A little comment on public sector responsiveness perhaps. Below is my question posed and the answer eventually given on behalf of Irish Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan (3 1/2 months later). I don’t think he answered the question though. Did he? You can be the judge. The good news about the reply is that I am guaranteed that it does not contain a virus but the Irish Department of Finance cannot guarantee that the reply does not contain malicious content. See the attention section at the bottom of the reply letter (bold and italics are my emphasis). A nod at least to the ideals of transparency from the Department of Finance.
THE ASK
April 4, 2009
Dear Minister
After a €7,7 billion investment of tax payers money and effective nationalisation of Anglo Irish Bank, can you explain why Anglo Irish operates and advertises off shore services from the Isle of Man as follows:
It seems not only will depositors enjoy the benefits of confidentiality and ‘tax efficiency’ now they also enjoy enhanced benefits of securitization of their deposits by the Irish tax payer.
The Minister for Finance, Mr. Brian Lenihan, T.D., has asked me to thank you for your email of 4th April last. You will appreciate that the financial crisis has had significant resource implications for the Department and I apologise for the delay in responding.
As with all covered institutions, all deposits with Anglo are covered by guarantee Scheme, including those in overseas / subsidiary operations. This step was taken to preserve stability and confidence of the Irish financial system. Anglo Irish Bank is a major financial institution whose viability is of systemic importance to Ireland. In its dealings with Anglo Irish Bank, the overriding concern of the Government has been to protect the economy from the wider losses that would occur in the event of the failure of the bank; to protect the €64 billion of customer and interbank deposits in the bank and to prevent the bank becoming a systemic threat to the financial system.
I hope this information has been of assistance.
Yours sincerely
___________________
Dermot Moylan
Private Secretary to the Minister for Finance
Attention:
This e-mail is privileged and confidential. If you are not the intended recipient please delete the message and notify the sender. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author.
This email was scanned by Sophos and has been certified virus free with the pattern file currently in use. This however cannot guarantee that it does not contain malicious content.
Tabhair aire:
Tá an r-phost seo faoi phribhléid agus faoi rún. Mura tusa an duine a bhí beartaithe leis an teachtaireacht seo a fháil, scrios é le do thoil agus cuir an seoltóir ar an eolas. Is leis an údar amháin aon dearcaí nó tuairimí a léirítear.
Scanadh an r-phost seo le Sophos agus deimhníodh go raibh sé saor ó víoras leis an bpatrúnchomhad atá in úsáid faoi láthair. Ní féidir a ráthú leis seo áfach nach bhfuil ábhar mailíseach ann.
In some countries advertisments for personal health products are subtle and besides the point. Think shiny people walking on the beach or in fields of flowers. In Germany though, the approach is more direct. For example, here is the current shop window display from my local pharmacy:
Vinnie Mirchandani thinks the IT industry is hyping up climate change. He thinks they stampede their customers into panic buying of strategic IT solutions for what might not be a problem at all. All the while, the industry coaxes hapless regulators into passing laws on climate change that require IT investment. He compares this to the Y2K response:
During the Y2K era Vinnie was at Gartner providing advice to clients on how to deal with the threat. His concsience bothers him still:
I have been asked a few times since 1999 – did Gartner hype up the Y2k problem for its own benefit? And my response is – well, it did shake and wake people up and eventually make Y2K a relative non-event. But, in retrospect, I do wish we had helped clients protect more against the “greenwashing” that went on back then.
It strikes me as a rather odd way to view a successful response. Dare to imagine we might successfully do the same to arrest climate change?
There is an obvious cynicism trap we need to avoid here.
Fortunately, Vinnie has the right instincts for the transparency needed to protect the integrity of the public & private sector climate change response:
This time the stakes are even higher. But we have a bigger set of watchdogs now. Us bloggers. I hope we don’t just report the problem. Or worse, just hype it.
Hopefully we can learn from the Y2K experience without deriving cynicism from the virtues of preparedness & mitigation. Glad you’re part of the conversation Vinnie.
Jason Busch from Spend Matters has written another barmy blog post on sustainability. Last year it was about the perceived futility of African sourcing. Today’s post is about – well I’m not sure what its about exactly. I had to read it a few times. I tried to leave a comment but Jason’s comment security feature defeated me (and on two computers no less). So hoping this will link back.
Let me deal w a few select quotes:
we personally think the notion of measuring — and comparing — carbon footprints across companies and regions is absolutely absurd given that we’re currently only looking at a partial picture of actual carbon emission.’
But industry has a methodology for complete life cycle analysis known as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. This lays out a process for emissions accounting throughout the value chain from supply chain to production to use to disposal.
Perhaps a factory powered by a nasty coal belching Mao-era plant in China might lead to a greener total product — provided its employees are kept from making a decent income — than a completely green plant powered by wind in the west (or China, for that matter) whose employees make a better living.’
But really, is that the choice for developing economies, produce in poverty or become prosperous in pollution? First – many are working hard to invest in smart technologies to conserve the energy we already have and to find new renewable sources of energy. Yes, developing markets are energy hungry and yes sustainability is also about social and economic development. That is why it is generally recognised that the developed world needs to reduce more CO2 and faster and that the developing world should have a little more slack to develop their economies.
Jason thinks that surveys and benchmarks on the environmental comparability of electronic goods such as his Apple computer are not helpful and signify little. Personally I don’t think we have half enough studies on the carbon composition in our everyday consumption. Also – you should know that recently the ‘loonies’ at Greenpeace have been quite encouraging of Apple’s efforts.
Come on Jason, supply chain sustainability is a really important matter whether human rights screening or environmental performance. It would be great to see you turn your considerable expertise to attend seriously to these problems. This can save procurement departments money and reduce risk overall in the business network.
As an aside, please do visit my main perch these days on ZDNet. This week I blogged IBM, Oracle, Google, SAP and general tech industry supply chain human rights issues.
I passed this sign a few times and today I just had to get the BB out and take a picture. You can find it at the corner of Mattock lane and Northfield Ave in Ealing, London.
How to take it? It’s funny, sad and just a bit uncomfortable. A slice of life in West London in 2009. Seems like even the Met Police have given up the effort except to make and place signs like this. Maybe Boris has too?
I’ve read a lot on the subject of sustainability over the years - some of it brilliant, some of it utter rubbish and a lot of noise in between. But as is often times the case, the best insights come from the periphery rather than the centre and hit you quite unexpectedly.
The following was just such for me and it comes from Ian McEwan’s 1998 novel, Amsterdam. I find myself drawn back to re read the piece every now and then. It’s a bleaker view than I normally take but there is always a joy in a new understanding.
In this scene, Clive takes a train from London to the Lake District and reflects on the state of things from the backstage view of life which one can often see from a train carriage. Hope you enjoy it too.
In his corner of West London and in his self-preoccupied daily round, it was easy for Clive to think of civilisation as the sum of all the arts, along with design, cuisine, good wine and the like. But now it appeared that this was what it really was – square miles of meagre modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing up to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic. It looked like a raucous dinner party the morning after. No one would have wished it this way, but on one had been asked. Nobody planned it, nobody wanted it but most people had to live in it. To watch it mile after mile, who would have guessed that kindness or the imagination, that Purcell or Britten, Shakespeare or Milton, had ever existed? Occasionally, as the train gathered speed and they swung further away from London, countryside appeared and with it the beginnings of beauty or the memory of it, until seconds later it dissolved into a river straightened to a concrete sluice or a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees, and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere. As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.
Back now from my unannounced hiatus. Sorry. Its been an exciting time. Dan Farber invited me to blog on sustainability over at ZDNET and so I have been busy getting up to speed with that. Its a real kick to have the opportunity to blog on ZDNET – its tier one for the tech sector and maybe the best opportunity I’ll have to keep the sustainability debate fueled up at industry level.
This blog is not a standy though – still lots to talk about here and plenty of room to differentiate Stay tuned. Thanks for reading – lots more to come.
An interesting debate on transparency seems to have spontaneously broken out around the blogosphere. Frank Buytendijk wrote a thoughtful piece on the topic and although he sees significant upside for technology enabled transparency:
Transparency is a competitive weapon to differentiate from the competition in attracting capital, informing customers about the value proposition (not only price) and in cost efficiencies by driving down the transaction costs in the value chain. Empowering the knowledge workers leads to more organizational collaboration, everyone being on the same page (focus and alignment) and as a result more ambitious targets.
but he also worries that perfect information leading to perfect competition will destroy margins:
The conclusion is simple. Part of your profitability exist because of intransparency. Transparency can lead to margin erosion. Is that what you are looking for?
Nick Carr plied the same path and ended up concluding:
You have to wonder whether, as what was once opaque is made transparent, the bolder among us will lose the incentive to strike out for undiscovered territory. What’s the point when every secret becomes, in a real-time instant, common knowledge?
These ponderings I classify similarly to the famous quote in 1899 from the then Commissioner of the US Office of Patents who said:
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
From the consumer perspective (and indeed for that matter from the pov of all stakeholders)such transparency can be only a good thing. With still 4 out of 6 billion on the planet excluded from meaningful participation in markets we have a long way to go and plenty of competitive space left before we reach this economic utopia of perfect competition, perfect information and no barriers to entry. But supposing we did reach it, I still think competition would thrive though the playing field of differentiation might focus more on dimensions of quality, trust, responsiveness and stakeholder assurance. Maybe then we will see the functioning of the perfect market place, a pure manifestation of economic theory.
It was good to see such a determined reinforcement of the Millennium Development Goals. The thing about sustainability is its multi dimensional nature. You scratch a technical issue like climate change hard enough and a governance issue emerges. Al Gore and Bono therefore tried to reconcile the MDGs and climate change crisis. Soon, I suspect we will see the green tech euphoria begin to run up against the hard edge politics of trade policy. Al Gore made this point:
In an IT empowered outsourcing world it is unimaginable that the wealthy industrialised developed nations would enter into an agreement, that has no provisions to anticipate the moving of production facilities, that might, at the margins, face a brand new set of economics because of carbon constraints, into countries that do not have any carbon constraints.
Maybe heresy to say but Bill Gate’s Creative Capitalism speech left me somewhat cold. There is nothing new here and great work has been underway for sometime to try to innovate new business models for the base of pyramid. Check out this report from the Harvard JFK School of Government CSR Initiative detailing some of the efforts in this area from across the ICT sector. These are all serious initiatives where companies are trying hard to kick start a real market for real profits rather than ‘recognition’ as a substitute.
Moving on, my favourite Davos question YouTube videos were from Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.com and Bruce Sewell of Intel.
Though I enjoyed very much his prolific coverage, one Davos curiousity for me was Robert Scoble. Recently he wrote:
I don’t usually write about stuff that I don’t have first-hand knowledge of. I’m not in Kenya. The Kenya story, as awful as it is, really doesn’t impact the tech world that much……….
For me its kind of an inside out way of looking at things. It’s as if the world exists to serve technology and not vice versa. Surely all these gadgets, communications and software we hold court on can offer something to help in terms of improved communications, institutional development, education and economic development for countries like Kenya. Something?
But Robert did say:
I’m hoping to expand my personal connections next week at the World Economic Forum where we’ll talk more about this, and other issues that don’t seem to — on the surface — affect the tech industry.
Davos really is the best place on earth to hold a beauty contest and what is more beautiful than sustainability? Every year for the past four, Corporate Knights and Innovest announce the global 100 most sustainable companies in the world at Davos and for the 2008 list tonight is the night. You can find the press release and the full list here.
The ratings agency Innovest carry out the research for this list and the methodology is clearly rigorous. The list represents category leaders in terms of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) risk and opportunity management relative to peers out of universe of 1800 securities of MSCI World-listed companies. What’s even more hair raising about it is the tremendous rate of churn each year and this year is no different with a churn of 30%. You can view the turnover lists here.
Interesting to see so many big names in the banking industry dropped including HSBC, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, ABN Amro. Out too is Henkel who produce one of the finest CSR reports in Germany if not Europe in terms of methodology. A notable deletion from the tech sector is Google.
Notable additions to the list include Honda, Nestle, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Post, L’Oreal, Rio Tinto, State Street and Societe Generale.
The IT & Telco sector breakout is as follows:
Nokia Corporation Finland Information Technology
Tietoenator OYJ Finland Information Technology
SAP AG Germany Information Technology
Ricoh Company Limited Japan Information Technology
Electrocomponents PLC United Kingdom Information Technology
Advanced Micro Devices United States Information Technology
Agilent Technologies Inc United States Information Technology
Hewlett-Packard Company United States Information Technology
Intel Corp. United States Information Technology
NTT Docomo Inc Japan Telecommunication Services
BT Group PLC United Kingdom Telecommunication Services
Cable & Wireless PLC United Kingdom Telecommunication Services
Of course, I’m really pleased to see SAP again in this list but know we will have to again work hard to stay within the G100 in 2009.
