John Elkington

Sitting out on the deck, after a day of calls with people like the Volans team, the Tessa Tennant ‘Amulet‘ team, Natura and Professor Cameron Hepburn of Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment (whose founder, Sir Martin Smith, we had bumped into at the Culham fusion research centre recently), Elaine and I were struck by the cloudscape as the sun sank into the west.

Travelled north to Leeds by train yesterday for Yorkshire Sustainability Week, speaking today in a session alongside someone I have known through his many incarnations, Dr Wayne Visser. Not sure I have ever been to Leeds before, but was impressed.

Also impressed by what Kate Hutchinson and her team have managed to pull off – and heard something of their ambitious expansion plans. After our session we went to lunch with someone else I have long known, Mike Berners-Lee of Small World Consulting. Fun. That said, noise in rail carriages both ways was not fun – thank heavens for headphones …

The interview I did with Mariijn Jongsma while in Maastricht last month recently appeared today (in Dutch, of course) over a couple of pages in the Dutch pink pages, Het Finacieele Dagblad. Friendly, as far as I can tell : )

Wonderful to see media coverage beginning for Hania’s new Amazon Prime series, Fifteen-Love, starring Aidan Turner and Ella Lily Hyland. Can’t wait to see it.

Across to UCL this evening to be a panellist, alongside Jeremy Oppenheim of SYSTEMIQ, at an event launching The Big Con, a new book by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington. Stonkingly hot in the famous lecture theatre, with a large screen immediately behind us serving like a giant 15-bar radiator. But a lively discussion – and, overall, a devastating critique of the way the Big 3 strategy consultancies (Bain, BCG, McKinsey – Jeremy’s alma mater as it happens) and the Big 4 accounting firms (Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PWC) ‘infantilise’ their clients, whether intentionally or not.