Mandy Haggith’s book ‘Paper Trails’ combines passionate description and cold analysis of the destruction of old growth forest around the world, to feed the ‘developed’ economies’ voracious appetite for paper products, from tissues to packaging and junk mail.

Haggith supports Shrink Paper and Forest Movement Europe (FME) – itself made up of big campaigns like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the WWF, plus a long tail of smaller organisations. Shrink Paper’s aim is nothing less than to reduce Europe’s consumption of paper by 50%, and it has provoked a concerted PR backlash from the European papermaking industry, as well as some of the larger printing companies, who have created a campaign called Two Sides to defend their record on the environment and social impacts, and rebut what it calls the 6 Myths about paper.

Haggith’s argument is that the social impacts of old growth forest destruction, and the creation of monoculture plantations, are even more pernicious than their environmental impacts. All over the world – from Canada to northern Russia, Indonesia and South America – indigenous and local peole’s livelihoods and freedoms are under attack because of the paper industry’s depradations. It’s worth quoting from FME’s manifesto at more length:

” We .. want to see a Europe that consumes dramatically less paper than at present, with all that paper made by an industry that is less reliant on virgin tree fibres, maximises the use of recycled materials, respects local peoples’ land-rights, provides employment and has social impacts that are beneficial, conflict free and fair.”

Calverts supports the basic propositions of Paper Trails, even though we realise that this means working in an industry – design for print – that needs to shrink even faster than the 4-5% per annum of the last decade. In fact, we would like to see a ‘Fair Trade’ mark for forest products which guarantees prices and standards for producer co-operatives. Calverts has long advocated and promoted 100% or part-recycled paper as the way forward for any designer or publisher who is seriously interested in improving the environmental impacts of our trade.  Although we are Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified printers, we think that ’sustainably sourced’ virgin fibre paper comes second.

Printers – and print designers – are gatekeepers of our society’s use of graphic paper, and we take that responsibility seriously. We know that good design, informed by careful media planning and an understanding of the technicalities of the print production process, can reduce the quantity, impacts and financial cost of most projects by at least 20% .

We have three copies of Paper Trails to give away (oh and by the way, yes it’s exemplary book design and uses 100% recycled paper.) If you’d like one, email news@calverts.coop or ring +44 (0) 20 7739 1474 and ask for Sion Whellens, the author of this post. Good reading!

Paper Trails – The True Cost of Paper is published by Virgin Books, ISBN 978-0-7535-1329-3

Followers of radical management journalist Simon Caulkin, who was recently sacked by The Observer ‘for cost cutting reasons’, met at the RSA last week to plan the launch of CREAM  – The Campaign for Real Management (provisional motto: ‘if you want to keep control, you have to give it away’). You are invited to comment on the first draft of the 

CHARTER FOR REAL MANAGEMENT

“This Charter is an attempt to define the principles of effective management, of universal application across all types of organisation, based on evidence and experience as the key elements that create effective, profitable and socially responsible organisations.

 The Charter has been drafted by a coalition of interested parties whose shared perspective is that the monetary and social cost of poor management is on a huge scale, with ramifications across societies and the global economy, and that this scale is insufficiently recognised by leading politicians, many senior executives, investor groups and other representative bodies.

 It has been prompted in part by the near-collapse of the Western banking industry in 2007/08; by frequently high levels of inefficiency in many public sector institutions, and by high levels of failure in many corporate initiatives, especially mergers & acquisitions. It argues that such systemic failures are not inevitable, and are indicative of conceptual errors in management thinking, which can be significantly improved by a more pragmatic, coherent approach to governance.

 While promoting the principles of strong management, the Charter is also a critique of some of the damaging models, based on flawed assumptions and methodologies that have become popular despite a lack of a body of evidence.

 The Charter sets out the willingness of the signatories to seek to shape and define a coherent philosophy to underpin the principles set out, and be prepared to promote and debate this approach in a public and democratic fashion.

 The Principles

1. Governance and management issues are fundamental drivers of long-term organisational success. These so-called “soft” management issues including corporate culture, operating assumptions, and personal management styles are key to an organisation’s success. So long as they are wrongly treated as a “side issue” by commentators, academics, economists, and others, there will be too much focus on questions of ownership and organisational structures. We believe this is fundamentally the wrong approach, which explains many of the problems that exist in private and public organisations today.
2. Our views are not drawn out of air. They are based on hard evidence built up by the experience of organisations since the 1930s, which shows the link between treating employees as partners and organisational effectiveness, based on a number of criteria including financial ones.
3.  In spite of this evidence, we regret that most management practices are not been modelled on the evidence of what works.  Instead of running organisations in partnership with employees based on trust, too many have opted for short-termist, macho working cultures which put an emphasis on the “appearance” of good financial results every quarter. This approach brought Enron crashing down in 2001. Today, we have seen some investment banks go the same way.
4. We disagree with the prevailing view that organisations are “structures” which employ “human resources”. There is no evidence to support this view and we believe it has caused great damage to public and private organisations. We believe that it is the people who create and maintain organisations, not the other way around. The way they are managed and treated will always have the greatest impact.
5. Teamwork and co-operation are fundamental pre-requisites for all high-performing and resilient organisations over the long-term. Common business models, however, understate the importance of the inter-dependency within different constituencies inside an organisation. We would like to see more recognition of the importance of co-operation.
6. We dismiss the mechanistic modelling of management culture which treats people as if they are inanimate objects. The current wisdom assumes that people can be organised like objects in a physical science. We agree that certain common measures help an organisation manage its processes and people. But every organisation, and the people within it, is unique and one mechanistic system cannot be right for every individual organisation.
7. We believe that every individual is unique and that attempts by professionals (much favoured by politicians and auditors in the public sector) to prescribe uniform “outcomes” from professional interventions is conceptually flawed. It is especially inappropriate in highly sensitive areas such as social care, or in the operation of quasi-judicial powers such as planning decisions.
8. Professional capability and autonomy should be the driving forces in the public sector. The monstrous and expensive machinery of monitoring, auditing, and target-setting needs to be reduced. There is no evidence that this centralised and control-based approach works. The money that is spent on this can be better directed towards the professional development of the people working in the public services. They, in turn, should be accountable to people with sufficient professional knowledge and experience to be able to hold them to account in a transparent manner, and to make a distinction between an honest mistake and culpable performance.
9. We believe that quarterly reporting in the private sector should be abolished. It underpins bad management by setting short-term yardsticks and by giving the illusory impression that the old accountancy measures are capable of providing an accurate picture of current and future organisational performance. Quarterly reporting distorts the management focus away from the underlying causes of strong organisational performance such as corporate culture, management styles, and operating assumptions.”