JohnElkington.com - profiles

John was asked to write a piece for Jain Spirit magazine, which gave a very personal perspective on his work:

The Sustainability Consultant

My work takes me around the world, repeatedly - and, these days, into the boardrooms of major companies. It will probably come as little surprise that much of the discussion in such places revolves around science, technology and economics, not religion. Indeed, let me begin with a public health warning: I am neither a Jain nor, in any recognisable way, religious. But much of the work I am involved in has a strong values base, some of which seems to align well with such tenets of Jainism as truthfulness, non-stealing and non-attachment (at least to the most rampant forms of consumerism).

When I began work, there was no formal career path for an environmental consultant, let alone a sustainability consultant. These days, things are different, but even now we often admit that we are "making it up as we go along." In the process, we are often thrown back onto our deepest values. Unlike most consultancies, we refuse absolutely to work for certain sectors - having turned down several invitations to work, for example, with the tobacco and nuclear industries. And even when we do work with companies like Shell, Nike or Ford, we carefully test the opportunities against our published principles.

As for religious or spiritual angles, I have long seen church religions as a major barrier to some of the thinking and changes needed to ensure a more sustainable world. A childhood spent in trouble spots like Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Israel convinced me that religion often fuelled - rather than defused - conflict. True, Jainism always struck me as somewhat different, but the closest I have knowingly been to Jains en masse was a few years back when a group boarded the same flight in Bangkok.

Then, when Jain Spirit asked me to write an article on the evolving art of sustainability consulting, I dug deeper into Jainism. In the process, I was astounded to find how closely some (but not all) of its core values aligned with my own - and with those of the wider sustainable development movement.

A shared respect for the natural world is perhaps the most obvious area of overlap. Let me tell part of my own story, by way of illustration. The foundations of the work I have done over 30 years were originally environmental, although I also studied economics, sociology and planning at university in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And, as it turns out, many of the values that surfaced during the 'Environmental Revolution' have striking similarities with the world of Jainism.

So, for example, from outside Jainism one of the most striking aspects of the faith is the doctrine of 'noninjury' to all living things. In retrospect, nature woke me up to this agenda, rather than religion. As a 7-year-old, notional Church of England Protestant, I had no inkling of Jainism - or anything like it - when one of the most pivotal experiences of my life happened in the mid-1950s. At the time, we were living on a farm in Northern Ireland. One evening, I was walking home through a moonless night from a friend's cottage. My path took me near several old flax ponds, which were still flooded. Suddenly, I felt something strange around my ankles. Reaching down, I felt what I later worked out were elvers - baby eels, coming up from the ponds and slithering over the hill to the nearby river, heading for the distant Sargasso Sea.

Intrigued by such natural mysteries, I made the mistake of asking an adult obvious questions for a child who still believed in some form of afterlife: Do animals go to Heaven? A mistake, as it turned out, because I was one of just three notional Protestants in a school run by Catholic nuns, a school that - in turn - was surrounded by a somewhat hostile Protestant community. Mother Superior, who ran the convent school, exploded. "You are either a pagan or a pantheist," she fumed, using words I remembered but did not then understand, "and I don't know which is worse!"

Well, as later events would prove, she was closer to the mark with pantheism. When environmentalism hit in the late 1960s, I felt this was a movement made for me. Indeed, in 1961, I had persuaded all the boys at my school in England to give their pocket money for two weeks to the fledgling World Wildlife Fund (WWF), launched that same year. But, as time went on, I was increasingly clear that I was not interested in a full-time career with a non-governmental organisation (NGO). So after a couple of years doing anything to avoid the necessity to get a grown-up job, I returned to university to study urban and regional planning.

It was my great good fortune to walk straight from that postgraduate course at University College London into a small consultancy, based in London's Covent Garden (ironically, named after a long-gone convent). With TEST, I worked on everything from pedestrianisation schemes in London to environmental impact studies in the Nile Delta. And it was this last line of work that set me on a new course.

In 1975, the consultancy project I was doing in Egypt hit a brick wall - and I faced a moral dilemma. Consultants are not meant to challenge their clients publicly, but the trajectory of the massive development projects I had been advising on was going horribly wrong: the Delta's largest lake, Manzala, was being chopped up by development experts in a way that was totally unsustainable. After trying hard (but unsuccessfully) to get the Egyptians to wake up, I returned to London and phoned the magazine New Scientist - and was commissioned to write a three-page article. As luck would have it, this helped persuade the authorities to reframe the various studies to address the entire Manzala ecosystem.

I learned both the importance of transparency and of listening to your conscience. While continuing to work with TEST, I embarked on a stream of articles for New Scientist and, later, for The Guardian - through to the point, several years later, when I was asked to help found a new publishing business, Environmental Data Services (ENDS). This business looked at what business was doing to address environmental priorities - and gave me an opportunity to visit hundreds of companies worldwide.

ENDS has gone from strength to strength, but in 1983 I decided I wanted to get back to consulting. After several years of working with major corporate and government clients, several of us formed a new company, SustainAbility. Then, in 1988, we wrote a book, The Green Consumer Guide, which sold around a million copies and helped launch a new social movement. Companies came under intense market pressure in relation to such issues as CFC aerosol propellants, lead in petrol, mercury in batteries, chlorine in paper production, and so on.

I learned another lesson. If you are prepared to pay the consequences, you can take a principled stand on key issues and, rather than, losing clients, attract a different set who have an appetite for real change. But you have to be careful not to let success go to your head. In 1996, we formed an independent Council, to challenge our thinking and priorities. Given that some members come from the NGO world, some of our clients were deeply uneasy, but they too now recognise the value of such diversity.

Periodically, we have done things current or potential future clients are uncomfortable with. Examples have included our promotion of corporate environmental auditing from 1989, stakeholder engagement from 1990, corporate environmental reporting from 1991, the 'triple bottom line' of sustainable development (focusing on economic, social and environmental value added - or destroyed) from 1995, and integrity in corporate lobbying from 2000. But we often find new market opportunities arise as a result.

As the agenda becomes more complex, however, so our work has moved towards board level. One key reason: if the challenges are simply technical or professional, they can be handled by professionals and technicians. But as such issues as environment, human rights and corporate governance become increasingly inter-linked, so the political implications mean that the necessary choices are best made strategically, which often means at board level.

In the midst of all of this, there is much about Jainism I aspire to, but cannot hope to reach. For example, cycling through London on my way to or from our office at Hyde Park Corner, it is hard to remain calm as motorists and truck drivers threaten life and limb. Twice I have been left unconscious, once with three cracked ribs. Continuous - if sometimes simply careless - threats have left me with a slightly less utopian view of human nature!

But at heart I remain an optimist. Within limits, we can make a difference. Business and trade are potentially hugely important mechanisms for making such changes, if operated in the right ways. SustainAbility is 15 years old this year, which means that we are looking back a decade and a half to test what we have achieved - and then looking forward over a similar time-span to get a sense of where we should be headed. Our road map for the future is laid out in a new book, The Chrysalis Economy.

The tension between values and value creation is eternal, but if we recognise the challenge and work to address it in the right way real progress is possible. Done right, consultancy helps catalyse right thinking and right action. Our thinking in this area can be found at www.sustainability.com. If you have comments on what we do, or what we don't, we would love to hear from you.