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John Elkington has had a big influence on the development of more sustainable business practices. His online journal offers an inside track for outsiders.
Most weblogs that cover corporate social responsibility topics are more like scrapbooks than diaries. Not John Elkington’s. Since 2003 the founder and chairman of the SustainAbility consultancy has been keeping an occasional online journal of his doings, his thoughts and above all his musings. In lesser hands this would be a yawn. But Elkington is an accomplished writer, and whether he’s whale watching, people watching, or reviewing the history of barbed wire, he invariably has something arresting to say.
And someone interesting to say it about. The fascination of this weblog, apart from the pictures that enliven the narrative, is the insider’s view offered on the individuals who have helped not just to shape, but to start, the debate on sustainable business practice. One day the pinstriped campaigner is musing on a chance encounter with Al Gore on the street, the next swapping stories with Sir Geoffrey Chandler, founder of Amnesty International’s UK Business Group, who describes Elkington as ‘a wandering albatross dropping fertility-generating guano wherever you land or hover’. There are times when this weblog reads a bit like Hello magazine for sustainability advocates – no bad thing in an often colourless field. Also like Hello, Elkington’s enthusiasm can become wearing. An occasional dose of scepticism wouldn’t go amiss.
Then there’s his happy knack of being at the best celebrity parties – or at least roundtables and masterclasses – rich feeding grounds for a thought leader who likes to blog. At Davos earlier this year, his fourth visit, he is ‘stunned by the seismic shifts in the agenda’ and notes that ‘the anti-globalization protesters may have been less in evidence, but their issues were ubiquitous.’ Economist journalists, we learn, ‘privately expressed their dismay’ at the magazine’s recent anti-CSR polemic. A few weeks later, reflecting on Carly Fiorina’s ousting, he recalls his visit to Hewlett-Packard’s boardroom. Her departure ‘sure as hell won’t help the wider corporate responsibility agenda in Bush’s America’.
Elkington says his weblog is ‘part platform for ongoing projects, part autobiography, part accountability mechanism’. Don’t be put off by this accurate, but boringly worthy, description. It is, quite simply, ‘a chance to rummage around in [his] brain’, as one visitor says in the online guest book. That makes for the most interesting insider’s view of all.
Most weblogs that cover corporate social responsibility topics are more like scrapbooks than diaries. Not John Elkington’s. Since 2003 the founder and chairman of the SustainAbility consultancy has been keeping an occasional online journal of his doings, his thoughts and above all his musings. In lesser hands this would be a yawn. But Elkington is an accomplished writer, and whether he’s whale watching, people watching, or reviewing the history of barbed wire, he invariably has something arresting to say.
And someone interesting to say it about. The fascination of this weblog, apart from the pictures that enliven the narrative, is the insider’s view offered on the individuals who have helped not just to shape, but to start, the debate on sustainable business practice. One day the pinstriped campaigner is musing on a chance encounter with Al Gore on the street, the next swapping stories with Sir Geoffrey Chandler, founder of Amnesty International’s UK Business Group, who describes Elkington as ‘a wandering albatross dropping fertility-generating guano wherever you land or hover’. There are times when this weblog reads a bit like Hello magazine for sustainability advocates – no bad thing in an often colourless field. Also like Hello, Elkington’s enthusiasm can become wearing. An occasional dose of scepticism wouldn’t go amiss.
Then there’s his happy knack of being at the best celebrity parties – or at least roundtables and masterclasses – rich feeding grounds for a thought leader who likes to blog. At Davos earlier this year, his fourth visit, he is ‘stunned by the seismic shifts in the agenda’ and notes that ‘the anti-globalization protesters may have been less in evidence, but their issues were ubiquitous.’ Economist journalists, we learn, ‘privately expressed their dismay’ at the magazine’s recent anti-CSR polemic. A few weeks later, reflecting on Carly Fiorina’s ousting, he recalls his visit to Hewlett-Packard’s boardroom. Her departure ‘sure as hell won’t help the wider corporate responsibility agenda in Bush’s America’.
Elkington says his weblog is ‘part platform for ongoing projects, part autobiography, part accountability mechanism’. Don’t be put off by this accurate, but boringly worthy, description. It is, quite simply, ‘a chance to rummage around in [his] brain’, as one visitor says in the online guest book. That makes for the most interesting insider’s view of all.
Alistair Townley
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