My Life As A Shark Tickler

Headlines From 50 Years Of Painful—But Mainly Productive—Close Encounters With Capitalist Jaws

It’s the question I dread beyond almost all others: What do you do? I loathe it because it’s so hard to explain in ways that most people can get their brains around. One possible answer would be: “I work with business, through markets, to save the world!” But let’s boil part of the story down to a James Bond-like formula: “I tickle Sharks. Human sharks.”

Having hit the three-score-and-fifteen mark today, I expect to do less of that sort of tickling in the future, particularly as the debate shifts from the why and the who of systemic change to the how and the where. But that doesn’t mean that the world will be prowled by fewer predators—indeed I expect their number to grow considerably in the coming turmoil. So perhaps my role now will involve helping younger change champions prepare for—and endure—their own collisions with vested interests. Helping them understand how to get in close to powerful people to change their hearts and minds.

By way of background, the opening lines of my just-published—and twenty-first—book, Tickling Sharks, run as follows:

“I have spent most of my adult life in or close to the jaws of capitalism. They’re predatory jaws, particularly since economist Milton Friedman, half a century ago, persuaded generations of business-people that their prime mission was to pursue a single bottom line—as long as they didn’t break too many laws along the way. Whereas some brave people tame lions and tigers, my aim has been to rein in market man-eaters—or ‘the future eaters,’ as Tim Flannery dubbed them in his book of the same name.

“That is, powerful people, businesses, and sectors able to dictate the fates of thousands, even millions, of people. Market actors able, with scarcely a second thought, to send mighty shock waves roiling through the natural world, oceans, and atmosphere. 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, I note, “has been far from pleasant at times—and sometimes decidedly risky. Tickling Sharks is the story of how this began for me, explaining what life is like inside the maws of some of the world’s biggest 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.

“Cue the Jaws soundtrack.”

Human Sharks

Often, the targets of my tickling have been human sharks. Or Sharks, as I style them in the book. “These are formidable people with Shark-like tendencies,” I explain, “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.”

Like sharks, however, human Sharks are not all cast in the same mold. Indeed, as I explain in the book, “research has shown that shark species show distinct personality types, with some being quite social and others more solitary. They build social networks and hang out with favored companions; you might even say friends. So, anyone insisting that all sharks—or all Sharks—are the same is, to put it politely, misguided.”

In engaging Sharks, of whatever type, we have been playing a “truth to power” game. For those who insist on goals and targets, it may be disappointing to hear that while the game’s purpose was often clear, the desired outcomes weren’t—beyond opening closed minds to new realities. In my mind, the stakes ran as high as the future of our planet, though other players saw things differently. Crucially, and unlike players of well-known games like chess, golf, gomoku, or poker, we had no option but to make up the rules as we went along.

One powerful example came in the form of a collision with ExxonMobil:

“When I ran into Rex Tillerson, he was chairman and CEO of oil giant ExxonMobil. Later, he became President Donald Trump’s somewhat mismatched secretary of state. He and I met, or more accurately collided, in Stavanger—the epicenter of the Norwegian oil and gas industry. We were both speaking to a three-hundred-person audience of fossil fuel people.

“I was on stage when Tillerson walked into the back of the conference hall with his entourage. As luck would have it, I was spotlighting how the oil industry—ExxonMobil in particular—had worked energetically to undermine the industry’s efforts to cut greenhouse emissions.

“From the back of the hall, Tillerson roared, ‘That’s a goddamn lie!’

“We proceeded to have a lively ding-dong over the heads of the bemused delegates, after which the dust settled somewhat—and I got on with what I had been saying. A few weeks later, ExxonMobil was publicly pilloried on pretty much the same grounds [and] the company lost well over half of its stock market value. That upset didn’t last, however. The oil giant later recovered lost ground, particularly when Putin’s Ukraine war drove up fossil fuel prices. Still, that confrontation lives on in my memory as an example of the sort of skirmishes we were fighting much of the time.”

Burger Shark

Another run-in was with the American food giant, McDonald’s. Here’s an entry from a diary I wrote at the time, published in 1990 as A Year in the Greenhouse:

Thursday, 29 June

Off with Julia to the Temple, to consult the oracle on the McDonald’s threat. Counsel says we start one-nil down in libel law, since juries tend to favour the plaintiff. And the recent Private Eye verdict, with the magazine thumped with a £600,000 fine, is a warning that it is a threat to be taken seriously.

“I wish I could wave a magic wand,” says Counsel, although it is clear that all three lawyers in the book-lined room are enjoying the case hugely. One, bald-headed and with a strange nervous tic which makes his whole body leap, hops around us like a vulture inspecting a fresh corpse. “The problem with companies like McDonald’s,” Counsel continues, “is that they are commercial giants and have their suppliers by the short and curlies.”

Counsel sympathetically added that it was not unknown for giant companies to pay people to perjure themselves. But then, as we rose to leave, somewhat dispirited, he said something that changed everything. “You are going to have to roll over, comply,” he advised. But then he paused, for theatrical effect . . .

“Unless, of course, you want to play poker!”

The story would later involve my appearing on a BBC radio show in front of 8 million listeners, alongside one of Britain’s best-loved comediennes, a famous TV scientist and a pop singer—who was the one who, unintentionally but live and on air, kicked off the long-running game of poker with McDonald’s. The game continued later that same day on a train stalled by lightning, involving an attempt to levitate the comedienne, and ended with our winning outright, albeit after one of the most nerve-wracking periods of my entire life.

Waving, or drowning?

Change is rarely linear, as Earthshot Prize CEO Hannah Jones argues in her foreword to Tickling Sharks. “Instead,” she observes, “it builds in waves, often proceeding via a series of tipping points before exponentiality hits like an express train. Most people then see overnight success, but the reality is that transformation is messy—relying much more than you might imagine on coincidences, on timing, and on those rare innovations that change everything. Time and again, we see real-world transformations build on hard-earned incremental gains achieved over years and decades.”

So what, she asks, “will it take, in this decade, to bend the arc of history toward a just, repaired, and regenerative world?” My own sense is that it will take at least one more societal pressure wave, something more like a tsunami. And I think we are beginning to sense the weak, early signs of something of the sort building all around us.

Paradoxically, the growing pushback against ESG in the United States, against environmental controls in farming across the EU, and against heat-pumps in Germany are all—to my eye—evidence that we are finally pushing into the heartland, raising existential risks for some long-established industries. Even a Trump win in the US presidential elections would suggest that others are sensing those building challenges, even if they are choosing to bury their heads in the political sands for the moment. Behind this assessment lies the work of people like my friends at RethinkX.

Once I had rumbled the fact that the future tends to come in waves, I tried to work out how to get ahead of the wave crests and stand upright on the racing edges of change. In the process, I worked out how to negotiate upwaves and downwaves—the peaks and troughs—though not without frequent spills, or wipeouts, as surfers call them.

Similarly, the entire history of our civilization has moved in waves: constructive and destructive waves; physical, political, cultural, and technological waves; large waves and small ones; visible waves—and those that our senses cannot detect. Tomorrow’s waves, today’s—and yesterday’s.

So how do these societal pressure waves work? I first began to plot our progress across them (or often the lack of it) in 1994, the same year I came up with the triple bottom line. I sat down over a cup of tea with a friend and colleague—Nick Robins, now a professor at LSE and an international expert in the field of sustainable and climate finance. We produced an initial sketch of the waves, at least as we then saw them.

Close Encounters

The analysis has since been presented in some fifty countries, though the fact that it has survived and evolved doesn’t guarantee that it is right in every detail. Indeed, I have sometimes encountered energetic pushback, with one set of academics in Berlin angrily demanding to know why we had tried to address such an important challenge in under an hour over a cup of tea. Was this another case of the notorious British sense of humor? The question behind their question: Why hadn’t we applied for state funding and launched a ten-year peer-reviewed research program?

I viewed the question from a different angle. Just as early explorers’ maps could be good enough to give those who followed a useful sense of their location—and where to watch out for coastlines, sheltered estuaries, riptides, or ship-eating reefs—my aim has always been to help people make business sense of the ever-evolving landscapes of risk and opportunity.

The other major question—and perhaps a more important one—was how we (and it has mainly been me) had calculated the vertical axis. How had we assessed the level of impact of the successive waves? My answer, and it probably incensed some academics even further, was that at times the process reminded me of a key scene in Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

In this sequence, actor Richard Dreyfuss is seen on his hands and knees on the living room carpet in his family home. He is using every material he can lay his hands on, from mud to mashed potatoes, to sculpt a shape he is obsessed with. This proves to be Devils Tower in Wyoming, which is where the aliens have chosen to hover in their attempt to engage humankind.

You have been warned. Treat what follows as based on a set of sketches, cartoons even. Like any set of long waves, mine have had their ups and downs. But, as far as I can see, they all seem to follow an underlying exponential curve, pushing toward some sort of systemic outcome, be it breakthrough or, wholly or in part, breakdown. For decades now, I have sensed—and tracked—an underlying paradigm shift. There’s (a lot) more on that in the book, but the diagram below catches some key elements.

Cycles, waves and an underlying shift

Counting waves

To date, I have tracked six societal change waves since 1960, though others preceded them—and many more will follow.

At its peak, as shown in the diagram above, wave 1 (Limits) began the process of alerting humankind to our common challenge—a reality dramatized by the Limits to Growth team in 1972 and then monitored by the Global Footprint Network, with its Overshoot Day campaign and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, with its Planetary Boundaries work. Wave 2 (Green) saw growing activism, successively impacting politics, consumer choice, and investment. This process continues in the government sphere with Green (New) Deals in the EU and United States.

Wave 3 (Globalization) saw a new round of globalization, promoting global governance solutions and the rise of countries like China and India, but also spurring the spread of unsustainable production and consumption patterns. Too often, developed economies exported their emissions to industrializing nations.

Next, wave 4 (Sustainability) put sustainable development on the agenda for all to see—a process accelerated by the launch in 2015 of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Wave 5 (Greta) was largely driven by new business mindsets—and by younger generations waking up and deciding to act.

Alongside growing pressures for deglobalization, wave 6 (ESG/Impact) has seen a growing proliferation (and confusion) of languages and brandings, linked to booms in ESG and impact investing and triggering inevitable resistance from vested interests, but with impact now potentially offering a common language for business and other market actors. In the process, there is an increasingly urgent need to expand our focus from responsibility and resilience to regeneration—the regeneration of our environment, societies, science, educational systems, economies, economics, and politics.

The dotted line heading up toward Regeneration indicates one possible—and hopeful—future direction of travel. But the more I have thought about it, the more I have concluded that the next great wave must involve an expansion of our focus of attention from individual businesses—with their brands, business models, technologies and supply chains—to the markets in which those businesses operate.

And that’s the story I have begun to share via this Rewilding Markets channel on Substack. Once again, as I write and talk, I’m beginning to get a better sense of what I think—or what I ought to be thinking and talking and writing about next: processes of regeneration operating across every dimension of the triple bottom line—economic, social and environmental. And, crucially, at the pumping heart of all this, politics.

Lessons learned

Towards the end of Tickling Sharks, I distil ten lessons learned from this continuing effort over the last half century. The last of them runs as follows: Recognize that whatever you do—and however well you do it—the work of others is more important.

What we do as individuals counts, true, and 30-plus endorsements at the beginning of the book give me some comfort that what I have done to date has helped move a number of needles. Never doubt that what we do as individuals can be crucial in bending the curves of history, but individuals only ever succeed in driving wider change by building psychological, socioeconomic, and political critical mass.

In the book, I distinguish between four different types of ocean predator: Sharks (covered here), Orca (more intelligent and strategic), Sealions (happy to perform their master’s bidding for a bucket of fish) and Dolphins—our best hope of a timely transition. As I put it:

“...the human and organizational equivalents of Dolphins swim in an expanding range of sweet spots, both lower risk and higher potential. In nature, dolphins are deeply intelligent, curious, playful, collaborative, and non-zero-sum team players—willing to accept lose-win outcomes for longer-term gain. They are interested in other species, and not just as lunch. The number of leaders showing Dolphin-like behaviors is growing, and they are likely to be our best partners for long-term change initiatives.”

So here are three other lessons I have learned, in headlines:

First, avoid being forced into elevator pitches. It can help if you distil your message and agenda into a single line, of course. But, wherever possible, break frame. Sharks and Orcas are pitched to each and every day of their frenzied lives. People are desperate for their attention, buy-in, and sign-off. If you allow them to impose that game on you, you have already lost.

If your target audience only has forty-five seconds to understand something as complex as the climate or biodiversity emergencies, they will be impervious to external inputs. Sharks often roll their eyes back, exposing a piece of thick cartilage, to protect their vision from struggling prey. Expect human Sharks to do the same. Watch out for those rolled eyes.

Even if you are not attacked directly, you risk being a raindrop on their Teflon or Gore-Tex. They have been trained to focus on the material challenges, the ones that could have real financial consequences. The challenge here is to be Velcro to their Velcro. To persuade them that you—and your change agenda—might be material.

Second, don’t assume that all Sharks or Orcas are evil. Some are, no question, and most represent some form of danger to other people’s lives, limbs, or reputations. We must be prepared to tackle the deadliest Sharks with everything at our disposal. Sometimes, even before we get to that point, they may try to take a pre-emptive bite out of us, because of territoriality, frustration, or sheer force of habit.

If you do find yourself headed into the jaws of death, a well-placed punch in the personal or corporate nose may distract predators long enough for you to escape—or, counterintuitively, to slip in deeper.

But remember that many leaders are reflections of the systems that trained, selected, and now incentivize them. Remove one, get a clone. The only real way forward is to change the incentives, transform the training and selection processes, and ultimately change the economic context that determines priorities and behavior.

And third, encourage leaders to get out more—and take your own medicine. Powerful people are some of the most sheltered folk on earth. Too often, they are insulated from other people’s realities, which is risky for all concerned. Offer them an opportunity to see different realities up close.

I have accompanied leaders as they travelled to places as varied as Japan’s biotech sector, Silicon Valley, and an array of slums around Nairobi, Kenya. Recommend unusual learning journeys for leaders and their senior teams. And, crucially, suggest ways for them to better engage their younger colleagues, whose futures their organization may be compromising, intentionally or not. Encourage them to appoint a youth board, to bring future generations directly into today’s decision-making.

An invitation

The entire Tickling Sharks project has been hosted and enabled by the company I co-founded back in 2008, Volans Ventures. I am hugely grateful to our CEO, Louise Kjellerup Roper, and to our wider team for giving me the time and resources to roam back and forth over the decades—and then to think my forward into the 2030s.

As the book concludes, we will likely see more change—both incremental and systemic—in the next 15 years than we have in the past 50. I feel we are standing on the threshold of an era that will bring us the sort of challenges that have been faced by earlier, wartime generations, but also a period in our collective history where the potential for truly systemic change goes off the scale.

New leaders—and new forms of leadership—will be crucial. But so will traditional styles of leadership, involving vision, out-of-the-box thinking, courage, determination, stamina and, crucially, the ability to engage every level of society, and every generation, in what is destined to be the biggest pan-generational project our species has yet attempted.

Here I will quickly loop back to the opening lines of the final “Lessons learned” section of this post and suggest that the best I can hope to do in what follows is to find, engage and network the people, organizations and industries that are working towards a just, repaired and regenerative world that Hannah Jones looks forward to in her foreword. Hence my job-title in recent years: Chief Pollinator.

Having failed to take a planned—and first-ever—sabbatical earlier this summer, because of the pressure of events, this “Rewilding Markets” channel on Substack underscores the fact that I have started rocketing up a series of learning curves, simultaneously. They all link back to lessons I have learned over the decades, as described in the book, via family, education and work. But, at the same time, they all lean forward into a very different future. And that seems to describe me—and what I do, however much I may struggle to articulate it.

I conclude the book—and this post—with these words:

“As for you, dear reader, thank you for your interest and for your own work—past, present, and future. I shall end here by wishing a fair wind to all those working to turn today’s sustainability thinking into tomorrow’s businesses, markets, and economies. We face immense challenges, but such times—when a long-evolving paradigm upends, like a vast iceberg turning turtle—can be both exhilarating and rewarding for those able to find and stay on their feet and, when needs must, who know how to swim.

“And a 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.”

Finally, for anyone wanting to continue the conversation, my email is john@volans.com.

Tickling today’s Sharks can up open the way for tomorrow’s Dolphins

And if you want to know more about the evolution of my thinking, today (June 18th 2024) sees the release of my 21st book, a memoir called Tickling Sharks: How We Sold Business on Sustainability (Fast Company Press). Our video trailer can be found here. Available in good book stores and on Amazon, in hardback, paperback, Kindle and audio formats—the last being the first audio version of one of my books that I have voiced myself. Let me know what you think!