Data, Data, Data. Reminds me of another Britisher, Sherlock Holmes.
YouTube – Lord Monckton adresses a Greenpeace-campaigner on global warming.
Socratic Dialogue by Lord Monckton with a Greenpeace-campaigner on global warming
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Category Archives: Green People
The Gates Notes : What is the world’s richest man learning?
Bill Gates is a great guy. You may not like Microsoft (I am personally a apple fanboi) but; you have to admire his business skills and now his foundation work. The most remarkable by any rich human being.
He is now spending a lot of time learning through the basics of subjects through online courses which he explains in this blog post on his new blog – The Gates Notes.
What a world we live in!
A lot of people ask me what I’m reading and how I learn about new topics that interest me. I am fortunate to have time to read a lot and I also like to view courses online from MIT’s OpenCourseware, Academic Earth, and others. These courses have ignited a passion of mine, which is to think about how to harness this approach so students who otherwise wouldn’t have access can experience these great courses and learn from these great teachers.
One of my favorite sources for great lectures is The Teaching Company. Most of their courses are available as audio downloads and on DVD. I had a chance to meet with The Teaching Company team and the way they find the very best professors and best courseware is impressive and it shows in the overall quality of the teaching.
via The Gates Notes.
The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery
“Japanese companies reinvented the process of making cars. That's what we're doing in health care,” Dr. Shetty says. “What health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation.”
At his flagship, 1,000-bed Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital, surgeons operate at a capacity virtually unheard of in the U.S., where the average hospital has 160 beds, according to the American Hospital Association.
Narayana's 42 cardiac surgeons performed 3,174 cardiac bypass surgeries in 2008, more than double the 1,367 the Cleveland Clinic, a U.S. leader, did in the same year. His surgeons operated on 2,777 pediatric patients, more than double the 1,026 surgeries performed at Children's Hospital Boston.
Next door to Narayana, Dr. Shetty built a 1,400-bed cancer hospital and a 300-bed eye hospital, which share the same laboratories and blood bank as the heart institute. His family-owned business group, Narayana Hrudayalaya Private Ltd., reports a 7.7% profit after taxes, or slightly above the 6.9% average for a U.S. hospital, according to American Hospital Association data.
CEO of the Decade – Steve Jobs
Superlatives have attached themselves to Jobs since he was a young man. Now that he’s 54, merely listing his achievements is sufficient explanation of why he’s Fortune’s CEO of the Decade (though the superlatives continue).
In the past 10 years alone he has radically and lucratively reordered three markets — music, movies, and mobile telephones — and his impact on his original industry, computing, has only grown.Remaking any one business is a career-defining achievement; four is unheard-of. Think about that for a moment. Henry Ford altered the course of the nascent auto industry. PanAm’s Juan Trippe invented the global airline. Conrad Hilton internationalized American hospitality.
In all instances, and many more like them, these entrepreneurs turned captains of industry defined a single market that had previously not been dominated by anyone. The industries that Jobs has turned topsy-turvy already existed when he focused on them.
[...]
The financial results have been nothing short of astounding — for Apple and for Jobs. The company was worth about $5 billion in 2000, just before Jobs unleashed Apple’s groundbreaking “digital lifestyle” strategy, understood at the time by few critics. Today, at about $170 billion, Apple is slightly more valuable than Google.
The Drucker Centennial
November marks the 100th anniversary of Peter Drucker’s birth. In more than 30 sharply written essays for Harvard Business Review and other publications, he delved into executives’ basic challenges and opportunities. Assembled here are some of his classic contributions, as well as new perspectives on Drucker’s influence.
via The Drucker Centennial – Harvard Business Review.
More here – Drucker Institute
Leith Sharp
- Image via Wikipedia
While working in the Greening job I learned a lot in terms of systems and inspiration from Leith’s work at Harvard. She has done some amazing stuff at a bureaucracy like Harvard.
She was the first paid environmental officer on the Kensington campus when still a student and after graduation was hired to “green” the university, which she did for five years.She pushed for sustainable solid waste disposal, worked with the state transit authority to cut commuting times to the campus, and ran a greenhouse gas challenge, an environmental living program so people could learn how to live sustainably, and a “green office” program.
By the time she took up a Churchill Fellowship in 1999 there were eight staff, funded by grants from not-for-profit groups, and government and university funding.When she set off to study international trends, she discovered “we were the ones leading, and instead of me learning from everyone else’s programs I used to get invited to present the UNSW case study.
It was exciting to be asked but on the other hand I was devastated to realise that no one had the answers in the higher education sector.”She spoke at Harvard and was recruited to create and run a program aimed at the enormous task of greening the campus.Her initiatives at Harvard are estimated to be saving $US7millon annually and have set the pace in the US higher education sector. Sharp has plenty of practical advice on inculcating the cultural change that must support technical measures such as equipment upgrades, lighting and insulation improvements, and making it self-funding.
via Harvard visitor Leith Sharp sharpens focus on sustainability | The Australian.
Atanu @ ISB
That’s the title of the course I am conducting at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. It is a small class of about 15 students. It’s a half-credit elective in the final term of the year.
My friend Atanu is teaching a course at the Indian school of Business in my Indian home city of Hyderabad. He is really good at going through the basics and teaching what he calls ‘vocabulary’. His premise is the industrialization of India which depends on urbanization of India.
He quotes a 100 yr old article on India in The Atlantic to drive home the point.
Another cause [aside from taxation] of India’s impoverishment is the destruction of her manufactures, as the result of British rule. When the British first appeared on the scene, India was one of the richest countries of the world; indeed it was her great riches that attracted the British to her shores. The source of her wealth was largely her splendid manufactures. Her cotton goods, silk goods, shawls, muslins of Dacca, brocades of Ahmedabad, rugs, pottery of Scind, jewelry, metal work, lapidary work, were famed not only all over Asia but in all the leading markets of Northern Africa and of Europe. What has become of those manufactures? For the most part they are gone, destroyed. Hundreds of villages and towns of India in which they were carried on are now largely or wholly depopulated, and millions of the people who were supported by them have been scattered and driven back on the land, to share the already too scanty living of the poor ryot [small farmer]. What is the explanation? Great Britain wanted India’s markets. She could not find entrance for British manufactures so long as India was supplied with manufactures of her own. So those of India must be sacrificed. England had all power in her hands, and so she proceeded to pass tariff and excise laws that ruined the manufactures of India and secured the market for her own goods. India would have protected herself if she had been able, by enacting tariff laws favorable to Indian interests, but she had no power, she was at the mercy of her conqueror.
A fascinating story of how India was doing the right things in the past. If only we can learn from our past.
The lucky 15 in his class. I envy you!
Obama’s pick to solve the energy crisis
Environmentalists and climate change activists are understandably delighted. Consider this: For eight years the United States has boasted an Energy Department that for all intents and purposes was a subsidiary of the U.S. oil industry. Now, should he be confirmed, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who specializes in climate change and renewable energy and already knows how to run a decent-size bureaucracy is going to be in charge of realizing Obama’s bold promises to lead the United States toward an energy-sustainable future. Symbolically speaking, one would be hard put to draw a sharper contrast between the Bush and Obama eras than what is achieved by this single appointment.
via Obama’s pick to solve the energy crisis – How the World Works – Salon.com.
The Visionary Shai Agassi
Better Place has come to Australia. After blogging about it yesterday I have been thinking a lot about the vision of Shai Agassi.
Imagine the audacity of his idea. Shai was tipped to take over as the CEO of SAP. That by itself would be a big deal at his age however, what he has set about doing now is unprecedented.
Traditionally you would expect that infrastructure like charging stations, and electric cars by car companies gain traction slowly and over a period of time it would settle down. Many different companies will participate in the process and some would fail. New technologies would be created, new models tried and after several business models have failed the entire industry settles on one or two models.
Shai is trying to turn things around. He has raised $200 million to start this project. He has devised a business model based on the highly successful mobile phone model where the cars will be provided at a subsidized low cost or even free and customers subscribe to use “miles” rather than minutes.
He is convincing entire countries to take up his idea. His home country of Israel was the first and then Denmark. And the third in my backyard of Australia. Australia has very few ventures of this kind and innovative capability happening. This can make a huge difference to the psyche of entrepreneurs here.
One person with a vision and belief in himself is going around changing the face of transportation. I respect Shai for his audacity of vision and his ability to take it forward.
You only need a few unreasonable people to create change and Shai is one of them.
How can I be part of this?
Are you a Green Collar worker?
According to an article by New Civil Engineer’s Alexandra Wynne, research by engineering and environmental consultant Royal Haskoning suggests that Government pressure to be green has led to huge increases in demand for ‘green collar’ workers – a term used to describe environmental-related roles.
“Over one third of businesses said their green workforce would need to increase by up to 10% and almost the same proportion said they were concerned about their firms’ ability to fill these roles.”
According to Royal Haskoning’s research, conducted by ICM last month (see news release), one in five (19%) of the 575 business leaders surveyed already employ someone with ‘green collar’ responsibilities. Of those not currently employing ‘green collar’ workers, 24% believed their company would soon make use of ‘green collar’ skills, services and products, with nearly a third (28%) hoping to do so in the next six to 12 months.
