The origin story of NELIS: How an idea grew into a new generation of sustainability leaders

 E-Square was a small company (25 wonderful staff) with a big impact. But still, I was frustrated, not so much with the people we worked with in the companies but with the SYSTEM in which they were embedded. It seemed highly unlikely that this system, led by well-known organizations and high-profile individuals, would ever help the world move to a place that could be called sustainable in the sense of enabling the continuation of life on our planet.

Then, one day in the summer of 2004, I was riding the Super Azusa Express from Shinjuku, Tokyo to the headquarters of Epson, the printer company, in Nagano (north of Tokyo) to speak at a conference of Epson Young Leaders. Suddenly – it was definitely what others call an epiphany – the name and idea of NELIS struck me: Next Leaders’ Initiative for Sustainability and, at the time, also Network for Leadership and Innovation in Sustainability (yes, NELIS was born with a double name).

I sensed that to arrive at any livable – or “thrivable” – future we would need to build a global network, bottom-up, person-by-person, heart-by-heart, of nextgen leaders across the globe for whom sustainability was simply second nature, the natural way to think, make decisions and therefore act. And, this global community would need to be big. A few hundred great young leaders would not be able to change the world. We would need a million, at least. The idea of NELIS was etched into my mind on that 2-hour train trip.

But, alas, fortune had other plans and did not allow me to act on the idea for ten years.

On New Year’s Eve, 2005, I hurt a ligament in the back of my neck while exercising in a Tokyo park. This led to all sorts of nerve pain and, ultimately, to seven years of illness, the worst from 2007 to 2013. I had to quit the company I had co-founded and went from a CEO’s salary to zero income. I was without work, left all my professional connections in the company I left behind, and moved out of Tokyo to a forested town called Karuizawa, to do nothing…

As I walked the woods in Nagano, and turned my attention to the inner world and my physical existence, my body gradually started rejuvenating, and I could again begin to think of reentering society. The one idea that would at that time not go away was NELIS. It was the one thing I did want to work on again.

During a coffee break at a TEDxTokyo conference in May 2014, now almost back to normal health, I shared the idea of NELIS with the co-founder to be, Tatsuo Akimura, a fantastic business innovator in Omi-Hachiman near Kyoto. He nodded and said, “OK, then let us put a date in our calendar to get the world to come to Japan. This is the only way to move forward.” We opened our – still paper – calendars and picked mid-October 2015, 17 months into the future. From June, also involving the 140-year-old local confectionary company Taneya. With its CEO Masahito Yamamoto, we started regular planning meetings in June 2014, established NELIS as a non-profit in January 2015 and as planned, had a week of brainstorming and co-inspiring with 25 young leaders from 6 continents and 14 countries in October 2015.