Reading Ahead: Episode 3: Sustainable Business

In 2016 we made the decision to certify the company I founded, Ella’s Kitchen, as a B Corporation. The logic, to me, was simple. A business shouldn't just be answerable to the people who put money into it. It should be answerable to everyone it touches — the families who feed their children with it, the farmers who grow for it, the planet it draws from. Ella's Kitchen became one of the first B Corps in Britain. 

For the third episode of Reading Ahead, the podcast I host for the University of Reading, I brought together two people who've spent their careers asking not just if business can be sustainable, but getting to the heart of what business is actually for in the first place. Amy Clarke is an entrepreneur, strategic ESG advisor, and Reading alumna who co-founded Tribe Impact Capital and now co-chairs B Lab UK. Jon Foster Pedley is Dean of Henley Business School Africa, a former airline pilot turned strategist, who's spent three decades building leaders across the continent. 

Amy's career has been built on trying to repair the relationship between ordinary people and their money. Tribe Impact Capital was founded on the premise that most of us have no idea our pensions and savings might be funding the very things that threaten our children's future — and that the moment you reconnect someone with where their money actually goes, they overwhelmingly want it working for good. 

Jon came at the same problem from the discipline of strategy itself. His argument was that the way business schools have taught strategy for decades simply isn't built for the volatility we're now operating in. At Henley Business School Africa, he’s asking how business understands value from the outset. His mission, in essence, is to make sure the next generation of African business leaders never see sustainability as a luxury layered on top of "real" business, but as the very definition of doing business well. 

What struck me most, listening to them both, is how naturally their two arguments meet in the middle. Amy is trying to reconnect ordinary people with the power already sitting in their wallets and pensions. Jon is trying to reconnect the next generation of leaders with the understanding that a business's boundary doesn't end at its own balance sheet. Different audiences, different tools, but the same underlying conviction I built Ella's Kitchen around: that a company which serves society first, rather than treating society as an afterthought, isn't a sacrifice of good business. It's simply what good business is. 

You can listen to Reading Ahead on your favourite podcast platform, or watch the full conversation on YouTube. 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2g2g08zIwoJGp0TOLqrynA?si=35e71038a1f140fb

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id6810221277?i=1000795903935

You Tube: https://youtu.be/awmKSocGsrA.