Warren Buffett once said: “I think you can learn a lot from other people. In fact, I think if you learn basically from other people, you don’t have to get too many ideas on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see.”
Strengthen Team India | The Australian
Rudd had planned to go to India in January, but Singh had a heart attack. Both Rudd and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith are determined to put India in the front rank of Australia’s foreign relations. Rudd is sure to visit India soon.There is a good deal of growth and development in the Australia-India relationship that can go ahead even without Australia agreeing to sell India uranium. But if Canberra wants to move the India relationship to the next level of strategic engagement, that will be necessary.
Tim Flannery, with whom this column is not always in perfect agreement, has pointed out that if you are concerned about greenhouse gases it is bizarre to export coal to India but not uranium, and thereby delay India’s move to cleaner energy sources.
Moreover, the whole world is beating a path to India’s door right now. The only real play Canberra has at a genuinely strategic relationship with New Delhi is to become a critical energy supplier, and that means uranium. Further, with the long-running insurgency in Sri Lanka solved at last, India will lead an accelerating process of South Asian regional economic integration (Pakistan excepted).
We need as intimate as possible a relationship with India across all policy fronts: the economy, security, global governance structures, pandemic and health issues, cultural exchange, everything you can imagine. There is a Labor Party federal conference in June and uranium policy won’t be changed before then. But surely a government as sensible and pragmatic as Rudd’s will make the leap on uranium some time in the next year or two at the latest.
An interesting book if you are interested in sustainability consulting.
The fast-emerging sustainability consulting firms are nipping at the heels of the
established consultancy giants who are scrambling to find their way in the emergent
field of sustainability. The upstarts are challenging many of the established notions
of how to add value to their clients’ operations. By looking at the business world
through what the sustainability expert Stuart Hart calls ‘new sustainability lenses’,
sustainability consultants are able to make sense of challenges that are baffling their
clients. Moreover, they are also beginning to help their clients uncover new and
sustainable value streams, the ultimate goal of good consulting practice.In Consulting for Business Sustainability sustainability consultants from around the world offer some of their perspectives and lessons on how to truly create sustainable value for their clients. Packed with new tools, advice and approaches, the book comprises a unique collection of wisdom from some of the leading lights in sustainability consulting practice. The areas covered include: developing best-in-class environmental management systems; sustainable design; supporting organisational change agents; working with key stakeholders; social impact assessments; human rights; and regulatory risk.
The book will be essential reading for practitioners in business searching for advice and toolkits on how to make their sustainability initiatives bear fruit, for consultants looking for advice on how others have provided value to clients, and for students of sustainability looking for best-practice examples and exploring future careers in this burgeoning field.
| A plug for the book from Gil Friend. I am waiting for a response to see if there is a digital version of the book. |
From Earth2Tech:
Electric vehicle infrastructure company Better Place is planning on using largely standard technology to deliver its electric vehicle dreams: car companies’ plug-in vehicles and basic charging stations. But one of the startup’s key technology differentiators is its battery swap station, and Better Place thinks by sprinkling swap stations at the edge of communities it’ll solve the problem of the short range of electric vehicles. So what technological feat has gone into the production of the battery swap station? Well, you can have a look-see Tuesday night at 10:30 p.m. Pacific time, when Better Place will be showing off a live video feed on its web site of a demonstration of its first battery swap station in Yokohama, Japan.
Atanu Dey points to this article on cities in the SEED magazine by Geoffrey West.
Doubling the size of a city increases wealth and innovation by about 15 percent, but it also increases the amount of crime, pollution, and disease by roughly the same amount. Apparently, the good and the ugly come hand in glove, an integrated, almost predictable, package. A person drawn to the city by innovation, a greater sense of “action,” and higher wages can also expect to confront an equivalent increase in smog, garbage, theft, stomach flu, and AIDS.
[...]
In contrast, the social networks that underlie the “superlinear scaling” of wealth creation, innovation, crime, and pollution behave in exactly the opposite fashion: The bigger the organization, the faster the pace of life. In big cities, disease spreads more quickly, business is transacted more rapidly, and people walk faster — all in approximately the same systematic, predictable way (the same ~15 percent rule).
[...]
In contrast, in social organizations where growth is driven by superlinear scaling, growth is unbounded, never reaching an “asymptotic” stable state, and proceeding at a rate that is faster than exponential. To sustain such growth in the light of resource limitation requires continuous cycles of paradigm-shifting innovations such as the discovery of iron, steam, computation, and most recently, digital technology. Indeed, the litany of such breakthroughs is testament to the extraordinary ingenuity of the human social mind when it comes to overcoming resource limits. There is, however, a serious catch: Theory dictates that the time between successive innovations must get shorter and shorter. So if we insist on continuous growth driven by wealth creation, not only does the pace of life inevitably quicken, but we must also innovate at a faster and faster rate!
[...]
The challenge is clear: The key to long-term sustainability of the planet lies in applying a scientific lens to cities, with the goal of understanding their dynamic structure, growth, and evolution.
Vital to Business Survival: Reading the Signs of Change | GreenBiz.com
What in the world is the next disruptive force?Business leaders in every industry have a powerful interest in figuring out what the next big disruptive change will be. Will society move to e-books? Will voiceover IP dominate the telecommunications industry? Will CD collections be discarded in favor of digital?
Those are important issues, but they pale next to the real change that is coming. The clues to this change are literally all around us — in the air, under our feet and in our water. The single most important issue of our generation is not only threatening how we do business today, it is threatening our society, economy and health.
This looming issue is the environment.
Once a concern only for hippies and extremists, the environment has become a pressing issue for everyone living in our world today. In “Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value and Build Competitive Advantage,” authors Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston write: “In today’s world, no company, big or small, operating locally or globally, in manufacturing or services can afford to ignore environmental issues.”
Some may argue about the causes of climate change and the role that humans play. But from a business perspective, there is no question that the environment is fast becoming a driving force behind public, governmental and economic activities around the world.
In short, the environment is the new musket.
Official Google Blog: Energy and the Internet
An interesting comparison of Energy used in Google Searches. More importantly, the blog post talks about the efficiency of using ICT in business.
The ACT Australian CleanTech Index rose during April 2009 and significantly outperformed both of its benchmarks, the S&P ASX200 Index and the S&P Small
Ordinaries Index.The ACT Australian CleanTech Index rose from 56.3 to 63.8 over the month of April recording a 13.4% gain. This compared to the S&P ASX Small Ordinaries Index gain of 10.3% and the S&P ASX200 gain of only 2.5%.
The financial year to date loss for the ACT Australian CleanTech Index remains below its benchmarks at 46.8% although is now outperforming the S&P ASX200 for the calendar year to date.
Business Spectator – Rudd delays carbon trading scheme by one year because of recession
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has delayed the emissions trading scheme by one year to July 1, 2011.Mr Rudd said the scheme – which was previously due to start from July 2010 – had been delayed because of the impact of recession and to provide business with certainty for the future.
Mr Rudd also said the government would increase the reduction target to 25 per cent by 2020 if a global deal was struck to stabilise carbon dioxide levels by at least 450 parts per million by 2050.
