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A nice email note today from Mark McElroy this morning. He is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Sustainable Organizations and the original developer of the Context-Based Sustainability method, to draw on his bio on the Sustainable Brands website

He is also co-founder of Thomas & McElroy LLC, creators of the MultiCapital Scorecard (see above), and a veteran of management consulting including time spent at Price Waterhouse, KPMG and Deloitte Consulting. He teaches in the ‘MBA in Managing for Sustainability’ program at Marlboro College in Vermont.

Hi John:

I’ve been meaning to reach out to you for some time now to essentially acknowledge, pay tribute to and thank you for something you did when you introduced the TBL in the mid-nineties, but which most people may not yet fully appreciate in my view.  And that was to explicitly associate each of the bottom lines with specific vital capitals. 

Most were so caught up with the metaphorical value of the TBL as an organizing principle for performance assessment — nothing wrong with that — that we failed to fully appreciate what you also had to say about how vital capitals correspond to the bottom lines.

Now, in 2015, we’ve managed to make the leap from metaphorical organizing principle to empirical measurement model.  The MultiCapital Scorecard, for example, is nothing if not utterly grounded in the view that TBL performance can and should be interpreted in terms of what an organization’s impacts are on vital capitals relative to sustainability thresholds.  In fact, it is the application of this idea to non-financial capitals that has given rise to the idea that sustainability criteria can and should be applied to financial performance, too.  Thus comes the idea that maximizing profits as a regulative ideal should be replaced with simply providing reasonable returns.  Sufficiency will more than do.

I now routinely call attention to this intellectual contribution of yours twenty years ago, and wanted to let you know that I am.  It’s a very big deal in my view, in the spirit of organizations not being able to manage what they don’t measure.  Sustainability performance in its full TBL form essentially boils down to capital impact performance, and you were perhaps the first to point that out.  So here I am giving credit where credit is due.  As “multicapitalism” now grows in prominence as a new anti-monocapitalism doctrine, your contribution to the transition should not be overlooked.

All the best,

Mark

Drove across fairly early to Kew Gardens this morning, in a fairly thick fog. Lovely air and atmosphere as we walked around, though with the aircraft roaring by just above the vapour.

Put me in mind of the Russian Airbus downed over Sinai yesterday. The scenery was also inflected by my reading of Alexander Kluge’s extraordinary book, 30 April 1945, which focuses in on what else happened on the day that Adolf Hitler committed suicide.

Have also been leafing through the second violate of the huge collection of Dalí’s painting by Robert Descharmes and Gilles Néret, which reminds me of just how big an impact he had on my mental landscape in the late 1960s.

It’s odd, In recent days, as I winged around Europe speaking to wildly diverse audiences, a surprising number of people (of all ages) came up to say thank you for books and reports of ours that they had read, from The Green Consumer Guide to Cannibals With Forks and The Zeronauts. One or more of these, they would say, at some point had had a significant impact on their thinking.

And that turned up the heat under a question that had been nagging me for quite some time. Stripped to its essence, it is this: When it comes to indicators of success, do I most want to be right – or to be effective?

Having written my first report on climate change way back in 1978, a publication commissioned by the European end of Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute, I was certainly early into the field. And climate change warnings and solutions featured in pretty much all my 19 books to date. (The one I would have to check was The Poisoned Womb, on reproductive toxicology, though I suspect it popped up even there.) I have also spoken about the challenge – and linked opportunities – in well over 1,000 speeches over the years.

But through all of this the climate situation has got progressively worse, and some scientists now argue that it’s on a bad exponential trend – where the pace and scale of change is already moving well ahead of our capacity to act.

So you might say that, as a global movement, we have been fairly effective in getting growing numbers of people to be aware of the issues, but singularly poor at getting effective and timely political action.

All of this was given a further spin this morning when I woke up to an email from Canada, offering a link to a father-and-son video celebration of climate change ‘superheroes’ in the worlds of science, politics, economics, business and so on.

A charming idea – and a surprisingly moving “belated Thanksgiving.” Interestingly, Sir David Attenborough is on the list, too. And I recall an early conversation with him, at a WWF lunch, probably in the 1980s, when he was still pretty skeptical about climate change. But he too eventually saw the light (or the tunnel) – and has since had a hugely helpful impact in this area.

But change is in the wind. As I travelled these last couple of weeks, I had wonderfully welcome opportunities to talk to long-standing friends – among them Alex Barkawi of the Council on Economic Priorities, Jørgen Randers of The Limits to Growth, BI and 2052, and Peter Zollinger of Globalance. Mercifully, all of them saw roles for me well into the next decade, and they even had specific suggestions.

Just yesterday I was reading Steve Jobs’ line that one of the best predictors of long-term success is sheer stamina. Well, feedback along the lines of that given this morning by Peter G. Watkins of DrivenTV and his son Spencer is surprisingly helpful in that department – and I warmly than them.

Then, later, when Googling for Jobs’ exact words, I came across this blog by Michael Simmons. And deep in its heart there was this diagram, based on the work of network scientist Ron Burt:

My reading of it is that the more you can bridge between different networks and clusters, the greater the impact you can have. So perhaps this analysis underscores the ‘superpower’ I should be working to develop.

That of cross-pollinating between different clusters, different networks, different worlds and, in a way, different futures.

And all of that leads me to conclude that my job title, which we had been talking about changing, should be ‘Chief Pollinator’. (Not Chief in the world, but in our corner of it.) It would bring a nicely symbolic theory of change with it, and tie in well with our Volans branding, linking back to the Latin for flight and flying things. Something to ponder as we head off to Kew Gardens to walk around in a dense autumnal fog.

Today, my father – Tim Elkington – went up to Derby with my sister Tessa for a dinner hosted by Rolls-Royce as part of the rededication of a Battle of Britain stained glass window (above, from www.the-few.org.uk).

The window was first dedicated in 1949, the year I was born, in the presence of BoB veteran Douglas Bader.

Whisked northwards, and back, in a gleaming Mercedes, Tim was asked to speak at the dinner. Here is what he said:

I’m here today to join with you in remembering those who fought in the Battle of Britain, and your contribution to its outcome.

But more especially, I’ve come to say thank you, Rolls-Royce.

I thank you, first, for the ‘R Type’ engine which powered the Schneider Trophy aircraft and Campbell’s Bluebird, which kick started my career in the Royal Air Force.

And I’m grateful, too, for the hundreds of hours I have flown behind Kestrel, Merlin, Griffon and Derwent engines – in Europe, Russia, on Atlantic Convoys, in India and the Pacific – without a failure.

You have never let me down.

A tribute surely to good design – and the work of your hands?

Thank you.

Slightly ironic that the smoking chimneys shown as background in the Rolls-Royce window symbolise both the effort that went into making the machines that helped win the war, and the damage done to human health and the wider environment by industrial activity – something my own life has been dedicated to flagging and putting to rights.

Another intense week, taking in Zurich, St Gallen and Brussels. A great call with Covestro from Terminal 5 on my way out on Monday. Enjoyed speaking and engaging the students at the oikos International FutureLab 2015 event in St Gallen, travelling there from Zurich on a train with Alex Barkawi and Peter Zollinger, both long-standing colleagues and friends.

Wonderful dinner with Alex and Peter at the Zum Goldenen Schäfli, with sloping floor, ceiling and soup (a fact echoed in the design of their website).

Then took the train back to Zurich and a flight to Brussels, to speak at a dinner heralding the first baseEUcities conference, organised by Daniella Abreu, formerly of Skanska.Was due to speak after the second course, but Jeremy Rifkin spoke for over 45 minutes between the first course and the second, engagingly – but taxing the patience of some audience members.

After that, I felt I shouldn’t speak at any length. Instead, taking the microphone, I asked those taking part in the dinner (perhaps 50-60 people) whether there were any comments on what Jeremy (who had by that time headed off to bed) had said?

The first comment came from Jørgen Randers, who I noted had been giving me life counselling before the dinner started. So, I said, this provided a welcome opportunity to take him by surprise. Jørgen welcomed the opportunity, but expressed extreme irritation with the Rifkin approach, even if various of us could see considerable areas of overlap.

Part of the problem for Jørgen seemed to be Jeremy’s constant name-dropping: he had just come back having worked with the Russian Prime Minister that morning, for example; he had been responsible for turning Angela Merkel on to the third industrial revolution; he is advising the Chinese government and they are spending tens of billions as result; and so on.

It’s also interesting that Jeremy seems to find it difficult to genuinely engage an audience in conversation, preferring his (admittedly impressive) extended solos. A zero marginal cost version of Eddie van Halen?

I then asked whether there were any other views, and Frank Schwalba-Hoth put his hand up. (I hadn’t seen him for many years, but had given him a warm hug when we met before the dinner began.) He now tore into Jørgen, who luckily enjoys cut-and-thrust, saying that Rifkin was an “eagle,” while his critics were “rabbits, sheep, worms.”

Aha, said someone, so what is John? “A nightingale,” Frank flashed back. So now we know.

The conference the next day had its flaws, but the speakers (including a Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium, Jeremy, Jørgen, Grame Maxton of the Club of Rome, and various business people) was an interesting opportunity to listen at close quarters to some great people. I summed up the day at the end of the event, which meant that I had to listen intently throughout.

Sitting still all day, and then heading home in a very cramped (and delayed) Eurostar (our train had to make its way around another that had stalled somewhere on this side of the Channel), then followed by a very noisy and late Piccadilly Line tube home, all helped ensure that that I developed a violent attack of leg cramp in the night, waking up howling.

Totally unlike any nightjar I have ever heard, but jarring in the night, certainly.

Then, on Friday, we had a brainstorm for the Friends Life Stewardship Committee of Reference, in the Aviva building at 1 Poultry. All a bit of a rush, as it happened. because the previous day I had looked at my diary on my BlackBerry, while on the Eurostar in France, and it had given a start time for today’s event of 11.00. But it was actually 10.00, something I realised only when I was 20 minutes late starting off.

Still, the Tube worked very well, and I was just 15-20 minutes late for what was slated to be a 4-hour meeting. And a very productive meeting it was, too, under Julie McDowell’s chairmanship.

Then back to the office, where Sam and Richard took one look at me and sent me home.