Sea Change Radio Co-Hosts Bill Baue and Francesca Rheannon speak with green business guru John Elkington about the new Phoenix Economy report. And Sea Change members join in the conversation with Elkington in the second half of the show for the first Sea Change Radio RoundTable. In this feature, we host a sustainability expert fielding questions from Sea Change members — this time featuring Calvert Social Funds Founding Boardmember and Ben & Jerry’s Boardmember Terry Mollner, Ener-G-Save Executive Director Karen Ribeiro, and Common Good Finance President William Spademan.
Corporate Watchdog Radio co-hosts Bill Baue and Francesca Rheannon speak with John Elkington, author of The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World. Elkington explains how social entrepreneurs use business strategies, such as scaling and replicability, to help solve social and environmental problems. He also discusses how this book finishes his trilogy, starting with Cannibals with Forks from 1997 that coined the term “triple bottom line” for measuring social, environmental, and economic progress and The Chrysalis Economy that predicts a 30-year period of creative destruction for business. Elkington founded the UK consultancy SustainAbility in 1987, which helped define the term “sustainability,” and recently received a grant to support its work on social entrepreneurship from the Skoll Foundation and also received a Fast Company Social Entrepreneur Award.
Corporate Watchdog Radio co-hosts Francesca Rheannon and Bill Baue attended the Summit on the Future of the Corporation in mid-November in Boston, a gathering to consider a fundamental re-design to integrate sustainability into the corporate structure. There, Rheannon interviewed two prominent thought-leaders: Michael Marx of Corporate Ethics International and the Business Ethics Network, and John Elkington of SustainAbility, who’s been called the dean of the corporate responsibility movement. Rheannon speaks with Marx about how NGOs are winning battles but losing the war when it comes to changing corporate behavior. NGOs and advocacy organizations can better motivate corporations to be more sustainable by re-framing economic issues within a moral context, Marx contends. Elkington flips this formula on its head, and advocates for going beyond moral suasion to showing companies how their economic self-interest coincides with sustainability.
This show continues CWR’s series which also includes interviews with Summit organizers Allen White, Majorie Kelly, Peter Senge, and Joe Laur.