Devoted fans of Ghana will wear this soccer jersey, designed by Puma, when they cheer on their team this month during 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
Fans of Cameroon, meanwhile, will don their team’s green World Cup jersey.
Ivory Coast
Algeria
Puma also sells replicas of the World Cup jerseys for Algeria and the Ivory Coast.
What all these shirts have in common is that they are manufactured by Impahla Clothing, a supplier to Puma based in South Africa that was started a few years ago by a man named William Hughes.
Surely there will be drama when play begins in the World Cup, but it will have to be exciting to compare with the drama in the life of William Hughes. He has known first-hand the joy of victory and the agony of the defeat.
Born in Kenya, Hughes, who is now 47, moved at a young age with his family to Zimbabwe. [click to continue…]
Anyone who paid attention learned a lot from the global financial crisis of 2008. Here are three lessons that were burned into my brain:
1. Live within your means. Debt creates risk. When homeowners, investors or banks take on lots of debt, and something goes awry—and it will—they will pay, big time.
2. We’re interdependent. It’s not only those who take foolish risks who will pay; the rest of us will, too. The global financial system, for better or worse, is so interconnected that failure in one sector can become contagious.
3. Accounting matters. People at the banks didn’t understand what they owned, what it was worth or the risks. They got the numbers wrong.
All of this comes to mind this week because I’m attending (and speaking at) the Amsterdam Global Conference on Sustainability and Transparency of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). That’s a lot of words to describe an event that is, at heart, about…living within our means, understanding that we are interdependent and getting the accounting right.
Only this time the piling up of debt, failure to see connections and shaky accounting isn’t just about money. It’s about the earth. We’re living way beyond our ecological means.
What’s more, if you thought the meltdown we just went through was bad, well, just wait for the next one. Who’s going to bail out the earth if it can no longer support us in the ways to which we have become accustomed? Mars? Venus? [click to continue…]
