The Power of Unlikely Connections

John Elkington

October 8, 2008

This evening, Alejandro, Charmian, Sam, Smita and I made our way across to King’s Cross from Volans for the launch of the new Hub in York Way, where I’m an Honorary Fellow. In his introduction, Hub co-founder Jonathan Robinson spoke of a core strength of the growing international network of Hubs as being ‘The Power of Unlikely Connections.’ A highlight of his speech was a video of Microsoft Steve Ballmer doing a semi-insane warm-up act for a company conference some years back, in which he proclaimed “I – love – this – company!” Pretty much the same era when Shell Chairman Phil Watts came on stage at a company event wearing an astronaut’s suit. Having had a teleconference with Microsoft today about a session I’m due to do for them in Redmond, Washington State, a couple of weeks hence, I confess I was more than a little uncomfortable. Then bumped into Molly Webb of the Climate Group, we began talking about a report they recently completed on the ICT sector, SMART 2020. She handed me a copy – and noted that Microsoft sponsored the work. Somewhat unlikely connection #1.