Search Results for: Tim elkington

Spent much of the week in Mexico City, with Grupo Bimbo. Main reason for being here was to do a session with CEO Daniel Servitje and his senior colleagues.

I was hosted in the city by Mauricio Bonilla Padilla, now a key person on the sustainability side at Grupo Bimbo, who I first met years ago when  I was doing a session at Imperial College.

After a successful session with around 16 top executives of the company, Mauricio took Jim McKeown and I around the city. One particular highlight was the Cantina l’Opera, where – because I felt I had finished for the day – I had my first tequila. Exquisite. Great food, too.

Among other things, we went to the top of the Torre Latinoamericano, from where the views were giddying. I had been feeling the effect of altitude since arriving in Mexico City, thanks to my very low heart rate, but the infinitesimal sway at the top of the tower enhanced the effect significantly. And, no, it wasn’t the tequila.

Earlier in the afternoon, we had been out to a Grupo Bimbo production plant some way from the centre, which was fascinating. Rather different from the Bimbo Bakeries USA plant Amanda (Feldman) and I visited in Pennsylvania late last year. Meanwhile, if all goes well, it looks as though I may be back in Mexico City later in the year. I look forward to it.

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.

My day began and ended with lawyers. I started the day by attending the memorial service for Stephen Lloyd at St Martin-in-the-Fields. The church was packed to the gills. A wonderful Quaker silence part-way through, interrupted only by a helicopter, a man in paroxysms of coughing and what may have been a grand-child doing what grandchildren do.

Sadly, it struck me that I only seem to go to St Martin-in-the-Fields for memorial services, most memorably for Sir Anthony Parsons and Sir Geoffrey Chandler, the last of whom was very much in my mind today, as a long-standing leader in the field with the likes of NCVO and Amnesty. Geoffrey, like Stephen, was a wonderful ally who was willing to stretch boundaries way beyond the then seemingly possible.

There was glorious music this morning, including Agnus Dei, Jerusalem and Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, and an astonishing cross-section of the multiple universes in which Stephen worked as probably the country’s foremost charity lawyer. Lovely double header from Jonathon Porritt and Tim Smit, another brace of Sirs, with Jonathon describing Stephen as sustainable development embodied, a one-man roundtable.

As I sat listening to the service, I reflected on the lawyers I have encountered over the decades. They include, most notably, my beloved and much lamented cousin Hollister Sprague, a WWI American fighter pilot in France and then Mr Boeing’s lawyer. He was a wonderful host in the Seattle area in the 1970s, with his home Forestledge overlooking Puget Sound and housing what was once the largest organ room in the West.

Speaking on behalf of the City of London, Sir Thomas Gifford said that Stephen was a lawyer who somehow always found a way to say yes. Then I thought of the  lawyers who prosecuted and defended us when we collided with McDonald’s in the Green Consumer Guide era, a battle I recorded in A Year in the Greenhouse, published in 1990.

But I had met Stephen well before that, back in the mid-1980s, when he helped us at the brilliantly ambitious but ultimately ill-fated Earthlife Foundation. Then, years later, he helped The Environment Foundation, of which I was Chairman, to fight a 3-year battle against the Charity Commissioners to establish sustainable development as a charitable objective. We won, entirely due to Stephen’s determination to see right prevail.

A joy to see so many old colleagues and friends at the reception afterwards, among them Colin Hines, Camilla Toulmin, Nick Hurd and Tessa Tennant. And then up popped Steve Warshal, originally a lawyer originally from Seattle who worked with Release back in the day and then was a Director of Greenpeace UK for many a year. I remember Steve coming to dinner at least once brandishing a court injunction from BNFL. he and I had a lovely lunch in the Crypt before I had to race back to Bloomsbury Place.

And then this evening there was BBC2’s stunning dramatisation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, featuring Mark Ryland as Thomas Cromwell, another lawyer, here defending Cardinal Wolsey. So I ended the day  in a much more positive frame of mind about the legal profession, though in the past most lawyers have tended to bring me out in hives. (Some would consider the many years I spent with SustainAbility in their Bedford Row offices, smack in the heart of London lawyerdom, as the height of poetic justice.)

The day also spurred my ongoing internal debate about what I should do next, as did a call with Andrew Winston this afternoon, and an email exchange with Tim Smit. It is clear that things are changing and that the next decade is going to be very different, profoundly challenging. Our capacity to speak truth to power – and to ourselves – will be vital. Stephen Lloyd was one of those people who did this quite naturally, or so it seemed, and yet did so in ways that left people wanting more. I can’t have been the only wishing that such people didn’t set the benchmarks quite so high.

Finally coming to the end of the Christmas and New Year holidays, in which much of my times was spent drafting the Volans Breakthrough White Paper. Amazing how long it can take to write short. The draft is now out for comment with Sam and Astrid, with just one section still to do, which will probably be tomorrow.

Apart from a visit to Little Rissington, to see my parents (Tim has been quite ill) and extended family, and a visit yesterday from Gaia, Hania, Jake and Paul for a New Year’s Day lunch, I have been reading somewhat eclectically (books like William Gibson’s The Peripheral, H.E. Bates’ Down the River, Andreas Wagner’s Arrival of the Fittest, Simon Scarrow’s Brothers in Blood, and Alexander Kluge’s Air Raid), writing, walking (including a visit to my favourite heronry) or watching television, in  one form or another. One highlight was watching the original films of The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps on the same day. They really don’t make them like they used to.

Elaine has been working away on her immense Lycian Coast travelogue, now posted – and has attracted an encouraging amount of positive comment.

Today we went across to Kew Gardens, to meet up with John Gilbert and take a glorious walk around the gardens. The weather was dazzling – so warm that we could eat outside at The Orangery.

En route, we stopped off at Cambridge Cottage to see the botanical paintings, where I took a couple of images of the room where SustainAbility held its first Council meeting – way back in 1995. A gentle haunting as I looked through the window, a form of of time machine. Thinking back to the 15 or so wonderful people we convened, among them Tom Gladwin, Charles Medawar, Jane Nelson and Ulrich Steger.

One highlight of the Kew visit was making fairly intense eye contact with a pufferfish underneath the lily pond area in the Princess of Wales greenhouse. Interesting to learn later that the big eyes of this fish makes them much loved pets, despite their toxicity.

The fish’s maze markings put me in mind of the complexities ahead in 2015, which looks set to be quite (American sense) challenging. But then the fact that my new friend is related to the box fish family put me in mind of biomimicry, particularly the concept car based on the boxfish, which was uplifting.

When I think of the areas of our work that most engage me these days, they include biomimicry (where I am on Janine Benyus’s Biomimicry Institute board), Gaia Theory (where John Gilbert and I have been working with the Science Museum) and the Sustainable Eel Group, which we were discussing as we walked around the Japanese building in the heart of the gardens. One thing I’m particularly looking forward to in 2015 is releasing the 27,000 eels that SustainAbility gave me to celebrate my 27 years to date with the organisation.

Seeing the pufferfish also put me in mind of the extraordinary, wonderfully complex nests they make. See also here. Nature’s equivalent of the rose window in a cathedral, perhaps.

At this juncture, there’s something about 2015 that feels to me pivotal, out of the ordinary. Interested to see what it might be.