The Who, The What and The How

30 Jan 2008 – John Elkington

As the summit wound down, Elaine and I headed back to Zurich for a meeting of the advisory board of Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes. They had just launched The Sustainability Yearbook 2008 in Davos – and they see sustainable development as on a roll. “In 2007,” say Sustainable Asset Management CEO Reto Ringger and PricewaterhouseCoopers CEO Samuel DiPiazza, Jr. in the Yearbook’s preface, “the visionary idea voiced in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 moved a little closer to becoming business as usual.”

But, to hijack an old saying, it’s often not a case of what is being said but who is saying it and how. At this year’s World Economic Forum annual meeting, twenty-one years after we founded our fledgling company SustainAbility, the S-word was everywhere. And, not surprisingly, there were some who fretted that the language and much of the agenda were being hijacked. But this year was the first one where I genuinely felt that our issues were shot through a majority of the sessions. The number of sessions with environment in their title, for example, had jumped 70%.

In terms of the ‘who,’ though, NGOs were present in distinctly smaller numbers this year, reflecting a conscious decision to return Davos to something more like the status quo ante the great era of anti-globalisation. Those that were there continued to make their voices felt, but their refrains are also now being taken up by CEOs like Neville Isdell of Coca-Cola and Peter Brabeck-Lemathe of Nestle. Neither company is widely seen as a sustainability pioneer, but at times such people almost seemed to jockey for position as they announced their commitment to tackling issues like water supply. (This, incidentally, looks set to be a key feature of the Davos agenda in 2009.)

The final statement, too, spoke of the need for “a new brand of collaborative and innovative leadership to address the challenges of globalization, particularly the pressing problems of conflict, terrorism, climate change and water conservation” (see here). But I was also struck by the way a different set of voices began to surface this year and by the way that the ‘how’ question is now being tackled.

Taking the second of these first, there is a growing interest at the Forum in engaging the wider world through online environments like Second Life (which was very much in the spotlight here last year) and, this year, through rapidly evolving social networks like Facebook (whose founder, 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, took part for the first time) and YouTube.

In terms of more traditional media, this was first year where I was invited to attend the Wall Street Journal private dinner where Journal editors convene a small group to distil the essence of the meeting. It hopefully breaches no confidence to report that once we had done the tour-de-table the WSJ team commented that what had emerged was the most diverse, Hydra-headed agenda in their experience. Among the snaking heads of the beast that now stalks the global economy, in addition to those outlined in WEF’s concluding statement, are the growing risks of recession and of protectionism.

As someone who has argued for well over a year that we are headed into a recession, and that it would be significantly deeper and protracted than most people expect, I can’t really say I was surprised by the nature of this year’s concerns. Indeed, the Societe Generale news only seemed to confirm that we should have had a recession a couple of years back and that the continuing boom conditions, which Davos 2008 had been intended to celebrate, allowed a bunch of financial idiocies to proliferate. Still, adopting an ecological metaphor, just as the long-term health of some ecosystems depends on fires or other cycles of natural destruction, so our global economy needs a regular round of recession and – in times of profound change – creative destruction.

Given the forces breaking loose in the outside world, there was plenty of media comment about the amount of champagne being downed by those on the mountain. In fact, one of the moments that sticks in my mind from the WSJ evening was when we entered the room just as one or more bottles of champagne exploded, sending a cascade of shattered flutes across the carpet and coating the front of one woman’s black and silver evening dress in hissing foam.

Having been almost deafened last year by the Google party, this year we decided to devote ourselves to quieter conversations, where you could hear the person you were talking to. And among the people who I found most interesting, in addition to those already mentioned in earlier entries, were Jerry Linenger of Circle of Blue and Craig Venter of Synthetic Genomics.

Linenger, as you’ll find if you visit the Circle of Blue website, is a retired astronaut and (a highly unusual mix) cosmonaut, having spent 132 harrowing days in space aboard the space station Mir. He survived an out-of-control spacecraft tumbling through darkness, low oxygen, the worst fire ever to occur in space and a language barrier with fellow crewmembers who spoke only Russian. Besides his involvement with Circle of Blue, Linenger is a wonderfully effective motivator for international audiences, such as last year’s World Economic Forum’s ‘New Champions’ meeting in Dalian, China, which is where I first met him.

Talking to such people, who have operated at the very edge of human existence and knowledge, has been one of the greatest privileges of my life in this space. And the conversation in Davos this year left me even more convinced that we are on the verge of a new era in our field.

If I had to pick just one person out of the Davos fray this year as a symbol of the emerging order, it would be Craig Venter. I have been reading his wonderfully engaging and insightful book A Life Decoded as I have flitted around the planet in recent weeks. And it is in the nature of Davos that I got to talk to him a couple of times. If you haven’t visited it yet, take a look at the Synthetic Genomics site. It’s also well worth visiting the linked J. Craig Venter Institute site, particularly their research on environmental genomics.

Just as Darwin embarked on the Beagle in the nineteenth century to find the keys to the secrets of life’s history, so Venter is doing in the twenty-first, aboard his yacht Sorcerer II, with a weather eye to life’s future. Clearly, there’s no way of knowing which of all the initiatives spotlighted at the annual meeting will both survive and reach meaningful scale, but I asked Dr. Venter to put me in touch with his people who are working on the scaling of solutions – and am waiting in eager anticipation…