Tom Burke is the Chairman of E3G, Third Generation Environmentalism, and a Visiting Professor at both Imperial and University Colleges, London. He is a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Tom was Environmental Policy Advisor to Rio Tinto plc (part time) 1996 -2016 and served as Senior Advisor to the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative on Climate Change from 2006-12. He was an environmental advisor (part time) to BP plc from 1997-2001. He was a member of the Council of English Nature, the statutory advisor to the British Government on biodiversity from 1999-2005. He was Special Adviser to three Secretaries of State for the Environment from 1991-97 after serving as Director of the Green Alliance from 1982-1991.
Firstly, is there are two bits of government. By in large, business is quite unsophisticated in its thinking about government. It tends to really want to stay out of the government. It tends not to think about government unless it’s procuring something, whether access to a market or a resource. Or unless it’s trying to fight off an impulse, a tax or a regulation. It tends not to separate the political bit of government from the administrative bit. They actually work rather differently. By in large, I’m over-simplifying a lot, but I need to do that, there’s a tendency amongst businesses to think, if they go and talk to leading politicians, it’s like talking to other CEOs. It’s not like talking to other CEOs. Leading politicians are not going to upset, but they aren’t necessarily going to do what they say they’re going to do anyway. You need to be much more sophisticated with an understanding of how government works. That tends to be available inside most governments. Most companies tend to rely on external advisors to really guide them through their relationships with government and politics and to do it inside that very limited agenda of procurement and impulse.
Rather than in those broader agendas of managing these wider exogenous risks. The thing I learned in government is it’s actually really complicated. Business is very simple. You make an offer to a customer and you run a project to deliver that offer to that customer. You try to eliminate from that sequence everything that’s not an offer to everybody who’s not a customer. You try to take out of the project to deliver the offer to the customer everything you don’t need. Successful business gets very good at doing that, at focusing on exactly that sort of process and refining it to a very high degree. Government can’t say it doesn’t want to deliver healthcare to people who live in the Shetlands just because it’s very difficult and very expensive. Government has to deal with the full scale of the commitments it’s got to meet. It’s a much more difficult exercise and it has to look much broader when it’s addressing a problem than businesses typically look. Quite a lot of the collision between business and government is because business can’t understand why government doesn’t see it the same way as the business sees the issue. That’s because governments are taking on board a whole lot of other factors that the business does.
There’s a need to really understand the broader context of policy I think inside business. Understand the difference between the politics and the policy. Realize that the way government deals with its complexity has a lot to offer business because the way it deals with it is by getting very good at process. At developing processes that keep complicated and often disparate, as it were, sectors alive. Business is less good at that could learn more from the administrative bit of government about how you keep people who are often heading toward different goals, but nevertheless need to do it together, how do you keep them aligned? I just learned a lot about that difference between what are good project skills, which business is very good at? What are good process skills, which government is better at? If you can combine those, you do better.
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Tom Burke is the Chairman of E3G, Third Generation Environmentalism, and a Visiting Professor at both Imperial and University Colleges, London. He is a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Tom was Environmental Policy Advisor to Rio Tinto plc (part time) 1996 -2016 and served as Senior Advisor to the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative on Climate Change from 2006-12. He was an environmental advisor (part time) to BP plc from 1997-2001. He was a member of the Council of English Nature, the statutory advisor to the British Government on biodiversity from 1999-2005. He was Special Adviser to three Secretaries of State for the Environment from 1991-97 after serving as Director of the Green Alliance from 1982-1991.