I write when an inquiry has reached sufficient coherence to stand on its own.
For four decades, business sustainability has generated remarkable commitment, investment and innovation.
Yet the trajectory remains deeply concerning.
Why?
Our Common Future—Now examines that question by returning to first principles.
It asks whether the greatest challenge facing sustainability is not a lack of technology, finance or commitment—but the assumptions that shape decisions before strategy even begins.
Published forty years after the Brundtland Report, the book is both a reflection on the past and an invitation to rethink the future.
Published August 2026
Perfectly Wrong examines a risk no organization using AI in sustainability has yet properly named. AI systems are now drafting sustainability strategies, ESG disclosures, circularity plans, and board materials at speed and with apparent authority.
The greatest risk is not that AI gets sustainability wrong.
It is that AI reproduces yesterday’s assumptions with extraordinary speed, fluency, and confidence.
Structurally right — within a frame that has already failed to produce transformation for forty years. Perfectly Wrong demonstrates, through a structured comparison of four leading AI systems given identical sustainability challenges, exactly how that happens — and what it means for every organization now acting on AI-generated sustainability outputs. P
Published August 2026
Real Circularity, co-authored with Rachel S. Kan and published in 2023, explores how circular economy principles can be applied in practice.
Drawing on decades of experience, the book moves beyond theory to examine the opportunities and challenges organizations encounter when translating circular thinking into real-world products, business models and decision-making.
It serves as a practical foundation for the broader questions explored in my later work.
Available worldwide in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover editions.
For professional education and implementation in the UK and Europe, visit Real Circularity and the Real Circularity Academy.
In addition to formal publications, I occasionally publish reflective essays through The Inquiry, a public Substack.
These pieces are not instructional and are not written to maintain visibility. They function as a place to think in public — exploring language, systems, and assumptions that shape how sustainability is understood and practiced.
Ken Alston has spent nearly five decades exploring one enduring question:
How can business create lasting prosperity without undermining the conditions upon which future prosperity depends?
His career has taken him from product development and corporate leadership at SC Johnson, through seventeen years working alongside William McDonough and Dr. Michael Braungart, to founding Circularity Edge®, where he now advises leaders on the future of sustainable business and organizational stewardship.
Throughout that journey, the same question continued to surface. Why do well-intentioned sustainability efforts so often produce progress that feels real—yet remains insufficient?
The books on this page are his attempt to answer that question.
Together they explore stewardship, sustainable circularity, leadership, belief, and the assumptions that shape the futures individuals, organizations and societies create.
When he is not writing, Ken speaks internationally, hosts the Circularity Catalyst podcast, publishes The Inquiry, and works with executive teams seeking greater clarity about the future they are creating.