End to end
“Are sheep people too?” No, they’re not, but they do deserve a good life before they’re shorn, or eaten.
This is one of the reasons my wife, Kate, bought a woollen hoodie from Sheep Inc. Each of their superb jumpers (sweaters if you’re North American) has an NFC tag on the hem which you can scan to unlock details of the garment’s manufacturing journey and carbon footprint (wool grown in New Zealand, spun in Italy, and manufactured in Spain).
Sheep Inc is the world’s first carbon-negative clothing company, and they also practice regenerative farming (nutrient-rich pastures, rotational grazing, high water infiltration), and the highest standards of animal welfare.
They are openly ‘slow fashion’, the antithesis of fast-fashion (think Zara, Uniqlo or H&M), whose business models work off a denominator of rapid design with three powerful multiplier effects: cheap fabrics x efficient supply chains x inexpensive off-shore labour. Now, this means we can buy ‘nice’ things for very little, but each of these factors is problematic at scale: polyesters are ecologically disastrous in the landfills where most of these clothes end up after just a short time; supply chains are hugely carbon positive, and labour conditions are rarely what the purchasers of the garments would accept for themselves.
So, in a world where even Gucci has announced full circularity of its supply chain, I’m optimistic about startups like Sheep Inc. My wife has used the QR code to name her sheep, and she checks on it from time to time (it’s still in the same field). Yes, it’s a gimmick, but it’s a testament to how seriously they take the idea that their clothing should last years, not months, or weeks.
Question: What can you do to build-in circularity into your business?
Small packages
When I was a child, someone gave me as a gift a micro-book. It was a dictionary maybe an inch wide, two tall, its pages impossibly thin onion-skin paper, its tiny print easily readable to my 12-year-old eyes. I carried it around in my pocket everywhere I went, and I’d pull it out whenever I was bored, fascinated by how it compressed thousands of definitions into such a tiny package.
Fast forward 40 years, and I remain intrigued by this idea of condensed knowledge, especially with today’s information oceans (the single encyclopedia in my school library had 100,000 entries, whereas Wikipedia has 6,383,725 - possibly a few more by the time you read this).
So, given this, how can we absorb a complex set of ideas, fast? Here are two very different examples that I’m loving lately.
One is “The Tiny MBA” by Alex Hillman, a pocket-sized book of pithy, sometimes low-brow aphorisms. Just one example: “To avoid over-engineering and wasting time, try flintstoning everything before you build big fancy systems and automations”. (BTW, ‘flintstoning’ means build a (low-cost) manual system before you automate). Hillmans’ book is most definitely NOT an MBA, but it packs a punch way outside its weight class.
The other is the Oxford series of Very Short Introductions, roughly 100 pages each. There are hundreds of them, authored by the world’s experts in each field, and I’ve recently been enjoying this distilled wisdom on Darwin, de Tocqueville, Behavioural Economics, and the US Presidency. A lazy hour on the sofa spent with any of these books leaves me feeling like I have a comprehensive view of a big subject, and marvelling at how an entire field of knowledge (made up of millions of hours of human endeavour) can be conveyed to me in the time it takes to cook a meal, or have a haircut.
Question: What’s the briefest package in which you can present a complex idea?
My kingdom for a whiteboard
This week, I was in a (Zoom) meeting with three clients and, as we were grappling with a complex idea, two of us said, at the same time, “Gosh, I’d kill for a whiteboard right now!”. The other two of us laughed and agreed.
I’m the guy who can’t think without a marker in his hand, scribbling phrases, joining them with arrows, and creating shapes to illustrate concepts. That’s why I remain smitten with my Remarkable 2 tablet, I use digital canvasses like Mural and Miro extensively in group strategy sessions and, in small meetings, even simpler but more immediate tools like Tilde.
But there have been a half dozen times over the past 18 months where I’ve really wanted a whiteboard that a group of us can scribble on, wipe off, re-do — and argue about. I don’t see an app for that (yet).
Question: What can’t you do digitally that you can only do in person?
As always, I love hearing that you’ve enjoyed reading. So, please take a second or two to click the heart. It would mean a lot.
And, as I mentioned last week I’m eager to get 5MSM out to more people, so please let some in your network know about it by clicking the ‘share’ link below. It’s super easy to post on your own LinkedIn or Twitter feeds.
In the meantime, please enjoy your weekend and, during the week, enjoy absorbing some condensed knowledge.
Andrew
Enjoyed the topics a lot this week, thanks Andrew. PS I'm a dyed in the wool (excuse poor reference pun) whiteboard visual guy too!
Hi Andrew, not sure if it helps, but there is a whiteboard functionality within the Zoom paid version. Simply click on 'Share Screen' and there is an option to click on 'Whiteboard'. It shares a blank canvas with a whole bunch of tools at the top. It's pretty cool!