Brics create their own development bank

The five ’emerging’ BRICS economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa account for a quarter of the world economy (24.5%). Their voting power at the IMF is only 10.3 percent. They have decided to stop waiting for the US Congress to ratify reforms to that voting structure. At their sixth summit recently they announced …

The Community Maturity Model

As businesses build presence on social media, and as they learn to cooperate with other organisations to achieve their goals, a ‘community’ approach can sometimes help to achieve goals more effectively than transactional approaches. But how does a business, that is used to operating transactionally, shift to a ‘community’ mindset? The Community Round Table exists to help businesses …

UN’s IPCC: “climate change consequences ‘bleak’, but cheap to fix”

Back in March the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its latest Working Group II report. The report predicted: food insecurity due to more intense droughts, floods, and heat waves a decline in crop yields starting in 2030, even as global food demand continues to rise water insecurity, due to shrinking of glaciers and changing …

Greyston brownies

Greyston is a bakery with a different view on the world. They don’t hire people to bake brownies, they bake brownies so that they can hire people. Founded in 1982, Greyston is the USA’s “leading social enterprise“, and explicitly aims to support underprivileged people in New York state by providing them with the employment, skills and resources needed to lift …

Welcome to the four day week startup

When the going gets tough it can often seem that the future must be worse than the past. But here is a story about one new company that is already turning over several million dollars a year, growing at 120% a year, and achieving all this by working a four day week. Yes, a four …

IKEA on track to be energy-independent by 2020

As an addendum to the earlier story about the need for all businesses to be carbon neutral (or better) in the next 20 or so years, Swedish retailer IKEA announced last week (14 Nov) the purchase of a 46 MW wind farm in Pincher Creek, Alberta. The 20 turbine wind farm is expected to generate 161 GWh of …