Thomas Power on LinkedIn: Earth Overshoot Day, 2024 (2024)

It's a year ago today that I lost a friend to cancer. Note: this is not a pity-me story. Anyway, I didn't lose her, she's around most days, wryly observing from a shoulder, or a cloud. Yes, it's been hard and random and sad but I am way down the list of people who matter. Way down. She had children, a spouse, siblings, parents, friends from childhood... This is a thought from seeing her husband navigate a different shape of life over the course of the past year. It struck me today (I'm slow on the uptake) that we must all be interacting with people day in day out who are going through stuff that could pulp us. Grief, illness, addiction, fear, pain...I guess the list is more or less endless. They walk among us. I know some people characterise this as 'a bloody minefield' or 'you can't say anything to anyone' but I'm going to call bullsh*t on that. This stuff isn't about 'them' and what they're experiencing, it's about 'me' and how I interact with other people. For clarity, I do not believe it's my responsibility to stare into everyone's soul and divine their innermost workings, even if I could. Nor am I on the pathway to becoming a tolerance & forgiveness guru, I don't have the facial furniture, or patience for that. However, I do think I can be better at reminding myself that pain is invisible; and I can be better at taking pause to consider what might be happening inside when someone frustrates, baffles or hurts me. When I actually manage to do it, that pause usually changes my response for the better.So that's my challenge to myself in honour of my cloud inhabiting loved ones: more pause.

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It is great to see the Travel by B Corp movement start to really gain traction. Exciting times ahead for a brilliant group of companies.

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If your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail.Here's Suella Braverman giving a speech in the US on Monday this week in which she says the UK Conservative Party must 'win back' votes from the Reform Party. The right wing of the Tories chasing votes cast somewhere beyond its right wing. Here's the thing though, Reform won four seats in the election. Meanwhile the centrist Liberal Democrats took over 60 seats directly from the Conservatives but pass under her radar. I'm honestly not interested in what Braverman is saying per se, I am fascinated by what seems to be a classic case of a hammer looking for a nail. In business, how often do we fall into the same trap? When do we chase after the wrong customers? How easy is it for us to fall into habits of confirmation bias? What systems to we have in place to make sure that we rise above it all and, without prejudice, observe the numbers and act on them? I know we all know this is what we are meant to do but, as humans, we are wired to create shortcuts and pathways which quickly lead us to embed habits and assumptions which can quickly become wildly incorrect. I think it was Jim Collins in his seminal book "Good to Great" who introduced me to the idea of finding a measure which produces data you simply cannot ignore. Those can be put in place in the cold light of day meaning they are more resistant to gradual erosion & slippage. Finding those golden measures which work for you is really tough - please feel free to share if you've got one that works for you. Perhaps a more useful piece of advice as we look at our businesses is this: "Fall in love with the problem, not the solution."

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This is lovely to see being picked up by B Lab UK as it really is a shocking number. The thing to remember is that greater economic nourishment of your host destination means you are going to have a better holiday. Probably. Think about it…imagine you have friends visiting you for the first time from somewhere far away and they want to get to know where you live. Are you going to take them to eat in a chain restaurant or in a place with local flavour? If you take them to a pub will it be the local ‘Spoons or somewhere with a bit more…personality? Take them shopping and will you go to the local craft shops, market or deli rather than a supermarket?I’m not saying there’s no room for ‘Spoons or chain restaurants, or supermarkets. Not at all. I am saying that these tend to be functional and effective places which we can navigate by habit and tend to populate our ‘domestic’ routines. They aren’t places of delight or discovery that we share with others.For me, my holidays are precisely the times when I want to discover the delightful. Even when it goes wrong it’s a story to tell. So eat, shop, drink & stay local wherever you are going, whenever you can and that $5/$100 others are leaving local soon becomes $20…$40…$60 circulating locally. Then that host community soon starts to thrive, which makes it an even cooler place to visit. Rinse & repeat…It’s really just fair exchange.

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There's change in the UK today. Although it's been very predictable, expected and unsurprising it is still a big deal. Not that things go from blue to red or green or yellow but the very fact of the smooth, rapid and peaceful transition of power is a big deal. I think Jeremy Hunt deserves praise for his 'victory' speech today in which he reminds us of the privilege of our democracy. He drew attention to Ukraine as a reminder that we must not take our freedoms for granted. Getting the tone right is not easy at times like these - as amply evidenced by a high profile handful of his colleagues (both departing and surviving) who still seem to be digging. This is a week in which those very freedoms have been somewhat quietly but irrevocably weakened across the Atlantic. Extraordinary as it is to say it but the contrast is stark and, I venture to say, incredibly unflattering for the USA. People whose brains I admire and opinions I trust over there are genuinely in fear for the integrity of their democratic institutions. The irony of the supreme court ruling for an effective divine right of presidential power in the week of July 4th Independence Day could barely be more raw. However, back to this side of the pond, there are many, many things which are not working well in this country. There are absolutely debates to be had about first past the post and proportional representation...but there is not a single voice saying the vote was maliciously rigged and for that I am genuinely grateful.

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Hopeful. We were all asked to sum up how we’re were feeling after this morning’s Travel by B Corp session which saw our 36 members being challenged to think very differently about our role in the world courtesy of the New Citizen Project created by Jon Alexander and Irenie Ekkeshis. My word was hopeful, others’ were energised, excited, intrigued…I could go on but it’s not a list of words you would normally associate with sustainable travel. Quite right too since really we were discussing big ambition and our envisioned future. We have to get to work, with action beyond words but that activity starts with ambition and collaboration. None of us is as smart as all of us…And what an all of us Travel by B Corp has become. Over a billion of combined revenues, over 7,000 staff and a lot of customers…a lot. We come together to work on challenges we can only overcome as a collective we. Exciting times ahead. Particular shout out to my co-chair Rochelle Turner and the Executive team of Nick Pulley , 🔭 William Bicknell and Hazel McGuire as being epic colleagues on the journey. With apologies to the many more like Rachel Parsons who I haven’t make checked here.

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Listening to Rajan Datar's enlightening three-part radio show 'The Tourist Trap' on BBC Radio 4 is at once enlightening and horrifying. Tales from one place in particular resonated with me.Hallstatt is a 16th century lakeside mountain village near Salzburg. It is so impossibly pretty that it was used by Disney to model the village in Frozen. With a population of just over 800, it receives something like a million visitors a year. Though tourism isn't without benefit to the local community, only a small minority of the community (maybe 20%) derive their income from visitors. Most tourism businesses are owned by external investors so the money leaves the village as quickly as it arrives. I can't help but picture the village as carrion, pecked at from all sides.The depressing truth seemed to be that people were there to get the photo and leave. That certainly seemed to be the gist of complaints from locals - those coming for a couple of hours, getting 'the shot' and moving on. There's a woman who's travelled from South Korea with her kids to get photos of them as princesses. That's a 13,000km roundtrip. But here's the thing: a memory isn't a photo.If we travel in search of a particular shot, we miss the very point of travel. If you haven't had a memorable experience in a place, an image triggers no emotion, no memory and becomes a mere facsimile. When we treat travel as a commodity, we create the conditions in which over-tourism thrives. Travel actually just becomes more 'stuff' we are accumulating, more clutter in our lives destined to be marked only by forgotten photos buried in a phone. Conversely, a travel experience isn't a defined product, extrinsic to us, it is the product of our interaction with a place, and its people and of course that's where memories come from. This more esoteric angle encourages us to actively consider how we want to engage with our host destination; its consideration comes before the practicalities of where we'll go and how long we might be there. So maybe we need to move away from thinking about all the places we want to go/see and instead think about how/what we want to experience and let that be our guiding light.

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Light from dark. I've been listening to the news this morning. The low point was listening to a minister defend the concept that this parliament decrees, in direct contradiction of our own supreme court, that Rwanda is safe for asylum seekers not just now but forever. I hadn't quite grasped the depths of how dreadful this bill is - not even morally speaking, it's just abysmal law. There is no mechanism within the law for that status to change, ever. You don't have to be a Law Lord to see why that's flawed. You really don't need to be much past reception year of primary school to work that bit out... But then came Caroline Lucas MP Brighton Pavilion onto the airwaves and saved my day. She wasn't talking about asylum or politics, she was actually talking about what she's going to do after she steps down at the next election. She's becoming an end-of-life Doula, a midwife for the afterlife. [Insert eye roll as Brighton's Green MP finds approximately the only way she could possibly become even more worthy.]And yet...as ever, I found her to talk compellingly. She spoke of how our culture is generally poor at dealing with death, how we can be better at helping more people approach their final days, not timorous in some alien clinical environment but calm and at home, where most of us would like to be when the time comes. She also spoke of the role of politicians as leaders of our society, their role in our changing culture to lean into this change. It reminded me that, while the front bench clings ever more desperately to power with a short-term agenda aimed at an ever diminishing constituency, there are the many across parliament who fulfill their duty to lead with integrity, in the long-term interests of all in our society. For them I'm thankful. A special shout out goes to the House of Lords which is currently rocking it by defending our democracy. Oh, sweet irony.

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Sharing an end of week treat...Yesterday I was talking to clients after their trip to Patagonia. I loved it because their overwhelming feedback was about not just place but how much they enjoyed meeting our people on the ground. It's actually that direct connection we have with our supply chain that makes us unusual in our industry. But don't worry, I'm not going to quote happy clients at you because that's not what this place is for. I am going to quote a happy supplier though. That's what this is. A message from one of our guides in Patagonia sent today. Having spent yesterday with clients of another operation (who hadn't had a great time) he was in reflective mood: "Iwould just like to get a message to you and all concerned in the office, those of you that put the trips together and make these incredible experiences happen for your clients. WELL DONE, good for you all. You are all doing an incredible job, taking in to consideration the distances, language, culture, people, transport and weather. The overall perspective of every client I have worked with is of Pura's professionalism and smoothness of their experiences they have. I hope you can share this with all the staff involved. Pat yourselves on the back. You’re doing an amazing job and creating wonderful memories for your clients. I am proud to be a part of it. Thank you."[For the cynics out there, this person is not given to these kinds of messages and gains nothing from sending it, other than our sincere appreciation.] I love to get great client feedback, I really do. But to get this kind of feedback from our supply chain is special. I often toy with the concept of a 'fair exchange rate' between us/them, here/there, us/nature...When equilibrium is achieved between hosts, visitors & us (as facilitators), magic happens. That makes me proud.

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