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Personal footprints, global change

Climate change is a serious challenge for every single one of us except, it seems, George Bush. Jyoti Banerjee checks out his own carbon footprint while assessing the environment’s impact on growth.

Nick Stern’s review of the economic consequences of climate change (commissioned by the UK Treasury) is nearly upon us. He is expected to announce that climate change will result in a 20% fall in global output, the sort of scale of negative impact on growth and development we might expect from a world war. Read Robert Peston's review of the Stern Review here.

In macro-economic terms, the plunging economic performance comes from a mix of factors:
dealing with lower agricultural and food output; the increased depreciation of capital due to its redeployment on things like sea defences as well as the greater pace of technological obsolescence (we will be throwing away our heating systems and installing air-conditioning, for example); and the adverse impact of climate change on people’s skills and development.

There is no doubt that climate change has moved into a higher gear. Many environmentalists now doubt that we can turn back the tide. We, and our children, will have to live with the consequences of our actions, and the actions of our parents and grandparents.

Should M organisations be listening to Nick Carr?

Nicholas Carr wants companies to spend less on IT. Jyoti Banerjee ponders that advice on behalf of medium enterprises.

At last week's London debate with Bob McDowell of Microsoft, Nicholas Carr restated his well-known perspective: IT does not add strategic value to an organisation, so companies should spend less on it, and business leaders should intentionally choose to be IT followers, not leaders.

What was different about this debate from many similar ones was the focus applied to medium organisations. Carr's usual analysis is based on large enterprises But does this approach work for medium enterprises as well?

My instinct is that Carr's ideas work better for medium enterprises than they do for larger organisations.

Typical medium enterprises don't have the budget, bandwidth or business practice to justify expensive investments in what Carr calls distinctive technologies. Instead, they prefer their tech to be low, and their infrastructure commoditised.

Of course, there are at least three caveats that are worth pointing out.

Groceries 2.0

Microsoft Office has some new competition. Jyoti Banerjee checks out the new kid on the block.

Stop getting excited. This has nothing to do with Office 2.0 or SaaS or open source or anything. The new competitor to Microsoft's cash cow comes from, well, a grocer.

Admittedly, this is not your garden-variety grocer. It's Tesco, a company that takes in £1 out of every £8 spent in UK high street stores, has seen off Sainsbury's for the top spot in the UK, is comfortably placed in fending off the attentions of Asda / Wal-mart, and has even decided to start its US operations with the first stores opening on the west coast in 2007. International sales in the first half of 2006 represented £5.3 billion, boosting the group's revenues to £22.6 billion. I say it again - these are just half year sales figures.

It is also true to say that in e-commerce terms, there is none bigger in the UK. Tesco.com is a billion pound company in its own right. I should also admit that it is a bit unfair to call Tesco a grocer, as 20% of sales come from non-food stuff (excluding petrol), and Terry Leahy's management team have a clear strategy to make non-food as big as food.

Medium enterprise research challenges policy-makers

Having trailed M Institute's research on these pages for some weeks now, some of you may well be wondering where they could read this research. Well, wonder no more, as Jyoti Banerjee explains.

Today M Institute announces its first research report, Empowering Medium Enterprise: A guide to policy-makers. Though aimed at government in the first instance, I think it should be accessible to anybody who has an involvement in the medium enterprise segment: business leaders, opinion formers, consultants, and the like.

For me, the report does two things. It lays out a case why medium organisations are different from both small and large enterprises. This is important because medium is often banded together with small in the SME definition. Such an approach is crazy because medium has more in common with large than it does small.

Secondly, it identifies a number of policy areas where unhelpful market conditions or policy stances impair the tremendous growth performance of medium organisations. Nobody, least of all M Institute, is seeking government intervention where it is not needed. Which is why the areas that are identified as needing some attention, such as access to finance, regulation and regional development, need to be considered all the more seriously.

You can find the report's web pages here.

Let me know what you think by email or a comment here.