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Date: 03 Dec 2018
Comment: 0

To Warsaw With EcoVadis

An indication of the menus here: the air tastes of burning coal

En route to the Spektrum Tower

Memes on an internal window

Andrew Winston illuminated

A view from the Spektrum Tower

Dinner in Romantyczna Restaurant in Old Town Market Square

En route back to the over-grandly named Royal Leonardo Hotel

Ditto 2

Ditto 3

A glimpse of the Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science

Flying back into the UK, a spectacle I never tire of

A fascinating trip to Warsaw, my first, for EcoVadis, where I have been on the Scientific Committee for around a decade. And here’s a bit of the section of the new book I wrote after the trip:

“There is a crack, a crack in everything,” intoned the late, lamented Leonard Cohen, “That’s how the lightgets in.” In the same way, reality sometimes cracks open in front of our eyes—andwe get a glimpse, an X-ray vision, of the future. That happened to me early in December 2018 while I was sketching out the early chapters of [the book].

A dozen of us were sitting in the offices of Paris-based supply chain management firm EcoVadis on the twenty-sixth floor of Warsaw’s Spektrum Tower. Outside, and all around us, impenetrable rain clouds hung low across the city.

Ironically, we were discussing how to illuminate darker corners of the global supply chains that feed today’s globalized economies.

Winking through the murk below were the lights of construction cranes. They were hard at work erecting a new version of a city largely levelled by the Nazis in 1944—and then held in an iron grip for decades by victorious Soviet occupiers.

Indeed, when the cloud began to clear a little, we could increasingly make out the brutal shape of one of Europe’s ugliest skyscrapers. Originally known as the Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science (or Pałac Kultury i Nauki imienia Józefa Stalina), it was stripped of every trace of the dictator during a later period of destalinization.

Originally, positioned as a gift to Poland from the Soviet people, the Babel-like structure has attracted many ungrateful nicknames over the years. Among the nicknames used by Varsovians, I learned, are Pekin (or “Beijing”, because of the building’s abbreviated name PKiN) and Pajac (meaning “clown”, a word that sounds close to Pałac).

Less common—but more memorable—nicknames include Stalin’s Syringe, the Elephant in Lacy Underwear, the Russian Wedding Cake, or even Chuj Stalina (Stalin’s Dick).

 Like the thousands of laborers who toiled on the original Tower of Babel, those who worked on the Palace of Culture and Science could hardly have imagined today’s world. Yet when the Berlin Wall was breached in 1989, a previously unimaginable crack opened up in communist reality, with capitalism increasingly running rampant.

All around the Spektrum Tower we saw high-rise buildings emerging from the murk, many sporting the logos of international companies like EY, Marriott and Mercedes.

But current forms of capitalism are under existential pressure, too, from several directions. On the same day that we looked down on Warsaw, climate leaders from around the world were looking around the city of Katowice, the heart of Poland’s coal-producing region.

And, if media reports were to believed, many were wondering why their annual climate summit had been parachuted into Katowice, the dark heart of Poland’s fossil fuels economy.

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Date: 21 Nov 2018
Comment: 0

A Piece Of E-Type Cake In Vienna

A nicely iced E-type in a Vienna cake shop window

Have never had much of an appetite for sports cars, but there’s something about Vienna. Last time I was here, for example, Elaine had me driving a Tesla around the grounds of a castle.

This time, here to speak at an Austria Glas Recycling event, I caught sight of this Jaguar E-type cake, just around the corner from a Tesla store. For some reason former Foreign Office Buffoon Boris Johnson and having one’s cake and eating it came to mind.

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Date: 19 Nov 2018
Comment: 0

Some Reflections On The Power Of Babel

Source: GreenBiz

My latest GreenBiz column considers some lessons learned from my recent trip to Berlin, Paretz and the like.

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Date: 16 Nov 2018
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BWB, Somerset House And Zetter’s

Lovely riverside sign

Further along

Overhead wreath in Spring Restaurant, Somerset House

Peanuts exhibition was on

Spotted as we walked along a corridor

A rather extraordinary day, starting with blood-letting at the doctors’ surgery in Barnes, then a meeting with Luke Fletcher and his colleague Rebecca Bruce of lawyers Bates Wells & Braithwaite, with whom I have a long history going back to Earthlife, I think, and certainly to The Environment Foundation, on a possible new structure for Volans.

Then Louise and I walked along the north bank of the Thames to Somerset House, where we met Yinka for lunch at the Spring Restaurant. Then we went to see people about possibly taking a space in Somerset House – and took a look at one possibility.

After which I did a call with Cathy Runciman of Atlas of the Future, though the wifi blindspots in Somerset House were a bit of an issue.

Then I walked up through Covent Garden, before walking across to Clerkenwell and Zetter‘s for a wonderful dinner with Elaine, Gaia and Paul.

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Date: 15 Nov 2018
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Köln: Responsible Leadership, Transformative Times

Georg Kell on stage

Is that really what I look like these days?

Bob Eccles receiving his lifetime achievement award from Professor Joachim Schwalbach

Bob says thank you, with a wonderful speech

Dance troupe after the Mayor’s speech

Flew in from London today to Köln for the 8th International Conference on Sustainability & Responsibility, themed around ‘Responsible Leadership in Times of Transformation’.

My session yesterday involved a debate on our recall of the Triple Bottom Line, with challenges from René Schmidpeter of the Cologne Business School. Very energetic audience participation.

A high point of the event was when UN Global Compact co-founder Georg Kell told me from the stage that I had been a great inspiration to him, though he told me later in the day that when I first challenged him early on his role as head of the Compact he was tempted to think of me as an “arrogant bastard”.

The Lifetime Achievement Ward went to Professor Robert Eccles of Harvard and now the Saïd Business School. Also a member of the Volans Advisory Board, as it happens.

In the evening, it was profoundly moving to hear from the city’s mayor, Henriette Reker. The subject of an assassination attempt in October 2015, she has been a brave champion of refugee rights.

Reminded me of talking to a Syrian refugee at the Paretz event, who had come to Berlin three years ago – and found the transition immensely tough. Mayor Reker is a symbol of the best of humankind when faced with the twin challenges of forced migration and acculturation.

She was followed by an extraordinary dance troupe, apparently one of 30 in the city, which spend much of the year practising for the annual carnival. Amazing energy and gymnastics. Uplifting, in every sense.

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Date: 09 Nov 2018
Comment: 0

West Wittering Again – Henry Royce Sketches The R Series Engine

Eric Menneteau, 2004, Schneider Trophy at the London Science Museum

Spent a wonderful week with the BMW Foundation at Paretz, near Berlin. On that, more shortly. But was thinking while there that BMW, back in the day, had produced BMW 801 engines for e.g. the Focke-Wulf Bf-190 fighter that pilots like my father Tim would have faced in WWII. The most produced radial aero engine of the Third Reich period.

Then this evening I watched Jacqui Farnham’s Channel 5 programme Rolls-Royce: Dream Machines, which I had recorded while travelling. And discovered something I had never heard before.

That was that Henry Royce had moved to West Wittering – and at one point sketched out in the beach sand an early design for the R series engine, which powered Britain’s successful Schneider Trophy contender, and would later evolve into the famous Merlin engine …

… Which powered e.g. the Hawker Hurricane.

… One of which Tim was flying when he was shot down in 1940.

… At West Wittering.

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Date: 09 Nov 2018
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Our Planet: Teased By Attenborough And Netflix

Credit: Netflix

When I got back from Berlin today, Elaine and I went across to Westminster City Hall for the WWF trailing of the forthcoming ‘Our Planet‘ series with Netflix and Silverback.

Great presentations from the likes of Sir David Attenborough, who is becoming steadily more activist, and Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Met and talked to a wide spectrum of people in the field before the showing, including Stanley Johnson (whose son Jo resigned from the Government today, apparently over Brexit, which he sees as a complete cock-up), then went across to the Cinnamon Club for a delightful dinner with Clare Kerr (who I got to know during our joint time as members of WWF UK’s Council of Ambassadors) and her husband, Nick Hurd.

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Date: 08 Nov 2018
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Out And About In Paretz

Sent off to wander for 30 minutes in the Paretz “wilds” (photo: Marc Beckmann)

Quite liked this photo of me prowling around in “nature” during the Paretz meeting, though I’m not completely sure I look persuaded that this is Nature as she should be. Meanwhile, my GreenBiz blog on the adventure has now been reposted by the BMW Foundation.

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Date: 08 Nov 2018
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With BMW Foundation And Toniic In Paretz

A piece of the Berlin Wall seen through the window of a PwC office, with the Bundestag in the background

Anti-war mural in nearby park

By the entrance

Sharpshooter

Barging by

River Spree

The BMW Foundation HQ is somewhere towards the top

Now we’re in Paretz

Have seen storks’ nest, but no storks

Doing my session

Bak home at the Storchenhof “ranch”

Walking to the Paretz Akademie

Alison and Tell, ahead

Radical actions favoured

Final session, reduced group

Frank Niederländer winds up the event

Some of the name badges left by participants

Flew to Germany on Monday, initially to Berlin for a session at the BMW Foundation Hebert Quandt HQ, featuring a beamed-in Jeremy Rifkin, then on by coach to the intriguing and once-royal village of Paretz. Spent several thought-provoking days with some 30 BMW Foundation and (the impact investment network) Toniic invitees – with some thoughts provoked captured in my latest GreenBiz column.

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Date: 27 Oct 2018
Comment: 0

An Ode To Our Mother – And Her Main Admirer

Tim and Pat married in 1948 – and many, many moons later

Here is a poem my sister Caroline composed recently, capturing elements of the adventures of looking after our elderly parents – he teetering on the edge of 98 in December, she 96. I can only say I love it. Its acute observation of two extraordinary beings and its patience and stamina in the face of life’s adversities.

The Year of Looking After Mum

In the half-light from the Anglepoise
she is a Limavady beach back in the fifties,
the pillow curving in sand-dune folds around her silver hair,
a beached and bleached mermaid – legs as useless.

This bedroom where you and he have slept and laughed and loved.
The wedding dresses twirled, the hair bedecked,
bridesmaids fluttering like cabbage whites over the brassica.
The mystery of the missing Doll’s House, solved.
The First Man on the Moon in shuddering black and white
on a grey plastic television, which creaked and pulsed with heat;
all six of us in your seven-acre bed.
The carpet, once fluffy vanilla clouds,
now matted and reeking like a damp Labrador.
The resident ghost appearing and disappearing here, in delusion and reality,
came to stay for good when the imaginary became your life.
Hallucinations so real you could reach through the shimmering portal
and pinch their warmly yielding flesh.
Your sightless eyes following apparitions in some other parallel bedroom
where all the abandoned little boys in the world had ample chocolate
and the floor was flooded to your ankles, a rippling High Spring Tide
that wasn’t there.
Where nothing was real except my father.
Now it’s full of fading light and holding on.
Every dent and scratch on ancient walls have history.
Every mark, careless graffiti, left behind in war and peace.
What matters is the minute.
Nothing else.

She says he loved her in an instant,
although she was wearing a stained apron, a dirty tea towel in her hand.
I think I love you, he said.
Don’t be silly, she replied.
But he was right.
The next day he came back with two new tea towels – post-war gold dust.
He had a girlfriend called Misty – she went back to America.
Mum was sad for her.

Caroline Elkington, Little Rissington, 2018

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John Elkington is a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development. He is currently Founding Partner and Executive Chairman of Volans, a future-focused business working at the intersection of the sustainability, entrepreneurship and innovation movements.

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Introduction

I began this blog with an entry reporting on a visit to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, on 30 September 2003. The blog element of the website has gone through several iterations since, with older material still available on this site.

Like so many things in my life, blog entries blur the boundaries between the personal and the professional. As explained on the Home Page, the website and the blog are part platform for ongoing projects, part autobiography, and part accountability mechanism.

In addition to this website, my blogs have appeared on such sites as: Chinadialogue, CSRWire, Fast Company, Good Deals, Guardian Sustainable Business and Huffington Post.

In this new iteration of the site, the ‘Comments’ function has been reanimated. Please do make use of it.

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