Driven to Drink: Duncan Goose talks about One Water, PlayPumps and social entrepreneurship

Source: ExecMay

Date :07/05/2008 17:19:54

Social entrepreneurship changes lives, but a social enterprise has disciplines that are a good benchmark for any growing business, believes John O’Hanlon who talked to Duncan Goose, founder of One water.

Written by John O’Hanlon

I don’t think I have ever heard the business case for social entrepreneurship set out as cogently as at a meeting of Enterprise Tuesday - the networking group run by the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at Cambridge - when Duncan Goose told a crammed lecture hall how you increase the odds of success when you are cash strapped, resource hungry and your only assets are your vision and determination. Setting up Global Ethics and the ‘One’ brand of drinking water taught him that success lies in increasing the odds in every way you can.

Born in Scotland, Duncan had a peripatetic upbringing spending much of his formative years in East Anglia and later attending what is now Coventry University. Talent and a taste for action seem to run in the family: his sister Claire is renowned for her appearances alongside Trevor Eve and Sue Johnson in 38 episodes of the thriller Waking the Dead.

Aged 20, Duncan found himself working in general marketing and advertising, a field in which he rapidly excelled. By the time he was 28 he was a business development director and board director earning a six-figure salary and working for a subsidiary of Martin Sorrell’s WPP, which he saw through a buy-out and subsequent merger into the J Water Thompson advertising group.

Unlike most rising stars of the corporate world, though, Duncan acted on the impulses most of us get at one time or another and ignore. In 1998, at the end of an affair, he chucked up the job, bought a motorcycle and set off to circumnavigate the globe. “I’d never travelled much after leaving university or indeed when I was at school,” he says. “Then I read about Ted Simon’s trip round the world [1980’s Jupiter’s Travels], sold everything I had and set off.” To travel was more important than to arrive, but there were a few significant moments of awareness.

Nor any drop to drink

One of these was in Honduras, which he reached in 1998 just as Hurricane Mitch also decided to visit, killing more than 30,000 people and causing $4 billion worth of damage. Duncan mucked in with the rescue work; however he and some other travellers set up a fundraising scheme to rebuild the village they were in. Enough money was raised to restore 13 villages. There was no lack of water there, indeed the place was awash, but you couldn’t drink any of it, so it was here that he began to realise the importance of clean water.

Back in London, having biked around Australia, India and Pakistan, Duncan turned to consultancy to earn his bread. It would be wrong to say his awareness of poverty was new found…

Click here to read the full Interview with Duncan Goose