Today, We Must All Be Ambassadors

The first in a two-part series reflecting on a trip to Romania and the Danube Delta

For many years, my personal website has been captioned Ambassador from the Future—and way back in the late 1990s I had positioned SustainAbility’s then HQ, overlooking Hyde Park, as an Embassy from the Future. All of which meant that there would only be one answer when I received the invitation from Romania’s Sustainability Embassy to speak in Bucharest.

In that moment, I also knew two things. First, I loved the spirit—and the humor—informing their branding. And so I imagined that I would like the people, too. And, second, if my wife Elaine and I were going to Bucharest we would wrap in a visit to the Danube Delta—which I had wanted to visit way back in 1968, the year she and I had first met—and, critically too, the year we had first seen an early showing in London of Stanley Kubrick’s breakthrough film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

For me, the most memorable sequence involved a Pan American Space Clipper synchronizing itself in orbit to dock with a giant, gently spinning, twin-wheel space station—all to the strains of Johann Strauss II’s An der schönen blauen Donau, or On the beautiful blue Danube. From that moment on, you could say that the Danube was sacred territory to me—and this piece of music among my very favorite.

In this first Rewilding Markets post inspired by our first visit to Romania I plan to explore not just how companies and brands fail—as Pan Am sadly did—but also how in market economies they can succeed and, in the process, how we are all becoming ambassadors for the brands we endorse and for the agendas we embrace. True, this diplomacy is more or less unconscious, as when we sport a Nike or Puma T-shirt—simply part of who we are, what we consume, what we do. But increasingly we will need to play this role both consciously and with intent.

The rise of the Global Ambassador

For some people the ambassadorial role has become central to who they are seen to be—and, increasingly, how they earn their living. Hence the spread of the role of global ambassador for brands. Do I need to mention people like David Beckham or Zendaya, or brands from Diageo and Louis Vuitton through to Prada?

Nor have I escaped the seductive trend. With great pleasure and interest, I have served on WWF UK’s Council of Ambassadors for some 20 years—and more recently became an Ambassador for The Churchill Fellowship. Furthermore, as I hit my fiftieth year in what we now call the sustainability sector, I have also assumed a new role with Volans, the change agency I co-founded back in 2008, once again as a Global Ambassador.

But what really made the Sustainability Embassy in Romania’s invitation stand out for me was that it was pitched as the SUSTENLANDIA CEO Forum, designed to engage senior business leaders from around the country. Even more striking, images of young people were used in a city-wide advertising campaign to hammer home the message that business now needs to take into account the very different views of younger generations of Romanians.

The SUSTENLANDIA CEO Forum

The event was chaired by British climate change coach Charly Cox—and featured professor Wayne Visserand I as the main external speakers. Wayne and I both spoke about the “3Rs” I identified in my 2020 book, Green Swans: Responsibility, Resilience and Regeneration.

The last two of these were among the reasons why I wanted to visit the Danube watershed, where major floods have recently been testing local resilience and, in the wake of the excesses of the beyond-grim Ceausescu regime, efforts are now being made to reverse some of the ecological catastrophes Communism inflicted on Romania. That will be my theme in the second of these Romania-inspired posts.

Some of the SUSTENLANDIA team

But back to the Intercontinental Athénée Palace Hotel, where the SUSTENLANDIA event was held. Here I was very much taken both by the kick-off introduction by Dragoș Tuță, the social entrepreneur who founded both The CSR Agency and the Sustainability Embassy, and with the opening panel session featuring four senior local business leaders.

The panel included: Adela Jansen, who serves as a member of various boards and advisory boards, is an associate professor at Bucharest Business School, and acts as an angel investor; Ștefan Buciuc, CEO of BCR social finance and also BCR’s head of social banking; Valer Hancaș, corporate affairs and communication director with Kaufland Romania and Moldova; and Nicolas Richard, a board member with the Foreign Investors Council (FIC) and CEO of ENGIE Romania.

The candor and creativity of the speakers would have done credit to leading edge events in any country. My sense was that everyone I spoke to later was enthused by the change agenda, even if they were also keenly aware of the steep slope Romania must still climb if it is to become a true leader in the sustainability field. And, I suspect, much of that international reputation will flow from how it is seen to manage and steward global ecological treasures like the Danube Delta.

A real Ambassador

Not surprisingly, linked themes came up when the external speakers were hosted by the British Ambassador to Romania, Giles Portman, and Chris Frean, his head of economic diplomacy. And at the reception in the Embassy gardens afterwards, I got to talk to people who had led Romania’s negotiations with the EU and OECD. Sustainability did not seem a foreign language to them.

Charly, Giles, Elaine, me, Chris, with Oana out of frame, bottom right

We came away from the experience uplifted and energized—and fascinated to see how all of this now plays through as Romania works to finds its way and place in a rapidly shifting world. To take just one example, in the Danube Delta where we would head next, we would hear striking evidence of the ongoing war in Ukraine—which controls 21% of the Delta.

We were all forcefully impressed by the role the British Embassy is playing in supporting present and future initiatives evolving within the Sustainability Embassy, represented at our audience with the British Embassy team by executive director Oana Grosanu.

But I emerged even more persuaded that in tomorrow’s world growing numbers of us must learn to play diplomatic roles in promoting the change and transformation agendas—a conclusion that was underscored when we later met some of the people battling to protect and restore the Danube Delta.

Still that, as they say, is a subject for another post—a few days from now, when I am hopefully back from the Sustain Exchange Summit in Belfast and then, the following day, from the Blue Earth Summit, to be held in the old Fireworks Factory in Woolwich, in southeast London.

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