Jain Spirit 2002 10 No 12

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 48

WORKPLACE
CARRY YOUR VALUES WITH YOUR LAPTOP
John Elkington encourages consultants not to shy away from their
values in the corporate workplace
needed to ensure a more sustainable world. A childhood spent in trouble spots like Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Israel convinced me that religion often fuelled rather than defused conflict. True, that Jainism always struck me as somewhat different but I knew very little about it. When Jain Spirit asked me to write an article on the evolving art of sustainability
"There is much about Jainism that I aspire to but cannot hope to
reach.”
CY WORK HAS TAKEN ME AROUND
the world repeatedly - and
these days into the boardrooms of major companies. It will probably come as little surprise that much of the discussion in such places revolve around science, technology and economics, not religion. Indeed, let me begin with a public health warning: I am neither a Jain nor in any recognisable way religious. But much of the work I am involved in has a strong value base, some of which seem to align well with such tenets of Jainism as truthfulness, non-stealing and non-attachment (at least from the most rampant forms of consumerism).
When I began work, there was no formal career path for an environmental consultant, let alone a sustainability consultant. These days things are different, but even now we often admit that we are 'making it up as we go along'. In the process, we are often thrown back onto our core values. Unlike most consultancies, we absolutely refuse to work for certain sectors - having turned down several invitations to work, for example, for the tobacco and nuclear industries. When we do work with companies like Shell, Nike or Ford, we carefully test the opportunities against our published principles
As for religious or spiritual angles, I have long seen church religions as a major barrier to the transformations
striking similarities with the world of Jainism.
One of the most striking aspects of Jainism is the doctrine of non-injury to all living things. In retrospect, nature woke me up to this agenda rather than religion. As a six-year-old notional Church of England Protestant, I had no inkling of Jainism or anything like it, when one of the most pivotal experiences of my life happened in the mid-1950s. At the time, we were living on a farm in Northern Ireland. One evening, I was walking home through a moonless night from a friend's cottage. My path took me near several old flax ponds, which were still flooded. Suddenly, I felt something strange around my ankles. Reaching down, I felt what I later worked out were elvers, baby eels, coming up from the ponds and slithering over the hill to the nearby river, heading for the distant Sargasso Sea. Intrigued by such natural mysteries, I made the mistake of asking an adult an obvious question for a child who still believed in some form of afterlife: do animals go to heaven? A mistake, as it turned out, because I was one of just three notional Protestants in a school run by Catholic nuns, a school that - in turn - was surrounded by a somewhat hostile Protestant community. Mother Superior, who ran the convent school, exploded using words I remembered but did not then understand: “You are either a pagan or a pantheist, and I
consulting, I dug deeper into Jainism. In the process, I was astounded to find how closely some (but not all) of its core values aligned with my own and with those of the wider sustainable development movement.
A shared respect for the natural world is perhaps the most obvious area of overlap. Let me tell part of my own story, by way of illustration. The foundations of the work I have done over 30 years were originally environmental, although I also studied economics, sociology and planning at university in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As it turned out, many of the values that surfaced during the Environmental Revolution' have
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46 Jain Spirit . September - November 2002 in Education International 2010_03