riots in London this month. With many now searching for an explanation of the sudden and surprising violence that spread across London and other parts of the UK, Bloom argues that sociological factors – chiefly endemic poverty and the alienation of consumer culture – are the real culprits, and further, that failing to address the fundamental issues and resentments of the communities that spawned the riots will only guarantee their repetition. The point is essential as we face the likelihood of wider and more frequent social disruption in response to economic, social and environmental stresses in the decades ahead.

Sustainability challenges are enormous. Ratings can help drive attention and capital (financial, human, consumer) to those companies best positioned to address these challenges. Rate the Raters is a project that aims to make sense of the expanding universe of corporate sustainability ratings and rankings and to improve the quality and transparency of such ratings.