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The Chrysalis Economy

How Citizen CEOs and their Corporations Can Fuse Values and Value Creation

A new breed of Citizen CEOs and business leaders is surfacing in corporate boardrooms. With rare vigor and insight, they are working to boost the performance of their corporations against the triple bottom line. Their goal: to build competitive businesses that are simultaneously wealth creating, socially responsible and environment friendly.

And not before time. The extraordinary boom-to-bust cycle in the New Economy has signaled two key lessons. First, while e-Utopia has receded beyond the distant horizon, we would be wrong to write off the New Economy.

Much of it is real. As a result, the dematerialization of the global economy will accelerate. But second, despite growing valuations put on intangible assets, new business models must also be able to produce profits and meet the expectations of the financial markets if they are to be sustainable.

The Chrysalis Economy, which we expect to evolve over several decades, will mark not just the end of many of the most unsustainable forms of capitalism but also the early evolution of radically different forms of wealth creation.

Just as in nature the greedy caterpillar metamorphoses into the gossamer-light butterfly, the coming decades will see Caterpillar and Locust forms of wealth creation giving way to Butterfly and Honeybee economic and business models.

BP, DuPont, Ford, Interface and Shell may all be high profile Corporate Locusts (or at least companies showing strong residual Locust tendencies), but they have also been showing signs of becoming Corporate Chrysalids.

What is a Corporate Chrysalid?

In simple terms, it’s a company, industry, value web or even economy in the process of metamorphosis towards more sustainable forms of value creation.

We are entering a new period of profound transformation. Inevitably, as with the early days of navigation and flight, some of the pioneering experiments in sustainable wealth creation are coming unstuck. But such failures can provide rich evidence pointing to second and third generation technologies, systems and business models that will enable us to sustain a livable, equitable world of 8-10 billion people at the same time as regenerating many of the planet’s ecosystems.

related links

John Elkington is a cofounder of SustainAbility and author of The Chrysalis Economy

Also by John Elkington Cannibals With Forks : The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business (Conscientious Commerce)

A PhD project at RMIT is looking at how senior managers deliberate regarding triple bottom line issues.

email yarrabuzz@ozpod.com