John Elkington

Here’s an interview by Anjali Ramachandran of Other Valleys, just posted – which nicely captures some of the stuff in my brain at the moment.

Had a wonderful conversation with Esther Dyson at the Zouk Capital dinner on Monday. Yesterday she sent me a link to this image of Richard and I at the B Team launch several years back, from the BBC coverage.

Feels a lifetime ago. And my main memory of chairing the event was that, whereas I had imagined the event might follow the piratical rules of a Blackbeard (or at least Yellowbeard), it sometimes felt more like the Royal Navy in the days of the lash and yardarm.

Probably dictated by the need to beam out the launch to tight timescales to hundreds of parallel events around the world …

Covestro were certainly taking their “Colourful” mission seriously at this year’s K-Fair in Düsseldorf. (Their other two core values are “Curious” and “Courageous”.) Exciting to be part of it. Very impressed by the student projects that formed a core part of the Covestro exhibits.

Got to meet Bertrand Piccard of the Solar Impulse for the first time, over lunch, and then did a lively session in the afternoon on “Sustainability’ with Richard Northcote of Covestro, Martin Stuchtey of SystemIQ and Jean-Marc de Royere of Air Liquide.

Had an email today from someone making a documentary on the life and music of Shawn Phillips. Brought back memories of an extraordinary night back in 1970.

Six of us were driving through Italy en route to Greece and Skiathos, when we arrived in Positano. Hippy days and we must have looked like ruffians. Up came a quintessential hipster, blond hair down to his waist. Shawn Phillips. We hit it off immediately and he invited us to his home later that night.

Three of us went, Ian (Lovell), Rex (Gowar) and I. Up endless steps to what seemed like the very top of Positano. There, in a huge largely unfurnished room equipped with large speakers, and with gothic windows looking down across to the town to the Mediterranean, Shawn played us the tapes of what would become his albums Contribution and Second Contribution. And maybe also of Collaboration.

His recording band including people like Stevie Winwood, Crhis Wood and Jim Capaldi of Traffic. (One link I discovered while researching this blog was to The Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Paul Buckmaster played a key role in producing some of Shawn’s music – and also that Stones song. Fiona, our next door neighbour in Barnes until she died, was part of the choir that backed the Stones on You Can’t Always, I assume recorded round the corner at Olympic Studios.)

In any event, a key memory of that long-ago Positano evening is of Shawn’s black cat, or at least a black cat, suddenly jumping up in the middle of a track with a very pronounced bass line and, quite literally, starting to dance. Unforgettable.

 

Early start in 123 Buckingham Palace Road, with PA Consulting and the UN Global Compact. A Management Today article celebrated the “Willy Wonka World” of PA – and the session was certainly full of delights, particularly the beta version of a map of tomorrow’s technology.

Afterwards, I took a cab back to the office, in an attempt to get back quicker for a session on a client. The cab driver had an Armed Forces Fund sticker on the window between the compartments. So I asked whether he had been in the armed forces? The RAF, it turned out, for 22 years as a fitter, leaving in 2006.

We exchanged a series of stories as we headed across to Bloomsbury. Among the ones he told me was of picking up an elderly couple at the Tower of London, when the poppy installation (see below) was on display. They were clinging on to each other like teenagers in love, so he assumed they were married. But it turned out that they were brother and sister – and had been evacuated to different parts of the country during the Blitz.

They explained that they had not seen each other for 75 years, despite searching for one another, and had just stumbled across each other at the Tower, simply by asking each other why they were there, where they were from, and so on. They said they never wanted to be parted again.

He then told a story about someone he used to know who looted a truck of Nazi gold in WWII, bought five cottages on the proceeds, but keep the deeds in a Rose’s chocolate tin and mentioned them to nobody, for fear of detection. It’s amazing where everyday conversations can take you …