Green Swans: The Coming Boom In Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

Author:John Elkington [Elkington, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781732439139
Publisher: Fast Company Press
Published: 2020-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 6: Eight Properties of a Future-Fit Society

Source: Future-Fit Foundation

The idea of the “break-even point” comes directly from the financial world. The original term signals that a company’s revenues and expenses have balanced out during a specific accounting period.8 It implies that the firm did not lose anything but equally did not earn anything either. By extension, the term extra-financial breakeven refers to the point where the negative and positive impacts of a business are balanced.

Whereas breaking even would be seen as a failure in most mature businesses, in the sustainability field it would be a major break-through—the first, critical step toward a truly responsible, resilient, and regenerative strategy and, over time, economy. The underlying logic shaping the Future-Fit approach is illustrated in Figure 7, with the four boxes explaining key lessons learned during—and about—the process of moving toward greater fitness for the future.

What does this mean in practice? How does the process look in a company that is moving from left to right in Figure 7? The best way to find out is to take a look. A good place to start is the Danish healthcare company Novo Nordisk.9 This takes us back into the world of the triple bottom line, despite the product recall I announced in 2018. To address any uncertainty this may stimulate, let me tentatively allow that the triple bottom line remains useful, indeed central, as long as it enables and spurs the push toward global system change—and is set in the context of what we might call the three Rs: Responsibility, Resilience, and Regeneration.

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