John Elkington

There’s no question that contrails are implicated in climate change, in various ways, but sometimes the skyscapes they create are wondrous things. Watched the male contrails unfurl across female clouds this weekend – and felt at peace with the world.

 

Now that I’m once again thinking of things taking flight, thanks to the derivation of the first part of our still-evolving Volans Ventures, I am tending to see flight-linkages everywhere I go. Today, as I cycled alongside the Serpentine, I came across the preparations for the second Red Bull Flugtag. Chatted to a couple of the teams, including those sticking a load of white feathers onto their swanmobile.

         

Subsequent note: The Cullinan Bird, designed and built by a team of engineers and architects from London, wowed the crowd with the longest flight of the day, soaring for over 39m before landing in the Serpentine. No idea where the swan placed. But the Red Bull Flugtag competition isn’t all about distance and the Cullinan Bird team apparently failed to impress the judges with their pre-flight performance, resulting in a 5th place finish. Intriguingly, given my interest in the potential of Homo volans in all sorts of areas of innovation and enterprise, the competition was judged both on distance flown and on the level of creativity.

I still find it strange to see terms I have coined out there in the wider world, living their own lives. Green consumer and triple bottom line still pop fairly regularly, whereas today it was the People, Planet, Profit formulation I came up with in 1995 as a more populist version of the TBL. It pops up again as the refrain of the Financial Times Sustainable Banking Awards. The awards are a joint initiative between the FT and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the latter of which we have worked with on several occasions, most recently on SustainAbility’s Market Movers study.

A couple of the banks we have worked with over the years also pop up as winner and runner-up for the Sustainable Bank of the Year award. These are Banco Real in Brazil and Rabobank in The Netherlands. Sustainable Asset Management (SAM) in Switzerland, where I continue to serve on the Advisory Board of SAM’s Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, also appears as runner-up for the Sustainable Investor of the Year Award, after E+Co. Given that the awardees and runners-up were selected from a record 182 entries from 129 institutions in 54 countries, they are doing pretty well.

Hania, who came back from Greece just before I arrived back from Brazil, took this picture for me while there – in the spirit of my CounterCurrent symbolism. Wish I had taken it!

 

Spoke at a lunch today hosted by Camargo Correa, a complex Brazilian group straddling areas like cement, construction, environmental engineering, textiles and footwear. Had met one of the shareholders, Renata Camargo Nascimento, a while back at an Alcoa Foundation event. With the aid of people like Carla Duprat and Ciro Fleury, she is encouraging the group down (or is it up?) the sustainability path. Among others, also met her daughter Luiza.

One of our challenges going forward, and particularly as SustainAbility does more work in countries like Brazil and India, will be to explore how best to help family-owned businesses like this. At least potentially, some of them could prove to have longer term time horizons than publicly listed companies.

As I left, Renata gave me a pack of information on Camago Correa – all contained in a large transparent bag, into which were inset a set of 12 flip-flops in different colours, symbolising one of their other businesses. And because the bag didn’t fit into my case, I carried it on top of my bags as I went through the airport later in the day. Remarkable how many people followed m pointing at the bag – and one very attractive woman even came up to me as I was about to go through security to ask me where I had got the bag? She wanted one, if at all possible. Felt as if I was trawling a succulently baited hook through the waters.

Ciro Fleury, Luiza Nascimento Marques da Cruz, me, Renata Camargo Nascimento, Carla Duprat Bait

One thing I signally failed to do in the speech, however, was to refer to a key project SustainAbility did recently for IFC. This report made the point that companies from emerging economies are increasingly making their presence felt in the global business community. Not only are they acquiring more and more companies in the developed world, but they are also pursuing strategies that are highly competitive with those of established businesses in western markets.

Market Movers: Lessons from a Frontier of Innovation explores whether such emerging economy firms are also managing to embed sustainability in their business strategies in ways that stand comparison with companies anywhere else in the world. It tells the stories of four firms ranging across the globe from Beijing to Sao Paulo – in many cases operating in some of the most challenging environments in which to foster commercial success – and how they have found business value in strategies based on sustainability.

The companies are: Amanco, a Latin American water pipe manufacturer that decided to develop a new water-tight technology and cater to low-income customers; Deqingyuan, an ambitious Chinese enterprise which supplies high-quality eggs in Beijing; Jubilant Organosys, an Indian chemical producer that has been able to reassure and attract investors with its high environmental, health, and safety record and efficient sustainability reporting; and MAS Holdings, a Sri Lankan apparel manufacturer that increased the retention of its mostly female employees by offering them benefits, including training courses in information technology. The company is now a supplier to some of the world’s leading retailers.

The report identifies a number of ‘ingredients of success’ – factors that contributed to the strong results in all four case studies and helped them overcome some of the constraints that many emerging-economy companies face. The five ingredients are :Leadership: the role of the chief executive or chairman in pushing through a strategy based on sustainability. Integration: the embedding of sustainability elements in corporate strategies from the very beginning. Innovation: using sustainability as a source of innovation. Differentiation: having the courage to be different. Quality of relationships: business benefits from strong relationships with stakeholders – suppliers, customers, employees.