You say you want a revolution?

My latest reading material is the book 'The Third Industrial Revolution' by Jeremy Rifkin. His central thesis is that it is the combination of energy and communication that makes for a true 'Industrial Revoltion'.  The first Revolution was built on coal and railways, the second on oil, electricty and the car and the third, the one we are experiencing now, should, he argues, be based on distributed energy and digital communication. It is an interesting idea and certainly one that seems to make a lot of sense. Revolutions generally do involve a combination of factors and we are certainly seeing a lot of change affecting everything. The book focuses a lot on energy but the communication advances are, if any thing, more dramatic. 

A good summary of Rifkin's views on the current Revolution is as follows. "The Third Industrial Revolution is the last stage of the great industrial saga and the first stage of the emerging collaborative era rolled together. It represents an interregnum between two periods of economic history.....If the industrial era emphasised the values of discipline and hard work, the top down flow of authority, the importance of financial capital, the workings of the marketplace, and private property relations, the collaborative era is more about creative play, peer-to-peer interactivity, social capital, participation in open commons, and access to global networks."

He outlines five pillars of this third industrial revolution including shifting to renewable energy, using the Internet to transform power grids and electric and hybrid transport. I found the chapter on distributed capitalism particularly interesting as we are seeing a lot of innovation around business models. As he says "although we think of entrepreneurship as isolated commercial accomplishments- in the form of new inventions or business ideas- the truly great  entrepreneurial contributions are more systemic in nature. They occur when the business community comes to see how their individual commercial pursuits fit into a broader economic vision." 

Business can be a really positive force for change and innovation in energy and communications is central to that change. Time will tell whether it is a truly historic revolution.

Read all about it.

Energy is frequently in the news and the last couple of  days are no exception. I have just picked out a few topics that I particularly noticed.

Last week the Office of National Statistics put out some research that UK household  electricity consumption was down 24.7% in the last six years. Given that a few years ago many of us wasted a lot of energy and the amount of money being spent on energy efficiency in the last few years this should be seen as good news. However, it didnt stop some commentators using it as an excuse to bash the energy companies again. I also suspect that it means the size of average bills is overstated because Ofgems standard consumption figures tend to lag reality. I acknowledge that high prices are causing people real pain but if the response is to be more careful in the use of energy that is, generally, a positive thing both economically and environmentally. 

US energy exports have been booming in recent years. In 2011 the US became a net fuel exporter for the first time in neary two decades and between June  2011 and June 2012 petroleum and coal exports doubled again to over $110 billion and oil and gas exports were up over 60% in the same period. These two sectors occupied the top two slots in the export growth league table. This is just an example of how unconventional gas has changed the energy landscape in the US in quite a major way.   However, the US is different from the UK interms of geology and politics. I can't imagine the scenes we have seen in Balcombe happening in Texas!

An article in the Financial Times discusses the issue of resource nationalism by looking at Mexican oil. I didn't know that Mexico nationalised their oil industry 75 years ago under President Cardenas. Now the current President, Enrique Nieto, has talked openly about bringing in foreign capital and expertise, but on Mexican terms. The ownership, production and value of fossil fuel reserves is always a highly political issue and countries all over the world take a variety of approaches, partly depending on whether they have resources. In fact in many regions around the world the politics and economics of energy are the dominant issue. 

These three stories all show how central energy is to our modern life.

Deluges and debriefs

Last week I visited Calgary in Alberta for a Board meeting of the Wood Group. Earlier in the summer Calgary was hit by very severe floods which affected both down town and many suburbs. It is still a major talking point. Flow rates on the rivers that flow through the city were between five and ten times their normal levels and over 100,000 people were displaced during the height of the damage.

In common with many companies Wood Group start meetings with a safety moment and as you would expect this time the focus was on crisis management. The key message was that it is important to remember what you wish you had done before the event so that next time you are better prepared. It reminded me of the importance of proper debriefing after anything significant (good or bad) which I first heard from an ex member of the Red Arrows air display team. They do a proper debrief after every display even if its gone really well.  Frequently we don't capture lessons, take remedial action and therefore improve next time and, in business as in other walks of life, we should. 

Nice guys can finish first

I was forwarded an article from the New York Times (not my usual reading material) by Susan Dominus. It is about a new book called 'Give and Take' by a leading psychologist, Adam Grant, from Wharton University. The essence of the article is summarised in this paragraph. 

".Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want to keep doing it. Traditionally the thinking has been that employers should appeal to workers’ more obvious forms of self-interest: financial incentives, yes, but also work that is inherently interesting or offers the possibility for career advancement. Grant’s research, which has generated broad interest in the study of relationships at work and will be published for the first time for a popular audience in his new book, “Give and Take,” starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other people’s lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves." 

The examples seem to be extreme but I would certainly agree that selfishness in a business environment is counterproductive and that trying to put others and the organisation before your own needs is both productive and rewarding. For example, before joining an organisation the better question is 'what can I do for it' rather than 'what can it do for me' 

The article can be found here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/magazine/is-giving-the-secret-to-getting-ahead.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&. It will make you think.

Linknode. A first and unexpected step

When I stepped down from SSE earlier in the summer one thing I was interested in was getting involved in some small companies and my involvement in Linknode represents the first move in this direction. It is also, for those people who know me, an apparently strange first move. After all I am the person who never had a PC in their office, believes that using calculators in exams is really cheating and spent most of his career trying to reduce IT spend. So why do I now appear to have got religion and got involved in an app developer?

My journey started three years ago when I bought my first iPad. Suddenly here was a piece of technology I both 'got' and could work. It made my life easier and changed how I went about doing business. I even bought my wife one for Christmas I was so taken with it. As a result I started looking more deeply at the digital revolution we are experiencing. I have read about digital disruption and big data and have bought numerous apps that give me, at my fingertips, information I find useful. The journey continued a year ago when I launched and judged the Enviroapp competition for Scotland's 2020 climate group. Actually it was even my idea. The competition was to develop an app to improve SME engagement with sustainable development and there were six finalists. Linknode didn't win but I was really impressed with their idea.

I stayed in contact with Crispin and the team as they developed Ventus AR. It involves the powerful combination of location, visualisation and mobility to allow you to see what a proposed wind farm ( or indeed any other type of development) would actually look like from where you are standing and holding up your tablet computer. It beats the postively ancient static photo montage  on all counts. It's cheaper for the developer, better for the local community who can see what they really want and more reliable for planners. What's not to like. 

As these discussions continued, the idea of me taking a stake and becoming Linknode's first non exec emerged. I heard about some of their other ideas such as Historylens and got even more interested and so when I eventually left SSE it was easy to accept their offer.

So that's how a technophobe came to be invested in a technology company. I believe that digital is truly disruptive of many aspects of our modern life and wind farm development and planning are no exception. I hope to help Linknode develop its existing products as well as new ones allowing the creation of meaningful and sustainable jobs. Small, entrepreneurial companies are the lifeblood of our economy and if I can play a small part in helping some be successful that will be a source of pride and enjoyment.

A Remarkable Year

You can only judge how significant events in a single year are with the benefit of hindsight. I think we are now far enough away from 1776 to say it was a remarkably influential year. Three things all happened in that year which have really helped shape our modern world. In no particular order they were:

1. The American Declaration of Indepedence which built on the philosophy published by Thomas Paine in Common Sense earlier in the year. This marked the effective beginning of democratic government.

2. Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations which is still one of the building blocks of economic thought and our reliance on markets.

3. The first two steam engines built by James Watt were commissioned marking the real start of the fossil fuel era.

These three themes of democracy, markets and fossil fuels still dominate Western life. I wonder how long that will remain the case.