Volans Team: John Elkington

John Image

  1. What do you wish it said about your working life and mission on your passport?

    In my wildest dreams, Ambassador for the Future.

  2. You're a citizen of where?

    My passports are British. I was born in a small mill cottage by a stream west of London, with fish swimming in the waters below. By the time I was 10 I had lived in England, Northern Ireland and Cyprus, and travelled to countries like France, Israel and Italy. Since then my work has taken me around the world, repeatedly. I used to say that my sense of citizenship went something like this: 1. Earth (perhaps because of reading the Eagle comic as a child and thinking I was an Earthling), 2. London (my home since 1970), 3. Europe (a work in progress), and 4. England (source of one of the most extraordinary languages in history—read Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue).

  3. Education in a nutshell?

    Pretty fractured till age 10, though 3 years as a notional Protestant in a Catholic convent school embedded in a Protestant community in the 1950s certainly left an impression. Sent away to school, first Glencot, a prep school near Wookey Hole, Somerset (headmaster eventually committed to an asylum) and the Bryanston, near Blandford Forum, Dorset (a total liberation). Abandoned an Economics course at university in 1968: this was the University of Essex, the world was in flames and economics seemed a little remote from emergent reality; then a degree in Sociology & Social Psychology; then an M. Phil. in Urban & Regional Planning at UCL (1972-74). I still sometimes find myself wishing that I spoke fluent Economics.

  4. Your working life?

    I am very much a product of my genes, times and experience. Among the people who have shaped the way I think and work (apart from my family) are/were John Roberts at TEST (1974-1978), Bernard Dixon at New Scientist (1975-1978); David Layton and Max Nicholson at Environmental Data Services (ENDS); Nigel Tuersley at Earthlife (1983-1986); Jonathan Shopley at John Elkington Associates (1983-1986); Julia Hailes and Geoff Lye at SustainAbility (1987-ongoing); Liz Knights at Gollancz (1987-1993); and Pamela Hartigan, Sophia Tickell and other colleagues at Volans Ventures (2008-ongoing).

  5. Things you are proudest of?

    My family; my environmentalism (starting with raising money for WWF while at Glencot, aged 11, in 1961; Max Nicholson many years later reminded me why I got started—a special edition of a major newspaper that he and colleagues at WWF had produced, which I read in the school library); my 17 books to date, particularly The Green Consumer Guide (Gollancz, 1988), Cannibals with Forks (Capstone/Wiley, 1997) and The Power of Unreasonable People (Harvard Business School Press, 2008); Environmental Data Services (ENDS: co-founded 1978); SustainAbility; some of the terms I have coined, including environmental excellence (1984), green consumer (1986) and the triple bottom line (1994); and, in the moment, Volans Ventures.

  6. One thing you wish you could change in your history?

    They say failure is a learning opportunity, but some failures never leave you. The Earthlife Foundation going down in flames in 1986 has always struck me as a tragedy, even though I helped trigger the process. Like a neutron star, it seeded much of the thinking that successor organizations—including SustainAbility—have got credit for.

  7. Most recent job?

    Founder & Chief Entrepreneur at SustainAbility; before that Chairman for 10 years (1996-2006); before that Director from 1987. Behind that, however, lie many other responsibilities and affiliations, among them Visiting Professorship at Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility at Cranfield University’s School of Management.

  8. Something about the family that have to put up with all of this?

    My parents, Pat and Tim, have supported me through thick and thin. On the nuclear family front, I met Elaine in 1968, a pivotal year in so many ways, with 2008 marking 40 years together. Our daughters, Gaia and Hania, have been a constant joy, inspiration and surprise.

  9. Why Volans?

    With SustainAbility hitting its 21st anniversary in 2008, it was time to think about new horizons. Working with Pamela Hartigan, particularly on The Power of Unreasonable People, set new thought-trains running. And a parallel motivation was the waves analysis I have been doing since 1994, with increasingly urgent evidence suggesting that we are heading into a fourth wave, focusing on scalable entrepreneurial solutions to the great global divides.

  10. Your potted vision for Volans 2010?

    Survival will be a great thing! Beyond that I see Volans emerging as a high-powered, highly effective and multicultural team, able to move easily between worlds—very much in the spirit of the flying fish (or Pisces volans), the original inspiration for our name. I hope that we will be a an increasingly powerful magnet for talent, a world class incubator of new thinking and initiatives, and a strongly preferred partner for people and organisations committed to deep-running political, economic, social and environmental change. With the extraordinary team we are starting with, we are least start with a strong hand.

John Elkington is a Volans Founding Partner and Director. A co-founder of SustainAbility in 1987 (Chair from 1995 -2005), he is seen as a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development. In 2004, BusinessWeek described him as “a dean of the corporate responsibility movement for three decades.” John has authored or co-authored 16 books, including 1988’s million-selling Green Consumer Guide and Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business (1997), and has written or co-written some 40 published reports. He is currently writing a book on social entrepreneurs with Pamela Hartigan of the Schwab Foundation, The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, to be published by Harvard Business School Press on February, 2008, and working closely with The Skoll Foundation on a $1 million, 3-year field-building program in relation to social entrepreneurship.

John is a Visiting Professor at the Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility, Cranfield School of Management. He also chairs The Environment Foundation and the Aflatoun Impact and Policy Analysis Steering Group, sitting on advisory boards for the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, a new Cleantech Fund developed by Zouk Ventures, Physic Ventures, LP, 2degrees, Business in the Environment, and Instituto Ethos, Brazil. He has just stood down as Chairman of the Export Credits Guarantee Department’s Advisory Council, to allow more time for new ventures. He is also a member of the WWF Council of Ambassadors, the Evian Group Brain Trust, the Tomorrow's Global Company Inquiry Team, the Cambridge Research Advisory Group for the University of Cambridge Programme for Industry (CPI), the United Nations Global Compact Cities Programme (UNGCCP) International Advisory Council, and the International Judging Panel for the DHL YES Awards, Asia and an advisor to the Fast Company Social Capitalist Awards. John is a Faculty member of the World Economic Forum. Personal website

© Volans Ventures 2008 | All rights reserved