Business as Unusual
John Elkington celebrates the linked legacies of Robert Davies, Paul MacCready and Anita Roddick.
Rare events cluster, the statisticians insist. Why? Well one reason, the psychologists explain, is that the human brain is a pattern recognition organ. Whatever the reasons, my mind has been searching for sense, meaning, in recent weeks as the news has successively filtered in about the deaths of three pioneers in the field of sustainable business. Each had a significant impact on the way I view the agenda and the challenge. And it seems to me that their passing may well signal a new era in the process of adapting capitalism to the twenty-first century.
So first a few words about each of them, then a few thoughts about what they might have said about the advice they might have given us about facing up to the challenges we face in the coming decades—and about the urgency, to use the title of our latest report, of ‘Raising Our Game’.
The three are Robert Davies (founding Chief Executive Officer of the International Business Leaders Forum, created with the Prince of Wales) died on August 18, Paul MacCready (founder of AeroVironment) on August 28, while Anita Roddick (founder of The Body Shop International) died last night, September 10. There have been a number of obituaries for Robert, but I liked the one in The Times. I also picked up Paul MacCready’s death from The Times, in the stack of newspapers waiting for me when I got back from China. But there was also an interesting one in the Los Angeles Times. And as for Anita, well you can take your pick—she has been covered everywhere, though I found the coverage in today’s Financial Times particularly interesting.
If I think about when I first came across these three, the listing would run in reverse order. I can’t remember when I first bumped into Anita, but I covered her work in my 1987 book The Green Capitalists[1]. And I quoted her to the effect that, “There is something magical about small companies run by people whose thinking was forged in the Sixties. You sit down and ask not only how the business should be run, but also what should be done with the profits.” That was a perspective we both shared. At the time, I recall, many people thought that she was fairly new to the game of green capitalism—a field that was only just beginning to get into its stride. She wasn’t. As she noted, “Although some people may think we are recent converts, the reality is that these concerns were always there.” The clincher: “The Body Shop dates from 1976 and we were already featuring Greenpeace’s anti-whaling campaign in 1977.” (As a sidebar, in 2003 SustainAbility was asked to carry out a third-party assessment of one joint initiative involving The Body Shop and Greenpeace, focused on that year’s World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Although, inevitably, there were frustrations on both sides, it was interesting that The Body Shop were the most critical of progress on the issue, which was climate change, while Greenpeace were playing a much longer game.)
In 1988, Anita did the foreword for The Green Consumer Guide, which I wrote with Julia Hailes and which sold a million copies in some 20 editions around the world. We were building on what she and Gordon had done at The Body Shop—and what groups like Friends of the Earth had done in areas like tropical timber products and CFCs. “Don’t just grin and bear it,” she encouraged readers. “As consumers, we have real power to effect change. We can ask questions about supply and manufacture. We can request new or different products. And we can use our ultimate power, voting with our feet and wallets—either buying a product somewhere else or not buying it at all.” How much more urgent that power has become with today’s globalising supply chains.
Anita helped us as we grew SustainAbility from 1987, but there was nothing special in that—she helped legions of people. Some I knew, like Rory Stear of Freeplay Energy, but most I didn’t. Unsurprisingly, she features in a new book, which I sent in to Harvard Business School Press just a few days ago. The title: The Power of Unreasonable People. Many thought her unreasonable, even crazy. But that’s typical of leading social and environmental entrepreneurs, people who change the world.
And the ‘business as unusual’ title I’ve adopted here? This was the title of her 2005 book—and also, I’m pleased to say, a section title in my 1997 book Cannibals with Forks (Capstone Publishing), which promoted the concept of the triple bottom line—and once again used Anita as a striking example of someone who had already been operating in this spirit for decades.
Yes, Anita could get up people’s noses, castigating old-style capitalists as “dinosaurs in pin-stripes,” and yet selling The Body Shop to L’Oréal, in which one of her least favourite companies—Nestlé—had a stake. But what a woman, what a heart, what a sense of humour, what a wonderful trouble-maker! And what a hole she will leave in all our lives.
It is my great misfortune that—unlike Anita and Robert, who I knew for years—I never met Paul MacCready. He featured in my 1985 book, Sun Traps: The Renewable Energy Forecast (Pelican Books). Ever since, I have meant to try to track him down at AeroVironment, the company he founded in 1971. The reason I covered him in Sun Traps was his extraordinary aircraft, the Solar Challenger.
“Poring over their phosphorescent radar screens in the St Leonards battery, high above the white cliffs of Dover” I wrote, “the coastguards policing the world’s busiest shipping lanes must often rub their eyes, not because of eye strain, but in sheer disbelief. Each year, the signals they transmit to shipping include reports on the increasingly bizarre attempts being made to cross the English Channel by those to whom the idea of buying a ferry ticket appears impossibly straightforward.” In a single week in 1981, I noted, “the Channel was crossed by two blind water-skiers, eighteen firemen in a rowing boat, seventeen swimmers and by eight men from Essex who traveled on a raft powered by, of all things, a combine harvester.”
But that same year, MacCready’s latest concoction, the Solar Challenger, flew the Channel, powered only by the sun. It took five hours and 23 minutes to take the crossing, but speed wasn’t the uppermost consideration in his mind. Pressed on why he had embarked on this latest challenge, MacCready struggled to answer. “People ask what practical value is flying a plane on solar power,” he mused. “I say it’s about as practical to fly a plane on solar power as it is with human power. I can’t think of anything practical about it.” Like Freeplay Energy’s Rory Stear, who markets a wide range of wind-up items, from torches to radios, MacCready was fascinated by human-powered technology. And, adding to the bemusement of the Channel traffic controllers, Bryan Allen pedaled MacCready’s Gossamer Albatross across the Channel in just two hours and 49 minutes. Although I never met MacCready, I did see the Gossamer Albatross hanging from the ceiling of my favourite museum, the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., a city that is now also home to SustainAbility’s U.S office.
Just as critics challenged Anita’s waltzing with major corporates like L’Oréal, so we should at least be a little nervous of AeroVironment’s activities in the defence space, as with unmanned aircraft systems. But, ever the optimist, I also see the extraordinary potential of MacCready’s later brain-children, among them Helios, a distinctly twenty-first century mutation of the Solar Challenger. A solar-powered aircraft able to stay aloft in a circling mini-orbit in the stratosphere, the idea here is that Helios could serve as a platform for providing cellular, video, and/or broadband wireless Internet access from what, in effect, would be equivalent to a 12-mile high tower. The implications for Third World development are obvious.
And Third World development was a long-standing passion of our third pioneer, Robert Davies. I last saw him at an IBLF event on social entrepreneurship at Kew Gardens, where I chaired the discussion (see July 5 post). Had the challenging task of helping six social entrepreneurs to tell their stories, more or less in sound-bites, and then three people from business to respond, all in 55 minutes. But typical of Robert and IBLF that they were making the attempt to bridge between social entrepreneurs and mainstream business, something SustainAbility is also embarked upon with our Skoll Program. And how typical of Robert, too, that after the Kew event he followed up and was planning a session where we were to discuss how our two organisations could work more closely together on a range of themes.
As to what these three extraordinary people would have said of the challenges that face us in the coming decades, I suspect their advice would have converged around a number of priorities and trajectories. Twenty years after the Brundtland Commission introduced the term sustainable development to the political mainstream, they would all have agreed on the central importance of sustainability. They would have converged on the need for a central role for business and financial markets in driving the necessary processes of political, economic, societal and—ultimately—civilizational change. And they would have been of one mind, I suspect, in terms of the role that individuals must play in catalyzing and driving these great processes of change provoking, building, directing and—in some happy cases—surfing the great waves of change.
As one such surfer, over decades, I profoundly thank these three—and all those who shaped and supported their own journeys. In the new book (The Power of Unreasonable People) that Pamela Hartigan and I just sent in to Harvard Business School Press a couple of days back, we build our entire thesis around something playwright George Bernard Shaw once said: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” whereas “the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable men.” And women, as Anita’s career so clearly demonstrated. But another thing I know they would all have agreed on would be the need for our collective movements, communities and organisations to raise their respective games.
Our sympathies and best wishes go to all who knew these three extraordinary people, as family, friends and colleagues.