In the 3rd Quarterly, we report on:

1. Insights from the Leading Wellbeing festival; video interviews
2. Processes underway to agree a human rights treaty on business; and a concerning lack of support
3. UN-published research on alternatives to microfinance; focusing on currency innovation
4. How to educate leaders for sustainability; research paper
5. Sustainable leadership spring school: Lake District & London, April 2016

1) Insights from the Leading Wellbeing festival; video interviews

Interviews on leadership for wellbeing and sustainability from are available as videos from the Network of Wellbeing. They include Charles Eisenstein, Nandita Das, Charlotte Millar, Jo Confino, Anna Zegna and Jem Bendell. They were attending an event with 200 people from 20 countries that was organised by IFLAS and Brathay. Lifeworth supported the web design and marketing. Some of the participants will reconvene in the Lake District on April 9^th for discussions, barn dance and a hike. If you want to join, please contact iflas@cumbria.ac.uk
2) Processes underway to agree a human rights treaty on business; and a concerning lack of support

In July meetings took place at the UN Human Rights Council to progress towards a new treaty on the human rights obligations of international companies. The process seeks to build upon the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights,” sometimes called the ‘Ruggie Framework’, and connect this to international law. In an article titled “Can CSR now support international law?” Professor Bendell looks at the response of WBCSD and others to this initiative.

3) UN-published research on alternatives to microfinance; focusing on currency innovation

At the UN summit on Financing for Development in July, the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) published a paper that explains an emerging successful alternative to microfinance. It is co-authored by Lifeworth’s Jem Bendell, with Matthew Slater and Will Ruddick. As far as we are aware, it is the first UN paper to discuss the implications of Bitcoin and currency innovation.

4) How to educate leaders for sustainability; research paper

Lifeworth’s founder Professor Bendell will present a paper on leadership for sustainability at the International Leadership Association in Barcelona in October. You can download the paper (pdf), co-authored with Richard Little from the management trainers Impact International. It is highly critical of the way many trainers and business schools teach leadership and offers a different basis.

5) Sustainable leadership spring school: Lake District & London, April 2016

The Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) is running a Sustainable Leadership Spring School in April, with a week in the beautiful Lake District and a week in London. It will also host the first intake of a new MA in Sustainable Leadership Development. Lifeworth’s Professor Bendell has co-designed and will co-tutor these courses. Click here to learn more about it.

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Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble?

…Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet,

How sweet his music! on my life, There’s more of wisdom in it.

These verses from the Lake District poet William Wordsworth, written over two hundred years ago, reflect the spirit of the Festival starting on July 16^th in the UK’s Lake District, organised by the Brathay Trust and the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS).

Scholarship is great, but immersing in nature and refreshing our creative desires is key for developing practical wisdom. The festival will be an exploration of ideas and also format, by mixing engaged scholars with radical professionals from across sectors and cultures. The aim is for a maximum mix of people, ideas and processes with few frills. Lifeworth has supported the event with IT services. As the academic chair of the Festival, I’m chuffed we will be welcoming scholars presenting over 40 papers, and speakers who are participating without charge, some coming from across continents.

We are aiming for interaction and reflection, with the Open Space, World Cafe, Open Mic and Storytelling sessions, amongst provocative plenaries and interviews. I’m looking forward to hearing philosopher Charles Eisenstein, actor Nandita Das and author Nicole Schwab. Underlying the range of sessions is the deeper question: “How might I lead greater wellbeing?”

It is an important question, because while more people speak of sustainability, the environmental news is really bad. While more people work on wellbeing, austerity bites and few address the power relations that undermine opportunities for collective wellbeing. While more people call for leadership, we risk forgetting the need for us all to lead together.

But tough issues don’t have to be explored in a tough or dull way. We can enjoy getting to know people on a deeper level as we explore whether to let go of our old stories of success and wellbeing, and where that will lead our work and life. That kind of fresh thinking likes fresh air, so we have organised a range of outdoor activities for participants… in the forest, on the lake, on the lawn.

The festival is also a celebration. I love what Brathay Trust does day-to-day in promoting young people’s wellbeing. We want to share the beauty of the Lake District, which inspires through the cultural heritage and contours of the landscape. It can be argued that contemporary conservation was born in the Lake District in the 1800s. Today, nearly 3 years after IFLAS was conceived, with around 2000 students from over 100 countries, it is time to share the IFLAS approach to sustainability leadership more widely.

So, Up, Up, friends, come join us for these days of exploration: www.leadingwell.org

Jem Bendell

Professor of Sustainability Leadership, University of Cumbria

Founder of IFLAS (www.iflas.info) and Lifeworth

At first glance, it seems like a logical story, where at some point people decided they wanted a medium of exchange rather than doing direct swaps of, say, your chicken for my apples. In my Money Myth TEDx I described a parable of a knight coming to a village with tokens to solve problems with barter. I said it wasn’t a history lesson, just a thought experiment. My aim was to show how charging interest on money can make us value money more than real wealth, like food, community and so on. I didn’t realize that the idea of money emerging as a way to deal with barter is taught widely in economics classes. Thing is, it’s complete bollocks. Now I realize what a pernicious fairytale it is, if believed to be true, as it distracts us from the real history of money, which is far more interesting, far more social, and way more political. So, let me to put the record straight with some heavy duty references

Some put the origin of the story of money emerging to improve barter to Adam Smith in the 18th Century. Then in the 19th century, William Stanley Jevons wrote a popular book that reinforced this view. He gave an account of a famous naturalist who, when on his expeditions in the Malay Archipelago, found that in islands where there was no currency but much food, mealtimes were sometimes preceded by long periods of hard bargaining, and if the commodities offered by the explorers were not wanted then their whole party went without dinner (in Evans, 2002). Monetary historian and economist Glyn Davies said of Jevons “It was largely his great influence which helped to condition conventional economic thought for a century regarding the inconvenience of barter.” (2002, p14). Such anecdotes then entered popular culture. For instance, in 1940, Geoffrey Crowther, formerly editor of The Economist, insisted that money “needed the conscious reasoning power of Man to make the step from simple barter to money-accounting” (Crowther 1940, p15).

Yet what substantial evidence is there? To find some, we have to look outside economics and to history, anthropology and archeology. “The picture drawn by economists about the inconvenience of barter in primitive communities is grossly exaggerated. It would seem that the assumption that money necessarily arose from the realisation of the inconveniences of barter, popular as it is among economists, needs careful re-examination” concluded Professor Einzig in the 1960s (1966, p353). Then, in the 1980s, after a career studying the topic, Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey concluded “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.” Glyn Davies (2002) concludes “the overwhelming tangible evidence of actual types of primitive moneys from all over the world and from the archaeological, literary and linguistic evidence of the ancient world, is that barter was not the main factor in the origins and earliest developments of money.”

Anthropologist David Graeber provides further explanations on how and when barter takes place. “Ordinarily, barter takes place between … people who might as well be strangers-that is, who feel no sense of mutual responsibility or trust, or the desire to develop ongoing relations… The English words ‘truck and barter,’ like their equivalents in French, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Portuguese, literally meant ‘to trick, bamboozle, or rip off…. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around. What we now call virtual money came first. Coins came much later, and their use spread only unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems.” We are never going back to barter, as barter was never the big thing back there somewhere.

The mistaken “barter theory of money” is unhelpful as it suggests that money works like a commodity with value in itself, rather than being an accounting system. As we explore in lesson 2 of the forthcoming free open online course on Money and Society, launched by the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) where I now work,  the earliest forms of money we know of from archeological records are systems of promises from trusted institutions for work done for them. The origin of money is credit and debt, not in escaping barter and not as precious metals. Once we recognize this, then we understand that money was not originally a thing of value, but a social agreement about how to coordinate economic activity. The question that arises is what conditions the issuance and redemption of debt is useful for society at large.

A big problem is that the misinformation continues. My search of “back to barter” in the news brought up quotes in the Economist, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal. If mainstream Economists can’t even get the basics about the history of money right, why do we trust them with informing us about the present or future of money? It’s high time sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, currency innovators and activists bring the issue of monetary system design into the public domain.  We are never going back to barter but we may go forward to new forms of collaborative credit system that displace the disfunctional role of banks and their deluded friends in economics departments.  We hope to help with our free course.

Professor Jem Bendell

Founder of Lifeworth and IFLAS, and Professor of Sustainability Leadership.

More info on IFLAS www.iflas.info

(Thanks to Matthew Slater, co-author of the Money and Society course for help in researching this topic.)

Sources:

Crowther, G. (1940). An Outline of Money (London).

Davies, G. (2002) A History of Money. A History of Money. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. https://archive.org/stream/HistoryOfMoney/HistoryOfMoney_djvu.txt

Einzig, P. (1966) Primitive Money, Oxford.

Graeber, D (2011) Debt: The first 5000 years, Melville House Publishing.

Humphrey, C (1985) Barter and Economic Disintegration, Man New Series Vol. 20, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 48-72 [p. 48]

That is a meaningless statement. Neither is there a rule or principle that stops a country adopting another country’s currency as its own legal tender. Ecuador uses the US dollar for its currency and has done for over a decade.

An independent Scotland could easily adopt the British pound as its legal tender if it wanted to, without being part of a banking union. However, its banks could not issue such currency as bank deposits via loans (the current origin of 97% of British pounds), unless it registered those banks HQs and assets within Britain. That’s not that difficult – just over the border, Carlisle might even develop as a financial centre!

Although we might want to keep the UK together, we shouldn’t be misled by politicians, civil servants or reporters who aren’t willing to have a quick google to see what happens around the world.

For Scotland to keep the pound, it would not profit from the issuance and sale of notes and coins. The issuance of physical currency is a tiny issue compared to the economic and social implications of issuance of the majority of money by banks, as debt. If it kept the pound but became independent, Scotland would have no control over monetary policy. If the UK wanted a strict monetary policy but Scotland needed a less strict one to enable more credit to boost economic activity, then Scotland’s economy would suffer an absence of a means to transact. That’s exactly the situation of Greece right now in the Eurozone. It means prolonged recession, austerity and a firesale of state assets. Hmm, but wait. That’s the current situation in Scotland… because the Scotish and British public have very little control over monetary affairs right now, as it is the private banks that decide how much credit is created, at what price and for whom.

So if concerned about monetary policy, as it should be, Scotland could keep the British pound but create a complementary currency to enable internal transactions. After all, why allow the volume of local trade to be determined by monetary policies decided elsewhere? That doesn’t sound like independence to me.

Such complementary currencies are widespread, many thousands of them worldwide, and much more stable than the recent cryptographic currencies like Bitcoin that have become famous in the past year. Some are very local, some are global and involve governments bartering products and even satellite time, some are backed by commodities, like Ven. We learned about dozens of them at a UN conference we helped organise last year, and we teach about them at our Institute: www.iflas.info

Since Bitcoin shot to fame, it is becoming more widely understood that a currency can be founded on an unhackable public database of transactions that is maintained by a network of any computers that download the relevant software. Therefore there are now hundreds of adaptations of the bitcoin code, which create other currencies. It is not surprising then that an entrepreneur announced yesterday that they are creating Scotcoin.

Could Scotcoin be the answer that Scottish independence advocates are seeking? Almost. One of the problems of these cryptographic currencies is that the way they are issued. Early adopters get a huge reward, as do those with the most powerful computers. Therefore, the proposal by Derek from Scotcoin is that an agency will distribute these coins to whoever is registered as resident in Scotland.

Scotcoin, or something similar could work, if a number of things happen:

• The code is changed to adopt Freicoin’s demurrage system so that a small fraction of your coins is paid into a common pot, which can then fund an ongoing basic income payment to every registered user. This avoids hoarding and encourages circulation of the currency
• The code is changed to remove some of the less useful aspects of bitcoin, for instance, requiring a larger amount of mining power to be decisive in changing the protocol (more than 51%), and to speed up the transaction times
• The agency issuing the currency becomes democratically accountable to the people of Scotland, so that people can decide how much the computing processors should receive for maintaining the network, what the demurrage fee should be, what the minimum income should be, and what guidance should be given on new developments in the code
• If issued and governed democratically accountable, then the Scottish government adapts legal tender laws to recognise Scotcoin, so that it would have the same legal standing as Pound Sterling when debts are disputed in court. In addition, the Government would accept tax payments in Scotcoin, or even demand some tax payments in Scotcoin, from companies operating in Scotland. In addition, the Scottish government could begin to pay some portion of state employees with Scotcoin. This would provide some basis for stabilising the demand for Scotcoin, and therefore its market price against other currencies.

Such issues are too important to be left to individual brilliance. If the initiators of Scotcoin don’t like this, no problem, the Scottish government can create their own domain extension, register Scotcoin to it, create their own cryptographic currency with a public mandate in mind, and regulate so that anything called Scotcoin that is not the government-backed system, would simply be counterfeit, and its commercial users prosecuted as such.

I dont think that will be necessary but, yes, in saying this I’ll come clean I’m not an anarchist libertarian who thinks that somehow private enterprise will fix all our problems. Instead, a blend of libertarian sentiment, entrepreneurial drive, and a strong social democratic spirit, could create a more useful monetary system in the long term. Activist entrepreneurs can lead the way, but they need to team up with others who know more about community governance, for instance.

This future governance wouldn’t mean that other private currencies couldn’t emerge.. indeed we are already seeing the emergence of a multi-currency economy around the world. Its just that if one such currency is to play a role as a national currency and be backed by the government, it will need certain characteristics and forms of governance.

If Scots want to go independent and keep the pound, that’s up to them, and they shouldn’t be misled by treasury officials.

The fact this has been opened up is good news, as it reveals how little our politicians and mainstream media seem to understand about monetary issues, so wedded are they to mainstream delusion about the nature of money.

As I heard the Chancellor I was reminded of a quote I included in my new book “Healing Capitalism”:

“To desire freedom is an instinct. To secure it requires intelligence. It must be comprehended and self-asserted. To petition for it is to stultify oneself, for a petitioner is a confessed subject and lacks the spirit of a freeman. To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority, for there is no tyranny but ignorance; to be conscious of one’s powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny. Self-government is not a remote aim. It is an intimate and inescapable fact. To govern oneself is a natural imperative, and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self-government. The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of it.”

That was E.C. Riegel, quite a long time ago, in a book arguing for us to create our own currency systems. As Felix Martin says, Bitcoin ain’t all that new, as the field of currency innovation has been around as long as we have. What is new is the ability for us to create and scale new systems quickly. In bringing attention to monetary issues in the context of the debate about Scottish independence, George Osborne may have inadvertently started a conversation that will bring more people to an awareness that money systems should be what we chose them to be, not means of control and exploitation.

So while I’m at it… Psst, all you austerised local authorities… listen up! You could create your own currencies too, and back them up by your payroll, by local taxes and charges for things like your super expensive car parks. Sound odd? Well these aren’t new ideas, they have been used by around the world already, from Brazil to Kenya. It’s about time we got our DFID civil servants studying what we can learn from the rest of the world, as our Treasury officials sound far too little-Englander to me! Now the Scottish independence debate has taken a monetary turn, and we wake up to our current monetary delusion, perhaps we all might be free.

Thanks, Jem Bendell

Professor of Sustainability Leadership (www.iflas.info)

Some links:

If you want to discuss this, see you over on the Lifeworth-IFLAS Linked In Group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Sustainable-Leaders-IFLAS-4778761

The BBC article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-26166794

See Scotcoin project: www.scotcoin.org

My book where I discuss all these things: http://jembendell.wordpress.com/2014/01/31/healing-capitalism/

If you dont know about Bitcoin: http://jembendell.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/davos-conversations-on-bitcoin/

For my views on the limitations of Bitcoin: http://jembendell.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/crypto-at-the-ok-coral/

You can also engage with a community of over 300 professional at the leading edge of transformative work on business responsibility, sustainability, accountability and positive impact, by joining the Linked In group of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS): http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Sustainable-Leaders-IFLAS-4778761/about

I thank Veronica, Frank, Janna and Mathew for having helped develop and maintain the portal at different times since 2001, and wish Christoph Stuck and his team at Globethics.net success in making this a more useful service for you.

Sincerely,

Jem Bendell

Founder, Lifeworth / Director, IFLAS / Senior Research Associate, Globethics.net

Do you think a spirit of adventure will help us to discover new ways of sustainable living and working? Maybe not. Do you want to explore this idea further? Good. Then consider joining me at the Royal Geographical Society in London on May 22^nd 2013. We are hosting a celebration of adventures in sustainability, with stories from explorer and broadcaster Paul Rose, environmental travel writer Kate Rawles, former Faithless band cofounder and 1 Giant Leap producer Jamie Catto, Wild Swimming author Daniel Start, sustainability communications guru Ed Gillespie, and myself, Professor of Sustainability Leadership Jem Bendell, amongst other eco-adventurous guests. The event introduces the new Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria. www.cumbria.ac.uk/iflas

The event is mostly by invitation only, but some tickets will be on sale from March (email martin.pyrah@cumbria.ac.uk to register your request for an invite). Currently we are looking for sponsors to help make this event accessible to a wider range of people and for a film we are making on the topic and event. If your organisation could sponsor this, and thereby invite your friends and business partners, please get in touch with me directly (jb-@-lifeworth.com). More information on the speakers follows below.

The speakers:

Paul Rose is one of the world’s most experienced divers and polar experts, a regular presenter of BBC programmes on exploration, and Vice President of the Royal Geographical Society. For the past 30 years he has been helping scientists unlock global mysteries in the most remote and challenging regions of the planet. His new BBC documentary, Frank Wild: Antarctica’s Forgotten Hero, has just aired on BBC ONE and BBC TWO. Paul is now using art to bring attention to sustainability challenges. www.paulrose.org

Jamie Catto is a former and founding member of the band Faithless. He left to form the double-Grammy nominated, global music and film project 1 Giant Leap. He blended sounds, images and ideas recorded across 5 continents, to explore the unity in diversity. Jamie also leads uniquely transformative workshops, which draw from the diverse wisdom, techniques and processes he encountered during his musical and philosophical voyages. www.jamiecatto.com

Ed Gillespie is Co-Founder of Futerra Sustainability Communications and a flight-free round the world traveller. In 2007-8 Ed circumnavigated the globe without flying in a slow, low-carbon travel adventure using trains, buses, cargo ships and the occasional belligerent camel. He works internationally on ‘selling the sizzle’ of sustainability, inspiring change through powerful, compelling visions of a positive future. www.futerra.co.uk

Kate Rawles is senior lecturer in Outdoor Studies at the University of Cumbria, environmental campaigner and outdoor philosopher.  She is author of The Carbon Cycle; crossing the Great Divide, chronicling her ride through the Rocky Mountains. Kate cycled 4553 miles from Texas to Alaska along the spine of the Rockies, exploring attitudes to climate change and searching for solutions in the belly of the oil beast.  Kate finds that crossing the great divide from here to sustainability is an adventure we’re all on, however unchosen. http://www.tworavenspress.com/TRP_The_Carbon_Cycle.html

Daniel Start is a writer, facilitator and consultant specialising in environment, community and economic development. He is the author of a series of cult classic books on ‘wild swimming’ in the outdoors.  What could be more refreshing than slipping into the cool, clear waters of a secret lake? And what could be more exciting than plunging into a hidden waterfall? Daniel shows that adventures can be found not so far from home. http://www.wildswimming.co.uk/

Jem Bendell is a Professor of Sustainability Leadership and founding Director of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria. In 2012 the World Economic Forum recognised him as a Young Global Leader for his pioneering work on innovative collaborations for sustainable development. His work has taken him to live and work in 8 countries on 5 continents. Alongside his academic career, Professor Bendell has worked for the United Nations and the World Wide Fund for Nature. His next book is called Healing Capitalism. http://www.jembendell.com

Lifeworth is delighted to be helping IFLAS to produce and promote this event.

Jem Bendell, Founder of Lifeworth and IFLAS (January 9th, 2013)

To us, sustainability means that everyone thrives in harmony with the biosphere and future generations. That does not mean maintaining or spreading a particular way of life, but a transition from behaviours and systems that are destructive, towards those that restore the environment and support individual rights, wellbeing, and community. It implies a systemic shift; large numbers of persons and organisations acting in a significantly different way. A transition to sustainability involves promoting ecological integrity, collective wellbeing, real democracy, human rights, support for diversity, economic fairness, community resilience, a culture of compassion, inquiry, non-violence to all life and appreciation of beauty.

Studies of positive transformations suggest this shift will require interacting cultural, economic, technological, behavioural, political and institutional developments at multiple levels. Leaders during social transformations appear to have transcended a concern for self, yet sufficiently sustained their wellbeing, and empowered others. Therefore our work seeks to connect the systemic and the personal, and mobilise insights from diverse schools of thought on how transformations occur. We see the transition to a sustainable way of life as an adventure, which I explained on film is a theme that frames much of our work.

Research at IFLAS will focus on actionable knowledge, action research, combining diverse disciplines, linking local with global, and learning from old and new teachings that arise from diverse cultural settings. I describe the research areas in a brief video. I am currently welcoming inquiries about potential PhD research. There is one opportunity for receiving a bursary to cover fees.

Our education will draw on our heritage as a place of experiential learning for over a century. We currently run an MBA in Leadership and Sustainability.

A sustainability leaders’ summit in July will mark the official launch of IFLAS, but the first open event is on March 11th, where we will train people on how to launch and scale a local currency. Our website goes live at the end of January.

So what am I letting go?

In the coming months, the Lifeworth jobs portal will be merged with Globethics.net who will be able to develop it further and reach a wider audience. Projects at Lifeworth Consulting will now be managed by my brilliant and steadfast colleague Ian Doyle.

As the year comes to an end, try letting go.

Unless you work in a circus.

Or especially if you work in a circus?

Cheers, Jem
Professor Jem Bendell
Director, Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS)
University of Cumbria, UK
Charlotte Mason Building
Rydal Road, Ambleside
LA22 9BB, UK

http://www.cumbria.ac.uk/iflas / http://www.jembendell.com / http://twitter.com/jembendell / http://weibo.com/jembendell

Click here to view the embedded video.

I had the pleasure of working with Thomas and the European Sustainability Academy to develop a network of professionals in Greece who organise alternative exchange systems, such as the local market currency in Volos, called the TEM. We facilitated the drafting of the Drapanos Declaration on Community Exchange, which provides a basis for future collaboration. It highlights the insight and purpose that many people share. I recommend you read it, share it, and consider endorsing it yourself.

Thomas then came to the north west of England, to speak at events organised by the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS), which I’m founding at the University of Cumbria. We organised the events with Transition Lancaster, the local chapter of the worldwide Transition Towns movement, which encourages local action to create sustainable communities. As a result of the events, IFLAS is now engaging Transition Lancaster and the Lancaster Ethical Small Traders Association, other interested business networks and community groups in the region, and the nation-wide Sustainable Money Working Group, to design experiments and action-research projects for scaling up alternative means of exchange. We hope to link this local innovation with the Working Group on the Sharing Economy, of the Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum, because we believe these issues are of global relevance.

The next event is a one day seminar on why and how to launch your own local exchange system, led by myself and John Rogers, co-author of People Money: the promise of regional currencies, and in association with the United Nations Non-Governmental Liaison Service, on March 11^th, 2013.

The Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) will be formally launched next year, with a 3 day summit of international sustainability leaders. Based in the middle of the world-famous Lake District, the ILS is an autonomous part of the University of Cumbria Business School, collaborating across the University on inter-disciplinary research, education and advisory. We work on personal and collective transitions towards more fair and sustainable societies. The field of alternative exchange systems and complementary currencies is an area which we welcome enquiries, particularly from potential doctoral candidates, partners in funded research, or prospective participants in our March seminar. For this, I can be contacted via my profile page at the University.

Professor Jem Bendell

Director, Institute for Leadership and Sustainability, University of Cumbria

Founder, Lifeworth.com and Lifeworth Consulting

Singapore, on 4th, at Syinc, evening talk on the future of money

Crete, Greece, 10th and 11th, at ESA, 2 day workshop on alternative exchange and currency systems

Barcelona, Spain, on 19th, at Future Economy, a talk on the future of luxury and brands

Lancaster, UK, 31st, at University of Cumbria, with Thomas Greco on alternative exchange and currency systems

Just over five years ago I began working on the luxury industry.  I thought, why cant these elite brands not excel in social and environmental performance? I researched, wrote and produced the report Deeper Luxury for WWF-UK, and it triggered a bit of a furore in the fashion press and wider luxury industry (about 8000 sites now link to the report). 5 years on, I’ve helped some luxury companies with their social and environmental impacts. But I havent seen much change. Some large firms like PPR have embraced the agenda, although we wait in anticipation for more results, in terms of positive social and environmental outcomes. In the 5 years, what inspired me the most were the entrepreneurs I met. People who were creating businesses to address social and environmental problems, and targetting the luxury segment as a way to do that. I began to realise something might be in this – that these entrepreneurs might be shaping the future of luxury, and that they might be revealing a new way we can engage in social change. In the new study, I profile sustainable luxury firms Elvis and Kresse, Tesla Motors, Shokay, Source4Style, Rags2Riches, Positive Luxury, Timothy Han and Nue Luxe… It’s called “Elegant Disruption: How luxury and society can shape each-other for good”. It took about a year to write, as it involved a lot of conversations to understand just what the potential of luxury might be to influence social change. Ill be presenting it at conferences in Brisbane and Barcelona in the coming weeks.

Abstract, August 2012:

From http://www.griffith.edu.au/business-government/asia-pacific-centre-for-sustainable-enterprise/publications/working-paper-series/issue-9
This paper outlines the contemporary luxury sector, showing it is global, thriving and influential. It shows how creative destruction is typical in most industry sectors, including luxury, and how disruptive innovation by entrepreneurs is key to that process. It proposes that the current time is potentially disruptive for incumbent luxury brands and groups, due to five key trends that are beginning to re-frame the markets that luxury brands sell to. Sustainable luxury entrepreneurs from USA, UK, Philippines, India, Argentina, China and Hong Kong are profiled and described as  pursuing “elegant disruption”: a well-designed intervention in markets that both uses and affects aspirations in ways that change patterns of consumption, production or exchange, for a positive societal outcome. The paper reviews the response of mainstream luxury brands to the sustainability agenda, proposing some possible reasons why they appear to be encumbered in embracing this agenda fully. Some of the paradoxes in the notion of “sustainable luxury” are described, in order to draw implications for both the luxury industry and people interested in positive social change. The paper draws upon the authors five years of interaction with the luxury industry on sustainability issues, and is therefore written as a “first person inquiry” and draws upon principles of “appreciative inquiry” in documenting the breakthrough approaches of some sustainable luxury entrepreneurs.