A week in the life of...

I am asked quite a lot now about what I am doing and how I fill my weeks after having spent nearly 11 years in an all encompassing, more than full time job. I guess I now have what many people would call a portfolio or plural career with a number of non executive and part time jobs. I deliberately wanted to keep quite busy but not silly busy and I think I am sort of achieving that, although my wife says I am away as often as ever! This week is in many ways typical as it involves trips to Glasgow and London but a quiet Monday morning and Wednesday afternoon. In between I will have managed an involvement with 9 different organisations.

1. I attended an Audit Committee update wearing my John Wood Group hat.

2. I spoke at an energy policy debate at Edinburgh University

3. I visited the first turbine to be produced by a tidal energy company I am involved with.

4. We held a management meeting of the software company where I have an investment.

5.  In my role as President of the Energy institute I chaired a heat summit.

6. I chaired a board phone call for Infinis Energy.

7. Then its a Maggies cancer charity finance committee to attend.

8. As chairman of Scotland's 2020 group I will be speaking at a dinner for Civil Engineers in Glasgow. 

9. I have an induction day at Aggreko.

On top of that I have had a few cups of coffee with contacts and friends and responded to the usual welter of emails and to started to think about my visit to a 10th organisation on Monday, which is another of the energy related SMEs I am involved with. Never a dull moment!

A minute in the life of......

I came across a snapshot of a single minute in the life of our data driven world.

Facebook.  208,000 photos uploaded.

Twitter.    350,000 tweats. 

 YouTube. 100 hours of video uploaded.

Google.   3.5 million search queries.

And those numbers are going up all the time. 90% of the data which currently exists was created in the last two years. 

You can ring my bell

Over the last few weeks I have been kept busy working for a company called Infinis Energy. It is a pure UK renewables business so was right up my street. It has performing assets in three different technologies; landfill gas, onshore wind and hydro. What has been different for me is that I was approached to be Chairman as part of the preparations for a listing on the London Stock Exchange. I have never been through an IPO (initial public offering) before and found it very interesting and, at times, frustrating. It involves a cast of thousands. I counted five different investment banks, three law firms, two corporate finance advisors, a specialist adviser on landfill gas and one firm of accountants. The conference calls, which at times were running at more than one a day, had so many people on them that I thought they might crash the system. 

It is also a very bureaucratic and legalistic process. The company had to issue a 250 page prospectus which amongst other things includes a very long list of every possible risk, to the extent that I thought we should have included the risk of a meteor hitting one of the Infinis sites. We had to have a number of Board meetings and I dread to think how many trees were sacrificed to produce all the papers. Everyone seemed to be issuing comfort letters to each other and everything had to be verified. 

On top of all this the business had to be marketed to investors. I got involved in something called 'pilot fishing', a term which seems tautologous at best as it involves initial discussions with potential investors and then the Management team spent nine days on a roadshow covering the UK, the US and Germany. They had over 40 one to one meetings as well as group lunches and video conferences. At one point the database of investor contact had over 700 individual fund managers being tracked.

This all came to head on 20 November when Infinis became the latest company to list on the London Stock Exchange. The management team were invited to a nice little ceremony to mark the start of trading, like the bell ringing ceremony in New York. They kindly invited me and it was a really good way to mark the end of the IPO process and the beginning of life as a quoted company. 

As a result I know find myself the Chairman of a public company board. Will I have to grow up now?

The Seven Ps of Effective Travel

I gave a key note speech at a conference on Scotland's clean air initiatives last week and it got me thinking of the hierarchy of travel options. I have used as my guiding principles the need to reduce both carbon emissions and air pollution, particularly in our cities. I have come up with a travel pecking order of 7 Ps:

1. PEACE. It is always best if we can avoid actually having to travel in the first place, partly because it can waste so much time. Modern technology like video conferencing, skype, face time and conference calls should always be the first option we think about.

2. PEDESTRIAN. I feel a little guilt promoting this one as I have a bad leg which makes it difficult for me to practise what I preach but for our local travel it should always be an option.

3. PEDAL. The second active option we should think about. Every time I go down to London I notice an increase in the number of bikes on the streets. The 'Boris Bikes' have made cycling easy for ad hoc journeys and Londoners are responding.

4. PUBLIC.  If we can't use our own energy to get around then the shared options are the next best. We have to use modern, digital, technology to make public transport easier to use. Apps for journey planning and real time data feeds are obvious steps we need to take. Maybe Edinburgh, with its new tram, can take a lead here. 

5. POOLED. The other shared transport is car pooling or lift sharing. Businesses should give incentives to staff who car share, like reserving the best car park spaces for their cars.

6. PLUGGED. New vehicles are being developed all the time with all electric cars, plug in hybrids, hydrogen buses and LPG fleets having a role to play. These have lower emissions than conventionally fuelled vehicles.

7. PETROL.  Our final choice, the last resort if you like, should be the private car (be it petrol or diesel). All too often, however, it is our first or default choice.

The challenge for policy makers and organisations is to make options 1 to 6 easier to adopt more often and then we will use them more often. If we just hit the car user over the head or in the wallet we will not get the sustainable behaviour change we need.