John Elkington
A world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development.
Boaty McBoatface was funny, momentarily, but thrilled to hear that Britain’s new Antarctic vessel will be called the RRS Sir David Attenborough. Last time I came across his spoor was several weeks ago, at a WWF Council of Ambassadors meeting in the Bishop of London’s home. The next seat to mine was marked out for Sir David, but he failed to materialise. Now he has, in rather magnificent reds, whites and green, with splashes of yellow – and with a helicopter pad on his nose.
The latest Volans newsletter, emailed out today, kicks off with Marilyn Monroe on the New York subway grate, before moving on to consider the winds of change in our area of business. As we move towards our seventh anniversary next April, we are considering a big pivot, to use Andrew Winston‘s term.
Gaia went to have breakfast at the RAF Club this morning with Tim (Elkington) and Tessa (Elkington), and then Tim, Tessa and my nephew Kipp (Elkington) went on to the Russian Ambassador’s residence in Kensington Palace Gardens where Tim was to be awarded the Ushakov Medal, alongside others who took part in the Arctic convoys to Russia in WWII.
Tim went to Russia on the aircraft carrier Argus. With the Putin-driven horrors in today’s Ukraine, there are real ethical issues here, but the ceremony celebrated the extraordinary endurance and courage of those who took part in the convoys in unspeakable conditions, against incredible odds.
After the presentation, tea and coffee were offered to the assembled company. When Tim muttered he wanted something stronger, Kipp found a table of shot glasses and a bottle of vodka – and the proceedings took on a distinctly Russian flavour.
Downwave 3 (2003 – 2007)
2003 marked the twentieth anniversary of our launching of the old John Elkington Associates—and saw the launch of this website, almost a year in the making. A huge amount has changed since 1983 and a great deal has been achieved. But as the Downwave 3 period gets into its stride, with global recession, war in Iraq, the economic impact of the SARS epidemic in Asia and so on, we need to refocus and prepare for new challenges.
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Among the issues I expect to be predominant in this new phase of the debate are:
Security:
Competing definitions of security are emerging. Some are based on high technology defence technologies, others on the notion that, in the end, “we are all in the same boat, including future generations.” There are profound implications for privacy and civil rights.
Globalisation:
With the market signals early in 2003 suggesting that the globalisation project has slipped a few gears, and could well go into reverse, there will be new emphasis on how we can achieve globalisation that really does achieve acceptable triple bottom line outcomes.
Governance:
Both global and corporate governance will continue to be in the spotlight. Of the two, global governance is by far the biggest challenge, as the problems experienced by the US, UN, NATO and the EU during the build-up to the Iraq war—and subsequently—demonstrated.
Financial markets:
A growing proportion of our work has focused on financial markets: the insurers, reinsurers, lenders, financial analysts, and so on.
Access:
2002’s World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was something of a political failure, but it usefully sketched out a powerful new agenda for the next decade. The focus will be on access: access to clean water, affordable energy, drugs (e.g. for HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria), and so on.
Social enterprise:
Most of our work has focused on large corporations, but we remain skeptical about their capacity to make the necessary changes in time. So we plan to focus more time and effort on the social entrepreneurs who are experimenting with radically new technologies and business models.
Market engineering:
To make the necessary changes happen, we will need to become much more sophisticated in terms of reshaping market signals to deliver sustainable outcomes. Experiments such as the Chicago Climate Exchange are pioneering in this critically important new opportunity space.
10 years on the blogging front
Chez Zedel
Just back from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, with Elaine and American friends Jim and Heather Salzman. The original book was published 10 years ago, in May 2003, and it struck me that I began this blog series exactly 10 years ago, in September 2013, with an entry on our visit to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod. And, as chance would have it, Heather asked us earlier this evening about a painting by Caroline (Elkington) in the kitchen of Elaine walking along the seahore near Wellfeet, on Cape Cod, that same year.
