Last week,David Cameron said the time had come for public figures to teach “right from wrong” and questioned whether the Church of England had done enough to defend those in the face of the “moral neutrality” that pervades modern life.
Procurement as a discipline also has a unique opportunity to ensure that the commerce, finance and the contractual acumen of the purchasing process addresses values and morals. (more…)
Our experience of working with companies to help reduce their carbon emissions has shown the majority of an organisation’s footprint is frequently outside its direct control.
There are a number of steps supply chain managers should take to understand and realise the opportunities for emission reduction within your supply chain. (more…)
Did you eat a chocolate you found behind a small cardboard door this morning? Or perhaps you found a picture of a star/tree/mistletoe instead and satisfied yourself with that?
In short, the paper called for all the reports and disclosures that a company makes throughout the year to be combined into one easy-to-read and easy-to-assess report that covers financial, sustainable and operational performance.
Now, ok, it’s hardly surprising that the IIRC believes that we should use integrated reporting, seeing as it’s in its name, but leaving the potentially tunnelled view to one side, it’s really quite a nifty idea. (more…)
Thinking of losing a bit of weight? Want to earn some cash for it? That sentence may sound ludicrous, but it’s the reality for some employees in the US who have been paid to shed pounds.
One woman was paid more than $1,000 after losing more than 100 pounds in nine-months ahead of her wedding, and $100,000 has been paid out to date to some of the ‘biggest losers’. (more…)
I don’t watch much TV these days, and I rarely watch films, so my impressions of places I have not visited tend to be shaped by my professional life or the experience of youth. For most of my life my impressions of Australia were heavily influenced by exposure to Rolf Harris as a child.
Despite strategies falling just short of counselling and hypnotic therapy, I can remember every word of Two Little Boys and I am still traumatised by his ritual murder of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. Rolf actually lives in a posh suburb of the town where I live, I saw him in Homebase last week. A print of one of his excellent paintings hangs on my wall at home so I suppose I have achieved some sort of closure. (more…)
From a human perspective, the events of this week in the UK have been tragic, shameful and deeply distressing. Yet, among the turmoil and destruction caused by the riots, there are a couple of things that merit discussion.
Recently I wrote a story about the importance of developing a complex system to model all the potential hazards to your supply chain. The essence of the article was that businesses should apply chaos theory to their operations. It’s a very strong idea, but one that has a clear flaw – you can’t predict how things will turn out. (more…)
When the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) launched the official mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville in May 2010, I was at the launch event at BAFTA in London. LOCOG director Sue Hunt sat next to me during the video to get my first reaction to the sustainability messages – I was quite impressed. The children’s story goes that the mascots were crafted from surplus steel from the Olympic Park and the craftsman went home on his bike to present them to his grandchildren in old shoe boxes, rather than elaborate packaging.
All very nice so far, but will the orgy of consumerism that follows be good for the planet? Will future generations of archaeologists discover landfill strata of unsold or discarded Wenlocks and Mandevilles?
This is a tricky area because unlike contemporaries the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), LOCOG receives no public funding. It is required to find the £2 billion needed to stage the games from sponsorship, ticket sales and revenue from merchandise. How can the drive to sell more stuff square with the most sustainable games? (more…)
I thought I’d heard all the unusual ways authorities spend public money, but that was before Southwark Council started greasing up trees to stop dogs attacking them.
Apparently, the owners of dangerous dogs encourage the animals to gnaw on the bark of trees to strengthen their jaws ahead of fights. In the six months leading up to December 2010, this behaviour led to the loss of 18 trees in the borough and left 140 more damaged. (more…)
The Durham MBA has taken a tropical twist, spending a week in the seaside town of Weligama (pictured) on the palm-fringed south coast of Sri Lanka.
I’m part of a group of 18 MBA students who are researching various different topics relevant to the region from the perspective of international development as part of one of our course modules. I’m looking at the cinnamon industry, a sector of some importance to the national economy and dependent on some very skilled, traditional production techniques. (more…)
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