I watched the best part of the 11th hour (Leonardo Di Caprio) film over the weekend and have renewed admiration for the ‘actor’ who’s followed his conscience in talking about the inconvenient truth of climate change. How many people around the world have seen this shocking documentary style film and the more poignant question, how many people around the world have heard its message?
‘Padling our canoe’ as I’ve previously described our intention to change the bottled water market away from its blind acceptance of polluting oil based plastic bottles and seriously carbon intensive glass bottles, to a more sensible and ecologically pragmatic paper carton (AQUAPAX), is a challenging task – but nothing compared to the mantle young Leonardo has raised his game to take on.
Admitted he’s a touch more famous than me, but hats off to the boy, he’s opted for the proverbial ‘road less travelled’ and he’s making a cracking job of it.
Pondering on the very real ‘ecological awareness’ message getting through, I met with Phil over at Impression Sailing & Events today and while I didn’t ask if he’d seen the film, his honest understanding of what we’re doing as a business and his sincere readiness to support an initiative he believes in, irrespective of its direct commercial return to his thriving business, shows true leadership in his field. Interestingly, ‘Impression Events’ have no grandiose environmental statements, nor ethical statements or privacy statements designed to satisfy the need for politically correct benchmarks, yet they walk the walk. That counts a great deal in my book and I’m proud to put a link to their site from our links page. Besides that, their pure passion for what they do is a pleasure to read and I urge anyone looking to ‘go sailing’ to look them up beforehand.
Regular readers of my blog will know I’ve previously cited the example of Enrons 64 page code of ethics document and what a mockery that company made of the whole subject. That’s not to say the rank and file Enron employees didn’t believe, but it sure as heck shows their board hadn’t bothered to read what they signed up to. Funnily enough, I’ve met with a few other companies this month and a similar thought crossed my mind regarding how much of their own words their representatives have read and/or believe in.
Employing public facing staff – now that’s a real 11th hour decision for any growing business (sorry Leonardo) – no intention to trivialise the important subject I started on, but representing a business is clearly about more than words on a website and businesses need to be more consistent about using words they believe in, and/or employing staff who speak of things as they really are…
Stay positive – I know there’s still a lot of good people out there – I met a number of them on Friday doing a demo at the John Lewis food hall in Oxford Street – but that’s a blog for another day!
N
NeilT's Weblog 