Is breakthrough capitalism the future of corporate sustainability?

Friday, 22 August 2014 00:01 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

The father of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), John Elkington, will take the stage in Colombo in just two weeks’ time, but as per his own admission – very few business have yet integrated People, Planet and Profit for value creation. For Elkington, the future lies in breakthrough capitalism – a call for business to get involved in shaping the world fit for a population of nine billion by 2050: “It’s part of a longer journey – and an opportunity to sketch a roadmap for our future,” he says. The world authority on corporate responsibility, John Elkington, will be in Sri Lanka on 1 and 2 September on an invitation from telecom service provider, Dialog Axiata PLC, which will host an exclusive CEO Forum featuring Elkington together with the United Nations Global Compact Sri Lanka Network on 1 September, followed by a public forum in collaboration with the British Council the next day. The forums – titled ‘The Breakthrough Challenge: Leadership for Tomorrow’s (Business) Agenda’ and ‘Tomorrow’s Bottom Line & the Power of Unreasonable People’ respectively – will delve into Elkington’s new vision towards 2050, in addition to discussing the critics of the TBL approach argue that it is too difficult to find relevant data and metrics to determine whether a particular project truly contributes to sustainability. “If CEOs are accounting for sustainability issues in their core business, why are we experiencing escalating pressures on our environmental, economic, political and social systems? Essentially, it is about rebuilding the status quo and transforming it into a ‘future quo’,” Elkington says. He argues that status quo capitalism lacks imagination and ambition. That there is a design fault within it and also those factors linked to it such as mindset, behaviour, culture, economics and technology” Breakthrough capitalism is a much broader and evolutionary theory than the original TBL formulation, based on the projection that the next 15-20 years will see more change in markets and business than we have seen in the past 50 – or even 100. It s a global call to action for corporate leaders to “reboot” capitalism through radically re-envisioning their business models. With his TBL thinking, John Elkington helped corporates change the way they think of value creation, of the life cycle of products, and of the rights of a growing spectrum of stakeholders, in some cases as yet not born. Elkington will share more on ‘The Breakthrough Challenge’ in Colombo in a matter of weeks, as Sri Lanka gains this exclusive opportunity to tap into the latest thinking of a key sustainability guru. Founding Partner & Executive Chairman of Volans (2008 to date) also Co-Founder of SustainAbility (1987-2008, where he remains a non-executive member of the Board) and of Environmental Data Services (ENDS, 1978), John Elkington is a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development. A 2009 CSR International survey of the Top 100 CSR Leaders placed Elkington fourth after Al Gore, Barack Obama, the late Anita Roddick and alongside Mohammed Yunus. Elkington is based at Volans – a think-tank and consultancy in London, UK – working with corporates, government and the investment community to drive market-based solutions to “the future’s greatest challenges”.