Growing our ECOnomy

We all felt the chills of those winter days in late 2008 while the “financial storms” swept the world. Many people were locked inside their own business world just making sure they survived the impact of these financial storms on their business. In the middle of the storm the business reality set in and some people could not be supported any longer by their companies. As a result they were “put outside” to weather the storm themselves.

We are now able to look back over those wintry days from a place where we are beginning to feel the warmth of spring days. New ideas are emerging and many people are looking for new business seeds to grow, that will provide sufficient resources before the end of the next autumn, so as to ensure they are better prepared for the next winter cycle. Yes the business cycles keep happening just like the seasons.

Some parts of the world weathered the financial storm relatively better than others. For example Singapore and Hong Kong survived quite well (maybe like their weather the seasons are not too varied or perhaps they just were more prepared for the storms). Meanwhile the Banking and Automobile sectors in the USA were almost putout to weather the storms all by themselves. The most important factor in any cycle is to look for ways of developing and growing so as to be stronger and more effective in the future.

What has really been highlighted during this latest financial storm is the importance of business looking even more closely at its role in a truly global economy. By global economy, I mean the impact that people have on the sustainability of the planet. We have all heard the messages from the likes of Al Gore through the film “The Inconvenient Truth” however this latest storm shifted the way in which many organisations conduct their business.

Many businesses have changed, well it is actually the people operating those businesses that have changed. Though the real question is have enough people changed? Asking that in a more direct way, have you changed? The changes you may have made are to now look at your business choices by taking into account equally the considerations of:

• Is this a good choice for me (myself and my business),
• for you (my suppliers and customers) and
• the planet (my home)?

Lets look at each of these 3 questions in turn.

Is it good for me? Of course you need to look after yourself and your business. You need to consider both the short term and long term impacts of your decisions. For example, if you make a product by cutting costs and lowering the quality, then your brand may become know as an inferior one that does not last.

Is it good for you? Making products that may give you great financial short term gains while compromising the health or safety of your suppliers or customers is not likely to lead to them continuing to use your products. Think about the examples of the Melamine in Milk or the Lead in the paint of children’s toys.

Is it good for the planet? As you know, we only have one world to live on and keeping that healthy is important for us all. Using production processes that pollute the water we need to drink or the air we need to breathe can be a significant problem for all people and creatures. Look at the example of how plastic is not degrading in the environment, it is accumulating in our waterways and being ingested by fish and animals where it stays in their stomachs and eventually feeds back into our own food.

Do you have defined systems in place to actually assess opportunities against these three questions? As you know having systems in place helps ensure consistency between different meetings and workshops. However, having the system in place is only one step. The second step is ensuring that the system is followed. Do you ensure your meeting and workshop facilitators know how your system works?

When facilitating workshops and meetings I like to remind people that it is the quality of the people’s input that creates great products, which in turn allows integrity of those products to have a great perception in the market place. This leads to your increased market share and hence increased profit. It does however not stop there. The way the company shares their profits creates even greater loyalty with people both inside the organisation and of course this also follows on to the wider community.

So how do you share your company’s profits with your suppliers, customers and the community? Are you creating a win-win-win situation in terms of the three areas of looking after me and you and the planet?

This leads companies to look at their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Initiatives and their Philanthropic Initiatives. No longer is just good enough to give away money to causes. Knowing those causes and actually participating with those causes through staff programmes is becoming the norm. Partnering with these causes gives a new meaning or purpose to making profits for the company.

Now where do you hold your team meetings and workshops? Are they always in the same meeting room? Why not vary the venue so you get to see different people shine. You could even use the venues that your CSR cause has available. I particularly like walking meetings in the outdoors. Have you tried a picnic at the botanic gardens, walking along the waterfront or heading out on a boat cruise? Naturally people will behave in different ways outside the meeting room and therefore their thinking will also change. When outside take note of what is going on with the different seasons and how the different plants and animals adapt. You may even see a natural example of an issue you are facing in your own business and can take that approach “back to work”. It may be to do with your waste products and you see that there is a natural way to decompose or reuse it as part of an additional product line. As you know, ideally in business (just as in nature) there should be no waste that can not be used by another business (organism) to support its niche in the market place (environment).

So rather than considering how you can grow your economy again with only a main stream approach why not start with an eco-logical perspective as you can not have an ECOnomy without an eco start!

Grow well
Dr Merrin

(written for http://www.walkyourtalk.asia/)

An eco week in London

I have had a great time connecting with such inspiring people that are making an incredible difference to the way we are living on this planet. Thanks to you all so much for sharing your time.

I thought that it would be quite interesting to let you know who I have met up with as I am sure there are some exciting opportunities to work together.


So here is a list of the people I met in the order I caught up with them. Having said that I am going to start with one of the people that I did not catch up with though who was instrumental in my introductions to many people. Thanks Gina.

Gina Lazenby - http://ginalazenby.wordpress.com/ is inspiring women for success in business & at home.

Katie Young - www.katieyoungdesign.com is pioneering ethical and eco design & product development, and has recently produced stylish raincoats from fabric made from plastic bottles.

Chris Le Breton is part of a team of people promoting The Awakening the Dreamer Symposium in London. He is active with the Transition Towns initiative. He is also planning a bicycle tour from New Zealand to London via Asia in 2010.

Mike Southon - http://www.beermat.biz/mike_southon.php Thanks for sharing the wonderful space at the Adam Street Club and your wonderful insights into business via your knowledge of the Wealth Dynamics profiling. If you really want to experience the energy of Mike then check out Mike Fab-Gere (www.fabgere.com) and book him for an extremely entertaining and educational event.

Joining Mike and I at the Adam Street Club were:
- Shaylesh Patel - www.healthyplanet.org - Healthy Planet enables you to support conservation by adopting plots in protected parks throughout the world and helping to map the parks, monitor the parks and fund conservation actions in the parks.
- John Grant - http://greenormal.blogspot.com/ - is a green marketing expert.
- Al Tepper - http://www.linkedin.com/in/altepper - who is an integral part of Natural Collection (www.naturalcollection.com) the UK's leading green amazon.com type etailer
- Susan Mills and Adam Pattantyus who are driving forces in the Resilient Cities Initiative which is model for swift, aligned action for climate and other social issues. They are yet to have details online about this initiative. They both work for www.merrimackmanagementassociates.com

Catching up with Oliver Tickell was going to be in Oxford and then we discovered he was going to be in London at the Sustainable Development Commissions Break Through event. So as his Kyoto2 (www.kyoto2.org) proposal was one of the 20 projects being presented.

At the SDC event I got to meet the following great people
- Maria Adebowale from Capacity Global (www.capacity.org.uk) was talking about cultural diversity. Loved her approach. Their mission statement is "A fair and equitable society can only exist if everyone has a right to participate in the major decisions that affect their lives. Only with full public participation can effective strategies for social justice, eradication of poverty and a healthy environment be found."
- Lesley Lambert from Compassion in world farming (www.ciwf.org.uk) which certainly struck an accord with my upbringing on a farm and the various situations animals can be raised.
- Mark Shearer from ProjectDirt.com (www.ProjectDirt.com) who are providing a wonderful online platform for groups and business to let people know via maps where they are making a difference in their community.
- Duncan Kay from the Sustainable Development Commission (www.sd-commission.org.uk) where he is a Transport Policy Analyst. Duncan turned up at the conference wearing a suit and riding a bike! Sounds like my travel to work in HK.
- Chris Church from Mapping for Change (www.mappingforchange.org.uk) who specialise in providing participatory mapping services to communities, voluntary sector organisations, local authorities and developers using a suite of innovative tools for communication.

A day around Charing Cross was had meeting up with:
- Jon Ralls who is a leading part of the Be The Change Initiative (www.bethechange.org.uk). One of the components of the Be The Change Initiative is hosting the Pachamama Awakening the Dreamer Symposiums.
- Leon Aarts who is a Social Innovator and the founder of Extraordinary Ones (www.extraordinaryones.com) which is helping individuals make a difference with every purchase they make.
- Jeff and Julie Wicks who are superb couple that base themselves between Hong Kong and Australia (yes they were in London). They support a number of social causes as well as providing great mentoring.
- Ashley Blackmore who I had not seen since being in Bali together in 2005. Ashley provides guidance & stimulus to organisations with sustainable environment & healthy living agendas. http://www.ecademy.com/account.php?id=65773
- Cyrille Jegu from www.naturalstep.org. The Natural Step is an international not-for-profit organisation dedicated to education, advisory work and research in sustainable development.

The Triumphant Events Team - http://www.triumphantevents.co.uk/
Michael Clarke offered me the chance to crew at Topher Morrison (www.tophermorrison.com) The Winning the Game of Wealth 3 day seminar. What a great event and thanks to Daniel Priestley and the TE Team. Daniel looking forward to hosting your social media seminar in Hong Kong. For those of you in London check out when the next seminar is at http://www.triumphantevents.co.uk/events?access=social-media-affiliate-marketing

Other crew members at the TE Event were:
- Janay Alexander is doing wonderful work helping mothers to keep the child birthing process simple www.thebirthspecialists.com (The website should be active by the end of July)
- John Hancock is giving pets an eco bed option. Check out www.petlifeonline.co.uk
- Justine Clare is doing great things assisting people to utilize Social Media tools. For ideas head to http://Triumphantmedia.wordpress.com

Final thanks must go to Christine and Steve for allowing us the use of their car and house. The house did come with Christine’s mother and sister, which was superb. Thanks Kath and Katy for your hospitality. Katy is a UK immigration specialist and her company is www.definitive-is.com

So a superb week was had and I look forward to hearing the successes of your respective projects.

For those of you who have not met me you might like to check out the view from our place in Hong Kong at http://asia-ecopreneur.blogspot.com/2008/02/magic-of-mui-wo-lantau-island-hong-kong.html

Grow well
Dr Merrin

Keith Vincent on Tourism and Conservation

Had a great and inspiring night listening to Keith Vincent. When you hear so much about the trouble travelling is causing in this world it is certainly worth remembering that there are great stories too! Thanks Keith

Info about the Safari's can be found at www.wilderness-safaris.com and bookings in Hong Kong can be made through www.atoasafaris.com.
Here is what the RGS (www.rgshk.org.hk) said to promote the event.

The Royal Geographical Society is pleased to welcome to Hong Kong at short notice Keith Vincent, Vice Chairman of the Botswana Tourism Board, which is tasked with developing the tourism industry and setting the tourism policies for the country's legendary wildlife reserves. Mr Vincent is a world expert on developing sustainable tourism in the environments of Africa. With a passion for conservation, his vision, which he is able to achieve and implement through his position, is to conserve and increase Africa's wildlife areas for future generations.

Mr. Vincent's wealth of expertise on conservation on the great plains of Africa comes from over 20 years experience running "Wilderness Safaris", a conservation organisation and ecotourism company promoting responsible tourism throughout the areas in which it operates in southern Africa. Its goal is to share these wild areas with guests, while at the same time helping to ensure the future preservation and regeneration of Africa's spectacular wildlife heritage.

Mr. Vincent runs camps and safaris in Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe and the Seychelles with a group of like minded wildlife enthusiasts who came together to ensure that southern Africa's pristine wilderness areas remain sustainably preserved. They operate privately on 6.5 million acres of southern Africa's finest wildlife reserves in some 60 lodges and camps from Hwange National Park to the great Okavango.

They have been nominated for and won numerous international awards for their work.

Mr. Vincent explained how to run tourism sustainably, with eco-friendly practices. This involves the methods of construction of the camps, the reduction of waste, the use of solar power, ensuring the elimination of damage to the local environment. He also speaks of the right ways to conduct safari tours to ensure game viewing with minimum damage to local environments, while allowing animals to be watched without disturbance. Mr. Vincent argues that it is essential to preserve pristine wilderness areas and the flora and fauna, or biodiversity, that they support. Preserving these areas is essential for Africa and ultimately the world's great wilderness areas.

Mr. Vincent was educated in Zimbabwe. During this time he developed a love for the outdoors and natural history of the country and became a professional guide, working for various safari companies throughout the country, before settling in Victoria Falls in 1984. He joined Wilderness Safaris in 1993, becoming the Managing Director of the Company in 1996. In March 2001 he moved to Maun in Botswana and became the Managing Director of both Wilderness Safaris and Okavango Wilderness Safaris. He is presently the Vice Chairman of the Botswana Tourism Board, which is tasked with developing the tourism industry and setting the tourism policies for the country.

Grow well
Dr Merrin

Earth Day - Yes it is another one today!

Happy Earth Day to you!

Earth Day has been celebrated since 1970. Find out more about Earth Day and the Earth Day Network at http://www.earthday.net/

Now this one day may be called Earth Day however I make every day an Earth Day – why not join me?

If every day we chose to take on one new way of supporting a sustainable Earth then by the end of the year that is an amazing difference you have made. I have focused on changing one thing I do a week, so that is 52 things by the end of the year. That is a very good outcome for us all.

Choices are simple and I would encourage you to take on at least one new item in your daily life today and then to tell others about what you are doing.

· Business cards – printed on paper not plastic, non-laminated using recycled paper with vegetable based inks. Well… that is 4 things all just in your choice of business card printing.
· Electronic Invoices – Send invoices out electronically, pay online and store the receipts electronically.
· Lights – turn on only those that you need, replace bulbs with more energy efficient ones.
· Appliances – Turn them off when not using them. Not just on standby – flick the switch.
· Air-conditioning – In summer set the temperature a degree or two higher (you can cope being warm – just take off another piece of clothing). Better still turn off the unit and put on a fan. Even better open the window and let the breeze blow through.
· Painting – If you are repainting your apartment then choose an eco paint. We used a clay based paint and it went on easily and did not smell at all.
· Cleaning – For your clothes, the dishes and the bathroom look for the eco options. They work just as well, are less harmful for you or your helper to use and they do not pollute the water with chemicals.
· Transport – Reduce the use of your own car. Take a bus or train when you can rather than a taxi. You can even try walking those shorter distances. It keeps you fit and you may meet a friend along the path.
· 3 R’s - Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. There are thousands of things you can do here. Separate out the recyclables from your rubbish and take them to the recycling station.
· Purchases - Choose to buy items with less packaging. Your oranges and banana’s do not need to be wrapped they come in a perfectly natural wrapper!
· Food – Eat less meat and become more vegetarian. I love a good steak though have stopped eating meat everyday. If you just choose to have one meal a day that contains meat rather than 3 meals containing meat then you have made a significant difference to how many methane generating animals have to be grown.
· Air travel – only travel by plane when you have to. Have a teleconference instead. Offset your travel with a carbon programme (http://www.plant-a-tree-today.org/)
· Take time to look at the natural beauty around you. Yes take time to talk to the animals and smell the flowers. It is Earth Day so say hi to you fellow planet mates!!!

Make every day an Earth Day

Grow Well
Dr Merrin