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John Elkington

John Elkington

A world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development.

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Star-crossed

John Elkington · 26 October 2008 · Leave a Comment

The hour going back today was one of few good things about the week, aside from a highly successful joint SustainAbility-Volans evening event at The Hub on Wednesday and a decompression session with Charmian, Sam and Smita on Friday evening.  Otherwise, the week’s character is summed up by what just happened with my treasure trove of photographs taken during the week, both by myself and by Sam.  I was uploading them to my laptop, when a message appeared to say that disk space was precariously low.  So I came out, thinking the 120-odd images to date would have been saved, only to find – after deleting them – that they had disappeared.  Must be tired – partly after putting up with a trip in and out of London this afternoon for a meeting at 2 Bloomsbury Place.

Still, on reflection, there were other good moments.  They included a session with Singapore’s Economic Development Board on Monday, a brown-bag lunch with Monica Araya of Climate Change Capital and members of the Volans SustainAbility teams, a filming session for Accenture on Wednesday, an Environment Foundation Trustees meeting at 2BP on Thursday, and the broaching of a couple of Geoff Lye’s kindly gifted bottles of champagne as things wound down on Friday – after one of the wildest weeks for a while, both externally in the financial markets and internally.   

A couple of folk who came in during the week from the United Bank of Carbon asked me what Volans was about and one phrase I dredged up from previous days was that we aim to be grit in other people’s oysters.  And sometimes the grit lands in our oyster, as it did this week – spurring an extraordinary bout of creative thinking, which has produced a new book idea, a theme for a research programme and a bunch of other things.  Ho hum. 

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Introduction

I began this blog with an entry reporting on a visit to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, on 30 September 2003. The blog element of the website has gone through several iterations since, with much of the older material still available.

Like so many things in my life, blog entries blur the boundaries between the personal and the professional. As explained on this site’s Home Page, the website and the blog are part platform for ongoing projects, part autobiography, and part accountability mechanism.

In addition, my blogs have appeared on many sites such as: Chinadialogue, CSRWire, Fast Company, GreenBiz, Guardian Sustainable Business, and the Harvard Business Review.

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About

John Elkington is a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development. He is currently Founding Partner and Executive Chairman of Volans, a future-focused business working at the intersection of the sustainability, entrepreneurship and innovation movements.

Contact

john@johnelkington.com  |  +44 203 701 7550 | Twitter: @volansjohn

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