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Artisan wines Last week the Teliani Collection of small batch artisan wines was launched in the wonderful depths of the not-quite-yet-open wine museum in Tbilisi. It was a lovely event with loads of cool Georgians, super talented winemakers and a host of smart people. I love this project because everyone wins - the would be winemakers get to turn their passion into a profession, giving them an incentive to restore the land and the stock of grapes, the wine business of Teliani Valley gets kudos for lending its expertise and effort into bringing these wines to the world, the wine lover gets to taste super rare wines they could never get elsewhere. Pretty much everyone involved in making and bringing the wines into the world was in that room - including the sons and daughters of the makers. The people who made the wine and the people who drink the wine were all in the same place - swapping stories, sharing together. Wine bits and bobs The not-quite-yet-open museum is a lot of fun - full of wine bits and bobs going back to 6 millennia BC. It seems that the kind of "let's all get together and share" culture around wine has always been a thing. Amongst my favourite things were this kind of aroma-tron - you puff the puffer and the wine aromas are intensified, so even a heathen like me can appreciate the nuances and subtleties: And also these are apparently drinking cups from a very long time ago (second millennium BC) called a "communicating vessel". (There's a similar thing down in Somerset for cider which is a Wassail jug, it has three handles for sharing): Making buying stuff a political act One of the challenges we have been wrestling with as we develop Good Growth, is how to connect the buyer, the consumer, much more closely with the regenerative impact at the head of the value chain. The point of these chains is that they do good - everything is designed to restore and not deplete the stock of natural and human capital. The act of consuming this wine or any of the products in a Good Growth chain is - by definition - an act of regeneration. I am really struck by the strong connection and alignment between the makers and the consumers - part of the value for both is in the shared interest in restoring and reviving environment and livelihoods. That's what I felt in the wine museum. I think there is a massive and important distinction between consumption that is extractive - that depletes natural and human capital - and consumption that restores it. This is important because when you start applying the regenerative/extractive lens to consumption it becomes a heck of a lot easier to work out what's good and what's not. For instance I now have a much clearer idea of what makes me uneasy about battery electric vehicles - the batteries can't be made without extracting a very precious and finite resource. In clothing and fabric especially the distinction between a product that is regenerative and one that is extractive is crucial - much more crucial than any of the standards and marks that are floating about at the moment and which focus on standardised inputs not actual outcomes for the environment or for humans. It calls into question what we really mean by "luxury" and whether it can ever be a good thing (I think not), and whether the debate around "fast fashion" should focus less on the fast and more on the fashion. Can we find a way to signal very clearly whether buying a product is regenerative or extractive? It would be a breakthrough. I think we can, so we're going to try. Watch this space. #goodgrowth #regenerativeeconomics #tomorrowscapitalism #telianicollection #regenerativeconsumption

This is the first of a handful of small batch artisan wines. It's a project with masses of potential. Georgia is a nation of winemakers and would be winemakers. Many thousands make wine as a hobby in the villages and mountains that are a long, long way from any kind of market. Commercialising this passion and making it possible for the makers to earn a living is the point of this project - and in the process a few lucky wine drinkers get to taste some extremely rare wines. This wine was bottled in the village with a small bottling unit and then brought to market by Teliani Valley as part of an artisan series. There are 7 winemakers featured so far. The rare dark pomegranate red Asuretuli Shala grape was discovered growing wild in the woods around Asureti by German settlers in the early 19th Century. It only comes from around this small village in southern Georgia. The wine - Asuretuli Shala - is small volume and rare (this bottle is one of 750). Levan Bandzeladze is a 37 year old auditor who has been making wine as a hobby in nearby Bolnisi since he was 18. Through this program his wines can reach a market of wine enthusiasts who until now would never have had the chance to taste this wine - and provide Levan with the chance to turn his passion into a profession. #goodgrowth #telianicollection #artisans #wine

There are far too many animals in Mongolia - it's turning into a desert And a system narrowly focused on "fair" pay for herders makes it worse On 10th January at the Volans "Tomorrow's Capitalism" event we referred to the damage caused by mass market knitwear and cashmere. Cheap cashmere mean that the only way herders can increase their income is by increasing the number of animals. This has led to a mass of livestock that is completely out of whack with the ecosystem. Paying herders "fairly" only exacerbates the problem. Two things need to happen: We need to recognise that a $60 cashmere sweater is a planet threatening abomination. Any brand purporting to do good whilst it's flogging cheap cashmere is greenwashing, no matter how much it crows about fair pay Herders need to earn much more, much for what they do for the environment. We need to pay the herders for the value they create - which is not fiber treated as a commodity but the the role they play in maintaining and nurturing the eco system. For centuries they have managed the right number of animals for the environment - but in the past few decades mass market brands have screwed this whole balance up by driving down costs and - directly and indirectly - caused a huge increase in herd numbers. Creating the desert. Our partner in the Altai Institute, Barry Rosenbaum, writes: Essential to the identity and economy of Mongolia, the grasslands are under increasing threat from overgrazing and climate change. Multiple studies over the past decade have shown that the once lush Mongolian steppe, an expanse twice the size of Texas that is one of the world's largest remaining grasslands, is slowly turning into a desert. An estimated 70% of all the grazing lands in the country are considered degraded to some degree. Overgrazing has caused 80% of the recent decline in vegetation on the grasslands. Since the 1990s, the country has gone from 20 million grazing livestock to 61.5 million. When animals eat more plants than can grow back naturally, the landscape begins to shift in subtle ways, as plants become sparser and patchy, and dead areas emerge, accelerating soil erosion. During the same time period, annual mean temperatures have increased by more than 2.0°C, more than double the global average. Most species of wildlife suffer from overgrazed grasslands. The consequences of increasing livestock numbers and change in herd structure with the resulting over-exploitation of land and plant resources, coupled with effects of climate change, has become the main contributing factor to the increase of species being categorized as endangered. For example, populations of Altai argali have coexisted with nomadic herders and their livestock for centuries, but today the impact of overgrazing by livestock on the habitats of this species is very high and have pushed argali into marginal habitats. Argali are a primary prey species of snow leopards. When the numbers of prey species decline, the decline of rare predators is not far behind. So the first Good Growth products are designed in a system that reverses this stupidity. Watch this space. #altaiinstitute #uniqlo #chigertei #goodgrowth #tomorrowscapitalism #volans #regenerativeeconomics

Is 'growth' always a good thing? (original post now updated with a little coda on how the concept evolved - June 21) I've been in 'growth' my entire working life. It's been the goal of (just about) every organisation I've worked at or advised. They've all wanted to grow: grab more market share; break into a new category; drive up margins; scale new propositions; hire more staff; have a bigger footprint etc. When I first arrived at VW the brand had been on a 7 or 8 year run of growth in a rising market (which came to a shuddering halt pretty much the same day I started). 'Growth' was expected. Every forecast, every plan, every budget was predicated on the idea that growth would continue. So when it didn't, a lot of things went wrong very quickly. The experience of 'not growing' was shattering to an organisation that knew only growth. That combined with a rapidly shrinking market caused a world of pain - a whole industry producing too many cars chasing too few customers, but unable to countenance the idea of shutting factories. The next 3 years was spent on a quest to recapture the magic growth formula - to get back to that (much more comforting) position of continuous growth. The business, and everyone leading it, was programmed to seek and expect growth. (I once got into a heap of trouble for suggesting that a particularly unloved product had reached its 'natural' level of sales and that expecting it to find more customers would be counterproductive. That kind of chatter is heresy in an organisation wired for continuous growth - I was put on triple rations of kool-aid until I'd recovered my senses). Since VW I've been struck by how deeply the pursuit of growth pervades every business. I've only ever had one client that was seeking to become smaller - and that was because they'd been compelled to by regulators and the state after a gigantic screw up that we're all still paying for. It absolutely was not what they wanted. They found the whole process of shrinking deeply humiliating. Another client had set themselves the target of being the biggest in their category worldwide - the biggest by revenues, by market share, by margins, by staff, by every metric you can imagine. And they got there - they ticked every box, they climbed all those mountains. But there was no jubilation - being the biggest, even though they'd longed for it for so long, was curiously unfulfilling. It just brought a whole set of new anxieties about staying the biggest and a sense that somehow they had missed the point. Burns up natural capital Conventional growth causes untold damage In a world of finite resources growth models that deplete those resources extract a cost that will be felt for generations to come. Nowadays business is getting better at recycling but the waste is still pretty appalling. Taiwan manages to recycle 77% of industrial waste - the US only 44% (household waste is even worse in the US at a mere 26%). That's a lot of waste being generated by business. Not to mention the waste generated from a use-and-dispose consumption model that assumes obsolescence in products. Cars, computers, phones, fridges, TVs - all these items are expected to wear out, are designed to be worth less every day. The business models of selling something means you only earn from selling more of that thing. You want people to need a new one (and by implication dispose of the old one). The traditional car industry earns not a lot from older cars as they seep out of the franchise service network. In fact car makers capture only a fraction of the lifetime value of a car. Which is why mobility and -as-a-service business models are exciting, as they realign incentives away from flogging new stuff to keeping existing products going. Burns up human capital But it's not just environmental damage that raises questions over growth. Over recent times I've come to question whether size - being big - is in itself a good thing. Now there is no question that big organisations can be a powerful force for good. In a world where many challenges are transnational, big business has an advantage in mobilising across borders. When a global business is clear on its purpose it can - if it really wants to - do amazing and positive things. There are numerous examples of this from unexpected quarters - some of the work GSK did in Africa with rural pharmacies, PwC's work to strengthen tax systems in emerging markets, L&G's investments in housing solutions for the future. But so few do. It's hard. And the need for the big machine to be kept going almost always blows these good intentions out of the water. I'm convinced of two things. Firstly that small, radical, agile businesses can have enormous beneficial impact on the world, that being big is not a prerequisite for impact. Secondly that the process of scaling, the process of growth, is in itself a problem. Something happens during the scaling/growth process that comes at a considerable cost - to impact, to returns, to purpose, but most of all to humans. I've lost count of the big organisations I've worked with whose "big purpose" intentions got sidelined by short term pressures. Some of this is down to baked in expectations around investment - all the discussion is around how big you can get and how fast, not how much growth is right. Investment models encourage unbridled growth - but recently I've met more and more investors that question the consequences. Some will express regret that the thing they loved in the pitch - the ethos, the culture, the belief, the principles - somehow got diluted during the growth process. Brand practitioners have long tried to counteract this dilution of ethos/values by codifying in some way the 'culture' - creating various tools to help attract the right kind of people in the first place, and then to 'align' them to the organisation's values. It rarely works - the culture of a business inevitably changes as it grows. That "we can change the world" pioneering spirit is hard to preserve as you move out of the attic and up into some swanky offices in glass and metal land. Many years ago I went to Silicon Valley just after the dot-com bubble burst with Leaders Quest. Some of the most forward thinking people there - who had time and reason to get philosophical about this stuff - were coming to the conclusion that there was a limit to the size at which an organisation could continue to act in a human way, that beyond around 30 people it became industrialised, codified, process-driven. More machine-like than biological. This mechanisation doesn't just make it harder for organisations to retain their human characteristics but also can create real harm by industrialising processes that would be better off staying at human scale. Take food for instance - we've seen some tragic consequences of complex food chains recently. The horsemeat scandal, and most recently the death of a Pret customer near here in Bath. The latest Pret death is entirely down to stupidly long and complicated food chains - the sandwich contained a supposedly dairy free yogurt which wasn't. The yogurt was labelled dairy free. The yogurt supplier blames someone further down the chain - etc. Getting at the truth of what's actually in your sandwich is nigh on impossible given the multiple links in the food chain. The tragedy for the Pret brand is that they are supposedly prepping their food on site - in other words the distance between consumer and the people making the food is short - but their underlying supply chain leaves them just as vulnerable to this kind of contamination as any other food chain. But there may just be a better growth model Over the next 18 months or so we will be developing a "good growth" model, for real, with a handful of small businesses with great potential, combining investment, brand development, organisation design and supply chain development. We believe that it is possible to design a business that does good things for people and the environment, that is good for all stakeholders including investors, and which grows in a way that preserves the human scale. So the three principles thus far are: social and environmental benefits hard-wired into the business model multiple stakeholder value (staff, investors, customers, society, environment, supply chain) also hard-wired into organisation design growth achieved through replication not scaling - human sized units that share some common resources It will evolve, and we will learn. When we have some new insights they will appear here. More later. Coda - How Good Growth evolved. June 2021 2 years and a bit from writing this original thought a lot happened and we learned a lot. "Good Growth" means the full integration of human wellbeing and environmental health. Finding ways for people in places to live well in synch with nature. The business system that enables that integration is rooted in place - recognising that each place is different, that value for creation for each place is specific. Underpinning this "each place is different" idea is a repudiation of "standards" as having any place in regenerative business. So the business system does not seek to integrate sustainability into supply chains, but rather to redesign the entire system from ecosystem out. Greening up business-as-usual isn't going to cut it. The only way for business to be sustainable is to integrate into nature. It's a top to toe redesign that puts place at the head of the system. Now (June 21) we know that the design works, and that Good Growth is a system that can be applied in multiple places. The organisational element of the place brand company in each place enables the system to work everywhere. Following the "replicate don't scale" mantra which flows through the original piece, we are now taking Good Growth to 50 places around the world, spanning 12m hectares from 2024. To enable that we are building a regeneration fund with the fabulous partners we have encountered on our journeys. By mid 2020s the system will be operational in rangeland, forest and marine ecosystems. Lots to do. More later. NK-P 210619