#3 A call for “de-growth” from the chairman of Quatro Trust
I’d like to introduce you to Tur Borren, the Chairman of Quatro Trust (and also my dear friend Mitzi’s Dad). Tur and I met years ago and hit it off immediately. I’ve always admired his questioning approach and his belief that people can solve the most difficult problems if they’re given the space and encouragement to focus.
This is my drawing of Tur with two of his grandchildren who are some of his biggest inspirations.
This whole project was Tur’s idea and I feel incredibly grateful to be in his team along with his sister Marceline and Mitzi who are acting as sounding boards and providing lots of knowledge, connections and encouragement.
I’m going to let Tur introduce himself in his own words, by sharing an email he sent me earlier this week. In it he shares a key idea, which has inspired this project:
Kia ora Loo.
I am excited about your journey into communicating the interface between economics and climate change. Thank you for letting me join you.
As you know I have been reading and analysing information which is readily available on this subject from many, many sources. This information can lead to only one conclusion:
Economic growth is destroying the planet we live on.
I am a businessman who has spent most of his time trying to solve the problems being faced by individual businesses in Aotearoa. My focus was helping struggling companies to overcome challenges and achieve long-term success. In my retirement, I have now turned my attention to the problems facing the economy of Aotearoa and the global world we are a part of. It’s very interesting to note the parallels between these two challenges.
The key to turning a struggling company around was nearly always to make it smaller and fairer.
I did my apprenticeship as an analyst in the Development Finance Corporation of New Zealand in the mid 1970s. The DFC was set up to provide banking services to the New Zealand manufacturing sector which were not readily available from the commercial banks. The major opportunity for the DFC lay in accepting greater risk than the private banks would tolerate. The quality of analysis became the DFC’s major tool of trade.
We all know that major new projects are not easy to implement. As a consequence many of DFC’s clients experienced financial difficulties in the early years of their development ambitions. The reason this is relevant is because it meant that I served my apprenticeship in two fields: the analysis of projects being undertaken by private companies seeking to expand and the negotiation of solutions when these plans ran into early difficulties. These conditions were ideally suited to a government-owned bank interested in promoting the public good through the private sector.
We spent our energy in furthering the best interests of New Zealand based companies many of which were struggling to achieve. We invested in such companies by invitation only. Our actions were dominated by a single underlying principle. We were not to profit from our input until the pre-negotiated outcomes of all other stakeholders had been achieved. We called this “problem account management”. It turned out to be both highly challenging and good fun in most of the companies we became involved with.
The resolution of problems is much easier than many people realise. It generally relates to recognising one or more fundamental weaknesses and finding a way to resolve them.
Making struggling companies smaller happened to be the way to solve nearly all problem accounts I have ever been involved in.
These were our rules for becoming smaller:
Reduce overheads and increase the importance of real work
Investigate the ways we could become better and fairer as an organisation.
Nearly always this required the immediate elimination of all consultants and improved relationships with our employees. No single employee was likely to have all the answers, but between all of them they generally had the improvement opportunities covered. Mutual trust and respect between management and staff in a smaller company was the beginning of the road to recovery.
The remarkable thing is that non performing businesses naturally tend to get smaller anyway. The only difference we were proposing is that we managed the process. It liberated resources, reduced stress and provided a platform for improvement.
If the primary purpose of a business is to give customers a good deal, then these outcomes are each highly desirable. If they are combined with a genuine concern for our impact on our wider surroundings we recreate the possibility of future success. And success breeds pride.
It becomes a virtuous cycle. And that is so much fun, doubly so if recent prospects had been so miserable!
The excitement of getting smaller and better.
Now turning to our current challenge of facing climate change. If our analysis of what is troubling the world is correct, then the solution becomes embarrassingly obvious. If economic growth is destroying the world, then surely the solution must be to reverse it. The question then becomes,
How can we shrink our economies for the benefit of the planet we live on without doing irreparable damage?
If we accept the principle that we must make our economies smaller, then all the information which is already available from multiple sources SUDDENLY starts to make sense. The HOW becomes much more obvious.
We think that there are two major outcomes which must be achieved to make our economies smaller:
We must use less energy
We must reduce the amount of waste we produce.
As luck would have it these two outcomes are already uppermost in everybody’s minds. They just get easier to achieve if we make our economies smaller.
That is where our challenge lies. We would be delighted if we could join the many voices already out there in making this future happen for the benefit of future generations.
Ngā mihi nui,
Tur Borren
November 2022