• Looking Back: 2000-2003
• Looking ahead: 2004-2010
  
• Some closing thoughts
  

What follows is intended to represent a kind of personal bridge into the medium term future. It is purposely personal and idiosyncratic, and as such meant to inform and open a dialogue with friends, colleagues and eventual sponsors, clients and working partners around the world concerning possible future assignments and cooperation in my areas of competence. Think of this as the future oriented complement to my current Vitae (available at http://ecoplan.org/vitae/britton-vitae.htm).

To make a long story short, I am now looking for two broad sets of things to populate my work experience over the coming six years or more:

• The Project Bouquet: First, I have set out to identify a limited "portfolio" (I prefer the term bouquet) of projects, partners, institutions and associates with whom I can collaborate on certain types of high priority assignments. . .
• The Next Great Project: And to the extent possible, I am definitely looking to be associated in each case what I call 'The Next Great Project' - i.e., challenges and assignments that have as their goal to identify transforming solutions and solutions paths, whether for a specific company, institution, city, or other target area or group.

The first three years of the new century turned out to be extremely dense, challenging and quite unanticipated. Among the high points kicking off the decade were a hugely satisfying 18 months dedicated to my role as Chairman of the International Jury of and program advisor to the Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities, followed by another year and a half (bringing us up to the end of 2003) as interim CEO charged with devising and implementing a turn-around program for a beleaguered Swiss technology company aimed at putting it firmly on a path of survival, innovation, quality jobs and profits -- GS-Automation in Geneva. Both of these were immense learning experiences: the former convincing me once and for all that I truly wish to continue to be creatively involved with high profile international efforts of this sort to support social-technical innovation and social justice in the name of sustainability. And the latter once again making it clear that with imagination, hard work and a bit of luck, we can indeed harness new technology to sane and create jobs while making profits.

Also over these first three years, I had the luck of being singled out in June 2000 for the Stockholm Challenge Environment Prize (not singled actually since the prize was shared with the consistently inventive Enrique Peñalosa, mayor of Bogota for a particularly effective environmental action we cooperated on in his city). And then in July 2002 for the World Technology Network for their 2002 Award for Innovation in Technology and Environment. The latter put their award in words certainly better than I deserve, but here they are anyway: "One of those outstanding innovators doing work likely to have the greatest future significance and impact over the long-term... and who will remain "key players" in the technological drama unfolding in coming years." Hmm. We can hope that it turns out that way.

Let me see if I can balance this self-promoting awfulness, with a few critical words on my own performance over this period.

• The Stockholm Partnerships project made it clear to me once again that without strong colleagues and support from the top, I am more likely to be a drag than a catalyst for success. I was fortunate in Stockholm to have both. The real key to our accomplishment here was the manner in which we made aggressive use of our interactive web site, actively supported with a lot of unhesitating day to day personal follow-up in order to activate our quite substantial international network. We thus were able to put not only our small Stockholm project team to work on the challenge, but also bring in the energies and contacts of our distinguished international jury (linked by low cost videoconferencing technology) and the several hundred projects that eventually became part of our network. This network continues to exist and is now a tool for future programs in other cities, and eventually a return to Stockholm for the longer term future.
  
  
• The Geneva industrial CEO experience was even more of an eye-opener in personal terms: not least making it acutely clear to me all those things that a strong CEO has to be able to do which are way out of my reach by training and temperament. Daily financial reporting, discipline and pruning of personnel, and knowledge of the nitty-gritty of the laonly superficial knowledge of the specifics of the engineering technologies that are our life blood there - all are areas in which I clearly do not have what it takes to get the job done on a day by day basis. But it was my job as transitional CEO to spot the deficiencies early and reach out to fill them (though not as quickly as I would have liked). Happily we now have a strong management team in place there, and my role has shifted to one of overseeing the performance of the new team as a member of the Board and helping as as needed as a super consultant and advisor in matters related to corporate image, strategic marketing, electronic communications and new business development. Stay tuned to see how this one works out.

2000-2003 Highlights:

• 2002-2003: Led technology manufacturing company restructuring :
  Served as interim CEO leading major strategic restructuring of an embattled Swiss engineering technology group, GS-Automation for global competitiveness.
• April 2003: Closure of Tagtronic S.A. - Took hard decision to close down this sister firm for reasons of insufficient capitalization, in-house technical expertise and staying power in this fast-growing but tough technology sector (RFID).
• July 2002: 2002 World Technology Network Prize . Cited for outstanding achievement in the intersect of technology and the environment.
• 2001-2002: Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities - Chair of international jury and co-organization
• 2000-2001: @Bilbao 2001 - Second Ertico European Assembly on ITS in Cities Conceptor and co-manager in this path-breaking communications event, with Leber Planificación e Ingeniería.
• 2001-2002: United Nations Car Free Days Programme
  Led this program based on work with our World Car Free Day Consortium, including with demo events in Bilbao, Surabaya and Freemantle.
• Summer 2001: Job creation program in Trinidad Tobago - Shoert term mission to counsel government on new approaches and pilot program outline
• June 2000: 2000Stockholm Challenge Prize for Environment Co-awarded with Mayor of Bogota for collaborative project demonstrating 'outstanding socio-technical innovation' and leading to new transport paradigm for 3rd world cities

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Looking ahead: 2004-2010

• Working with whoever has the mandate, funding and courage to create, support and implement pattern-breaking processes and incentives for stimulating social-technical innovation and social justice in a sustainability perspective.
• Institution building (i.e., anyone want to give me an independent whack at creating a constitutional process for the EU or a major overall and alternative game plan for the UN and any of its agencies?)
• Independent program review: Independent review, (discrete) commentary and brainstorming on socio-technical programs or initiatives, or those requiring a review and possible rethink -- whether in the public sphere or in industry and international business.
• Program restructuring and creation of new structures and routines of existing underperforming units to achieve more ambitious and more activist revised goals
• Job creation and rethinking work -- especially if I can find backing for putting some of our ideas and experience on this to work in specific areas or target groups (example: very aggressive, properly funded programs to create full employment conditions for males in the 15-35 year age bracket in violent areas of high unemployment. See Rethinking Work for first background on this.)
• Regional development and refugee programs that can improve living and economic conditions in 'labor exporting' countries, in an effort to retain both brainpower and workforce in regions of origin.
• Cities of the Future programs that use technology, public activism, citizen participation, private initiative, and the media to create sustainable cities
• New Mobility: Support of a wide panoply of policies and programs which get at the real root of the transport/sustainable cities interface. (See World Transport Policy and Practice, and @World Carshare Consortium for examples of this kind of thinking.)
• Technology transfer by new means or through supporting lesser known successful innovations and practices
• In private sector, working with major industrial, resource and financial groups to create and administer true, non-greenwash programs of sustainable development and social activism (all while making an honest buck in part through these actions).
• And, working with others to advance the following concepts by working with others in areas such as:
  International networking and coordination for sustainability initiatives.
  Pattern breaks for socio-technical change.
  Innovative award and prize programs to encourage and support hands-on, independent social-technical innovation and social justice in a sustainability perspective (including from the volunteer and private sector)
  Validating sharply different alternative futures using new technology (through new techniques of simulation, interactive exploratory tools, striking visual displays, etc.)
  New ways to deliver needed social services (also but not exclusively via new technology)
  Harnessing new technology to facilitate distance work in new and far broader ways.
  Sustainable mobility - supported by new technology but also through better planning and management of demand
  New approaches to integrated, sustainable city planning and development
  Anything to do with programs aimed at concentrating development, educational and health resources on girls and young women.
  Conflict negotiation, arbitration, adjudication
  Creation of opportunities and conditions of life in countries and regions now suffering labor/brain outflows

Distance work: Over the last decade I have carried out most of my work with a combination of personal and 'virtual' presence with my work partners: a formula which has worked well and which I intend to continue to use in the future. The mechanics of these arrangements are mediated by a continuously up-dated array of computer and communications tools which together provide true 'virtual presence' of the sort needed to get the job done. (More information on this as you require.)

Future Work Partners and Sponsors:

• The outstanding qualification that I should be looking for in partners and sponsors for my work over this period is (a) groups with strong felt need in areas in which my background and work style can find its place; together with (b) a clear mandate and the resources needed to tackle the challenge at hand, and (c) leadership which is up to the task. My experience shows that if a very strong, almost desperate need for remedial policy and practice is not felt, then my style probably is a bit too (and here I search for the word) "strong" or perhaps better "discomforting" for the comfort zone probably being sought. (My creative dissonance work style does not go very well if the overarching target is, public pronouncements and rhetoric aside, maintaining someone's comfort zone.)

• It is my best guess that as part of my work bouquet I will end up working in an appropriately flexible manner with one or two outstanding public sector agencies that has a strong mandate for change in areas where I can pitch in. And with one or two industrial or financial groups that are looking hard for new patterns of activity or initiatives that relate to my competences, and with a strong commitment to implement the results.

• I also intend to find a way to have regular shoulder-to-shoulder working and learning relationships with leading projects, thinkers and doers of the sort that one finds at best in a great university, foundation, institution or similar center of excellence.

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Some closing thoughts

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