The Story Begins
The Early Days
Challenging Times
The Balancing Act
Get Growing or Get Out
The Pace Picks Up
Arriving in America
The Vision Grows
The Odyssey Gains Focus
Where to from Here?

'Activist in a suit' was the headline waiting to be written when Paul Gilding became a corporate consultant. The young Australian's personal reinvention followed back-to-back stints running Greenpeace in Australia and then internationally as Amsterdam-based Executive Director. Gilding had wanted to engage more with the business world to enlist its help in driving a global environmental rescue. Others in the hierarchy of Greenpeace - the planet's number one activist group - were not so ready to embrace the corporation to drive change. Gilding was ousted. He had something to prove.

Days after being forced out at Greenpeace, Gilding addressed a conference of business leaders in Zurich. He spoke as a long-time social change campaigner - but one no longer shackled by Greenpeace correctness circa 1994. His optimistic topic was 'The Role of Enterprise in Creating a Just and Sustainable Society'.

"Business faces the exciting opportunity to redesign itself into being a positive force for society, leading the way forward from the social and ecological crises we presently face," he concluded. "It is an opportunity to release the enormous positive human energy we need if we are going to turn the situation around.

" The student radical turned global activist had become enchanted with the potential for business to save the world, highlighting its power, its adaptability and its positive culture. The big question, then and still, was whether business was ready to take up the challenge?

After taking stock of his life, Gilding and his partner Michelle Grosvenor established the firm that is now Ecos Corporation, initially in partnership with a British-based consultancy group, Paras. Their first office was their new living room in the Sydney suburb of Birchgrove, half a world away from Amsterdam. It was 1995. The Internet was just starting to attract serious attention beyond the cloistered worlds of academics and computer nerds. The 'new economy' was still in gestation. The United Nations climate change summit in Japan's ancient city of Kyoto was still two years off. Around the developed world the environment had slipped down the political priority list after the fervour of the late 1980s and culminated in the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992.

In Australia, as Gilding hung out his new shingle, business was lagging well behind North America and Europe in terms of environmental awareness and commitment to eco-efficiency. As for global warming, Australian industry appeared to be in fully-fledged denial. Sustainability - and the notion that corporations should focus on the community's social and environmental values, as well as hard-nosed financial value - was nigh on invisible on the national corporate agenda. While there was talk about post-Rio commitments to ecologically sustainable development, ESD, everyone had their own ideas about what this meant. Environmentalists stressed the 'E' for ecological sustainability, while corporations pushed the 'D' for sustainable development.

Few companies, if any, were prepared to walk the talk. In this climate, Paul Gilding was trying to make the leap from being commodore of the protest boat fleet to boardroom insider. Who would hire him? Would anyone? And what would he deliver?

For the first few years the fledgling business often struggled to sell the sustainability message. Post-living room, the headquarters became a former church in an inner city suburb, with a big snooker table in the back room. Staff came and some went, with key figures including expatriate Americans Graeme Mawer and Robin Roy, and South African ex-banker Mark Lyster, who became a pioneer of Ecos' ongoing quest to build the business value case for sustainability. The new company's own balance sheet ebbed and flowed.

There were a number of significant clients, though rarely enough, and some notable successes. Ecos helped Western Mining Corporation to produce the Australian mining industry's first major environment report, and also guided Placer Dome Asia Pacific's emergence as a sustainability leader in gold mining. It conceived the idea of making the Athletes' Village for the Sydney 2000 Olympics - called the Green Games - into the world's largest solar suburb. It also created the blueprint for an historic forest peace deal in Queensland, involving the cooperation of industry, government and environmental groups to move logging out of old growth forests and into plantations by 2025.

During 1997 Paul Gilding looked overseas and began to foster his most significant and most enduring client relationship - with the DuPont Corporation in America. In DuPont he saw the potential to work towards a truly sustainable corporation in the 21^st century, creating an 'icon of achievement' that would guide and encourage other corporations to change as well. For Gilding, DuPont's 'miracles of science' corporate slogan and its vast scientific resources make it a company that can create solutions for problems, rather than just create problems. He bonded closely with Dr Paul Tebo, DuPont's safety, health and environment supremo, who has spearheaded its goal of zero waste, zero toxic emissions and zero workplace safety incidents. The 'hero of zero', as Tebo has been dubbed, is a leading global figure in sustainability circles.

Gilding's own international profile was growing too. One of the keys to the Ecos modus operandi is his personal ability as a communicator. Being heard and being noticed were two of the great challenges that confronted the fledgling consultancy. But Gilding found a voice that resonates with business leaders in North America, Europe and Australia. He built trust that despite his radical origins, he could both maintain high-level confidentiality and give the advice corporations need to hear, as opposed to what they liked to hear. His advocacy for sustainability is couched in language that business can relate to and his prescriptions for action can engage even business leaders. In the frontline of the battle to convert business to sustainability, that ability to translate is crucial. It means converting ideas into words, words into action and passion into pragmatic progress.

Two years after he founded Ecos Corporation, Gilding was awarded Tomorrow magazine's Environmental Leadership Award. The small, but influential global environment business publication applauded a dynamic young newcomer to the consultancy business, having found him to be 'both convincing and an easy man to like'. "You can't deny business its roots," explained Gilding to the magazine. "It has to have growth and profit to succeed against its competition in society. If you want to make it do something different, then make it more profitable for business to do good things or less profitable to do bad things."

As his profile with business grew, Gilding had to contend with tensions in the world of activism that he had left behind. The former head of Greenpeace International working with a company like DuPont - once a contender for the title of 'world's biggest polluter' - was always going to be a provocative image, regardless of the progress DuPont was making towards embracing sustainability issues. And working with other clients like mining companies and the Queensland timber industry inevitably raised questions about Ecos Corporation's credibility. Gilding admits to times of doubt. "Our first crisis was in 1997," he says. "There was a lot of financial pressure and morale was challenged by people leaving. There was a sense that it just was not going to work. There was little or no respect for us with the NGOs. We had lost friends and we came from that community."

Then, at the start of 1998, the mood changed as a new recruit came on board. Alan Tate, Australia's most respected environmental journalist, left his high profile job with the national television broadcaster to join Ecos Corporation. "Both NGOs and business thought it was important that Alan had joined. He was a climate change expert and a highly credible figure. From a business and morale point of view it was a very powerful and significant point for us in our development."

When Tate wanted to leave journalism to engage directly in the battle for sustainability, he found that his options were very limited. "At that time Ecos Corporation was really one of the few places in the world to go," he says. Tate had covered the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and then watched the international enthusiasm evaporate. At the report-back on Rio+5 in New York in 1997, he witnessed world leaders admit that environmental problems had escalated in the face of international inaction and then fail to agree on a better way forward.

"I decided that governments would not lead us towards the solutions," says Tate. "That it was too much to expect that governments alone would create the fix. At the same time, there were clear signs that business was seeing opportunity at long last in solving environmental problems. Ultimately, business does have more self-interest in the solutions than governments might," he says. "And business can take a long-term view. Becoming a global brand like a Nike or a McDonald's is fraught with danger. But becoming a global brand in partnership with the global community provides both strength and security." There are dangers, however, and leadership requires courage. "We frequently advise companies that if you seek leadership in this area that you have to do extraordinary stuff," says Tate. "That frequently requires you to do new things - set precedents, create icons and do things that are memorable. That also requires bravery."

Understanding the challenges and opportunities arising out of the transition from the old, polluting industrial economy to a new, cleaner knowledge economy is a core area of Ecos Corporation's client work. This is taking the firm further and further away from its environmental origins, and deeper into a broad role advising on business strategy to integrate social, environmental and economic priorities. Ecos Corporation has identified six drivers of the new economy: Globalisation: The globalisation of the economy, the values and expectations of which have already led to a far more competitive and fast moving economy, will in the future lead to even more dramatic shifts. Sustainability: The recognition of the economic, security and human threats posed by ecological change and social inequality, along with recognition that the changes needed to address them are as daunting as they are crucial to our future health and prosperity. Connectedness: The way individuals are connected and communities are created through new technologies, economic forces and the media, and the implications for how change occurs and how risk is created and managed. Retreat of Government: The changing and decreasing role of government in a globalised, fast moving, connected economy, and the way it will adapt to the challenges posed by globalisation and the rising power of transnational corporations. Victory of the Market: The way liberal, market-based democracy has become the dominant way to organise society, with all its implications for the role of the market, the power of corporations and the societal expectations of corporate performance. Rise of Civil Society: Coupled with the victory of the market, civil society is evolving into a connected yet distributed, powerful and market-making/breaking force. As such, it can hold corporations globally accountable, especially via activist NGOs.

Operating between the often opposing worlds of business and NGO-style activism can be like walking a tightrope. But it's a balancing act that Ecos Corporation has maintained in its push to drive change through corporations by helping them convert society's values into business value. To this end, Ecos Corporation has always needed to work with both business people and NGOs, often bringing them together to seek constructive ways forward.

The clients, however, rarely become any less challenging in terms of their industries' traditional impacts on society and the environment. Among Ecos' clients was Pacific Power, a major electricity generator. In their 1998 strategic research, Mark Lyster and another Ecos Corporation recruit, Gabby Greyem, led the company into working on sustainability issues with Australian cotton growers, one of the world's most controversial crops.

Ecos Corporation also began working with a joint venture between Canadian oil and gas producer, Suncor, and Australia's South Pacific Petroleum (SPP). Suncor/SPP wanted to mine vast shale deposits on the Queensland coast, opposite the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef, to produce oil. This project became a major target for Greenpeace, based on its projected impact on global warming, and came to pose the most serious challenge of all to Ecos' relationships in the world of activism. (The Ecos Corporation contract with Suncor/SPP was ended by mutual agreement in 2000. A year later Suncor withdrew from the joint venture, paying a $7 million exit penalty and leaving a large question mark hanging over the project's future viability.)

Towards the end of 1998 Ecos Corporation made another key appointment, and one that was likely to ignite new doubts in parts of the activist world. Ben Woodhouse wanted a second life and a second career when he retired from Dow Chemical after 33 years, so he relocated himself from America to Australia. A toxicologist by training, and a businessman by inclination, he'd risen to the position of Vice President for Global Issues and Crisis Management at Dow.

Sustainability was a theme that Woodhouse learned - and in a real sense helped to pioneer - as he, the renowned David Buzzelli and others steered Dow back towards a degree of community acceptance. Beyond Dow, he helped to start US President Bill Clinton's Council on Sustainability, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, making him a genuine leader in the field. In their former lives, Paul Gilding and Ben Woodhouse were more likely to be on opposite sides of a stoush. Gilding had led a Greenpeace that excelled at inflicting 'significant emotional experiences' on recalcitrant companies - or exploiting self-inflicted ones - while Woodhouse had to manage the fallout in such circumstances and avoid any repeats. At Ecos Corporation, a belief in sustainability and the potential for the market to be mobilised towards it brought them together.

Expanding and prospering is a constant issue for Ecos Corporation as well as its clients. In spite of its significant early achievements, in 1999 Ecos Corporation had to question its own future. Success was coming as strategising for sustainability entered the business mainstream, especially in the US. But the challenge of the Ecos Corporation mission to change whole companies and industry sectors demanded new skills, new people and even greater commitment. The choice was to grow or get out and Ecos Corporation voted for growth. The old church was left behind as Gilding, Tate and Woodhouse moved to the Sydney CBD, with views of the city's spectacular harbour. They farewelled Mark Lyster, who moved on to head up PricewaterhouseCoopers' emerging sustainability practice in Australia, and welcomed Cath Bremner, the quintessential 'bright young thing' from McKinsey and Co.

Bremner was looking for "something" and over time found herself being transformed into an activist - though one with a sharp sense of what business demands from its advisers. Her transformation from McKinsey to Ecos Corporation happened as she rubbed shoulders and intellects with former activists, tackled burning issues like genetically modified organisms in food crops and products, went into the streets of Seattle during the landmark riots that shut down the World Trade Organisation meeting at the end of 1999 and launched a series of angry anti-globalisation and anti-corporate protests that are still running.

In the second half of 1999 Ecos Corporation underwent a growth spurt. Other recruits included Rick Humphries and Sheena Boughen, who both knew Paul Gilding well from their days together in Greenpeace, and Murray Hogarth, a former environment editor at the Sydney Morning Herald and a journalist with 21 years experience in television and print. The challenging client list grew too, with resources giant BHP retaining Ecos Corporation to help it engage the environmental and social NGO community over its disastrous mining experience at the Ok Tedi gold mine in Papua New Guinea. The main problem was the contamination of rivers caused by tailings from the mine. The job was a classic example of stakeholder engagement, aiming to turn a crisis situation into a constructive dialogue on how BHP could withdraw from the mine project while also making provisions to compensate villagers and restore the environment, and ensure that the same mistakes would not be made again at future mine projects.

The Ecos balancing act was proceeding apace, especially with Rick Humphries joining the company after more than a decade filling high-level strategy roles with Australian and international green groups. For years he had been entertaining a "sneaking suspicion" that traditional activist tactics were running off-track, so finally he declared himself ready to try working with corporations instead of against them. "Unless we try something radically new we are buggered," says Humphries, with characteristic bluntness. "Clearly governments and the Left wing view of the world have failed. Our economic behaviour is what got us in trouble. Unless we change that and make corporations a force for doing good things, then there is no hope." He says he is "beyond ideology now", explaining: "I am a social ecologist, I suppose."

Humphries' passion is a palpable force, especially in a room full of business client representatives who have always lived their lives shielded from 'greenie activists', only to now be confronted by a born-again believer in the power of free enterprise. (Admittedly, even corporations frustrate Humphries for being too slow to act decisively.) He mixes passion with sharp strategic thinking. His focus is turning overwhelmingly towards the five-sixths of the world's population who don't share the wealth and lifestyle of the high-consuming, heavy-polluting one-sixth who live in the First World countries, and Ecos shares this focus as a key direction for the years ahead.

"The 'five-sixths' is a huge thing that is emerging for the corporates," says Humphries, who sees this marketplace as being critical to the survival of capitalism. "We have to be more aggressive and up front and say to companies, 'You guys all rely on a stable growth-oriented system. You have to invest in elevating the five-sixths'. Governments cannot do it alone, and nor can NGOs. Business has to change its culture. They have to keep pace with what is happening in the real world. The trick is to combine society's values with the vision to create value."

Sheena Boughen expertise lies in cultural change and organisational development. She's a teacher by early profession and by instinct, though her classes now are business professionals. Boughen's background is as a dairy farmer on a quiet stretch of Australia's eastern coast, and later a driving force in Udder Choices, a community action group formed by women in the dairy industry to oppose a government-backed deregulation plan that has closed many farms. Since joining Ecos, she commutes between the farm and Sydney, and Sydney and the world to pursue her work on driving change towards sustainability.

Many people assume, says Boughen, that achieving change around an issue is about "getting the content right". She believes that designing the content - or the strategy - is the easy part. "The hardest part is shifting people, their attitude and behaviour," says Boughen. "It's 20 percent content, and 80 percent 'what does it mean for how we act'. At Ecos we believe in the strategy and we guide you. We give people the tools, the motivation and the content so that they can do it themselves. If you no longer need us, then you are succeeding at change." Her key focus is on "action learning". Every lesson is based on a real project, whether small, medium or large. The old maxim that 'seeing is believing' holds true in business as much as anywhere else. "If you have a community of learners in the workplace, you have people who are confident to ask questions and to change," says Boughen.

Amid the millennium parties of 2000, the pace of growth and change within Ecos picked up. On the Ecos board, Paul Gilding's brother Tony - a veteran of the business world rather than the activist one - had been taking an increasingly active role in helping to grow the company. They agreed it was time for a Managing Director for the company.

Michael Ward had spent the past several years riding the rise of the Internet, as Vice President for corporate relations with Australia's biggest homegrown Internet service provider, OzEmail. In that job, which included responsibility for investor relations, Ward helped OzEmail to grow from about 100 staff to more than 800, to survive the NASDAQ crash in the US, and to be sold - at a windfall profit to early investors - to the MCI WorldCom company, UUNET. The challenge that he took on at Ecos was to achieve the growth and internal business discipline that the company needed, without losing the activist character it cherished.

Once again, growth also coincided with departures of much loved members of the Ecos team. Kim Grosvenor and Ben Woodhouse both left Ecos in the latter half of 2000. But others were joining the frontline consultants corps, and the backroom research and support teams, including a number of longstanding part-time Ecos employees who became full-timers. The new team members included Justin Sherrard, an Australian returning home after a stint in London with big global environmental consultancy group ERM, another Greenpeace veteran Blair Palese, researcher and environmental engineer Simon Cornell, knowledge manager and website whiz Sandra Davey and several others.

At the same time, Ward and Gilding were preparing the company for the development of a US-based team. At a company retreat the Australian team had agreed on a dynamic five-year growth strategy, one that relied heavily on working with American companies. The starting points were Ecos' expanding relationship with DuPont and a major new client, the Ford Motor Company, which was being driven to embrace the sustainability challenge by its new chairman Bill Ford jr., the great-grandson of the iconic American industrialist, Henry Ford.

As well as recruiting employees, Ward began looking for alliances with other organisations, ones that share Ecos' values and commitment to change, as a way to extend its reach quickly. When major expansion into the US was first contemplated, a central office was envisaged with Washington, DC a possible location. But Ecos wanted the best, most committed people - and most of them are committed to living where they want to live. "I came strongly to the belief that having a central US office is not conducive to having the best people," says Ward.

So in America the people of Ecos live in Boston, Wilmington and Washington. In Australia they are spread out as well, meaning the Sydney office is becoming the hub for people dotted across two continents.

The Ecos American build-up began quietly, early in 2000, with Gilding hiring MBA graduate Erik Simanis as a part-time assistant to develop Ecos' intellectual property. Simanis, an outstanding student under sustainability guru Professor Stu Hart at the University of North Carolina, had focused his studies on sustainable enterprise. At Ecos, he was assigned to making a case for sustainability that the world of business will both understand and accept.

Then in late 2000 and early 2001 there was an explosion of personnel growth in the US, as well as more recruiting in Australia. It was clear that those joining would bring a rich diversity of new experience to Ecos, while sharing the company's passion for driving change. Those signing up with Ecos in full- or part-time capacities included:

• Don Reed
• Sam Weiss
• Katharine (Kats) Fisher Maroney
• Hillary Nussbaum
• Victor Del Rio
• Andreas Merkl

Sam Weiss was appointed as a new member of the Ecos Board of Directors in May 2001.

Having invested in people, Ecos was now ready to pursue more clients.

Today Paul Gilding still wears the memories of his activist days on Ecos's corporate sleeve. A life ring from the Rainbow Warrior, the protest vessel sunk in New Zealand in 1985 by French spies at the height of an anti-nuclear testing campaign in the South Pacific, hangs on the wall of the Ecos head office as a memento of his Greenpeace days. But he's learned a lot in the years since, especially about how business operates and how an activist-at-heart can deliver value for clients while staying true to his own values.

Gilding's passionate belief that business can lead the world to sustainable solutions has proved to be infectious. His own vision has grown. Like-motivated and similarly minded individuals have gathered around him, forging a team drawn from the ranks of high-level environmental and social activism, industry, finance, the corporate advisory world, information technology, environmental consulting and journalism. Other bright, talented people with a commitment to sustainability look to Ecos as one of the few places in the world where they could combine their passion with a career.

For its people, Ecos has become both an adventure and a deep responsibility.

The company is hardly alone among small businesses in having its ups and downs, at times struggling to survive in a difficult marketplace, then bouncing back to prove that selling sustainability strategies to corporations can be done. For its true believers, there's no room for failure. "We are, like it or not, a very important symbol to many people who care about sustainability," says Gilding. "It is very important that we run this business well. We have an obligation to the world to show that you can get this right."

In April 2001 some 20 Ecos employees and close affiliates gathered in Sydney for the company's first 'Odyssey'. They came from the US, Europe and from up and down the east coast of Australia. Many of them were meeting for the first time and for some it was their formal induction into Ecos. During the group's meeting, strong consensus emerged around a combination of Ecos values and value, with the theme of driving change being paramount:

• Who Are We? We are Ecos, people motivated by our values and our mission to drive change towards sustainability. We are optimistic and having fun, but in a hurry.
• What Do We Do About It? We focus on value as the most powerful way to initiate change in business, and on mobilising people's passion - driven by their desire to lead meaningful lives - as the way to accelerate that change.
• Who Will We Work With? There are no ideological constraints. But there are a whole lot of judgments that need to be made and we will only keep working with clients who show genuine commitment to the change we seek.
• What Do We Believe? That the human species is facing its greatest ever challenge - potential demise or the transition to sustainable economic and cultural growth. And that human thoughts and actions are constrained by artificial borders: between business and the community; between values and value; between humans and their environment; between the economy and the eco-system.

On the third day of the Odyssey, Gilding had a business revelation that harkened back to his activist origins. "We really are a campaigning organisation," he said. "We exist to drive change. The reason why activism works is because you say 'whatever it takes to get it done, we will go and do it'. We need to help our clients to change. That is our campaign." The concept immediately captured the mood of the room.

It's a powerful idea. But there's no doubting the size of the task involved in translating that campaigning spirit into successful client relationships, and into business success for Ecos itself. Activism is scary enough for corporations when it's on the outside, so on the inside it can be terrifying. One former client told Gilding that letting his ideas loose inside a corporation was like unleashing a virus. But others have been more than willing to embrace Ecos and its mission of inciting corporate activism, allowing Gilding and his growing team to test their thinking, to apply their skills and to let their passion run. "I think the campaign virus has been unleashed by the last few days," Gilding noted in the closing minutes of the Odyssey.

In the world at large, much has changed since Paul Gilding began his Ecos odyssey back in 1995. Public concern for the environment and social justice is again on the rise around the planet, although action by governments, corporations and people everywhere still lags far behind what is needed to make real progress towards sustainability. Activism also is on the rise, some of it angry, even anarchic. In mainstream business circles the terms 'corporate governance', 'corporate responsibility', 'corporate citizenship' and 'corporate sustainability' are all being used widely, even in Australia, though it still lags behind Europe and North America at the big end of town. Ecos has played a modest role in promoting the change that has already occurred, but hungers to do far more.

"We talk value and we talk business," says Gilding, identifying why he believes Ecos has achieved what it has. "Our reputation is that we understand value. That is the most powerful thing that we have ever done. We are also a client-focused company. That is what we exist for; to generate value for our clients and through that drive change." In many ways, his faith that business, not government, will be the crucial force that will drive sustainability in the 21st century is being borne out. Many in the activist world that rejected Gilding and his ideas eight years ago are now focusing their campaign efforts on corporations, rather than governments, precisely because they now believe that this is the fastest way to drive change. Sometimes they punish and sometimes they engage constructively, but it is now the corporations, their brands and their markets that are the main game.

After the Odyssey, Ecos, like many companies with the majority of their business in the US, were impacted by events post-September 11, 2001. Our client work continues there but, as expected, businesses have been cautious about spending and Gilding and the Ecos team had to be realistic about how long it will take to return to a time when sustainability would be back on the corporate agenda.

In order to protect the business and plan for the future, Gilding and the Ecos Board made the difficult decision to cut back on full-time staff and overheads and focus on growth in 2002. A number of Ecos staff members have become contract associates working on specific Ecos projects in the US, Australia and internationally. Others, including Michael Ward, have left the company. In a combination of a number of roles, David Truran has joined Ecos as its General Manager and Chief Financial Officer. A second Odyssey with remaining Ecos full-time staff took place in Sydney in late 2001 with a plan for growth and a strengthening of the company's focus.

Alan Tate and Justin Sherard have formed their own Australian-based consultancy - Cambiar - and work with Ecos as associates. And in a strange twist of fates, Mark Lyster, who left Ecos to work for PwC in Sydney, has returned to Ecos as an associate. Additional associate relationships are being developed in the US as well. The associates structure allows Ecos to continue to work with some of the best sustainability experts internationally but allows the company some financial and time-commitment flexibility that will help it move forward in the current economic climate.

In the final synopsis, the Ecos approach is defined by the phrase 'values to value'. Gilding's focus on value doesn't repudiate the need for corporations to provide benefits for society, as well as their shareholders. He simply argues that all actions taken in the name of sustainability should ultimately translate into shareholder value, and that this can be measured in traditional areas like margin improvement, risk reduction, capital efficiency and growth enhancement. If societal value is not being created as well, then the business model won't be robust enough to survive in the longer term, and value will cease to flow to shareholders. At that point a corporation is in danger of losing its capacity to change anything, its own fate included.

"Sustainability strategies will not be successful or sustainable unless they deliver shareholder value," says Gilding. While this may seem obvious, it is often a focus missing from debates around strategy in this area. We argue it should be front and centre - that the potential to generate shareholder value or not should be the key criteria in making decisions on the right strategies to follow in the pursuit of sustainable growth. This is campaigning. We're here not just to come up with ideas. The world doesn't need any more ideas on sustainability. We need to provoke a debate in which they get adopted and acted on!"