Depending which way you want to look at it, a new entrant to the car hire industry, or a substitute for buying a car, has just been announced by Sir Stelios Haji-Iaonnou and Brent Hoberman (co-founder of lastminute.com).
Their new service, called Zipcar, will rent cars by the hour and will be test launched in spring 2012.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/68d4cba2-249d-11e1-bfb3-00144feabdc0.html
When we start to see customers as part of our business model (see previous post) interesting, disruptive, and beneficial things can happen. Continue reading
While the financial crisis marches on, and investors frantically seek out safe havens for their money, it is worth asking what a ‘safe haven’ would look like.
Late last night we were sent two links.
The first is a video describing “How to use the Internet to make $1m in 18 months”.
The second is a page describing how the latest CO2/climate data shows that the 2 degrees climate change we thought was ‘safe’ isn’t, Continue reading
As a further post-script to the Kübler-Ross piece earlier today, we ask you to think back one year to December 2010 and imagine that you are living in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, or Syria.
If someone had told you that within 12 months Mubarak and Gaddafi would be gone, Osama bin Laden would be dead, that thousands would demonstrate on the streets of Syria and Tunisia, and that thousands more in Greece and America would be inspired by their example and also take to the streets, would you have believed them? Continue reading
During the last 20 years, global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased by almost 50 per cent in the last 20 years.
The rate is accelerating — in 2010 they increase by just under six per cent.
This is dramatic news for the ability of Earth to support life.
In the light of today’s earlier post, will your response to this news be denial or anger; will you try to bargain with the situation or slip into depression; or can you feel acceptance the facts, and move to do what needs to be done?
Over the weekend we reflected on some of the stories posted last week: increasing levels of methane from melting permafrost; the rising costs of climate change events; the fact that investments in renewable energy last year passed those in fossil fuel energy; and the fact that companies can now make plastic cups out of plants.
We realised that each of these stories brought out a different emotion in us. So this week we’re going to start with a review of the “Kübler-Ross model”.
We’ll summarise it briefly and then focus on the implications for permabusiness and you. Continue reading
This plastic cup may not look like much but to me it is a symbol of hope.
Because rather than being made from oil it is made from plant fibres. It is renewable and compostable.
And what that means is that even though the world is changing, we will be able to find new ways to create the things we really value and take them with us — even things as apparently insignificant (and as fossil-fuel-dependent) as a plastic cup.
The company that produced it is called London Bio Packaging.
Six years ago they didn’t exist.
Now they are an example of the opportunity that exists for every business to become a permabusiness.
