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In the past 48 hours, I have been at the Guildhall for the CISL/Unilever Sustainable Living Young Entrepreneurs Award (I did a session for the finalists at Churchill College, Cambridge, last year); then a fascinating Sustainable Eel Group session yesterday morning at Fishmongers’ Hall; next, yesterday evening, I was up in Manchester, doing another session with the UK Green Building Council; then this evening it was a private view at the Science Museum of the new Churchill’s Scientists exhibition. And along the way a series of riveting conversations covering everything from plastic pollution (with Richard Northcote of Bayer MaterialScience today) of the oceans through solar energy (with Mary Archer this evening) to the Atlantic convoys (with someone whose uncle died on one of them). Brain fizzing.

 

Great to see both The Zeronauts and The Breakthrough Challenge making the Sustainable Brands top books listing, alongside some other wonderful titles. Various people are dubbing 2015 the ‘Year of Sustainable Development’ – I wonder if it will make much difference in terms of the audience for these books? Can only hope so!

2015 should be the year when I get to release the 27,000 eels that SustainAbility gave me in celebration of 27 years of involvement with the companies. (For background on earlier release, see here.) That number seemed small, however, when I read in The Times on Saturday that Bulgarian customs officials has seized 2,000,000 baby eels hidden in the luggage of two Chinese men arriving from Spain.

A critically endangered species, European eels cannot be exported outside the EU. Fetching €500 per kilo in Europe, such eels go for up to €1,300 per kilo in Asia. In the week where I am due to attend a board meeting of the Sustainable Eel Group, this news was a reminder of just how steep an incline eel conservationists still have to climb. I wonder how many other cases of eels have slipped through our borders?

Great to see an old friend, Professor Rob Gray, joining forces with Professor Markus Milne to take a closer look at the triple bottom line agenda, 20 years after I first came up with the notion.

As I comment on The Conversation platform:

Many thanks to professors Rob Gray and Markus Milne for breathing some further oxygen into this debate. In reading the later stages of their assessment, however, I am reminded of the late Anita Roddick’s comments on the pessimism of the thought — and the optimism of the action. (When The Shop Australia did a triple bottom line report, they didn’t use three zebra hindquarters, but three men’s bums.)

For those new to this area of discussion, The Economist had this to say on the triple bottom line (TBL) a while back: http://www.economist.com/node/14301663

Twenty years on from the first launch of the idea, I have been working with Jochen Zeitz, who pioneered the Environmental Profit & Loss (EP&L) approach while Chairman and CEO of PUMA. He and I have done a book on what we call ‘tomorrow’s bottom line,’ called ‘The Breakthrough Challenge: 10 Ways to Connect Today’s profits with Tomorrow’s Bottom Line’ – see http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118539699.html.

The spirit of the piece is that business can’s simply account and report itself out of the hole we have collectively dug for ourselves. Integrated reporting is only a small piece of the puzzle. Instead, what we call the ‘Global C-suite,’ the top teams of the world’s most powerful 1,000 companies, are going to have to embrace a ‘Stretch Agenda’ linking their strategies (whether couched as TBL, shared value or whatever) to the wider sustainability context.

This is the theme of a white paper we have just completed at Volans, with support from the Generation Foundation. Called ‘The Stretch Agenda: Targets & Incentives for the Breakthrough Decade,’ this is due for launch in March.

If you’re interested in receiving a copy let me know at john@volans.com.

A new blog which I did with Jochen Zeitz on The B Team’s Plan has appeared on the Guardian website and on Huffington Post, to coincide with the 2015 World Economic Forum summit in Davos. More to come, if all goes well.