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What you'll learn
Guest: John Elkington, Serial Sustainability Entrepreneur
Transcript:
SAIF: On today's episode, we're excited to have John Elkington. John is a serial sustainability entrepreneur and has been an observer and collaborator of corporate sustainability since the 1980s. He's credited with coining the terms "green growth" and "triple bottom line," and has been called the dean of the corporate sustainability movement by BusinessWeek.
John and I explored the current ESG downturn and lessons from previous cycles, how companies and countries are adapting, and what makes a high-performing sustainability professional today.
I usually introduce myself as having been in sustainability for about 20 years — though my early career started on the activist side and then in politics, and I only really got involved in corporate sustainability around 2015. John, in our last conversation you mentioned you'd already been through several cycles by that point. What you were doing in the 80s and 90s prefigured a lot of what people are getting into now. And even the terms you're credited with coining — green growth, triple bottom line — presaged this idea of money and impact going hand in hand. What was that like from the inside?
JOHN: At the time it was very hard to see where the whole field might be headed. I had an enthusiasm for the world of business that went back to the 50s and early 60s — because of my father's background I was interested in aircraft, and therefore in the companies that made them. As a child I'd write to American aerospace companies and receive these packages of information back. I suspect some of them thought I was trying to build my own air force.
When I started approaching business in the 70s, writing for New Scientist, I found it almost impossible to talk to companies about safety, health, or the environment. They made the standard assumption that if you were an environmentalist, you were a communist. That wasn't a joke — it was simply how they thought. It took me about eighteen months to get through the front door. But once I had, things opened up fairly quickly.
I still remember Peter Melchett, who was running Greenpeace at the time — this was probably the late 80s — saying to me: "It's fine if you want to try and engage business, John, but the only way forward is to pin them down with regulations so they can't move an inch." My response was: if business is important to sustainability, you can't simply pin them to the ground like Gulliver and hope they'll be creative. You've got to inspire them, motivate them, incentivise them. I still believe that.
SAIF: One thing I find interesting in today's narrative is this idea that sustainability can be good business — though I think it's easy to overstate that. I see the market in roughly three categories. There's maybe 10% of companies that can genuinely capture real value through early-mover sustainability positioning — a Tony's Chocolonely, a Lush, an Oatly. Then maybe 20–30% of fast followers who pick up trends and reposition certain brands — Danone, Unilever, some of Nestlé's brands. And then there's a 50–60% of the market that will be regulation-driven, bearing most of the cost and very little of the upside. Does that framework resonate with you, or would you cut it differently?
JOHN: It's interesting that several of your first group are relatively young companies — not 100-year-old institutions like Nestlé or Unilever. I'm somewhat jaundiced at the moment, because even companies with Chief Sustainability Officers are still treating this as something discretionary — something at the edges of what they do, not built into the core of their business model, whatever they might claim publicly.
You're starting to see major companies like Mercedes-Benz backing away from public commitments — in their case, 100% EVs by 2030. I understand why: the market hasn't built as fast as they hoped. But it's a suicide note to their shareholders, because in comes BYD and a wave of highly competitive Chinese EV brands.
So to your question: yes, there's a very small proportion of companies that will genuinely make sense of this agenda because of who they are and how they think. But many companies we currently take for granted — I'd include even Nestlé — may not exist in their current form in ten to fifteen years, given what's coming at them. The component businesses may survive, but not necessarily under the same brand.
SAIF: Would you say a sensible incumbent today should or shouldn't set a science-based target? Absent a forcing mechanism, it's a significant cost to take on, and there's a certain logic to doing what seems reasonable and watching how things develop rather than sticking your neck out further than necessary.
JOHN: What we're seeing is many very large companies arriving at exactly that conclusion — "yes, morally we should do this for future generations, but the markets don't yet dictate it." And particularly with what's happening in the United States right now, with the effective dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency, the trend lines are pointing in a pretty contrary direction.
The danger is that people are treating US policy as indicative of global direction, when at exactly the same time another superpower — China — is racing to control the commanding heights of tomorrow's economy. They've weaponised rare earth minerals and metals. They're so deeply into solar, wind, and batteries that they're radically outpacing the EU and the United States in patents. They're massively competitive in EVs. Add AI to that list. The balance of advantage between the superpowers isn't just shifting in terms of military ambition — it's shifting in terms of their understanding of where tomorrow's economy will necessarily take them.
The problem for many Western multinationals is that they're hosted by countries still operating in the old paradigm. That's partly why, after 50 years of working with individual companies, I've spent the last couple of years thinking: it's still important to work with individual businesses on their boards, brands, business models, and supply chains — but unless we reshape the market dynamics that dictate their priorities, everything else will blow away in the wind.
SAIF: I think what helped the renewable energy transition was the achievement of genuinely competitive economics — and China's push has been driven in part by the logic that greater scale drives better unit economics, and the player with the biggest scale wins. But that dynamic doesn't necessarily apply to all sustainability levers. More sustainable agricultural output, for instance, may not get cheaper at scale — it might just cost more, regardless of volume. Do you see a similar scale-driven power play emerging in sustainable commodities?
[Mid-roll: AltruistIQ]
JOHN: With China specifically, there's a strong geopolitical driver. They can look back at history and see what happened to Japan with the American oil blockade during the Manchurian conflict. China doesn't have large domestic fossil fuel reserves, so in any major conflict it would be vulnerable to energy strangulation. One key driver behind the Chinese government's renewable push has been the imperative to develop domestic energy independence.
There is a first-mover advantage in all of this. The first country to get deeply into these spaces can become dominant for a range of reasons. And the pressure on other countries will intensify as China weaponises more of what it controls — I saw very directly what happens to a just-in-time economy when China decides to halt rare earth exports.
The question is whether other countries can achieve the scale China has in order to drive down the price point of these new technologies. On that, I'm genuinely not confident.
SAIF: Zooming down from the macro to individual businesses — we've seen the massive subsidy regimes of the Inflation Reduction Act, the subsequent backlash, and now we're in this uncertain middle ground. What does this moment create in terms of opportunities for individual players? Are there niches you find exciting? Where would you advise an individual business to focus in this decade?
JOHN: The context I find useful here is my years working in Japan, watching what their Ministry of International Trade and Industry — MITI — did. One of its disciplines was to invest into recessions and economic downturns. When everyone else was losing faith in the future, MITI invested.
I think we're in exactly one of those periods again. Many companies will clutch their heads, cut CSO budgets, and say, "That was an interesting experiment, but let's focus on the real business." And then there will be a cohort of entrepreneurs who go in a completely different direction — whether it's in materials, clean energy, new forms of transportation, or anything touched by the digital age and by AI.
Yes, AI is overhyped. Yes, it has a substantial energy and carbon footprint. We know all that. But when I look at where AI is beginning to be applied — biomolecules, new materials, vaccine development — the stimulus to innovation is profound. Almost any area of the economy touched by the digital world, which is essentially everything, is going to go through an extraordinary set of evolutionary and learning curves over the next ten to fifteen years.
In terms of specific sectors: water, energy, soils, agriculture, food, and nutrition are all extraordinary opportunities. We've seen companies from Walmart to Unilever to PepsiCo to Danone to Nestlé all talking about regeneration. At the moment it's a feeding frenzy around a term. But if you think seriously about the next 25 to 30 years, regeneration — economic, social, environmental, ecological — is the future. There are people beginning to build real business models in that space, and they will require new market dynamics, which means they'll also have to do the politics.
One final point: one of the things we've been pushing large companies toward is the recognition that sustainability is becoming genuinely political. The upside is that it's becoming more legitimate than it once was for companies to lobby in the right direction. There is a huge need for companies to become more politically active — and I think the public will be more supportive than in the past.
SAIF: We've started to see a little of that in the UK nutrition debate, where some of the loudest voices calling for tighter regulation on food ingredients were actually larger corporations.
JOHN: One could cynically say it helps keep barriers to entry high.
SAIF: Exactly — and I think that's a legitimate business case for doing it. On the topic of what's getting shelved in the current political environment: I notice the big casualty is mostly everything other than carbon. The carbon agenda at the large companies I work with is largely unchanged — public targets may be slightly lower, but the underlying work is the same. What is getting shelved is water, the nature agenda, and those hidden regenerative agriculture pilots that never quite get brought to scale. Are we just going to drop all the other stuff and make the problem bigger, then come back to it in a few years?
JOHN: Yes — it will make the problem bigger. My mental model for the next three to five years is a recessionary environment for ESG and for various elements of the sustainability agenda, including parts of the carbon agenda. But all that means is pushed-back and delayed necessary action. When that action comes, it will come faster and harder, and it will knock out some of the players who thought they could afford to wait.
My perspective over fifty years of tracking societal pressure waves — first on government and politics, then on business, now increasingly on financial markets — is that these things go up and go down. But the periodicity between wave peaks is shrinking. We're in a down-wave now, and down-waves are actually when the most innovative work gets done — not when people are swimming in the froth making public commitments. But there is a much bigger wave coming, and it's the one where this agenda goes deeply into the strategic and competitive advantage space.
On shelving water and nature-based solutions: what an idiocy that is. We recently completed the latest round of GlobeScan's global polling of sustainability experts — published as Sustainability at the Crossroads — and one thing that struck me profoundly was how far down the list nature-based solutions had fallen. How idiotic we are as a discipline: if climate is going to be such a challenge to our economies, nature-based solutions is one of the absolutely critical areas we should be investing in and deploying at growing scale. We'll be briefly stupid, then reality will reimpose itself.
SAIF: I'd actually argue nature is more directly correlated with business performance than emissions, at least for certain sectors. If you're a food company, you're essentially buying from nature — the availability of raw materials is a core operational risk. Take chocolate, coffee, sugar, vanilla — all heavily exposed to nature risk, often in monoculture environments. The business case there is actually cleaner and more quantifiable than it is for carbon.
JOHN: Except that you can jump between sources for a while — you can source ingredients from new suppliers and defer the problem. But you run out of room on that game very quickly, and shifting all the logistics that support those supply chains is expensive in its own right.
SAIF: I want to come back to the sustainability function itself, from two angles. First: how do young sustainability professionals survive a down-cycle? It's comparatively easier when you're innovating because you can say "my lead time is three to four years anyway." But if you're looking at your next promotion, what do you actually do? And second: are there any lessons from prior waves that are relevant today?
JOHN: The pushback we're seeing — particularly from the Trump administration — is partly a reflection of the fact that the sustainability agenda has been mainstreaming, and that has started to be perceived as an existential threat, not just by fossil fuels but by anyone sitting on potentially stranded assets.
On prior waves: if you look at the Fortune 500 in 2010, fewer than twenty companies had a Chief Sustainability Officer or equivalent. By 2021 it was over 50%. Most self-respecting large companies now have that role. That institutionalisation will continue — we're herd animals.
But at the same time, you're starting to see CFOs looking at CSO budgets and thinking, "reporting and accounting — that should be part of our realm." Chief Legal Officers are looking at compliance and thinking the same. There is going to be a significant reconfiguration of this space.
I would be nervous about going through an entirely sustainability-specific education from undergraduate through to master's or PhD. There will still be space for that, but as this agenda becomes real, your skills as a chemical engineer, an economist, an accountant — in apparently unrelated but increasingly adjacent fields — are going to matter far more. You'll need to understand the sustainability context and toolkit, but that context needs to sit on top of real technical depth.
If you're just entering this space, my first piece of advice is: be as entrepreneurial as you possibly can right now. Invest your time, effort, and whatever capital you have in things that look high-risk, because the next ten to fifteen years will bring such a convulsive set of shifts across every market. You probably won't become a Zuckerberg or a Gates, but you'll have a remarkable ride, and you'll build skills, expertise, and experience that will be highly saleable if you later choose to return to the large corporate world.
I started in this space when there was no career structure at all. It took my father twenty years to understand what I was doing — it was only in 1998, when The Green Consumer Guide sold a million copies and was suddenly in every newspaper headline, that he said, "Ah, I see what you're trying to do." His values shifted at that point, and he became a different person. That kind of profound value shift is what we'll see more broadly over the next twenty to thirty years — though perhaps not where we most expect it.
Europe, for instance, I think is being left behind. It's producing a great deal of regulation, but in a sense that's an old-order approach to the sustainability agenda. It's not weaponising regulation to create new industries the way it could. It's lost that killer instinct.
SAIF: It doesn't have the killer instinct it once had — it's been blunted. What would you say is the archetype of the best sustainability professional you've encountered? What do they do well, and what are they excited by?
JOHN: I've worked with hundreds of companies and interacted with tens of thousands of people who consider themselves in the corporate responsibility, ESG, or sustainability space — so it's a complex question. But of those I really admire, the leading sustainability professionals share a few qualities.
They can command the attention of the senior people in their business. They are credible, coherent, and curious — continuously looking around corners and beyond known horizons. They get out of the building. They talk to people in Silicon Valley, their Chinese counterparts, communities dealing with water crises in India. They operate by William Gibson's principle: "The future's already here — it's just not evenly distributed." They go to where the future already exists and bring it back.
They also play a critical ambassadorial role. They bring activists and influencers into the company and expose senior leadership to new voices and new ways of seeing the world. At the same time, they build alliances across sectors — trying to bring the voice of business and, increasingly, finance into global governance at a very challenging time, when the multilateral mechanisms built after World War II are largely unravelling.
And finally: they bring on younger people. They recognise this is not an agenda that will be resolved by 2030. It requires new generations of talent, trained the right way, with the right connections — and they invest in that pipeline.
SAIF: I partially agree and partially disagree. Storytelling, convening, being a great ambassador — those are the traditional skills of sustainability professionals, and they're genuinely important. But what I'm noticing an absence of is harder technical skills: data analytics, AI fluency, the quantitative rigour that finance or procurement bring to their work.
Most sustainability professionals are further behind on AI within their organisations than other functions. Sales and marketing typically embrace technology faster. And for a lot of sustainability teams, the AI they use in their personal lives hasn't yet transferred to their professional workflows.
I think there are two ways the reconfiguration of the function could go. Either other functions like legal, finance, or procurement absorb sustainability responsibilities and upskill their own people — or sustainability professionals move into those functions and bring their capabilities with them. If it's the latter, they need to get good fast at what those functions actually do. The bar on data quality and analytical rigour in finance is much higher than in sustainability right now. The bar on driving negotiations and win-win outcomes in procurement is higher. There's a real onus on sustainability professionals who want to thrive in the next few years to manage that upskilling deliberately.
JOHN: We're not disagreeing. You asked me what patterns I'd noticed in people I'd interacted with historically — that's offset in time. And I will say: in recent years, when I visit a company, I'm far less interested in talking to the Chief Sustainability Officer than, if they have one, the Chief Economist — because these people see a fundamentally different world.
On data: I think it's absolutely critical. The problem with most CSOs and sustainability professionals right now is that they're strangulated by reporting requirements. They're cranking the handle, producing information — not always data — that very few people then use to generate meaningful, timely market intelligence. That's a problem we collectively have to crack. I absolutely agree with your analysis. And I think that's what makes this such an extraordinarily interesting next ten to fifteen years.
SAIF: John, that's a fantastic note to end on. We've covered a lot of ground — the macro environment, the big moves by the US and China, where Europe is losing its edge, where the real opportunities lie for innovators and entrepreneurs, and what skills matter most for sustainability professionals at every career stage. I'd love to have you back for a part two in a few months to see how some of this is shaking out.
JOHN: I'd love that. I've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation — let's continue it however we can. Thank you very much.
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