Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism

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John asked me about whether I was hopeful about humanity’s potential to actually have a positive and regenerative impact. This is very eye-opening book, where the reader is taken on a shock start, by an economist updating his work. Whilst the timing of the Anthropocene is highly debated, humans are clearly having an outsized impact on the environment and driving a number of environmental trends in a negative direction globally. John shared how Volans is about to launch a ‘Green Swans Observatory’ to track and document such hopeful developments, people and movements.

Once we have received all suggestions from our partners we will create a shortlist, and those chosen will be the inaugural candidates for the Green Swan Observatory.

He is the founder of several businesses and thinktanks advocating corporate social and environmental responsibility and he has widely published on green consumerism and sustainable development. This is how John Elkington describes his view on the era that we as a species recently entered, the Anthropocene.

All four still exist and the last two were respectively the second and first certified British B Corporations in the U. We must also ponder how to help some of the world’s “lame duck” industries, which otherwise will exert every sinew to slow down the necessary changes to transform their mindsets and business models. At his 70th birthday event, John said: “next 10 to 15 years are going to be by far the most exciting, and by far the most challenging, and by far the most dangerous of my entire working life. According to Elkington, Green Swans boast “exponential progress in the form of economic, social, and environmental wealth creation”.And that’s exactly the effort that John and the Volans team have been engaged in for the past 18 months, bringing together a wide range of experts through the Tomorrow’s Capitalism Inquiry to figure out where we go from here. Finally, as per Elkington’s words, he is a short-term pessimist, but “a qualified long-term optimist”, a characteristic embedded in his writing and that evidently runs like a common thread through the book. They become super wicked problems when time is running out, there is no central authority, those seeking to solve them are also causing them, and current policies discount the future irrationally. After a comprehensive discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each of these methods, the report finds that while each prudential pillar is useful in addressing climate risk, regulatory capital requirements are by far the most impactful.

John notes that people also now talk of Gray Swans: issues “which are predictable and may have been predicted, but which when ignored for too long erupt in ways that can rock the world on its heels. So, please step up and play your part in this transition by submitting your suggestions via the forms below . A real life example comes from the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, a front runner in regenerative business and a true Green Swan, according to Elkington. Elkington explains that this process starts by coming to terms with the fact that a business does not operate in a vacuum, but can only prosper when society prospers, which in turn depends on a healthy biosphere. That having said, in a way, Elkington did a great job in collecting the stories of dozens of leaders and visionaries in the realm of sustainable development.Early on, many Green Swan innovators and entrepreneurs tend to be dismissed out of hand, very much like the Ugly Duckling in the fairy tale. Black Swans are problems that lead exponentially to degenerative breakdown (They are sometimes said to occur gradually, then suddenly. Most people would agree that we as a species should make radical changes in the way we live, to safeguard a sustainable future. There is a fair bit of repetition and a certain amount of publicity for companies that the author founded. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Is the idea meeting an established need, for example by solving an obvious and immediate pain point for the target user? Book, Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism, by John Elkington, Fast Company Press April 2020.Unfortunately, the new rules for selling outside the UK mean we can no longer sell and ship books to countries outside the UK. A Green Swan delivers exponential progress in the form of economic, social, and environmental wealth creation. Its quirky appearance, however, means that its potential evolution into a Green Swan can be hard to detect early on. Green Swans draws on Elkington's firsthand experience in some of the world's best-known boardrooms and C-suites. Over the years, Elkington has also served on over seventy boards and advisory boards, advising companies, non-profits and policy-making organizations.