Sustainability guru and triple bottom line inventor John Elkington – and member of the select band of 100 Global Sustain Ability Leaders – can always be expected to raise eyebrows and lift spirits. This time he asks: Among the gloom and doom, does a spark in positive coverage of innovation and enterprise in business media mean we’re headed for a breakthrough? He would like to think so and so would we. Read More

By John Elkington with Susie Brown for Guardian Professional (31 August 2012):

According to business media, where is the world heading?

While much of business media is filled with doom and gloom, positive coverage of innovation and enterprise is breaking through.

Does a spark in positive coverage of innovation and enterprise in business media mean we’re headed for a breakthrough?

Many moons ago, megatrends guru John Naisbitt analysed print media to get a sense of where the world was headed. In the dog days of August, in the spirit (but not style) of Naisbitt, we decided to buy every business magazine we could lay our hands on – tearing them apart as we hunted for evidence on whether coverage in key media sees us heading towards one of two scenarios: breakdown or breakthrough.

Breakdown is the 100% negative scenario. A world in which early experiments and enthusiasm fade in the face of wider incomprehension and resistance to change. Our businesses, cities and economies overshoot ecological limits, bringing the planetary roof down on our heads.

And then there is the breakthrough scenario, which increasingly shapes and informs our own agenda. This assumes that, with the usual ups and downs and ins and outs, the trajectory of our societies and economies is pointed toward a very different set of outcomes – in fields as disparate, but still intimately interlinked, as population growth, pandemics, poverty, pollution and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Cutting across both main scenarios, there are change-as-usual initiatives.

These are often worth having, but fail to address the nature and scale of the challenges we now face. The assumption here, reinforced by the relative failure of this year’s Rio+20 summit, is that political leaders, investors, and the global C-suite proceed at a dangerously relaxed, incremental pace. There are plenty of projects designed to boost efficiency and effectiveness, to satisfy and even exceed customer needs and wants, but the need for system change is largely ignored.

So out we went, prowling through newsagents and grabbing armfuls of magazines as we travelled across Europe.

We devoured business magazines such as Bloomberg Business Week, the Economist, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, the Grocer, the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Money Week, the New Economy, Wired and World Finance.

We also pored over mainstream newspapers such as El País and Le Monde; news magazines such as New African, Newsweek, New Statesman and Time; policy journals and magazines such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and New Internationalist; design magazines such as 3D World; and general interest magazines including American Scientist, Dazed & Confused, Intelligent Life, Monocle, New Scientist, Rolling Stone, Surface and Wallpaper.

A quick-and-dirty analysis showed a striking pattern, which won’t come as news to anyone who thinks the media only report the bad stuff: themes linked to a range of breakdown scenarios dominated many of the publications.

Typical stories focused on the civil war in Syria, self-immolations in Tibet, banking scandals in the UK, zero growth in the French economy, the worst year for forest fires in Spain (at a time when fire services are being cut back as part of the national austerity drive), Rolling Stone’s astounding piece by Bill McKibben on the “terrifying new math” of climate change, the coming pensions crunch as populations age, and online piracy. To name but a few.

In contrast to the profusion of breakdown stories, change-as-usual solutions seemed to be significantly less well represented. No surprise, perhaps, given that things such as corporate social responsibility, sustainability reporting and stakeholder engagement have gone mainstream and so aren’t particularly newsworthy. That said, the middle ground still shows signs of considerable innovation and creativity, with both articles and ads featuring eco-celebrities, including sustainability focused fashion designer Eileen Fisher.

Particularly striking was the sheer amount of advertising for electric vehicles: Nissan and its LEAF; Audi with its e-tron, “the future of electric mobility;” and the BMWi offering to place you in what its manufacturer calls “the state of sustainability”. Just as in the early 80s every new car had to be a four-wheel drive, in 2012 it seems it has to be sustainable.

And it was slightly weird, in parallel, to see the way the green waves have been spreading to companies in different parts of the world, particularly where they advertise in western media. Take Hyundai in the Week. “Think everything isn’t linked together? Think again,” the company says, promoting its own branded form of eco-efficient mobility, Blue Drive. “Like ripples in a pond,” the ad notes, “everything we do affects the world around us. That’s why Hyundai is dedicated to the development of sustainable, eco-friendly vehicles.” The last line: “Because together, we can turn the smallest ripple into a cleansing wave.”

Hmmm. That’s likely to be a breakthrough only if you believe the answer to our access and mobility needs is a personal automobile, whereas a system-level breakthrough might involve urban design, public transit systems or, at the very least, novel car-sharing schemes. Fully in the breakthrough space, by contrast, is Fortune magazine with its wildly positive story on Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard and the cooperative business movement (the New Internationalist).

At a time when it is increasingly clear that we need to open out the focus from individual companies and their supply chains to wider market dynamics, and ultimately to the cultural context, it was interesting to see one of our favourite business magazines, Fast Company, spotlighting what it calls the League of Extraordinary Women, some of these innovators dealing with breakdown challenges, some active in change-as-usual settings (albeit with higher ambitions), and some explicitly aiming for breakthrough.

We also found a fair amount of coverage of the growing power of civil society in countries such as Japan and China, the repercussions of the Pussy Riot trial in Russia, and the emergence of high-octane NGOs like the Black Fish Network.

But what to do if you want to breakthrough but are stuck in an incumbent business? Professor Bob Eccles and his colleagues give advice on how to create a sustainable company in the MIT Sloan Management Review. The leaders of sustainable companies, they conclude, are different because they take a long-term view; have a clear direction in mind; are more willing to tolerate risk; and are more knowledgeable about sustainability themes.

Overall, what struck us in the breakthrough zone was that, almost regardless of where we looked, positive coverage of innovation, enterprise and entrepreneurs has been going through the stratosphere. One of the most striking examples of the trend was Surface magazine’s coverage of Nike’s zero waste strategy. (When asked for current examples of breakthrough initiatives, we often point to the sportswear industry’s Roadmap to Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals.)

We have already covered a fair amount of ground with our Breakthrough Capitalism program, with a first progress report now posted, but as we move into the next phase one key objective will be to help boost the coverage of breakthrough innovation, entrepreneurship, finance and policy-making.

There’s an open invitation to join us for the next magazine-ripping session, sometime next year.

John Elkington is executive chairman of Volans and non-executive director at SustainAbility. His latest book is The Zeronauts: Breaking the Sustainability Barrier (Earthscan/Taylor & Francis). He blogs at www.johnelkington.com and tweets at @volansjohn

Susie Brown is an On Purpose fellow and is a key member of the Volans Breakthrough team.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk