1995 - 2008

Ecos operated as a very successful business for 13 years. We built a team of twenty incredibly committed and skilled professionals working around the world advising companies on how to see sustainability issues as market forces and integrating them into business strategy. Our clients cut across all sectors and many countries, with companies like DuPont, Ford, Diageo, BHP Billiton, WMC, ANZ Bank, Insurance Australia Group, China Light and Power, Zurich Financial Services, Placer Dome, KPMG, and Anglo American.

We always advocated to our clients that business strategy should be centered around a clear social purpose. However, we recognized that our clients’ bills had to be paid, along with a reasonable return on capital. Around this time, the focus in corporate responsibility was on the “triple bottom line,” a phrase coined by my good friend and one of the world’s outstanding corporate sustainability pioneers John Elkington, founder of the U.K. firm SustainAbility. It meant that companies should deliver and report on social and environmental performance as well as profits.

In contrast, we centered our strategic advice on what we called “single bottom line sustainability,” meaning that the pursuit of profit, without which no company can succeed, and the pursuit of sustainability should be a single mission, not separate, parallel efforts. In 2002, Don Reed and Murray Hogarth, two of our most experienced advisers, and I released a major report with the title Single Bottom Line Sustainability. It caused quite a stir in the corporate sustainability community around the world because we argued that companies should take only those actions in sustainability that delivered definable financial benefit to the company.

It wasn’t that we believed in shareholder value as an end in its own right. Ecos followed its own advice and was clearly purpose focused. We were transparent about being in business to drive change toward sustainability, not to do what ever our clients wanted to pay us for. However, we recognized that unless we gave advice to clients that delivered value, they wouldn’t keep following it. If we wanted to drive sustained action on sustainability, that action had to deliver measurable financial reward for the companies involved.

Ecos and its extraordinary team of people, achieved many great things. We helped our clients, society and ourselves to learn and get ready for what’s coming. We helped great old companies like DuPont turn around their giant organisations to face a new direction and be ready. We achieved practical success like helping new start-up Easy Being Green, grow to over 200 staff and cut over 4 million tonnes of CO2 in just 18 months. We helped to shift the attitudes of leaders in the business community. We stayed focused on our purpose, enjoyed ourselves and did some good.

The team from Ecos Corporation continues to work with other consultancies, NGOs and companies in the USA and Australia, where they advocate and drive change in corporate, social, environmental and policy arenas.