JIB UNPACKED

First a bit of housekeeping. If you want to see the slideshows on the blog full screen, you can double click on the pictures and it should take you to our Picassa site.
Today we are in a rainy Buenos Aires, Argentina and Marci and Skye have written their first blog posts below. Since the last blog post, we spent almost 6 weeks in Bali and then a few days back in the USA before heading to South America. Soon we will travel south to the Futelafu River and then onto Valle Chacabuco and the site of a new Patagonia National Park.
Charles Dickens’ first sentence in a Tale of Two Cities included the phrase, ‘…it was the best of times; it was the worst of times…’ This sums up what I’ve experienced on the road so far.
We’re now about half way through our walkabout. Since the last blog entry we have roamed continents, crossed the equator twice, boated between equatorial islands, celebrated a new year with friends and family and flown across vast oceans in climate controlled metal birds.
I’ve seen how different and same people are; how happiness isn’t tied to wealth; how resilient local cultures have ritualized community service; and how technologies – like bottled water and cell phones – make it easy for people from far away places to visit, live and work (and thereby significantly influence local people and places). Above all I’ve seen the endurance, adaptability and possibility of people everywhere.
Capitalism has clearly become the dominant economic model globally. Increasingly human life on earth all hangs together. And the ability to be somewhere and transmit information far and wide instantly – like on this blog – changes everything.
In the coming years, winning business people and the companies they run will be guided by three simple principles…
They will:
• Seek Transparency – understand who is helped and who is harmed by your business, suppliers and industry
• Help Many – serve your customer, shareholder and employees and as many others as possible
• Harm None (but your competitors) – do the right thing, remove risk and sleep well at night
I believe that this holds as true for the woman selling boxes made out of recycled bottles on the Skeleton Coast of Southern Africa as it does for the $500 billion Walmart.