In this profile in Ethical Corporation magazine—which calls him “CSR’s leading thinker”—Elkington restates his view that regenerative business models could create at least $12 trillion in opportunity and add up to 380 million jobs by 2030.
John Elkington, CSR thought leader
Elkington has some very cogent things to say about the shocking changes in geopolitics last year, from the Brexit vote to today’s change of US president.
But maybe the most intriguing thing is this little snippet:
…He is travelling to Germany to meet with Covestro, a spin-out from the German chemicals giant Bayer, which has just opened a plant using CO2 in place of polymers in mattresses and upholstered furniture.
So why not turn carbon dioxide into a salable product?
Insatiable curiosity about the world has always powered my writing and speaking. I wanted to know more about this. A few seconds of searching led me to Covestro’s page about this technological and environmental breakthrough. While the writing shows distinct signs of a non-nartive-speaking author, the information is quite cool.
Stumbling across this article on bicycle-powered-everythings (bicimaquinas) in Guatemala—grain mills, water pumps, nut-shellers, blenders, and more—I’m reminded once again of the key question to ask if you want to spark innovation while keeping an eco-friendly focus on using fewer resources.
Too often, we focus on the tool: asking questions like “how do I get a new tractor?” But what is a tool? It’s a means of accomplishing a task! So the real focus should be on the task: “How can I get this done?” Asking “how can I get harvestable plants” might lead to plowing with draft animals—or to no-till farming techniques.
Green entrepreneurs (or frugal ones) refine that question. It morphs into “How can I accomplish this with the fewest resources?” Money and time are resources. So are raw materials, energy, water, plant seeds, animals, and so forth.
The people at Maya Pedal, the organization profiled in the bicimaquinaarticle, understood this. They looked around and realized there were a lot of junk bikes out there that could still do plenty of useful work, just not as transportation. They’ve come up with 19 different models so far.
Bicycle technology is cheap, accessible, understandable, and versatile. In fact, my latest book Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World mentions a number of creative bike technology uses, even including a bike-powered trash hauling company. I also know of a fitness center that harnesses the energy of their bike-pumping clients to light the room.
We can ask this question in many situations—and it creates abundance. Asking “how can I power my electronic devices easily and cheaply without negative environmental consequences” might lead to developing something like the amazing Blue Freedom frisbee-sized hydroelectric plant (no dam required).
This blender is one of 19 different types of bicimaquinas—bike-powered equipment—developed by Maya Pedal in San Andrés Itzapa, Guatemala
Back when laser printers were retailing for $7000 and I had only a dot matrix, I asked myself how I could offer laser quality to my clients without spending that kind of money. That led me first to rent time on a nearby laser printer for a dollar a page, and later—when I spotted a remaindered model for $2500—to organize a co-op of four local business owners who chipped in $700 each to buy the printer and a sturdy stand for that very heavy machine. Since I organized the co-op, the printer lived in my office.
Amory Lovins, founder of Rocky Mountain Institute, asked himself how to build a really energy-efficient house that could fund the energy improvements out of capital savings. All the way back in 1983, he built a near-net-zero-energy luxury home that didn’t need a furnace or an air conditioner (in the snowbelt outside Aspen, Colorado, where the biggest industry is skiing). I have a detailed study of Lovins’ work in Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, by the way—including the energy retrofit of the Empire State Building that saves $4.4 million per year in that building’s energy bills.
What’s the second question you might ask? How has nature already accomplished this task? But that’s an exploration for another time.
Thanks Heath Dannis, @dannis_heath for sharing the great story about bicimaquinas.
As someone who is decidedly NOT a fan of the annual Black Friday shopping orgy—and who participates instead in celebrating Buy Nothing Day (like Black Friday, always on the day after US Thanksgiving), I just love this!
Patagonia had pledged to donate all of its worldwide online and offline revenues on Black Friday to environmental causes.
The outdoor clothing maker previously announced it would donate 100 percent of its global retail and online sales on Black Friday. It says it expected to reach $2 million in sales, but instead generated five times more. Patagonia says the fundraiser “attracted thousands who have never purchased anything from Patagonia before.”
Mind you, that’s not the profits from its $10 million in sales. It’s the whole amount, the gross revenue. Nothing set aside for product costs, operating costs, or anything else. I hope this generates many loyal new customers and lifelong fans. May the company’s generosity be a source of continued abundance, and maybe next year they can repeat and do even better.
All I can say is BRAVO and WOW!
Personally, I’ve been a fan of Patagonia for decades. I even profile the company in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. I didn’t happen to hear about this ahead, but might have actually moved from participating in Buy Nothing Day to making an online Black Friday purchase to support the environment. That would not have felt like the crass commercialism that seems to fill every moment of airspace in November and December, and feels especially extreme on Black Friday.
[Editor’s Note:] I read John Engel’s article in the Daily Hampshire Gazette (my local newspaper) and immediately went to his website to ask his permission to reprint. It’s highly topical and speaks so strongly to something that I’ve felt for a long time but never got around to writing about, and that’s why I chose to share it with you. I generally enjoy his column (which you can read at his site—link is at the bottom) but this is the first time I was moved to republish one.—Shel Horowitz, “The Transformpreneur”]
As published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, October 26, 2016
As the presidential race approaches Election Day, rhetoric – from candidates, pundits and voters alike – has reached a fever pitch. My kids Zoe and Adam, at ages 10 and 7, are befuddled by both the hype and some of the more disturbing messages that have reached their young ears.
Filtering both the extreme and mundane, what continues to hold my attention is one of the election season’s most persistent themes – a steady beat of cries that the country is in disastrous condition and only getting worse. Some voices from this chorus are calling for a return to life as it was in the 1950s.
While I was not alive, let alone a father in the 1950s, my historical understanding of that era provides me with some insight about what my experience of fatherhood might have been like, in that most laudable decade of modern America. Granted, fathers probably were not writing columns about the experience of fatherhood, and since Al Gore had yet to invent the internet there were no Daddy Blogs – or Mommy blogs, for that matter – to peruse on smart phones, while children frolicked on play dates.
But had I been writing such a column in the 1950s, here are some important topics I may, or may not have, considered.
I might have expressed concern over the dangers families faced while traveling in automobiles, since protective child safety seats had not yet been developed and adult seat belts were not yet standard equipment.
Father and child (in the pre-safety equipment mindset) – Photo by Felipe Daniel Reis
Revolutionary as it was, I would not have been writing about the 1955 patent of a cutting edge chemical known as BPA, which for decades thereafter poisoned infants and children through contaminated baby bottles and Sippy cups until the FDA banned its use in these products, in 2012.
While it would have been socially unacceptable, I might have written about the customs of the day that relegated fathers to roles of provider and protector, denying them the opportunity to nurture their children and share equally, with mothers, in domestic chores and homemaking.
I would have been more than remiss, had I not written about the trauma experienced by people of color who were both routinely denied basic civil rights and subjected to extreme violence when trying to simply create a better life for themselves and their children.
I certainly would have written about the plight of women and mothers — and by extension families — who at the time had relatively little political power, limited professional opportunity, and were subject to persistent sexist norms. Though I probably would not have written about the domestic and sexual abuse women experienced because, as a country, we did not even begin seriously addressing these heinous crimes until the 1970s — and later.
And it would have been beyond taboo for me to write a column about the challenges parents faced when helping their gay, lesbian or transgender children triumph over discrimination and intolerance.
So, while I am not immune to experiencing fear-based nostalgia, calls for returning to bygone eras remind me that we humans often yearn for something we don’t have — and even harder for something we fear losing — all the while neglecting to appreciate what we already have gained. And this leaves us ill equipped for the hard and necessary work of identifying goals and actions that will guide us to a future that unites, not divides, us.
So as a father — in 2016 — I both celebrate, and seek to build upon, the gains we have made since the 1950s, regardless of who is president, because for me, hope trumps nostalgia.
My friend Kathleen Gage posted a quote from Albert Schweitzer about people sometimes reacting with hostility or obstruction to your attempts to improve the world. And then she said.
So if you are doing good for praise and accolades, you are doing it for the wrong reasons and it is no longer a good deed. It is an act of manipulation. Do good because you are called to do good and for no other reason.
I’m going to gently disagree. I agree with the first two statements. But I disagree about “for no other reason.” I’m guessing that really what we have is different definitions of the concept of a calling—that mine is a lot stricter than hers. And that’s because, a few times in my life, I’ve experienced a genuine calling: a feeling that I was put into this place at this time to do something very specific—and that I had to do it.
We do good for lots of other reasons than because we are called to: to show your children what is possible. To make conditions better for others. To improve the lot of a group facing oppression that you don’t belong to–or that you do. To right an immediate wrong. Not all of these rise to the level of a calling. But all of them (and far too many more to list). I became an activist at age 12 and remain one. Five times, I have felt that calling—to:
1. Do what I could to stop the Vietnam war
2. Move the country away from a reliance on nuclear power (maybe the worst technology ever invented)
3. Protest publicly when the US bombed Libya (and I was the *only* protester on the first day, but by a few days later, there was a whole group of us out in front of the courthouse)
4. Save the mountain two miles from my house (with a massive outpouring of community support, won that one in just 13 months!)
View of the Mount Holyoke Range, showing the land saved by Save the Mountain in 2000.
5. My current mission of showing the business community how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—not through guilt and shame, but through enlightened self-interest
Yet these are only the tiniest fraction of thousands of actions I’ve taken for social change. The rest were not a “calling” but simply the right thing to do. They were not done for self-aggrandizement. If that had been my goal, I would have taken far faster and easier paths (like the Internet millionaire meme). Some of them were tiny and easy, like signing a petition. Others consumed years of my life, like the time I spent building what we now think of as the LGBTQ movement or my involvement in changing the politics of the city I lived in for 17 years, and the small town where I’ve lived for the past 18. Most were somewhere between, like serving on committees for grassroots groups or local governments.
That said, I gleefully share that my current calling is the most exciting and meaningful work I’ve ever taken on.
When have you felt a calling? What was it for and what was the result?
Last night, I signed a petition created by Rep. Joe Kennedy about gun control. The page gave me the option to share on Facebook, and I did. Then I went to bed.
I was pretty horrified to check my page this morning and see my share that said “Stand With Rep. Joe Kennedy” and had a huge picture of him. Not a word about gun control showed up in the Facebook preview.
So I took it down and posted this note:
To those who might have wondered why there was a huge campaign ad for Rep. Joe Kennedy on my page last night. I had just signed a petition he originated on gun control, and wanted to share it. I didn’t check how it posted on FB. I felt tricked and betrayed enough to take the entire post down. Let him get signatures some other way.
This was a classic bait-and-switch. In fairness, Kennedy probably delegated this to some social media intern and most likely wasn’t personally involved. But if I lived in his district, this would make me look for someone else to vote for, because I don’t like being manipulated and cheated.
Only after I took it down did I think about blogging about this feeling of betrayal. If I’d decided to blog before I instinctively took it down, I would have grabbed a screenshot to post here. Instead, you get the logo of the ultimate-bait-and-switcher: Volkswagen.
Aging Volkswagen showing VW logo. Photo by Daria Schulte.
VW, of course, preyed upon environmentalist car owners to sell them a low-emission vehicle—but fudged the test results and was really selling highly polluting cars. This is costing the company billions, and it isn’t over yet. The state of Vermont just filed suit against VW two days ago. Vermont, tiny as it is, has the second-highest per-capita concentration of VWs in the country (after Oregon)—precisely because environmental consciousness is extremely high among its residents. In fact, a year ago, a group of those Vermont residents already filed a class-action suit against Volkswagen.
I used to think my parents and in-laws were overreacting with their continuing pledge never to buy Volkswagen s because of the company’s involvement with the Holocaust. After all, the people who made those brutal decisions are long dead or in nursing homes. But after this scandal, I can’t think of any reason why I would ever trust the company again.
Bottom line: in business and in politics, bait-and-switch has no place in ethical marketing.
Someone asked me today what advice I’d give to someone just starting out. If someone had given me these four bits of advice in 1981 when I was just starting out, I’d have been on the success track a lot faster.
Be green and ethical—and willing to proclaim this to the world
Delegate early, especially those things you’re not good at–but keep checks and balances in place
Don’t reinvent the wheel. An off-the-shelf solution may be better and cheaper than reverse-engineering something
Recognize the REAL opportunities that provide first-mover advantage–and walk away from those that aren’t there yet
Here’s what they mean to me, and why I picked them:
Transform
First, there’s the social transformation I want to bring about by transforming the business world. I want to end the biggest crises of our time, and I see the business community as the best lever. Appealing to enlightened self-interest—the profit motive—I want to make the bottom-line business case that just as going green saved costs and increased revenue, so too can addressing big picture issues like how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. When I first started talking a great deal about going green as a profit booster, around 2002, people looked at me funny. Now, it’s common business wisdom. I think the same will be true eventually for creating profitable products, services, and a company DNA that address these issues at their roots.
Second, the transformation in my own business. I see consulting, speaking, and writing on how business can bring about that transformation (and how any particular business can develop and market the right social change products and services for its own culture and markets) as a major part of my business in the coming year, and for the rest of my working life. While I’ve been thinking about these things for many years, have written books and given talks about it, I still have to find the markets that are willing to pay for what I know I can do for them. I go into the year with two possible markets that are quite different: small entrepreneurial and startup companies, and large, established corporations. I’ve developed two different websites for these audiences, because the agenda, methodology, timetable, and price structure will be very different.
All of this is a natural outgrowth of the green business profitability work I’ve done the past several years—but while it builds on the past work, it is different. I’m confident that I can make it work, but am still a bit fuzzy on the how. Which brings us to the second word:
Win
My original choice was “succeed,” but then I went to Chris’s post. He chose “win” as one of his words, and I think it’s like success, but stronger. It can also work as both a noun and a verb, as can my third word.
Also, I feel that on many levels other than the material, my life IS a success. I made a conscious decision about 30 years ago to have a happy life, and I’ve made good on that: I love the marriage I’m in, the house and community where I live, the places I visit, the local organic fresh food I eat, the books I read, the performances I watch, and so on. That decision rippled through all areas of my life. As early as 1985, it was the difference between feeling angry and frustrated and cheated when I had to spend an entire day of precious vacation mailing packages back to myself, as the old me would have—and thinking, even before I was married, about the wonderful story I’d have to tell my grandchildren.
But there are two areas where I need to replace that general feeling of success with a clear, strong victory: the economic underpinning of my business (which has now had two low-producing years in a row while I retooled for the transformation)…and the deeper impact of my work on the world.
The problem with having many interests and multiple skill areas is that it’s really hard to focus. When everything is fascinating, how do you choose? Yet, to succeed—to win—you have to close some doors so you can pass through the doors that remain open.
This is the lens: I’m using to help me choose what to focus on:
Over the past few years, I’ve worked hard to overcome a case of what my friend Noah St. John calls “success anorexia.” I’ve looked at my money/success blocks, and overcome a number of them. But, watching my own failures doing things that have worked really well for others, I realize there’s still some hidden piece, deep in my subconscious, that courts failure. I need to find that piece, hold it up to the light, make an alliance with—and redirect—the parts of it that act out of love, excise the parts that are rooted in self-hatred, and have a clear win. This will be difficult, because I don’t even know what it is that’s holding me back. But it’s essential.
Once that hurdle is overcome, I want to look at how to broaden my impact. I have a great message and great examples of how we can solve these big problems. But for that to really change the world, I need to find tens of thousands, maybe millions of people who are open to that transformational message. None of my books have ever sold more than a few thousand copies. My blog and social media audiences are limited. The number of people who hear me speak in a year is much too small. The second big win I need is to get myself in front of a far larger number of people. That this will help with selling more books, doing more paid speaking to larger audiences, and getting more consulting gigs—in other words, contributing to the win I’m looking for in my own blocks—is an extra benefit. At age 59, I have a limited time to make a big impact on the world. I want to leave a legacy of creating deep transformational change, because I love this planet. And that’s a nice transition to the third word.
Love
Love of others and of self, love of the ecosystem and the planet. In my youth, I was a very angry, loud activist who felt utterly betrayed by governments and corporations and wasn’t good at finding common ground or seeking alliances with those who thought or felt differently from me. Over the years, I’ve learned how mistaken I was—starting all the way back in the 1970s. Some might say I’ve softened but I don’t see that way. I’ve learned to approach with love, respect, and an understanding that almost all of us want a better world; we just have different ways of understanding how to bring it about.
Love is often about deep listening. It’s also about seeking a higher good for a greater number of people, without sacrificing the needs and desires of others. It’s about building the communication skills to allow environmentalists and Tea Partiers to discover their common ground (something I talk about very specifically in my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World).
Going deeper, this is what allows even the most hate-filled opponents to go past the hurt and build a better world for everyone. Nelson Mandela was a master of this. So were the people who formed the various Arab-Israeli joint projects such as the magnificent Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom community in Israel, where Jews and Arabs study and work together—the name, in both languages, translates as “Oasis of Peace”—or Combatants for Peace, which pairs Arab and Israeli former combatants to travel around and speak about cooperation.
It’s easy to love those who agree with you. It’s much harder to love those you might blame for the death of a loved one or the loss of your land. I have tremendous admiration for those involved in these sorts of cooperative efforts and I want to be more like them.
2016 is going to be a GREAT year for the green world, and the green business world in particular. I thought so even before two developments this past week that make me even more optimistic:
Add in the widely spreading understanding in the business world that going green the right way slashes costs, boosts revenues, and generates profit, and it’s not surprising that 2016 will be a year of great progress. (If you don’t yet see the connection, order a copy of my new book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. It’s got hundreds of examples ranging from Fortune 100 to solopreneurs.)
Expect to see lots more high-level research, looking for holistic steps that create big jumps in energy efficiency and big reductions in waste. Already, we’ve made amazing technological leaps within just the past couple of years. I’ll name two among hundreds:
Approaches like biomimicry—modeling how nature solves complex problems—will let sustainability ripple through the whole culture, relatively rapidly.
Electrical storage (a major restraint on renewable energy growth) has made huge strides, including the vaunted Tesla battery systems.
All is not sunshine and roses, of course. The Act of Congress that extended the clean-energy tax credits also opened up the door for some of the worst kind of carbon-intensive development: exporting the dirtiest types of fossil fuel energy. Public pressure—activism in the streets, in the boardrooms, and in the halls of legislative power—must hound every proposal to put in fracking, use or transport tar-sands oil, build unnecessary pipelines, etc.
One key meme has to be “honor the commitments we made at COP21.”
If the business community, especially, makes it clear that it expects the US to do its part in meeting the targets, and that exporting fossil fuels across oceans will work against this, that open door may stay largely unused. But it will take vigilance.
One not-so obvious trend
The above predictions are relatively mainstream in the green world, even if they appear startling to those outside of it. Let me conclude with a much more “out-there” proposition:
Businesses will go beyond merely going green. Sustainability will be seen as a first step. More and more companies will be going beyond sustainability to create a world where hunger and poverty turn into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.
Why? Because they will see enormous profit opportunities, and because it feels so much better to oneself, employees, neighbors, suppliers and other stakeholders to see making the world better as a key success metric. How? I wrote a whole book to answer that question.
A similar international meeting (in Bonn, Germany)
After the failure at Copenhagen a few years back, I didn’t have big hopes for this year’s event. Yet, I’m beginning to think the big Paris climate change conference known as #COP21 may actually accomplish some real change.
Oddly enough, my optimism is rooted in something I would have seen a few years ago as a fatal flaw: that the results will be based in voluntary, not mandatory, compliance.
Why? Because:
We can’t GET mandatory compliance. In the US, that would require a yes vote in each house of Congress, or even worse, the 2/3 Senate support required to adopt a treaty. But even as far back as Kyoto, US electoral politics had become a toxic swamp of attack-dog partisanship. No climate change bill with teeth is going to pass Congress any time soon. And without US (or China’s) participation, any agreement would be useless.
The US and China have already agreed to take climate seriously, and have negotiated their own agreement. Weaker than I’d like, but a heck of a good start, and one that seems to have helped apply the brakes on China’s mad rush to coal (the worst scenario for averting climate disaster).
New technology makes it easier to do more with less, use. our resources far more effectively, and solve engineering problems with biological thinking (for example, letting bridge engineers study spiderwebs). We understand now, for instance, just how much energy and carbon we can save by going for deep conservation.
Early discussions about whether the world should agree on a 1.5 degree Celsius vs. 2 degree C cap in global temperatures compared to what existed before the Industrial Revolution means we’ve finally gotten past the question that’s been holding us back for so long: why do we need to contain rising temperatures in the first place? For the first time, the world is pretty much in agreement that it has to be done. Not just scientists, this time, but governments, too. Climate deniers (other than in the US Republican Party leadership, apparently) are now as marginalized as environmental activists were 20 or 30 years ago.
I could keep going, but you get the message—we can do this!
