January 14th, 2008

Team,

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.

I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.

Steve

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Well, I guess we thought. That’s why we’re Grapethinkers… lol. Exciting for us, given that we’re a technology company focused on enhancing the health of our world. We always made a big bet that grapes and wine would become this icon for health, environment, sustainability, and even technology, who knows. As this magical little fruit becomes symbolic of so much more, so will Grape Thinking.

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His team includes:

Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the EPA: former commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection

Nancy Sutley, Chairman of White House Council on Environmental Quality: former energy advisor to California governor, Gray Davis

Carol M. Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change: former EPA administrator under Bill Clinton

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior: Colorado Senator

Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture: former Iowa Governor

The carbon tax is favored obviously because it lends predictability to energy prices, whereas the cap-and-trade system tends to be more volatile and discourages investment in carbon-free technologies (clean coal, energy efficiency, renewable energy).

The way cap-and trade works is the government sets a cap or limit on the amount of pollution that can be emitted. Companies are then issued a set number of emission allowances/permits, with which they trade amongst each other based on the amount of pollution they need to emit for operations. This system obviously rewards the seller for limiting emissions and punishes the buyer for needing to emit more. If the monitoring and enforcement of this system is sound and the ‘cap’ limit and initial allocation of allowances is determined using an appropriate process such as grandfathering provision based on historical emissions, then the cap-and-trade system can actually be more effective than a carbon tax by creating a marketplace of competition to solve the issue. However, the stipulations and costs to enforce this system may be too great, not to mention the potential corruption the system tends to encourage.

The carbon tax might be the simplest, most straightforward way to address emissions. The tax revenues would not only offset other taxes, be used to fund environmental projects, and give incentives for clean tech investment, but could also be allocated to start paying off the insane amount of debt that the US has racked up this year trying to prevent our economic collapse!

Whatever course of action we take, I’ve got faith Obama, Chu, and gang will figure it out.

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A holistic philosophy on products, services, businesses, organizations, and humanity as a whole that advocates growth and change through systems thinking. I recently found an amazing write up at the LOHAS website about how this philosophy will help the business culture of the future.

Here’s my favorite excerpt:

“For the last 250 years, we have been living in what Peter Senge calls the ‘industrial age bubble’, based on a ‘take, make, waste’ worldview. Behind this way of life has been a set of attitudes and beliefs about economics, wealth, and business. We tend to think of these beliefs as “common sense”, or even as objective natural law. But in fact, they are received knowledge, the inheritance of centuries of cultural, political, and philosophical tradition. Our way of business is based on learned behavior, not natural law.

With this worldview, we’ve created unprecedented wealth, knowledge and communication. And, we’ve created environmental toxicity, cheap throw away products, denatured industrially-produced food, and a culture of low self-esteem and spiritual poverty.”

So how do we change? How do we grow?

Bio-inspiration is very interesting to us. Recognizing that many of the solutions to our worlds’ most urgent problems are right in front of our face, in nature. Anything from how plants use water and sunlight to produce energy to natural supplements being the preventative medicine to perceiving businesses as living systems much like forests, and even to feeling a oneness with nature that fills that spiritual void many of us feel inside. The answers are right there, we just have to see it and feel it, and take action. If we can incorporate this way of feeling and thinking into our own lives as well as our products, services, and business operations, we can work toward helping the planet become what it was meant to be and pretty much already was until humans arrived… a living, breathing, renewable system in itself.

There is no doubt a groundswell forming behind this message and when it reaches critical mass, it will sweep the world and help bring about the unity we need to start healing. So who’s gonna do it? Who is going to help bring about this change? Well, for starters, we’ve just elected a great man to the presidency of the United States. He is a symbol of unity and as he surrounds himself with more and more incredible advisers, his message will be honed, and he will be able to deliver it to the American people and the world in a way that touches their hearts and inspires them to find their own answers inside.

On our end, we see ourselves as bio-inspired marketers and technologists. The grapethinkers incorporate this understanding and awareness into our own personal lives, and now feel ready to build an organization that incorporates it as well. I talked about similar philosophies in a previous post on biodynamic agriculture and anthroposophy. The idea of a living system where people are simply parts of the whole. This is why I love wineries so much because I think that they’re physical locations that people can touch and be a part of, that gives tangible meaning to the words behind the message. It’s the essence of Zen… you can’ t just contemplate these things as intellectual ideas, you have to experience the world and feel it for yourself. I had to go all the way to Alaska this year and then ride a motorcyle to LA to start understanding what it is and start feeling it… everybody obviously can’t do that, so wouldn’t it be cool if you could go to a biodynamic estate and get the holisitic experience?

I’ve come to believe that another big part of this understanding sweeping the world is an acceptance of evolution and what evolution really is. That the planet has grown over time and that people and other life are simply extensions of the one life force that is our planet, our galaxy, and ultimately our universe. Just as our life force as human beings is comprised of all the individual living cells that make up our bodies. Seeing the recurring pattern in nature. However, many devout religious sects have trouble believing in evolution, for many reasons… it takes away the crave for afterlife, it’s below them to think we evolved from apes, or most significantly it implies a lack of belief in God. But what if evolution is simply the force of God? Human beings didn’t just appear one day, did they? It’s a humility that I think the world needs to find, a beautiful insignificance if you will. When we see a mountain or a tree or another person, we feel one with that ‘other’ object. We overcome the dualism and delusional developed sense of self that has evolved, and find unity within ourselves and with the world around us. Yet, it’s only when we find and feel this individually that we can form organizations that feel it as well.

What lies ahead is unknown, and it may take great hardship and struggle over the coming decades to reach this point of enlightenment in our world. We’re currently in the middle of one of the greatest economic crises ever, and are fighting multiple wars in the middle east. The world is reaching a boiling point, and I don’t know if it’s going to spill over, or if the movement can gain enough momentum fast enough to calm things down and begin the healing. It’s important to keep spreading the message and working together, but yet sometimes creative destruction is necessary.

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Here’s a company that’s doing something very special. I watched Ron’s presentation at VLAB (MIT/Stanford Venture Lab) Green Tech for the Consumer Market this past January and got very excited. Then after hearing Trae Vassallo’s glowing presentation at the Silicon Valley West Coast Green conference, I knew they were out to change the world.

Recycle Bank is influencing the creation of a cutting edge process called single stream recycling. They supply their customers with a Recycle Bank garbage bin in which they can throw all of their paper, plastic, metal, and glass. The bin has an RFID microchip inside, which is read by special levers retrofitted onto city garbage trucks that weigh the amount of garbage. This value is sent to each individual consumer’s online Recycle Bank account, where it is converted into Recycle Bank Reward Points at a ratio of 2.5 reward points for each pound of garbage. These Reward Points can then be redeemed at local businesses that consumers normally buy from, such as Whole Foods, Bed Bath & Beyond, and many more. What an incredible incentive to get people recycling!

With such a dynamic program that will certainly increase the recycling rate, RB gains the credibility to negotiate exclusive long term contracts with city municipalities to deliver garbage from Recycle Bank customers to material recovery facilities (MRF) and in essence divert trash from going into a landfill. This creates great economic value for the city by allowing them to sell the trash to manufacturers such as Coca Cola or Pepsi instead of paying landfills to take the garbage. Wow, make money instead of pay money? and Recycle Bank takes a cut off the money saved from landfill diversion rather than the money earned from sales to manufacturers. A very smart marketing decision that influences cities to broadcast how much money they made in a year, which in turn gets other cities excited about the Recycle Bank program.

This is big for 3 reasons:

1) high profitability with exclusive municipality contracts and a valuable online advertising engine

2) environmental health through the elimination of waste

3) the ability to influence consumption behavior

This 3rd reason is what really fascinates me.  With other green businesses, sure it’s great to benefit the environment, but obviously the price has to be right for adoption. And yet, even when the price is right, people are lazy and don’t want to change their behavior. They might call their utility company and say I want green power, if and only if its cheaper (Austin Energy). With Recycle Bank, the single stream recycling program that they’re pioneering is enough to influence people to actually start recycling. And even more so, RB gains the ability to influence consumer purchases with their Reward Points system. For example, they’re planning to roll out a program that gives people greater rewards for shopping at ‘green’ businesses.  Organic food stores, LEED certified establishments, and even specific products.

This is a business that’s right in front of the American consumer’s face… they can touch it, they can feel it, they can put more money in their pocket, while being guided to a healthier life and changing their local environment. Recycle Bank becomes an incredible solution to the entire consumption side of the sustainability equation. We still need the west coast to figure out solar and fuel cells so we can get off coal and oil, but this is a practical solution to get us moving in the right direction. I’m lovin it!

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Beacons of Hope

In 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected president of my country, I remember an age of jubilation that was infused into children, adults and people from overseas alike. Backpackers would come to our country with Mandela t-shirts, and when we traveled abroad and told people we were South African we were somehow associated with a little bit of that Mandela magic and people were that little bit more welcoming. With Mandela in power, the dominant feeling was that no matter what happened – things were going to be okay.

In the past 8 years that formative optimism of the Mandela years had left me, and I found myself in the midst of a new generation of cynicism kicked off by the Clinton impeachment, followed by the stealing of the election in Gore v. Bush, and the subsequent anomalies of extraordinary rendition, water-boarding and the abomination that is Sarah Palin. When Gore released his movie, Inconvenient Truth, only then did the world realise what could have been – if only America had fought a little harder in 2000.

When I woke up on Wednesday the 6^th of November, after 18 months of watching this election, I realised the enormity of what has happened. As I showered a feeling of relief washed over me and I knew that the page has been turned.

Last night, drinking wine at a friend’s birthday party, by the end of the bottle and toward the end of the night, there was no more lamenting about the future of America and the ultimate waning power of the Western World. All the negativity and anxiety had been replaced by a palpable optimism. Progress will no longer be hindered by right-wing radicals who oppose any form of scientific advance or hope to pull society backwards – instead anything is possible. America has done the impossible and lived up to its name of the land of opportunity for the first time in many years.

From now until Obama is elected Americans have a reason to celebrate and raise their glasses in a toast to the future with their heads held high. I cannot describe the feeling of knowing that the Bush years are over. We no longer need to drink wine to forget what has happened… but can rather drink and toast to the future. Cheerz!

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Wow, what an excellent conference! A game changer. I have to thank my friends over at Village Green Energy for hooking me up with a free pass. I’ve been so passionate about this movement as long as I can remember… ever since 6th grade when I messed around with electromagenetic fields and plants. Early education for me was all about ecology and environment, and that followed with rigorous economics in college, which I didn’t quite understand about myself until now. Having not gone into banking with my degree and now seeing the state of the economy I was like shit… but David Suzuki put it so clearly… it’s (eco)nomics. I can’t believe I never recognized that. I automatically associated economics with the greedy, short-sighted mentality of Wall Street that focuses solely on the bottom line and exploiting the market for cash and egoic status. Yet you realize the bottom line is not the statement of cash flows or the balance sheet… it’s the fuckin planet. Ecology + Economics = Sustainability. This conference was absolutely buzzing! People were feeling alive and connecting and touching each other like I’ve never seen in my life. We all knew the green revolution is ready and about to change the world in a big way.

The keynotes were superb with Al Gore, Jerrry Brown, and David Suzuki really leaving a moving impact on me. Nobody was afraid to go deep. Sure there was plenty of talk about clean tech innovations or green building or policy changes.. but more so people were incredibly open about spiritual and conciousness based changes that are going to take place around the world to solve this crisis. Sarah Susanka even brought the crowd to tears with her moving presentation. It’s so much bigger than green or solar or oil… it’s about enlightening the human race that we are one and we share the same spirit with each other and with the world as a whole. I found it to be quite the religious experience to be at this conference. A few others being recently when I went into the wild of Alaska for a few weeks and when I saw the Dalai Lama speak in Bethlehem, Pa.

Aside from the heavy stuff, there were tons of innovative companies doing everything from cutting edge solar installs, to green acrhitecture consulting, to new age battery storage, smart grid stuff, efficiency software, New Resource Bank (which is exploding with business during this banking crisis… lol gotta love it!) and sooo much more. You had builders, utility reps, entrepreneurs, mad scientists, engineers, and everyone was so open and loving and connecting. I was blown away… it took me 3 full days to digest it all.

There were also brilliant seminars and panels, the best one for me being the State of Investing in Clean Tech, where partners from KPCB, Foundation, Sigma, and DFJ (all the big Menlo Park firms) talked about what companies they’re investing in and what technology is working… and yet something was different. These are VCs and of course money is there first concern, but with this clean green movement we are finally going to enter into a phase of social… or better yet eco-capitalism… where we benefit the environment and the social welfare of all while making a shitload of money and creating a shitload of jobs. This is an unprecendented opportunity in economic human history. Create a concentrically cyclical supply chain and pass the prosperity around the world. I was inspired by the VCs stories of how they’re going green in their own lives and their deep personal commitment.

A few themes from the conference to leave you with:

1) Nature to the grid baby – energy, health, architecture

2) Ecology + Economics = Sustainability (Eco-Capitalism)

3) Sky power will fuel the earth

4) The only thing special about humans is our foresight… our ability to see and shape the future. So lets use it.

5) A new connected conciousness is emerging that will limit the individual ego that has evolved and scorched our earth with fragmented, disjointed, greedy agendas. The only chance at eternal life is if we live together as one.

6) Be the change you want to see in the world!

In my humble opinion, these are unprecedented and magical times in the history of our race and our planet. There’s no better place to be then right here, and right now.

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My grandfather was a banker and probably spent his entire life working for the same profit a single banker a third his age would have made in bonuses over the last five years. The key difference between my grandfather and the modern banker however, is that my grandfather valued his society, his customers and the future – whilst the banker of today has merely intellectualised greed with a series of financial instruments used to justify the unjustifiable and create as much personal gain in as short a span of time as possible. So much has the plague of greed and lack of value spread that Rhodes Scholars and top intellectuals have been wooed into studying finance, whilst in today’s times of real challenges , their skills would be better employed in engineering, medical research and civil society.

The old institutions were even built with materials of substantial value – marble, granite slab and steel – whilst today’s modern building, like the ‘Gherkin’ in London or many other modern institutions seem to have chosen a material that reflects the high-risk, short-term gain and quick-buck mentality of modern business: glass. Today’s institutions are primarily made up of transparent and easily shattered material – how apt a metaphor.

Listening to a debate on torture the other day I was struck by one of the key tenets of the argument against torture being that it dulls our intelligence community and our ability as a society to ask proper questions and gain reliable information honourably. The strength of the argument for me was that it did not appeal to human suffering but rather appealed to the sustainability of our society – saying that torture makes our institutions lazy and therefore weakens our society. Surely that also holds for using high salaries and bonuses as an incentive to work, and the same argument can be made against the high-risk/ high-return mentality that has been in fashion for a time – not on the basis of an argument against greed, but rather on the basis of long-term sustainability and the value to humankind. Paying signing bonuses and giving large profits doesn’t make people work harder, it just makes them want more for less, and in a slew of defaulting banks one has to wonder where all that money for all those bonuses was coming from in the first place. What will impact the future of society more: the downfall of Lehman Brothers or major headways into stem-cell research? Stem-cell research is the obvious answer. Given that, think of all the wasted talent the job-losses that Lehman represents – intelligent minds distracted by greed who, instead of getting lost in the complexity of derivatives and materialistic pursuit could rather have been adding actual value to society trying to make their mark on history.

In these times of financial uncertainty, three things have actually gone up in value: wine, art and mineral resources. These are all things with perhaps the exception of oil that our grand-children will one day see (assuming the world is still around of course.) Society demonstrates its true wisdom in times of adversity as was the case during FDR. Only when great societies are ascendant do they lose judgement and overextend themselves (think Rome and post-Clinton America). Adversity forces us back to the basics, while opulence encourages indulgence in the superfluous.

If we as a society are to succeed, and our civilization is to continue prosperously and sustainably, then we must focus our efforts on those things that create value for more than ourselves – but for generations to come. Wine is such an area – it enriches families, creates a profitable supply chain, puts focus back into the environment and provides pleasure to the consumer. Whilst old Lehman employees may have hit bottom, they can always get up and dust themselves off and try again –taking comfort with a few friends and a couple glasses of wine. At this time when their employer no longer exists – it will prove that the only thing valuable in their lives is their friendships and their family. The failure of their institution discredits their chosen career and hopefully when the hurt of Monday’s events subsides and the lens of greed is lifted, they can refocus on what matters and ply their brains to creating sustainable value in an industry our grandchildren and children the world over will one day benefit from. Let us not fear economic uncertainty, but merely reflect on the causes of it and then go back to the thread of that which runs through history and continues to last today: art, wine and all that which thousands of men throughout the ages have laboured away at –not for profit or wage but merely for the love of civilization and society. Let us say cheers to the death of Lehman and hope their employees will emerge with a desire to help society and not just themselves…

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Red Wine is a perfect libation for festivals – primarily because it doesn’t need to be kept cold; it doesn’t lose its fizz and if you’re drinking wine locally produced its dirt cheap and super-good. Within minutes of popping the cork however I’d managed to spill the Rioja on my new pants and was questioning the merits of wine in a situation where a shower is hard to find… when suddenly, with a splash of from my water bottle – the wine was gone. Brilliant! Wine proof pants – what more could a young millennial wine-lover at a music festival wish for? I reckon marketing the pants specifically as wine-proof and selling it at Bonnaroo could be a good gig.

Festivals have become huge in the UK – and I guess the States is now picking up. Winemakers have a huge opportunity to sponsor music festivals – because the combination of music, nature, art and alcohol are what festivals are all about. Festivals have re-invented themselves since the days of Woodstock and are a perfect platform for not only entertaining people, but many organisations use them to spread awareness and raise money.

The Green Man Festival coming up next week is one of the most prominent indie festivals – where, much like the Big Chill – and both less commercially than Glastonbury, it promotes organic food, green living, sustainability etc. There’s a huge oppotunity in this concept and I’d really like to see some of the Oregon wineries putting on some music festivals and promoting their wines together with bands from Washington State and around. Many vineyards have acres of land and there’s plenty scope to host festivals on the vineyard grounds themselves. Once millennials cotton onto the benefits of wine and the contribution of viticulturalists to the environment and to local communities – it’ll certainly be the final push needed.

Now that I’ve found a pair of wine-proof pants; and have finally sprung for a decent festival tent whilst having fallen in love with festivals on the first night of Benicassim in a monent of sitting with my wife and two close friends, Will and Anin, drinking Rioja as a pre-game at the campsite with Sigur Ros about to play… I think it’ll be hard to go back to taking normal holidays.

Hopefully next year the Grapethinking team can bring some of the fabulous Tastevine collection to Bonnaroo and some of the other festivals in the US, and one day to the UK – we’ll provide a tent, picnic blankets and a selection of some of the best and most affordable wines from around the world… we’ll leave the music to the musicians though. Don’t forget to bring wine-proof pants…

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The crux of the problem lies in what Robert Reich in his book Supercapitalism labels ‘socialised capitalism’: which is ultimately a form of capitalism that allows the rich to get rich with no obligation to share their wealth; and then when the rich go bust (ala Bear Stearns) then socialism kicks in and everyone shares in the losses. The essence of the open-source industry is akin to the blogosphere in that it is a platform upon which ideas are shared with no restriction. Ultimately, wine shares much in common with this ideology in that its wealth is often shared out along the supply chain more evenly than in say, the motor-industry where practically everyone from the production line workers to the environment gets a raw deal.

The Ford-style capitalism brought to the wine industry by Ernest and Julio Gallo will always be a factor – but ultimately the winosphere is clearing the way, and the likes of Mondavi are having to step aside for the multiple Capozzi’s, Tastevine’s and other niche wines and wine companies which are emerging as a result of the netroots. And of course, it certainly helps our case that Obama style wine democrats will soon be in power as opposed to the No-bama-chanting beer swilling McCain luddites.

I saw an advertisement which caught my eye the other day for Banrock Station – which is now pushing the phrase ‘saving the world one glass at a time’ and has a wine glass with a stem that has been photo-shopped to be the stem of a rose. Last year at the London International Wine and Spirits fair I got talking to the folks from Banrock Station and they all broke down to me how their vineyards support local water supplies, preserve the local wildlife, enrich the local community, cultivate a diverse eco-system on their sites and practice sustainable farming tactics. Essentially, farmers have the land and the earth at their best interests and are oftentimes at the forefront of organisations fighting to protect nature and the earth. It is comforting to know that if it is to be inevitable that if the world will run out of fossil fuels and everything comes to a grinding halt as big brands do destroy the world and we are sent into a pre-modern state of existence: at least seeds, water, soil and sunshine cost us nothing… and even though our computers may have powered down and our iPods may no longer work – we’ll still be able to sit down for a bottle of wine at the end of the day.”

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