Last year the CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, Carlos Goshn has reconfirmed his intention to build 500,000 electric vehicles (EVs) by 2013. Wired magazine suggest he is either a “brilliant visionary or crazy as a loon”. But Renault-Nissan certainly have the track record, selling over 7 million cars in 2010. Goshn is investing four billion Euros to build 11 factories in 8 countries to produce the EVs and batteries. The Nissan Leaf is in production with 7000 sold world-wide so far.
Nissan have a entertaining range of advertisements promoting the EV concept in the US.
Renault-Nissan is developing diverse partnerships to position EVs to move us beyond the internal combustion engine. Better Place is working with nations and cities to implement their innovative battery-switch technology.
Better Place is planning 40 battery switch stations in Israel and has signed 400 agreements with parking lot owners for the installation of charge stations. Recently, Better Place announced plans for battery-switch installations in Canberra, Australia. CEO Shai Agassi’s inspiring Ted talk, outlines the Better Place vision.
Renault-Nissan is opening a research facility in Silicon Valley across the road from Google HQ. With Goole investing $280 million to help US householders get financed into solar power, this appears to be a good neighbour to have.
Shai Agassi makes the point that mass-adoption of EVs will happen, when they are clearly a cheaper option than existing vehicles. The vision and drive of people like Carlos Goshn will make this happen.
Here is a first in a series of blogs offering a interpretation of human history positioning the times we are in now as the end of a long historical saga of empire building, and the dawn of a new global civilisation. In later posts I will explore the parallel shift from economies of exploitation and extraction to sustainable economies. And the agency of civilisation becomes communication, rather than conquest.
Rift valley refugees
We are all descendents of Rift Valley refugees – our ancestors left Africa thousands of years ago and dispersed across the planet. Thus began the long migration, with humans constantly expanding into new territory. My country, New Zealand, was the end of the line, first colonised only about a thousand years ago by my wife’s Mäori ancestors, and further colonised by my European ancestors in the last 200 years.
This grand human saga has been civilisation by conquest. One group of humans would establish a foothold in a locality, but never for too long before being displaced by another, usually violently. Alternately, a sub-group, motivated by aversion to the status quo and/or the lure of new horizons would move on to establish a new colony. For years, the planet had abundant resources to fuel humanity’s relentless expansion. There were brief periods of peace and stability, but few lives were untouched by conflict.
This became the default human experience and patterned behaviours such as displays of dominance, disputes over resources, and ingrained insecurity predominated. Edgar Schein’s model of culture can be applied to this pervasive human culture. At the top level of Schein’s model are artefacts – the artefacts of the age of conquest changed over time, along with the characters in the war stories, but the essence of the stories was the same. As our ancestors replayed the stories over time they ingrained underlying assumptions of what life is all about and reinforced enduring drivers of human behaviour – “growth is good”, “extracting value” and “us and them”. Occasionally, enlightened individuals and movements would emerge but they would typically be usurped by those possibly influenced by the new, but reverting to the old patterns of behaviour.
Schein's model and the age of empires
Schein’s classic definition of culture indicates how these patterns of behaviour are reinforced as the right way.
A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. (Schein, 2010 page 18)
Course correction and the end of empires
This pattern of behaviour caused great injustices, but our species thrived. As we learned to further develop our intelligence we arrived at a point in our development, 250 years ago, to use machines to further accelerate our expansion and extraction of the world’s resources. But in the last few decades the combination of this new technology and the old patterns of thinking have manifested a set of problems dwarfing any that humanity has faced before. Its time for a course correction.
We also appear to be at the end of the age of empires. The social evolution of humanity has seen us aggregate into larger and larger groups and embracing wider loyalties. What we loosely call “Western civilisation” is the last of the empires, or perhaps more correctly, a cluster of empires. The centre of power has shifted from Europe to the United States and colonisation has been more by commerce than by occupation, but it can be seen as an extension of the processes begun by Europeans for over a millennia.
Economist Jeffrey Sachs, in his book Commonwealth, describes the process of convergence, whereby the United States position of a superpower is waning, and major economies head towards a state of convergence, where no single economy can dominate.
A new kind of global politics must take shape, built not on U.S. or Chinese preeminence, but on global cooperation across regions. Despite the reveries and fantasies of some, the age of empire is over, and certainly the age of a U.S. empire. We are now in the age of convergence.
Any thoughts so far. Part 2 of this series of posts looks at Civilisation by Engagement and Community Building.
How do you know if a company is green-washing, or over-promoting its sustainability performance? Brand Logic’s recently released Sustainability Leadership Report compares the perceptions of sustainability of 100 prominent brands, with their sustainability reality.
Their matrix, sorts the brands into 4 categories:
leaders – those who perform well in environmental, social and governance (ESG) dimensions of sustainability and successfully communicate their achievements
challengers – who are performing well, but not getting enough credit
promoters – who are credited with ESG performance ahead of their actual performance
I have been looking for examples of excellent stakeholder engagement. Recently, I have reconnected with the Harvard Business Review (HBR) and found the same quality of material as before. What’s different is that a ethos of engagement permeates the magazine.
Here are some examples from the May 2011 edition:
A HBR.org page lists a range of resources accessable at www.hbr.org including blogs, enewsletters and HBR IdeaCast on iTunes. And at “Ask.Answer.Engage.” readers “can pose questions about workplace challenges, find solutions and offer others your advice”.
The editoral on page 18 concludes with “I’d love to hear from more of you”.
The “Interaction” section summarises feature articles for earlier editions, and provides several extracts from reader’s feedback. Some are supportive of the articles and some critical. The authors have the opportunity to respond.
Social media
The HBR magazine is the hardcopy compliment to a range of social media options that offer multiple ways for readers to engage.
In addition HBR has a Linkedin group and portrays an engagement ethos at twitter.
HBR appear to have left no stone unturned to create opportunities to engage with stakeholders. The icons of business thinking that appeared so remote in the past are now much closer to us.
Do you know of other examples of engaging magazines?
Steps to Sustainability 