The Colombia-USA Business Bridge is the Colombia and USA leg of My Most Trusted, hosted by Ken Alston. A warm introduction is the only way to meet someone here. No bots, no spam, no cold outreach.
un tinto. The small black coffee Colombians offer a visitor, often before a single word of business.
In Colombia a first meeting rarely starts with a slide. It starts with un tinto, a small black coffee offered the moment you sit down, and a few minutes of real conversation about family, the city and the trip. Business follows the trust, not the other way round. An American firm that turns up cold gets politeness. One that arrives through someone both sides already know gets the coffee and the conversation.
Every club has an idea like this one, and it belongs to the place rather than to us. It is not a slogan we handed out.
Ken Alston is an author, speaker, and executive advisor who has worked in sustainability for nearly fifty years: twenty years at SC Johnson, seventeen years alongside William McDonough and Dr. Michael Braungart (ten of them as CEO of their Cradle to Cradle consulting firm), and independent practice since, through Circularity Edge, the consultancy he founded. His work examines the belief gap, the distance between what an organization believes and what it can actually substantiate, and two questions travel with him into every room: what had to be assumed for that answer to be true, and what can't we see today because of what we already believe? He writes The Inquiry every Tuesday, hosts the Circularity Catalyst podcast, and wrote Our Common Future, Now and Perfectly Wrong: How AI Turns Sustainability Blind Spots Into Business Risk. He is also a partner in Real Circularity, with Rachel Sheila Kan and Simon Hedley, and a co-author with Rachel of Real Circularity (2023). He was lead author of Circular Economy Roadmaps for Aruba, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay.
Ken Alston is a real person in Charlottesville, not a logo. That is the point. Somebody has to know both people for an introduction to be worth anything.