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John Elkington

John Elkington

A world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development.

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Green Swans Fan Club

John Elkington · 25 May 2020 · Leave a Comment

I have never much liked the idea of fan clubs, but it’s a little different when you attract elements of your own. The launch of Green Swans on 7 April triggered an extraordinary groundswell of good will and enthusiasm, with abundant commentary on social media and a growing number of major media channels covering the book.

Here is a screenshot of the Financial Times review, pairing the book with Rebecca Henderson’s impending book, Reimagining Capitalism. The first time that I have been described as an “elder statesman” of the sustainability field …

Other mainstream media coverage has included pieces by Forbes and Reuters, with last week also seeing publication of a short piece by Board Intelligence. among the coverage on GreenBiz was this write-up by Shane Downing of an interview I did with GreenBiz Editor-in-Chief Joel Makower. Articles by me on related themes have appeared in places like the BMW Foundation’s TwentyThirty platform, Ethical Corporation, GreenBiz and Sustainable Brands.

Working with Louise Kjellerup Roper’s son Noah, I also created a map of the “Green Swan World Tour” to date, which has been posted on the Green Swans page of the Volans website. It plots activities from California to Japan, from Norway to South Africa, and from Australia to the United Arab Emirates.

In fact, recent weeks have been a blizzard of podcasts and webcasts and webinars and the like. Here are a few of the events:

First line of speakers list for Kapault Cloud, hosted from Oslo

We have also launched a Green Swans Bookclub via Goodreads, where I did the first one and Denise Hearn the second, that one focusing on her book The Myth of Capitalism.

The reactions on Green Swans have been pretty much uniformly positive to date – but why the sense of the fan club dynamic? Well, it’s because of the photos people have been posting of the book in the context of their own lives, as in the following:

By no means finally, we soft-launched our new Green Swan Observatory in my keynote for the Catapult Cloud event hosted from Oslo on 19 May. The idea is to scout for, analyse and support emergent Green Swan trajectories around the world. The next stepping stone will be my webinar in Tokyo (see below, though again done from our front study in Barnes) on 5 June, World Environment Day 2020.

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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.

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

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