Tickling Sharks: How We Sold Businesses on Sustainability
John Elkington
Fast Company Press (June 2024)

“You’re going to need a larger perspective.”

As I began to read Tickling Sharks, I was again reminded of Vernon Vinge’s essay, “The Coming of Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” (1993), in which he suggests that “the acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur).”

In The Singularity Is Near (2005), Ray Kurzweil predicts that “convergent, exponential technological trends” are “leading to a transition that would be ‘utterly transformative’ for  humanity.” In The Singularity Is Nearer, Kurzweil explains how and why humanity’s “Mellenia-long march toward the Singularity has become a sprint. In the introduction to The Singularity Is Near, I wrote that we were then ‘in the early stages of this transition.’ Now we are entering its culmination. That book was about glimpsing a distant horizon — this one is about the last miles along the path to reach it .”

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So what?

In Tickling Sharks, John Elkington shares his thoughts about the “sustainability revolution” whose results will “dictate the fates of thousands, even millions, of people.” Prior to when Singularity occurs, Elkingto insists,  mankind must somehow find effective ways to communicate effectively with powerful people, businesses, and sectors,” forces that Tim Flannery characteries as “the future eaters.” These are “market actors,” Elkington suggests, who are, “with scarcely a second thought, able to send mighty shock waves rolling through the natural world, oceans and atmosphere.”

Elkington adds, “In some cases, you might even see them as market equivalents of the great white shark that dominates Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film, Jaws, which launched in 1975, just as I was starting the journey that I describe in this book.

“The experience has been far from pleasant at times — and sometimes decidedly risky. Tickling Sharks is the story of how this began for me., what life is like inside the maws of some of the world’s biggest c corporate predators, and what I learned along the way as we tried to work out how to speak tomorrow’s truth to today’s power.”

Over the years, when he is asked what he does, “I sometimes reply that I tickle sharks for a living [and] the targets of my tickling have been human sharks. Or Sharks, as I will style them from here on. These are formidable people with Sharklike tendencies, often possessed of immense power, prestige, and wealth people running some of the most successful, dominant, and aggressive institutions of our time; and people, many of them, who would happily skewer their colleagues’ careers or chew up their competitors, spitting out indigestible bits along the way as they move on in pursuit of new prey.”

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Here’s John Elkington’s final thought: “Over the years, a surprising number of younger friends and colleagues have noted, somewhat wistfully, that they wished that they had been around for the ‘glory days, the golden years,’ of the sustainability revolution. My heartfelt reply: they’re still to come.”

Tickling Sharks is a magnificent achievement. Bravo!