Search Results for: Tim elkington

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.

For most people, a “ticker” has to do with clocks, hearts or bombs. But for anyone familiar with stock market capitalism, the term suggests the unique code assigned to each security traded on a given stock market — for example, AAPL for Apple Inc., BAC for Bank of America, F for the Ford Motor Company.

My modest proposal is for a secondary ticker to be applied by governments and stock exchanges to all companies vulnerable to risks associated with so-called “wicked” problems. And the obvious ticker symbol, whether on the Wall Street, London or Shanghai stock exchanges, would be WCKD.

For more, see GreenBiz, here.

Rough-and-ready scoops of the BBC Breakfast Programme’s coverage this morning of the portrait being done of several of the precariously few surviving pilots from the Battle Britain.

Artist is Jeremy Houghton – and the main pilot featured in the 3.52 minute sequence is my father Tim Elkington. Part of a sequence that are being worked together, but I think this captures the man today wonderfully well.

As Tim says in the interview, this should be less about the pilots and more about the RAF. And, as it happens, I’m part-way through The Birth of the RAF, 1918 by Richard Overy, with Patrick Bishop’s Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory in my to-read stack.

2017 has been fairly frenetic, but despite – or perhaps because of – Brexit and Trumpism, work has been going like gangbusters. Marches included my annual lectures at Imperial College (where I was accompanied by Lauren Cervino, who is anchoring our Carbon Productivity work) and UCL (ditto Florence Isaacs, who has been a member of the team before heading off to do her PhD in Antarctica).

I’m travelling a bit less at the moment, albeit with a burst of trips to places like Israel and India now in immediate prospect. But I did fly to Norway (Oslo, then Kristiansand), with Geoff Kendall of the Future Fit Foundation, to speak at a conference organised by the Strømme Foundation.

The event was chaired by John G. Bernander, a former CEO of Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and of NHO, the main organisation for Norwegian employers. He has also been an MP for the Conservative Party. he was on the same flight in – indeed helped me get my luggage out of the overhead bin. A good start!

Philosopher Henrik Syse, who is a member of the Nobel Committee and former head of the Ethical Board for the Norwegian Pension Fund, also spoke.  We had met when I was in Oslo last year. Fascinating to hear a truly philosophical view on business responsibility.

Other speakers included Christian Thommessen of ResponsAbility. He works  closely with Stephen Brenninkmeijer, as do I at the Social Stock Exchange. And, as I was coming back through Heathrow later in the day, who should take my arm but Thomas Brenninkmeijer.

The assault on truth, facts and data continues, with major implications for the sustainable development movement – which marks its 30th anniversary (at least as measured by the publication of 1987’s Brundtland Com mission Report, Our Common Future) in 2017.

Here are my early thoughts on the need to drain a very different swamp, the dark side of the Internet and World Wide Web, which has soured the political process with its supturations of fake news and general vindictiveness.