Business should be one of the driving forces behind tackling climate change and world poverty, but that requires learning from innovators already at work
SustainAbility, which I co-founded early in 1987, is preparing to celebrate its 21st birthday. Reversing normal procedures, we are sending a birthday message to well-wishers that evokes an attitude we are supposed to have left behind in our teenage years: "Be unreasonable."
Having worked with major companies for over three decades, I need no persuading that mainstream business and financial institutions have central, crucial roles to play in tackling such challenges as climate change, human rights and poverty. But I agree with the likes of [Harvard academics] Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen that corporate responsibility is a necessary—but insufficient—condition for tackling such challenges at scale.
This calls to mind the "business as unusual" line I used in a 1997 book and which the late Anita Roddick memorably used as the title of her 2005 account of her entrepreneurial journey.
I have absolutely no compunction in calling Anita unreasonable, in multiple dimensions. Given that she wrote the foreword for our million-selling Green Consumer Guide as long ago as 1988, this may seem profoundly disloyal, but it isn't. It signals why so many of us held her in such deep respect and affection. "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world," as playwright George Bernard Shaw put it, whereas "the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Or woman.
So a growing proportion of my time since 2000 has been spent tracking down such people—and understanding what drives them, how they do what they do and what we can all do to help them. The lessons learnt can be found in a new book from Harvard Business School Press, The Power of Unreasonable People, which I have co-authored with Pamela Hartigan of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Being unreasonable, we conclude, is a process by which older, outdated forms of reasoning are jettisoned and new ones conceived and evolved.
Our work in this area has also been helped immeasurably by the award of a three-year, $1m grant from the Skoll Foundation, established by eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll. That said, anything like global sustainability will be impossible without the engagement—and radical restructuring—of business and markets. As Skoll's ex-colleague and co-billionaire Pierre Omidyar put it, "I have learnt that if you want to have a global impact, you can't ignore business. I don't mean corporate responsibility programmes, but business models that provoke social change."
Time and again, in periods of extraordinary volatility, disruption and change, it turns out that the best place to look for clues to tomorrow's revolutionary business models is at the fringes of the current, increasingly dysfunctional system. So that's where we have headed. The journey has taken us from the mainstream to the margins, from the alpine meetings of the global elite in Davos and convenings of social entrepreneurs in places like São Paulo to the festering waste dumps of Bangladesh. In the process, we believe that we have found clues to the ways in which all businesses, large or small, corporate or entrepreneurial, will increasingly operate in tomorrow's markets.
There are an estimated four billion low-income consumers, constituting a majority of the world's population, and they make up what is increasingly called the base of the (economic) pyramid, or BOP—with BOP markets now estimated to be worth some $5trn. But how can mainstream business, financial and political leaders best come to grips with these emerging trends in value creation? Three answers spring to mind. First, they can experiment with new business models. Second, a can-do attitude is much more likely to succeed than don't-do, won't-do or can't-do mindsets. And, third, it makes sense to study and work alongside can-do innovators and entrepreneurs already hard at work on developing real-world solutions.
John Elkington is co-founder of SustainAbility and a founder of Volans Ventures. Click here to read an extract from his new book, The Power of Unreasonable People.
