Do Caribbean Fish Rot From The Head, Too?

I read his book "The Fish Rots From The Head" over a decade ago. Then, this week, I bumped Bob Garratt virtually at an event in the Caribbean. Our theme: the changing climate for corporate governance.

I have only once visited the Caribbean—Grand Bahama to be precise, back in 2006—and it was one of the weirdest conferences I have ever spoken at. The organisers were office furniture-makers from the Grand Rapids area of America, all of them apparently of German extraction. The venue was a fenced-off resort where the guests were all white and the staff were all black.

Throughout our stay, the trade winds blew constantly. It seemed as though we were in some particularly exotic Agatha Christie story. To amp up the oddness, the other main speaker was John Perry Barlow, one of the lyricists for The Grateful Dead, founder of the Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) and author of A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.

He was at once one of the craziest people I have met, and yet one of the sanest. A modern-day pirate—and we got on famously. But his desire to continue the Wild West era of the Internet and of cyberspace wasn't exactly to my taste. Absent governance, as in the form of sheriffs and Federal marshals, untrammelled human nature is rarely the royal road to sustainability.

Some of that flashed through my mind as I readied myself for a less physical, indeed entirely virtual foray into the Caribbean this week. It is often hard to measure our impact, but the influence was clear here in the theme of the fifth annual conference of the Caribbean Corporate Governance Institute. It was “Regenerative Capitalism,” and sub-titled “Promoting Exceptional Governance for Small States.”

That combination was also the title of my keynote—and I found myself following in some pretty impressive footsteps, most recently those of Nelson Mandela’s granddaughter, Nandi. Warmly welcomed by CCGI CEO Kamla Rampersad de Silva, I also discovered that the Institute’s global ambassador—who I was meeting for the first time—is professor Bob Garratt.

That sinking feeling

When I first began to seriously engage with corporate governance, well over a decade ago, his 2010 book The Fish Rots From The Head was required reading. I don’t recall it having a strong sustainability thread, but Bob now told us that he had just delivered his first (virtual) lecture for an Indonesian university—and noted that the country is being forced to move its capital city, Jakarta.

Indeed, it is now described as the world’s fastest sinking megacity—thanks to a combination of rising sea levels and over-pumping of ground water.

One of the greatest problems we have in developing and implementing sustainability strategies around the world is the quality of governance—at every level, from international institutions like the UN right down to the smallest family owned business.

Effective corporate governance is crucial, as Garratt has long argued. Whoever first came up with the idea, a long-ago Chinese proverb warned that, “The fish rots from the head.” And so it is with businesses and other organisations—with some of the worst excesses only becoming clear when the economic tide retreats and exposes long-standing failures that had been masked by buoyant markets.

Having acknowledged Garratt’s work, I kicked off my keynote by insisting that regenerative capitalism is an oxymoron, by design. Coined, I think John Fullerton of the Capital Institute, it is meant to provoke. And it did.

Same old, same old?

Indeed, one panellist insisted that it was simply new jargon, signifying nothing significantly different from nature conservation, environmental protection and all the rest.

I begged to differ, noting that terms like conservation and protection are essentially about keeping things—as far as possible—the way they are. Regeneration, by contrast, implies a more radical approach and focuses on recovery, restoration and renewal.

Another age-old theme that surfaced was that since the First World has caused the defining problems of our time, whether through the trafficking of human energy slaves, or by burning fossil fuels to create today’s energy slaves, it should pick up the tab for climate catastrophes. By contrast, the thirteen Caribbean nations have tiny carbon footprints.

Interestingly, though, there was strong pushback from others in the region. They argued that local leaders—and local businesses—have a crucial role to play in tackling the challenges. They also argued that where environmental taxes are raised, the revenues are rarely plowed back into environmental protection and regeneration.

No desire to become climate refugees

Still, as one speaker noted, people across the region “have no desire to become climate refugees.” And yet the symptoms of the accelerating climate emergency are all around them, including bleaching coral reefs, disappearing beaches and stronger hurricanes. Indeed, it was hard to disagree with the speaker who argued that rhetoric has outrun real action across the region, as it has elsewhere.

Spotlighting the patchy progress to date, one striking presentation came from Ronaele Dathorne Bayrd, a partner and ESG leader at PwC East Caribbean, based in Barbados. In fact, I had used some of her statistics (drawn from a 2023 survey) in my presentation.

The study found that over 50% of companies now see ESG as an issue for strategy and risk management. Of those, however, only 10% said that ESG featured regularly on their board agendas. And, it turned out that, of all the challenges they have to face, boards felt they knew least about ESG.

Some pressure is likely for larger businesses in the region, however, as schemes like the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) start to bite. “There is a potential for larger companies to be caught in the CSRD net,” she warned.

Growing anxiety among young people

One theme that resonated strongly with me was the discussion of the growing anxiety—indeed often anger—among younger people as their elders fail to tackle the increasingly obvious challenges at the necessary pace and scale.

The risk of younger people feeling alienated from their political systems can only grow—once again underscoring the urgent need for improvements in governance at every level, not just in the region but globally.

As Kamla Rampersad de Silva said to me later, “We do indeed have a lot of work to do in the region, to get boards to take on the challenge of sustainability as part of their core focus. I believe we are making inroads in bringing key people together but we still have to get to that space where we are actually making a difference. We cannot depend on governments to do it.”

Towards the end of the session, another panellist—Ronnie Bissessar—noted that, “Regeneration is a term I very much enjoy.” He then went on to say that, “very few of us have the benefit of looking into the future with any degree of certainty and optimism.”

He then mentioned the work of economist Nikolai Kondratiev, who also had a huge influence on my own thinking. Whatever you may think of the long-wave economic theories of people like Kondtratiev and Joseph Schumpeter, both long-standing heroes of mine, and both covered in my new book, Tickling Sharks: How We Sold Business on Sustainability, Bissessar concluded that the Caribbean nations “must be part of the next cycle, or risk being left behind.”

In my concluding comments I noted that in periods of intense systemic change like these some of the best solutions come from the edges of the old order, of the failing system. Could the same be true now? Maybe so. As Bob Garratt drew the threads, he argued that the Caribbean nations could increasingly use their small size as an advantage, to ensure that they are “nimble, agile and flexible” as the world changes around us all.

And if you want to know more about the evolution of my thinking, today (June 18th 2024) sees the release of my 21st book, a memoir called Tickling Sharks: How We Sold Business on Sustainability (Fast Company Press). Our video trailer can be found here. Available in good book stores and on Amazon, in hardback, paperback, Kindle and audio formats—the last being the first audio version of one of my books that I have voiced myself. Let me know what you think!