The world needs more good ideas.

I’ve been working on environmental and social causes for almost 20 years and, as you can imagine, it’s hard work. Even with the rise of sustainability in the past decade, for the most part, people and planet are more often than not an after thought in an economy that is fundamentally about making as much money as possible as fast as possible, with little consideration for the long-term impacts.

That’s not say people aren’t interested, or indeed trying.

I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who wanted to destroy the world’s wild places, put plastic in our oceans or pollute our air. Almost everyone agrees with the idea of a fair go. The problem is, it’s hard to ‘bring these ideas to work’ so to speak, when there is often no clear benefit for the company - at least not in the short term. And so, sustainability becomes a trend - invested in when times are good, but with budgets cut significantly when times get tight.

It’s pretty clear the world can’t go on like this.

You don’t have to Google far to find out that climate change is now upon us and that issues like deforestation and inequality are acute. If you want to know the extent of the problem, three stats that always stick in my mind are:

• Every one of the last 10 years is one of the 10 warmest on record (NASA, 2024)

• Global wildlife populations have fallen over 70% in just 50 years (WWF, 2024)

• The world's 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50% (Oxfam, 2019)

I choose these three because I believe that, as a set of issues, they are the most urgent. Climate change because it is changing the planetary systems we rely on to live, deforestation because it destroying the nature we are a part of and inequality because the spoils of this destruction are so crazy badly distributed that the vast majority of humanity doesn’t even benefit from all the destruction.

I could of course go on about plastic pollution, overfishing and so on, but that would be kind of depressing. And while stats like these are the backdrop for why I thought this podcast and blog series might be a good idea, they are not what it’s about.

It’s about finding answers.

As I was saying, I genuinely believe most people want to find answers. But like you and me they are stuck in a system of going to work, going home, paying the bills and doing it all over again. So much for Eat. Sleep. Rave. Repeat. More like Spreadsheet. Can’t Sleep. Slave. Repeat.

Of course good people still try. But when one tries to bring this sort of thinking to work any big sustainability idea will no doubt face what can seem like insurmountable challenges.

Let’s say the company you work for makes a billion plastic widgets a year, and your big idea is to make them our of recycled plastic. Sounds easy, right? But of course it’s not. Chances are the supply chain just does not exist. No one is collecting old plastic (and if they are it’s the wrong sort), no one is sorting it and melting it down into usable material and, even if they are, everyone is pretty nervous about putting this new material into the million dollar machine that turns plastic into widgets. Then, even if you get past all those hurdles, chances are this new supply costs more than the old one which simple sucked dinosaur juice out of the ground and refined it into cheap polymers. And no one is prepared to foot that bill.

So your big idea goes in the too hard basket and the problem lives on.

All of of which is a way of saying that, whether people are motivated or not, often change is hard in a big organisation where systems and processes have been set over years. So how do we change this?

Enter the startups, the revolutionaries of the business world.

Unchained by precedent, and able to test things small then scale up big, it is the role of the entrepreneur to pioneer new supply chains and business models. They exist to shake the status quo and show a better way is possible. So when the world of entrepreneurs turns its attention to revolutionising business in ways that is better for people and planet suddenly change becomes possible.

The world needs more of these good entrepreneurs, or goodtrepreneurs.

We need more people trying more thing, and succeeding, more often. So I figure that if the lessons learned from success and from failure are easier to find and learn then more people might just be inspired to have a go and be more likely to succeed.

So that’s the idea.

The podcast is the first part of it. I see that as the research component. But it also throws up some great stories. With each episode, I’ve written a short article to capture what I feel are the key learnings. Over time, I hope to find common threads which can be bundled into a how-to-succeed playbook. But that’s in the future.

For now, please enjoy the stories of good people with good ideas for a better world. And tell me if you know someone whose story I should tell.

Because the more good stories we tell, the more good ideas will come and the better our chance of building the better world we’d all like to live in.