General

October 23, 2013

In a global culture where an underlying mood of aggression and distrust is deeply and subtly embedded, it’s easy to respond to the multiple and increasing threats of ecosystem breakdown with the same aggression that we see played out on a daily basis. However, this is a place where Einstein’s famous quote is absolutely relevant:…

August 7, 2013

Michael Gerber first published his business classic “The eMyth” in 1986, and it’s been a business book bestseller for decades, revised as “The eMyth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It“ in 1995. (NOTE: The “e” is nothing to do with the Internet – it stands for “entrepreneur”.) Its insights…

June 25, 2013

Let’s talk about the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of profitable sustainability… Humans need more than why information for behaviour change.  If a good reason why was enough to create behaviour change then we wouldn’t have problems with smoking, obesity or any number of other ‘challenges’.  To make effective change, most of us need more than “reasons why” – we also need…

June 16, 2013

When the tide comes in across the sandflats, sometimes it doesn’t look like there’s anything much happening at all.  There’s a trickle here, a trickle there – it almost looks like nothing is changing.  Then some of the trickles start to join up and you can see that something is starting to happen. This is…

June 6, 2013

Lovely example of biomimicry from Ecovative via Grist: Usually you do not want fungi in the walls of your home. But Ecovative is building a home in which having fungi in the walls is the entire point. The “Mushroom Tiny House” will use mycelium (the mass of threadlike “roots” that mushrooms use to take in…

May 24, 2013

What’s beyond ‘someone should do something’??? OK, so you want a change in your world – what’s that change going to look like?  Do you know ?  Can you describe what you want instead? A web post I was referred to recently said that: “Those in charge of our world currently are clearly not doing…

May 23, 2013

I was inspired by ‘Cradle to Cradle’ when it first came out – as a business analyst in the manufacturing game it just made so much sense. Good to see a followup – “The Upcycle” is going on my reading list – after I get through “The Blue Economy”. As an Ontological Practitioner who believes…

May 23, 2013

An interesting ‘small, local, smart solution’ – maybe one of the world’s shortest commercial supply chains? “On a recent business trip to the Northeast US, I booked a flight that would allow me a long layover at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Even though most business travelers run from a layover, I had an ulterior motive. I wanted…

December 17, 2012

“Here are a few things you do with a prickly pear cactus: Get poked. Turn its fruit into jam. Use it to clean up dangerous concentrations of selenium in arid California lands. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, a long history of artificial irrigation has impregnated the soil with selenium. In small quantities, selenium is beneficial…

December 2, 2012

In 2001, Jim Collins published his research into the factors that turned good businesses into great businesses, performing well above their industry average over long periods of time. The title of the book is “Good to Great. Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t”.