Profile: John Elkington

It would have been very hard to predict the
future of the aerospace industry when watching the Wright Brothers wobble
fleetingly into the air above the sand dunes at Kittyhawk just over 100 years
ago, says visionary John Elkington, who speaks in Singapore on 28 October, but
that’s the nature of our task now in terms of identifying the pioneers of a
profoundly different – and more sustainable – global economy. Perhaps we should
let the green dust settle a little, but let’s not wait until 2021 to do this
again: how about a ranking of emerging green disruptors for 2012?

The National University of Singapore (NUS)
Business School invites you to a sustainability leadership talk by Mr John
Elkington on Friday, 28 October 2011 from 3pm to 5pm.

Mr John Elkington is a world authority on
Corporate Responsibility and Sustainable Development.  He is also the Founding Partner and Executive
Chairman of Volans and Co-founder of SustainAbility.

Sustainability ‘definitions’ are numerous and
John Elkington will explain the elements of true sustainability activities.
Through examples, John will show what constitutes sustainability and some of
the processes that need to be embedded in a company’s strategic DNA.

John will also present the drivers as well as
the leadership requirements that are critical to a successful sustainability
programme. There will be discussions on how companies have successfully
addressed the issues in starting and expanding their sustainability
initiatives. John will also share his experiences as a member of Unilever’s
groundbreaking 10-year sustainability plan.

Green Leaders of the Future

Newsweek (16 October 2011):

The green game changes so quickly that
today’s top environmental companies could be surpassed in a heartbeat.  John Elkington on the race to sustainability.

When it comes to going green, a decade can be
an eternity. So, as I join my colleagues on Newsweek’s advisory group for Green
Rankings in celebrating the achievements of the leaders spotlighted in the 2011
surveys, I can’t help wondering who will be in the top slot ten years from now,
in 2021, or even 2031?

Don’t get me wrong. Having worked in the
field of what is now labeled sustainability for four decades, it has been
extraordinary to see what some of the world’s biggest publicly traded companies
have done to become more transparent; shrink their environmental footprints;
perform against the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental
value-added; and link their brands to powerful social causes.

It’s great to see IBM topping the rankings.
How times have changed. I recall working with the Chairman of IBM UK in the
late 1980s, for example, and being partly responsible for the virtual
crucifixion of one of his directors when he went to the company’s Armonk
headquarters in New York State and tried to pitch the idea of sustainable
development. Like a number of U.S. corporations at the time, IBM viewed the
embryonic sustainability agenda as a distinctly European affliction, rather
than as an emerging strategic imperative for business.

Now we find ourselves in a world where things
we have done since the Industrial Revolution (e.g. burning fossil
fuels)–indeed since the dawn of agriculture (e.g. cutting down forests and
rice paddy farming, which generates a great deal of methane)–have created a
monster environmental challenge. Once again, business is being blamed, but
business is also responding; these days we look to the corporate world not just
for clean-ups but also for solutions that can help our national economies in
the growing global market for greener technologies, products, and services.

America’s Greenest Companies

In case you doubt it, take a look at the
latest survey launched by the World Economic Forum (WEF). To measure the impact
of sustainability on economic competitiveness, WEF is developing a new
analytical framework—the Sustainable Competitiveness Index (SCI). Covering 100
countries, the SCI will supplement the WEF’s flagship Global Competitiveness
Report with a focus on elements required to make competitiveness sustainable
over the longer run, in economic, social, and environmental terms.

When I was working with IBM UK, despite the
early resistance to the sustainability agenda, I found that various of their
scientific centers were using environmental challenges to force the evolution
of their computer modeling technology—for example, modeling air quality
problems in Mexico City as a way of stretching current computer models to their
limits–and in the process finding ways to improve them. When I visited their
scientific centers in California, Norway, and Switzerland, I found research
teams feeding data into their supercomputers that represented a range of
environmental challenges. Later, as their need to model ever more complex
systems grew, they switched to biomedical imaging.

Now, with the global population touching 7
billion and headed toward 9 billion by mid-century, the time has come to
embrace the environmental challenge–not as a citizenship issue but as a core
element of the business agenda in the coming decades—as IBM is doing with its
Smarter Planet initiatives.

The next decade could see an intense weeding
out of even some of the companies at the very top of the latest Newsweek
rankings.

In our deliberations, our Green Rankings
advisory group raised questions about the make-up of the list, and where
certain companies ended up on it. For instance, why did Google, which has been
trying to tackle some great social and environmental challenges, not appear
higher in the listings? (Google has approached the issue both in its core
activities, for example, with Google Earth, and in the investment activities of
its co-founders and with the activities of Google.org.) In this case, a key
part of the answer is transparency—or a relative lack of it to date.

But I think there’s potentially a bigger
issue here. Another factor shaping the results of the Green Rankings has been
our conscious focus on today’s giant companies, which inevitably forces a
concentration on incumbent businesses, business models and technologies—rather
than on potentially disruptive ventures at the edge of today’s economic system.
There are clearly pitfalls in this approach.

True, there’s nothing wrong with focusing on
incumbent companies when the rules of the game are clear and change is moving
along broadly predictable trajectories. But I don’t think that’s where we now
find ourselves. Far from being in a longish recession, we are headed into an
era of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. And every
time that this happens, many incumbent companies fail. Simply put, the next
decade could see an intense weeding out even of some of the companies at the
very top of the latest Newsweek rankings.

Increasingly, I believe that we are going to
have to look in rather unusual places to find the future. As science fiction
author William Gibson put it: “The future is already here—it’s just not very
evenly distributed.” So a week or so before Newsweek published its 2011 Green
Rankings, my company, Volans, and global ad agency JWT launched a follow-up
report to 2009’s The Phoenix Economy, this one called The Future Quotient, and
focusing on pioneers in seriously long-term innovation. You can take our beta
version of the Future Quotient test here, thanks to our collaboration with
MindTime Technologies, Inc.

It would have been very hard to predict the
future of the aerospace industry when watching the Wright Brothers wobble
fleetingly into the air above the sand dunes at Kittyhawk, but that’s the
nature of our task now in terms of identifying the pioneers of a profoundly
different—and more sustainable—global economy. Perhaps we should let the green
dust settle a little, but let’s not wait until 2021 to do this again: how about
a ranking of emerging green disruptors for 2012?

Source: www.thedailybeast.com and www.volans.com