Having heard President Clinton speak a few times while he was President, it was inspiring to have a conversation with him on Saturday (July 2) after his unscheduled presentation at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Hannah Jones, VP of Sustainable Business and Innovation at Nike, had the most memorable lines among dozens of speakers at two recent conferences, the “Ceres Conference 2011: Igniting Innovation, Scaling Sustainability” and The Conference Board’s “Corporate Citizenship and Sustainability” gathering in Washington, DC
Corporate responsibility is to the management of a company what patient safety is to the administration of a hospital. If you are not doing it, what are you doing?
Difficult to manage, impossible to avoid, and the endless driver of opportunity, driving and managing change has been at the core of my work going on three decades.
When I began to unhook from SustainAbility in 2008, after 20+ years, to co-found Volans, Jonathan was working with the US end of SustainAbility — and sent the London end of the Volans team a large cardboard box of multi-colored felt rocks, which initially I couldn't make head nor tail of. I thought he was mad, or overly American.
But I have to say that, over time, those felt rocks have become a central feature of the Volans culture, thrown by team members at other team members (or guests) on the slightest provocation. That aside, he's a consummate professional, creative collaborator, skilled communicator, and keen intellect—and I am delighted both to have had Jonathan as a colleague and to now count him as a friend.
John Elkington
Founding Partner & Executive Chairman of Volans, Co-Founder & Non-Executive Member of the Board of SustainAbility