John Elkington
A world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development.
Blown away on Monday by the first episode of The Innocents, the new Netflix series co-written by our daughter Hania and Simon Duric. Launched today. We attended the premiere at the Mayfair Curzon. Here’s a piece by Hania from the Sunday Times Magazine last week – and here’s a review from the New York Times. Go, June and Harry! And brilliantly well done to the entire team!
Last night marked the formal end to our first decade at Volans, the actual milestone having been 1 April, and the end of a face-to-face Board meeting involving the likes of Paul Bunje (former Chief Scientist at the XPRIZE Foundation and now co-founder of Conservation X Labs), Kavita Prakash-Mani (Global Markets Lead at WWF International), Sam Lakha and Geoff Lye.
One sad note was Louise Kjellerup Roper’s absence in Copenhagen, following the sudden death of her mother.
In the evening, I also mentioned the deaths of Richard Northcote, whose friend and former CEO Patrick Thomas spoke last night, and Tessa Tennant – with Tom Burke and Mark Campanale in the room, both of whom I had last seen at the lifetime achievement celebration event for Tessa a week or so before she died.
Also heard from long-standing friend Steve Warshal of death of another key figure from the environmental movement, though since it’s not yet mentioned on his Wikipedia site or anywhere else, I’ll not mention him by name here.
Despite the intimations of mortality, over 100 of us celebrated the first 10 years of Volans at the Wellcome Collection.
The ‘cabaret’, performed from a red-carpeted staircase, featured Geoff, Clover Hogan (whose camera took the image above), former Covestro CEO Patrick Thomas, Kavita and Paul. Went on twice as long as I had planned, and any fault was mine as the compère, but you could have heard a pin drop throughout the session.
Interesting to see several people in the above image holding copies of our new OPEN brochure, which we have been working on in recent weeks – featuring our emerging thinking around the “locked-in syndrome” our species is now suffering from. And with one of the four keys spotlighted for unlocking mindsets being the need to shift the focus from cleaning ‘fish’ (e.g. corporations) to ‘oceans’ (e.g. markets).
And below is the image I conjured at the beginning of my introduction to the evening, the photograph originating from the first visit I made with Yinka (Awoyinka) to see the Wellcome Collection Reading Room, where we held the event.
I love the upside down Antony Gormley figure, coupled with the signage, ‘Somewhere in Between’. Between worlds, between geological epochs, between our first ten years and whatever comes next. But our Board meeting over the past couple of days suggests that there could be some great things ahead …
Delighted to appear in ‘The New Ism’, a podcast by social entrepreneur superstar Mel Young and Alex Matthews. My only regret in the podcast‘s 47 minutes running time is that I said that the optical experiments in Hannover mentioned by Thomas Kuhn were from the 18th century – when I meant 19th. But what’s a century between friends?
Much saddened to hear yesterday from Tom Burke of the death of Tessa Tennant on Saturday. We really did all squeak it in under the wire with the celebration of her lifetime achievement award on 28 June, courtesy of Aviva.
More details on the evening can be found here.
The videos are great – and I get to say a couple of things in the middle one, ‘Highlights from the Video Corner’.
In one way or another, all of us were saying the same thing. We loved Tessa, we deeply wish she had been with us longer, but we feel deeply privileged to have known her – in my case since the days when the Green Alliance was still in Chandos Place.
Also served on her advisory board back in the day at the Merlin Ecology Fund and NPI.
Very keen to help with the world’s first sculpture symbolising the transformative power of green finance.
GreenBiz just published my latest blog as part of The Elkington Report, this time reviewing the worldwide reactions to the Harvard Business Review post I did – proposing a product recall for the Triple Bottom Line.