eBay has decided to enter the microfinance business with MicroPlace. To my knowledge it is only the second webpage directed to individuals who want to give microloans to entrepreneurs in developing countries - the first being the much-hyped kiva.org, which I whole-heartedly recommend (the first of my so far three loans is soon paid back, and I look forward to investing it again). However, there are differences between the two, and it might be a good idea for any prospective borrowers to have a look at this comparison, for example, before deciding.

Greenlandic broccoli.

One of my favourite magazines, Foreign Policy, has a couple of exclusives on their website while the next issue is sent to the printers. If you are interested in cars (which I'm not, but I appreciate their ability to take me from one place to the next, preferably without too much pollution) then have a look at the models of the future. Lots of ideas, but very few are realised in the end.

Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, also speaks his mind to Foreign Policy. A strange concoction of opinions it would seem: first he claims that the UN should step into the fight against global warming with greater gusto, and next he feels that he can't influence politics as much as he would like to. Sure, leaving decision making to the Secretary General will really enhance decentralised decision-making... Anyway, he wants to make money preventing global warming, and who can argue with that?

Här lite intressant läsning.

http://di.se/Nyheter/?page=/Avdelningar/Artikel.aspx%3FArticleId%3D2007%5C10%5C23%5C253873

Kolla också in andra intressanta artiklar på Dagens Industris reportageserie om klimat.

www.di.se/klimat

Al Gore has been awarded the Nobel Peace prize 2007. Mr Gore is a case in point when it comes to blessings in disguise. Lose some, win some?

Elsewhere, specifically in Potsdam this week, 15 other Nobel laureates convened to discuss global warming.

Finnish Business & Society 2/2007 interviews Hanken's very own Johanna Mattila (among others) re: business and climate change.

There's a special on nuclear power in the latest issue of the Economist. There's an interview with the environment activist Stewart Brand who nowadays advocates nuclear power as the only real option. Also, an explaination of how modern nuclear plants work, and a special on the States' newfound entusiasm for fission. Appearently, no plants have been built for decades, but suddenly 30 or so are planned. The reasons are to be found in the green movement who has waken up to realities, but also in the fact that modern nuclear plants are far safer, cheaper and efficient than the old ones. Good news it would seem, as long as we remember Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.

Chevron, the oil-cum-energy company, is anxious about being seen as responsible. Have a peek at their online game, where you plan the energy supply in a city and see what consequences your choices have.

Anita Roddick, activist, entrepreneur and the founder of the Body Shop, passed away yesterday of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 64. Thoughts go out to her family.

For those looking for a radical, or at least slightly titillating, solution to some of the world's misery - pick up the latest issue of Foreign Policy. The article I'm referring to is the cover story, "Legalize It", where Ethan Nadelmann, director of Drug Policy Alliance, gives his view on the so called War on Drugs. Now, legalization of drugs is hardly a new initiative, but as a believer in free trade in all its connotations I'm happy to see the issue discussed in a respected magazine for once. Nadelmann's points are the basic ones: the "war" can't be won, the demand can't be reduced, prohibition is mostly based on prejudices.

I only wish he would stress the supply/price side more clearly, ie when the US cracks down on, say, opium production in Afghanistan the risk for the farmers increases, which means the prices will go up. Then even more shady types will enter the market with a fresh army of Kalashnikov-toting ragamuffins behind them, and violence in the industry will increase. Then the US feels the need for some more crop killing, and there we go again. For the US to simply buy all the opium i Afghanistan and burn it (which is sometimes proposed, and would be less costly than the current war on drugs in the country) is probably not a good idea either, as Afghanistan produces 90 % of all the opium in the world. Talk about a giant supply deficit!

No, a well regulated legalization seems to be the answer if we at all care about the people of the developing countries. As Nedelmann writes: "The global war on drugs persists in part because so many people fail to distinguish between the harms of drug abuse and the harms of prohibition. (...) Governments can arrest and kill drug lord after drug lord, but the ultimate solution is a structural one, not a prosecutoral one."

Filmen som visas på terminens första filmkväll är The Corporation, en psykologisk granskning av företag som om de vore människor. Utgångspunkten är att företaget i sin blinda strävan att göra vinst mest liknar en psykopat, och precis som när det gäller mänskliga psykopater är ju då frågan huruvida man kan kräva av en sådan person att göra gott. Domstolar brukar i alla fall se psykisk sjukdom som en förmildrande omständighet. CSR må vara fint på pappret, men om det bara används för att öka företagets vinst kan man helt enkelt se det som en metod för psykopaten att nå sitt mål.

Nu på tisdag kl 18 på Casa alltså. Låt inte det faktum att Noam Chomsky dyker upp som talking head i filmen hindra er från att vara med om en intressant visning i sällskap med likasinnade. :-)

Bill Clinton håller ångan uppe. Förutom att vara en försvarlig del av hustrun Hillarys "two for one"-kampanj så har han tydligen ägnat kvällarna i hobbyrummet åt att skriva ned sina tankar om filantropi. Här är åtminstone en recension. Håll med om att undertiteln är smörig.

Mannen som dragit över flera kvinnor under sitt gifta liv än de republikanska presidentkandidaterna tillsammans (inte speciellt monogama killar med tanke på sina kristna övertygelser) är sannerligen inte den första och knappast den sista i att haka på den senaste filantropitrenden. Sedan Warren Buffett lämpade över 30 miljarder dollar i Bill Gates händer och sade "gör det bästa du kan av det" är det många som vill ge sina two cents om filantropins roll i världen, och framför allt hur filantropi bäst ska bedrivas. Ett sätt som kanske inte är det första man tänker på att dela ut pengar som priser till företagsamma personer, eftersom företagsamhet, som vi alla vet, är lösningen på fattigdomen i världen.

För att nu ta glorian av det hela måste ju också tilläggas att egentligen är vi givmilda av precis samma orsak som när vi köper bling bling åt oss själva. Men så länge resultatet är gott får det väl anses vara okej.

Mycket riktigt börjar säsongen igen. Den 11 september, en tisdag, ordnas den första filmkvällen i samarbete med kursen Corporate Sustainability på Hanken. Visningsplats är Casa kl 18, men vilken film som visas är ännu inte bestämt. Det ska kursdeltagarna rösta om, och på torsdag borde resultatet ha uppenbarat sig.

50.000 träd per år slipper malas ned till pappersmassa när flygbolagens samarbetsorganisation IATA slutar använda pappersbiljetter 2008.

A new semester is about to begin, new Net Impact members are joining the Hanken chapter, and a new season of CSR courses is starting. Sounds good.

Wishing everyone a good and sunny first week of September.

The Times discusses green consumption in an article titled "Buying Into the Green Movement."

Sorry about the break! It's summer again... Happy last weekend of June, everyone.

Helsingin Sanomat reports of US electronics retailer Circuit City and their novel layoff strategy. The corporation laid off 8% of their higher/highest paid workers in March, telling them that they could reapply for their old jobs at a lower wage.

"This strategy strikes me as being quite cold," said Bernard Baumohl, executive director of The Economic Outlook Group. "I don't think it's in the best interest of Circuit City as a whole." (Yahoo! News, March 28, 2007)

"Available for a limited time only"... New York Times Magazine's special issue on ecological building design and living.

"Cleaning Up"

“Corporate social responsibility” often means leveraging the concern (or guilt) of the affluent on behalf of those less fortunate: Sell to first-world consumers and redistribute some of the profits to address third-world problems. But a case has been made for a different strategy that involves selling to the poor themselves. In a speech last month, for instance, Harish Manwani, the chairman of Hindustan Lever Limited, pointed to his firm’s marketing Lifebuoy soap to India’s sprawling underclass as an example of its efforts to bring “social responsibility to the heart of our business.”

Hindustan Lever is a subsidiary of Unilever, the packaged-goods giant (it owns brands including Dove and Ben & Jerry’s) that was formed in 1929 by the merger of the British soap maker Lever Brothers and the Dutch food company Margarine Unie. Global brands seem like a recent phenomenon, but Lever was already operating around the world when Lifebuoy entered the Indian market more than a hundred years ago. Another thing that existed a hundred years ago and is still around today is a large number of preventable deaths.

In his speech, Manwani focused on deaths caused by diarrhea-related diseases (the World Health Organization estimates such illnesses kill 1.8 million people a year) and noted that better hand-washing habits — using soap — is one way to prevent their spread. For several years, the World Bank has been involved in initiatives with multinationals, including Unilever, to address the issue.

Hindustan Lever’s Lifebuoy campaign, however, is not philanthropy; it’s business. Throughout its long life, the antibacterial soap has been positioned as a health-and-wellness product: a 1902 ad in Harper’s promised “this wonderful cleanser and purifier” was “the enemy of dirt and disease.” That “core proposition” remains, says Punit Misra, the marketing manager who oversees Lifebuoy and other skin-cleansing brands for Hindustan Lever. Perhaps the most significant change to the product itself in recent years has been the introduction of smaller, and thus cheaper, bars: a half-size, 50-gram bar, for five rupees (about two ounces, for roughly 12 cents), was introduced in the early 1990s. (The small-package approach is now used by many companies in developing markets.) More recently, the packaging was made “more contemporary” by replacing the “strapping young man” on the package with an image of a couple and their children, Misra says.

And five years ago, the company introduced a campaign called Swasthya Chetna or “Glowing Health,” which, boiled down, argues that even clean-looking hands may carry dangerous germs, so use more soap. It began a concentrated effort to take this message into the tens of thousands of villages where the rural poor reside, often with little access to media. “Lifebuoy teams visit each village several times,” Manwani said in his speech, using “a glo-germ kit to show schoolchildren” that soap-washed hands are cleaner. Manwani says this program has reached “around 80 million rural folk” and added that “sales of Lifebuoy have risen sharply.” The small bar has become the brand’s top seller.

C. K. Prahalad, a University of Michigan professor (and Hindustan Lever board member), uses the India Lifebuoy story as a case study in his 2004 book “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” which argues that the profit motive can be a powerful force in addressing global poverty issues. Building a campaign around a well-known product like Lifebuoy can be effective precisely because even the world’s poorest citizens can be “brand conscious.” (Hindustan Lever’s Misra agrees, saying that such consumers will stick with a brand they trust, because “money means that much more to them.”)

Still, is this really the right place for the profit motive? Hindustan Lever’s position is that profitable responsibility is the point. “If it’s not really self-sustaining,” Misra says, “somewhere along the line it will drop off.” Prahalad makes similar points. “The question that comes up all the time is: These companies are pushing consumption, but what we need is livelihood improvement,” he told me in an interview. But preventing illness also means a family might avoid a potentially devastating loss of several days’ work. And ultimately, he says, campaigns like Lifebuoy’s Swasthya Chetna should be evaluated not ideologically but by their impact on the global poor. “The alternative,” he said, “is needless death.”

(The New York Times, June 10, 2007)

More Moore

Shopacalypse

Reverend Billy is the founder of the Church of Stop Shopping that preaches against "mindless consumerism." An article and a video about Rev. Billy from a recent episode of the Today Show is here. Billy is a performance artist who has staged corporate "exorcisms" on location at stores like Victoria's Secret and Starbucks.

Earlier this year, Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame produced a documentary about Reverend Billy; the film is called "What Would Jesus Buy?" Apparently the movie will come out in December this year. An interview with Mr Spurlock about WWJB can be found here. A quote from the Spurlock interview:

For the past two years I haven’t bought anyone in my family Christmas presents and I haven’t asked them to get me anything either. I’ve said, “I don’t need anything, I love you guys and the most important thing is for me to get to see you and spend time with you.” So we’ve been planning family vacations. Let’s spend our money on something that we will all enjoy, and be together. That’s what I encourage everyone to do. That’s the most valuable thing you can do-spend time together to talk and communicate and connect. We don’t connect with people at all anymore. How many times do you just send an email to somebody without getting on the phone or send a text message? It’s the world we live in. We continue to get further and further away from real human contact. Especially for people that we love and care about, we can’t let that happen. So for me, that’s the one thing that I’ve really tried to do since meeting Billy.

Somewhere along the line we bought into this whole idea that if you don’t buy a lot of stuff or if you don’t buy a lot of things then you are cheap and you don’t love someone or that they are not as valuable. I think we need to remold that.