The Provocateurs:

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, the co-founder of Thinkers50. I’d like to welcome you to Provocateurs, the podcast where we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. Our aim with this series is to provoke you to think and act differently through conversations with insightful leaders who offer new perspectives on traditional business thinking. This is a collaboration between Thinkers 50 and Deloitte, and my co-host today is Kulleni Gebreyes. Kulleni, a principal in Deloitte Consulting LLP, is Deloitte’s US Consulting Life Sciences and healthcare industry leader, and US Chief Health Equity Officer. Kulleni, great to see you.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Des, it’s wonderful to be here and I’m very excited that we get to talk to our guest today, Andrew Winston. So, Andrew is one of the world’s most widely read writers and thinkers on sustainable business. His books on sustainability strategy include Green to Gold, The Big Pivot, and most recently, Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take, which he co-authored with Paul Polman. I know we’re going to talk about courage today, Andrew.

Andrew Winston:

Yeah, absolutely. I’m looking forward to it. Thanks for having me.

Des Dearlove:

I should say too, Andrew and Paul Polman are number three in the Thinkers50 Ranking of the most influential management and business thinkers in the world. So Andrew, yeah, great to see you. Welcome.

Andrew Winston:

Thank you. Something went wrong with that ranking, Des. I don’t know what happened with you guys in that meeting, but I do appreciate it. So, happy to be here.

Des Dearlove:

No, we think we got it right, but let other people be the test of that, they can judge, not that you’re under any pressure. So how did you start this journey? I mean, you’re known for, obviously as Kulleni was just saying, one of the most read writers on sustainability. You’ve been at this for a while. How did you start out on this journey?

Andrew Winston:

Are you saying I’m old, Des? Is that what we’re saying? It is funny how you start to realize you’re not the new kid, it dawns on you at some point. I got into this probably about 20 years ago, a little more, 22-23 years ago. So I came out of school with an economics degree. I worked at BCG, sorry Kulleni, I was at another big consulting firm for a few years, did the traditional thing and I was in media companies in the nineties, right as the internet was coming in at a really exciting time. And my last big company job was at Viacom, I worked at MTV, and it was probably the last time I was cool – for our generation, my kids don’t know what MTV is, so it’s wild. But I was at a .com after that and rode through the .com crash and found myself free, which is a nice way of saying unemployed and searching. And I just realized I didn’t want to go back to marketing and development biz dev jobs, which is what I had done, and strategy, and I had this offer to be head of strategy at a retailer and just something didn’t feel right. Long story short, I started reading about and asking about this thing called sustainability, and I knew personally that the system didn’t feel right. We couldn’t probably continue as we are just on a resource base. I came at it very practically, which I think still infuses my work that, to me, there’s just a practicality to this. And I went back to school to get a degree in environmental management, and I had an MBA already that I got along the way while working, and I came out of school and wrote a book with a professor that I met there, and it was Green to Gold, and that was my first foray into this.

And I thought I’d end up back in companies or in consulting firms, but ended up just forging my own path for the last almost 18 years. Wow, almost 18 years now since that first book came out. And I didn’t know I’d be a writer, honestly, I was a quant guy originally, but it worked, and we sold a lot of copies and I wrote a few more books and just kept going. And I do a lot of speaking, advising, continue to write for magazines, in books, whatever form I can. And my mission is really to change the way companies and executives think about business and help them build a thriving world fundamentally.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Andrew, that’s so great. And I’ll tell you that regardless of where you worked, we did graduate from the same alma mater, so I’m a Princeton grad as well, and I loved MTV. So all else is forgiven in terms of any differences.
But to the point that you said that you work to change the minds of business leaders and how they approach sustainable strategies, you’ve written a number of books, as we’ve said. How has your thinking evolved from your first book to Net Positive and what are things that have stayed constant?

Andrew Winston:

Well, look, there’s a constant strain throughout that the problems we face are real. I mean, earlier on, you have to give more credibility to questions about climate change 20 years ago. Even though the science was clear, there’s a change, at least, for the good in this sense that we don’t really have to convince companies to put it on the agenda. And I’m sure we’re going to get to that in our 45 minutes, the anti-ESG movement, what’s going on right now. But by and large, what’s really changed in the last 20 years certainly, but in the last five, was that it’s on every large company’s agenda. And that took a lot longer than I thought, but I’ll tell you … So there’s been this strain of, hey, there’s climate change. I’ve gotten probably more on the S side or the combined issues side of things as I’ve gone through this for years. I started with climate and resources and got the degree in environmental management, and my work is much broader than that now because it’s really all connected. But at the macro level, the philosophical level, the thing that’s really changed for me I think is just thinking a lot more about narrative and story and asking what’s gotten in the way, why hasn’t it gone faster? Because I get questions like this all the time, well, if sustainability’s better for business, and that’s clear, why doesn’t it go faster? And there’s lots of good answers. Inertia is always a good one. The system is what it is and it’s hard to change. If it weren’t hard to change, there wouldn’t be giant consulting firms, right? I mean, change management is what we do. But I’ve realized that there’s this base story, and you can call it many things, but it stems from really the neoliberal economic model and it’s the short-term focus. It’s the free markets above all. It is the short-term shareholder profit model, and it really is the water that we’re all swimming in, and it has been a solid 50 years since Milton Friedman. So basically every executive that you know has been raised entirely, and this is really global. I mean, arguably even China has a fairly capitalistic set of industries and companies, right? The model of putting profits above all has really become dominant, completely dominant, and it’s very hard to question. And that’s what sustainability always feels like it’s swimming upstream against; it’s that you sound like you’re saying, don’t profit. I mean, I basically have to answer the question, “Doesn’t sustainability always cost more?” Some version of that question in everything I do, every interview, every talk, still, almost daily. And there’s something about that, that I’ve written about, this burden of proof on sustainability is just higher than on almost any other topic in business. And it’s one of my favorite themes, and I’m happy to unpack that, but that’s been the really biggest change in the storytelling; to realize we’re all sitting in this story that’s really hard to question. And even if you identify it, it’s hard to question, but most people don’t realize it. It’s just, it’s the air that we breathe.

Des Dearlove:

I mean, you mentioned how difficult it’s to change the minds of executives, but Paul Polman, who you ended up writing Net Positive with, I mean he was one of the stand-outs, I mean in terms of an exemplar of somebody who was prepared to think differently and step out of the normal paradigm. How did that come about? How did you and Paul get together and what was the genesis of that collaboration?

Andrew Winston:

Well, I mean Paul knows everyone as far as I can tell, so certainly he was familiar with my work. I was on the advisory council for North America. Unilever had a lot going on and they had a global council, but North America, Western Hemisphere, wanted their own going back to the mid 2010s. And so I was working in the area and crossed his paths a couple times, but then my previous book, Big Pivot, he bought for the management team, as CEOs do with books, and I came to one of their sustainability plan updates in London. So we crossed paths a few times, but then the fall after he had left as CEO in 2019, he and his right-hand guy, Jeff Seabright, who I knew for years and years, who worked at many companies, including Coca-Cola and Unilever, they approached me during climate week in New York and said, Paul was out now and was busier than ever. His version of retirement is hilarious to me. It’s more work than I will ever, ever do. He’s very busy, but he said he gets asked all the time, and he never really wanted to do a book because it felt ego driven. I think he’s the quintessential Level 5 leader in the Jim Collins sense. It’s natural for him to be just natural about it. He just sees these things very clearly. I think he’s a natural leader, he’s a natural systems thinker, which is amazing as a leader, harder as a writer. Systems are connected in circular and not chapter by chapter. So that gets to a later point of the relationship, which is what was my role? Which was trying to keep the story as linear and coherent as possible. But they approached me and said, “We’re getting all these questions because companies are saying, “We got to do more.” We need to go down this path, and you’ve done it and you’ve been out there. How do we do it?” And so he felt like this was going to give him something to hand people, and I think that’s been part of the reason, but he really is not comfortable too much with the ego driven approach. I think an autobiography of him would be really interesting too, but that wasn’t really our purpose. It was a little bit of a biography of Unilever’s journey, but then a much broader view on how companies can build a much more positive world fundamentally.

Des Dearlove:

So Andrew, a lot of people will be familiar with the term net-zero, but the book is Net Positive. How do you define net positive?

Andrew Winston:

Yeah, I mean we define it, I think, fairly simply, which is a company that enhances the well-being of everyone that they touch in a broader perspective across their value chain. A company that seeks to improve people’s lives and improve their well-being, and fundamentally one that thrives and profits by solving the world’s problems, not creating them. And the core question we ask in the book is, is the world better off because your business is in it? And I do find people pause there. I let that sit often, when I’m doing talks and meetings, and just let people think about that for a minute, because it’s a really hard question to answer. I mean, at first you jump right to, yeah, we employ people, we provide goods and services, all that. But it’s a really complicated question fundamentally, and part of the impetus of trying to go in a way beyond net-zero was not just to be provocative, but to acknowledge the scale of our problems and how fast they’re moving and just really how big climate change is in particular. But also, inequality has gotten radically worse, and it’s part of what’s undermining democracy around the world. It’s one of the forces, right? So we’re in this really dangerous time for humanity. So we need the leaders to think beyond just, “How can I be incrementally better?” to, “How can I heal?” The word regenerative is being thrown around. I find that a helpful word in many ways, but not as much of a business word, and net positive and regenerative, they’re probably 98% overlapping. The people that would find distinctions are in a small circle on LinkedIn debating this language. But it’s fundamentally, how do we heal? How do we build back and have more resources, leave more for the next generation of our kids, but also even for the next CEO, the next generation of the company? And look, it’s a big goal, but there’s lots of things where seeking out the positive may actually be the better, even cheaper, and sometimes even faster path than just trying to tweak around the edges. It’s a more systemic view of the change that’s needed.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Andrew, you’ve shared so many important ideas, both misconceptions as well as the key messages, which is you’re not driving for companies to not profit, right? There’s no message that says don’t profit. And at the same time, I think it’s a challenge to say, how do you thrive and profit at the same time? And I tell you, at Deloitte we talk a lot about aligning purpose and profit and it’s really important to us. And so I’d love to ask you about what are the organizational role models that you can point to, right? Companies that are really not just talking about doing the right things, but actioning on the things that you’re describing in terms of creating a net positive impact?

Andrew Winston:

Yeah. Well, I want to quickly unpack that. I mean we could spend hours, but just quickly unpack the profit while being sustainable or sustainable while profitable. There’s always this discussion like they’re at odds and they really truly aren’t. In the long run, they’re by definition not at odds. I mean, sometimes, in this field, you get accused of saying everything’s win-win, and I don’t think I’ve ever really said that, but by trying to be positive in this field, it sounds like you’re saying it’s win-win. In the long run, it’s by definition win-win because it’s lose-lose. I mean, if we don’t tackle climate, if we don’t deal with inequality, then the system starts to break down and everybody is less well off fundamentally, and so it is win-win in the long run. The question that gets harder is the medium run or the short run. But when I talk about this story, the story we’re living in a free market, there’s also a component that companies make decisions on maximizing profits only, and they really don’t. We could spend time on this, but the behavioral economics, behavioral psychology revolution over the last 20-30 years has taught us that people make decisions on a lot of things, and that includes the biggest, most powerful executives. There’s just a gut, there’s a strategic feel. That’s part of the reason they get the big job and the proof point of this, that to me makes it so obvious, right now is AI. Companies are spending, the technical term is gobs of money, truckloads of money, and the ROI on that is not clear. There is nobody who can tell you the exact ROI, but when you say, “Hey, let’s decarbonize, let’s look at human rights in our supply chain, let’s make sure everyone is healthier in our business,” they say, “What’s the ROI?” Again, there’s a story problem here, right? So I just like the challenge up front that there’s this platonic ideal of seeking profit that companies do. They don’t. And so it’s about how do you get this into the nature of how business is done?

So tackling this in that holistic way, there’s no company that can claim to be net positive. The system’s not really in place for that. You’d need an entirely clean grid, for example, right? You can’t get to even zero right now. And I would point to Unilever, because that’s a big part of the book, that creates a lot of problems right now. They’re having what some say are problems, I’m not sure it’s as clear as that. These are very complicated big companies. There’s been a lot of difference in leadership since Paul left and the different approaches. Some say they’re pulling back from sustainability. I don’t actually see that in that way. I think there’s some pulling back from the language of it, the way others have in this anti-ESG moment, like Larry Fink at BlackRock. They may not talk about it the same, but the work going on is kind of the same behind the scenes, and I think that’s going on in a lot of places right now. But I still would point to Unilever and my take is there was many years of leadership before Paul, during Paul, after, and they’re still doing really, I think very interesting things, like Unilever and Microsoft. I think they’ve taken a really holistic view of carbon and their commitment to renewables, their commitment to even sequestration, which is super expensive right now. And they’re doing it as we’re seeing this explosion of data centers and AI. They’re doing really good work. IKEA has always been a great example. I mean, there’s the obvious IKEA, Patagonia, these companies that have either family ownership, or smaller ownership usually can think broader, can think longer. So we can find pieces of the story. Companies are doing pieces of it really well. Mars has a bunch of problems in their supply chain, but also does some really amazing things in their supply chain. IKEA does this great work with renewables. They make more energy than they need. That is by definition, on energy, net positive, and they’re selling solar to customers, which is this additional multiplier effect. So we can point to pieces and there’s lots of areas that need tons of work, right? The skeptics will say, are the companies really doing anything around say plastics? There’s some very tough areas to get to net positive, but I see more commitment from companies around the world to get to something better than they are, and at a really basic level, to how they operate and how their value chains operate. So I think on some level at the beginning, we’re at the end of the first inning, or whatever metaphor we want to use for “We got everyone to the table,” and now it’s like, well, “How do we really do this?” is what I think slowing people down a little bit, and all the reporting and compliance requirements now, which we can talk about, is this huge driver, for good and bad.

So, I don’t know, that was a long answer to who’s leading on this. It’s a really tough question, honestly, even though this is all I do for a living, because you can pick apart anybody. I mean, let’s be honest, the multinational’s really complicated. They’re not monolithic. So people will say, “Are you crazy?” if you say someone’s a leader, no matter what you say.

Des Dearlove:

You’ve mentioned the backlash. Where are we in this story? I mean, it does feel like, and it might be a language thing, it might be that the good deeds are going on, the good work is going on beneath the surface, but it does feel like a point, not just in US, of course, in Europe as well, where I am, which, it felt like we were perhaps pushing ahead a bit faster, but that seems to have gone into backlash as well.

Andrew Winston:

Yeah, it’s really hard. Look, I’ve written about this a lot. I’ve looked at the what’s so-called anti-ESG movement, and there’s a lot of different elements of it. I wrote an article about it… Because I worked in consulting at the beginning of my career, everything’s a two by two matrix, so I had to create a two by two of the different kinds of anti-ESG. I think it’s important for companies to get a handle on that. There’s people that are upset with companies or think ESG is a cover, is greenwashing, it’s not being used right by the financial world, because they really can’t prove that the stocks say that their pickings are better on some dimension of sustainability, and that’s not exactly what they’re doing, by definition. They’re looking at the risks to a company or a stock from sustainability issues. So it’s a different question.

I think the stuff where the business cases become clearer and clearer is going to continue. I don’t think anybody’s going to stop decarbonizing. It’s just getting cheaper and cheaper. It’s better for the business, it’s better for your brand, all of it. Where things get dicier is really on the social side. The attack on diversity and inclusion, the attack on LGBTQ rights. That is harder to say. What’s the chill on that? I’ve seen reports and data saying that the move that happened after the killing of George Floyd, for companies to take on diversity in a deep way, that they’ve slowed or pulled back because of this pressure. It could be a uniquely American thing. There’s aspects of this diversity agenda that are very American. But if nothing else, it is creating what they call green-hushing, which is companies are speaking much less around sustainability. I see that everywhere, it’s clear. My business is mostly abroad now. People are just hunkered down. And the danger of that is not that some of the work stops, like I said, you’re going to still put the solar up. It’s that the core of net positive is really partnerships and collaboration and systems thinking, and it’s pretty hard to have effective partnerships if you’re not talking. So the longer that goes on, I think the worse it is for the bigger picture conversations we need, the policy conversations we need.

I mean it’s interesting, Des, you say it’s slowing in Europe because I’ve been thinking, thank God for Europe over the last couple of years because the reporting requirements, they’re a pain, companies are complaining, but they keep it on the agenda for real, right? People know they have to talk about this, create their story, get their data together. And so in a way, thank God that Europe has kept the pressure up. It could go back, right? Elections change who’s in charge and you could see some reduction, but I don’t know, once there’s a system in place of reporting, it’s pretty hard to go back because the whole system of the big four, of the consulting firms, it all builds around this, and companies and their advisors have to put these reports out. So it’s a distraction on some level, but it’s a really necessary step in the long run. I think it’s keeping things moving, so it’s a really complicated time.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

As you’re speaking about sustainability strategies, one of the things that you’ve said are critical is the narrative, right? And then you just shared with us how there is green-hushing and how the narrative is actually potentially being suppressed and there are multiple competing narratives out there. And so what’s your advice and guidance to organizations and business leaders? What’s the role of business in speaking up and what topics do they speak up on and how would you guide our listeners?

Andrew Winston:

Yeah, look, it’s complicated and there’s a lot of voices out there saying companies should only chime in on things that they have a clear position on or that they can help solve. I think there’s some truth to that. It’s a little bit motherhood and apple pie to say that, I mean, because I come back to the sense of responsibility, ownership for impacts. It’s easy to say, we’re not sure how we’re going to solve a problem like wages or gay rights, but you do have an impact on them, especially multinationals. I think there’s a series of things that are very hard to sit out. There is no sidelines in the end on things like democracy and voting. I think, on information and misinformation, yes, that’s a tech sector issue, dead center of their materiality, but it’s an issue for so many others. If you’re in any kind of science-based industry, the attack on science affects your business. If you’re in pharma, the anti-vax movement affects your business, right? So I think it’s really hard to sit out some of these things that are really core to the direction of society and development of society when you’re as big and powerful as companies are. I mean, they’ve gotten what they wanted, right? That’s been hands-off for the most part, laissez-faire policies. Again, it’s part of the same narrative. So companies are bigger, more powerful than ever. So I find it a little convenient when they’re like, “Well, this is up to government,” when they’ve been saying, as part of this narrative, “Government’s always wrong, government screws things up.” So, which is it, right, if you’re going to play this role? And I heard, years ago, Walmart has always taken criticism for their effect on small towns and there’s legitimate discussions there. They said once, years ago, we have the same problems of society, because they’re so big, right? So they have issues around healthcare, they have issues around violence or mental healthcare, all of these things, mental health, and I think there’s some truth to that. These companies are in the midst of all these problems and need to be part of the solution.

And I think part of what guides this is not just what you think you can have a real impact on. It is partly what’s expected by your employees and your major stakeholders. And I think companies that underestimate what young people, younger workers expect, I think, will be in trouble. The data is really clear from not just younger Millennials, but now Gen Z as they enter the workforce. Their view of the biggest problems in the world, climate comes up, open-ended questions globally. Climate is up there. They have the same issues around quality of life and inflation and economics, but climate’s way up there, and the rights of people, in particular, I think the gay and trans community, it’s a core value. 30% of Gen Z identify in some way as LGBTQ. This is a very different world. And I find, my two boys, who are Gen Z, just in general, they don’t understand what our problem is with some of these issues, and they’re coming into the workforce, and companies are feeling it in terms of “Do people want to come into the office, the work-life question, where do you work?” They’re seeing that directly, but I think they may Ah eunderestimate how much this younger generation expects you to live some form of values.

So look, it’s not easy. None of this is easy, but most companies have stated clearly their values around a number of things, including inclusivity and equality. It’s up there on most companies. So in a lot of ways I’m just encouraging them to live those values and be consistent even in the face of criticisms because you’ve got to step back and say, are those criticisms in good faith? What are the people criticizing about? And so, I’m hoping companies will have more courage and be braver and stand up on some of these things and not get bullied really, and say, we’re going to fight to solve climate change. We’re going to fight to make the world more equal. We’re going to fight for gay rights, and I don’t mean they need to go marching, right? By fight I just mean live up to them and be consistent across their business as best they can. This is not easy. I was in a meeting the other day and they said, “Well, we have businesses in parts of the world where it’s illegal to be gay.” Right? So there are clearly challenges here, but you can maintain, at the corporate level, what your policies are and your consistent support for different groups of people. I just don’t see how companies can avoid that in a world where they really do have more power than governments in many ways. They have this role in society, they don’t really have a choice.

Des Dearlove:

You’ve mentioned courage several times. We were talking about it before we started recording as well. On one hand, yeah, we’re saying that the CEOs and executives need to stand up with their values, but how can they overcome the resistance from outside and inside the organisation? Because the polarisation isn’t just … it’s happening everywhere. Presumably the employees are also divided on some of these issues. It’s not straightforward, as you say, it’s a complicated situation. Where can they find that courage from? How do you start on that journey and keep a North Star, as it were?

Andrew Winston:

Well, look, this is a core question of going forward for me in my research and thinking about courage. And I’ve been reading a lot of academic papers on … There’s been studies in psychology for many years on what is courage, types of courage, organizational courage. There’s obvious things like military courage that people have looked at, but it’s much harder, if you’re not jumping on a grenade, what does courage look like? It is challenging. One of the only answers I have so far, that Paul and I included in Net Positive, is the idea of collective courage, that it’s at least easier if you’re not going at it alone, and some of the advice I’ve given companies is when they’ve gotten maybe into trouble. Disney was the classic example, in Florida, and fighting over its support of gay rights, and there was this idea that this was a cautionary tale. I think they ended up in a very good place, but the mistake they might’ve made was just not going it with others, going it alone in this fight they had over this set of laws. When I’ve seen it work well is when you see 100 companies sign a statement about an anti-trans bill or something like that. That’s happened over the years. Or voting rights. They’ve come together. That’s one way. And I think Paul has worked a lot on bringing together CEOs from a few key industries like fashion and agriculture, and there’s some studies and some, I think circumstantial evidence that indicates if you get 20-25% of a sector together, like CEOs representing about that much of the flow of that sector, you can probably move the whole thing, right? You don’t need 70-80%. These tipping points are smaller than people realize. We see it in technology, on clean tech. The tipping point on electric cars and solar isn’t 50%. It’s 5 to 10% of the market, right? You start to build this momentum. I think that’s true on these issues also.

The tougher question that I’m going to spend probably the next year or so researching and trying to figure out what to say about is, what does it mean to find personal courage and how do you get there? And I’d say in the experience I’ve had talking to executives for many years and doing some research, interviewing them, CEOs, why do you care about sustainability? For the ones who have talked about it, the courage seems to come, it sounds so obvious, but just from their kids. I mean, the most common thing I’ve heard when someone makes a transition and says, okay, I really care about this larger issue and how my company plays in society, their kids just were asking them what they’re doing. It wasn’t even all that complicated. It wasn’t just “I have kids,” it was actual conversations. Gen Z is not a theoretical generation to your typical 50+ C-suite person. That’s their kids. And young Millennials for the Boomers. So I think there’s something about the very personal family conversations that give you courage. It is that classic deathbed conversation. If you think about, “What am I really looking back on?” There’s some sense of legacy and that seems to provide some courage.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Andrew, your comments on courage truly resonate and also your guidance on “Do it as a collective!” So, I mentioned at the beginning, I get to serve as Deloitte’s Chief Health Equity Officer, and one of the things that we’ve done is actually work with the World Economic Forum to create a global health equity network and have CEOs sign a Zero Health Gaps Pledge just to activate exactly the types of things that you’ve described. And in my perspective, one of the other things that drives courage is being able to continue to deliver on the financial performance of your organization or company, as you’re activating on this. So you’ve said it’s cheaper to act than do nothing. So can you talk a little bit about that, especially in line with courage, of actions that require courage, but create also a better bottom line?

Andrew Winston:

Well, I feel like I’ve answered every question with, it’s complicated. If this was easy stuff, you know? Sometimes I really wish I had just decided to be an innovation or marketing thought leader or whatever the phrase is. And not that that’s easy, but you don’t start from your back foot of having to prove that it has business value. So the idea that inaction costs way more than action is very clearly true now, even though there’s people trying to debate it at the macro level. At the global level, the cost of climate change, of doing nothing on it, is from many, many trillions to, let’s be honest, extinction, right? I mean the range of options going forward is pretty bad, and the costs of doing something have come down so dramatically. It is cheaper to do renewables in most parts of the world, right? The EVs are starting to be, just cheaper lifecycle, right? So part of it is at the macro level, the challenge is always in systems. Is that true at the microeconomic level for a given company? And the answer is yes and no, and it comes back to what I said before that you can’t promise that everything’s profitable immediately. Only sustainability is asked to prove that. And even in the ESG investment world, they always ask, does it outperform? And I’m like, well, if one class of investment always outperformed, all the money in the market would go to it, right? You don’t see people go, oh, we launched a biotech fund. Is it going to outperform every quarter? No one asks that. So there’s a weird burden on sustainability. And it’s not to say you have to also profit or drives profits, doesn’t mean every choice you make is immediately profitable, right? It’s like all other things in business. These are investments.

I think decarbonizing, even going beyond what’s the obvious cheapest stuff, is going to be very valuable to businesses as they’re then not as reliant on very volatile oil and gas prices, fossil fuel prices, the geopolitics of it. It provides resilience, right? That’s a good example, looking at your value chain, making sure there’s much lower incidence of human rights issues, looking at wages levels. I mean, let’s be clear, some of this costs more. To give living wages to people costs more. That’s the point, right? It’s to raise the wages. The question is what does that do for your business? How much less turnover do you have? How much better and productive are people? Are there business values in it?

But again, it’s a great collective courage thing. I don’t think a single company should say, “We’re raising wages here.” They should go and get the policy changed, get the minimum wages changed for everyone. Then it’s not this big, “I’m going to take a hit in my stock because I raised wages.” So some of it, again, is coming back to that collective action so that if it seems like something’s going to be more expensive or could put you at some short-term disadvantage, what would stop that from being true? What needs to happen? What scale do you need in a new technology? What scale of collective action do you need? Work the problem, is my push on things. People just say, “It costs more!” And that’s a really knee-jerk reaction in almost every sector, being sustainable costs more. And it’s not even true, but often it is just about stepping back and saying, well, what is it that you think will cost more? And how do we work that? How do we change that?

So my larger encouragement here is to think about this as an investment in the business and not just at some cost. And I get there’s some historic nature to this that when the original stuff around green was compliance-based, putting a filter on a smokestack, there was a very direct ROI and compliance. So it came from that history and it’s been very hard to get it into this category, like AI is now, like investing in new techs, like investing in your people, often in their skills. That’s just assumed, right? Has value, right? And I think we get into trouble. When companies show that they are not good at thinking about the larger value of things, they don’t invest in R&D, they don’t invest in the long term in anything. It’s not just around sustainability. And I think it hurts them in the long run, right? And companies that lean into the recessions, invest in them, there’s been studies on this over and over again, they do better, and sustainability is right in the core of that. This is what the world needs to look like and what your employees expect you to do. So this is the category to lean into.

Des Dearlove:

How do you personally find the resilience to keep at this mission? Because I’ve known you for a while now, and I mean, you keep on pushing, you keep on provoking. This is all about provocateurs, but how do you find, I guess, the personal courage and just the resilience, really, to keep knocking on the door?

Andrew Winston:

I don’t know if I always do. I mean, I’ve been public at times. I have my own mental health issue. I’ve dealt with depression my whole adult life. I think lots of people do, and I think it’s much more common to talk about it now than it used to be. So there’s some amount of pharmacology involved in my resilience and talking to people, family and doctors at times. And kidding aside, part of it is talking to people in the field. We have our late night drinks about… The “Are we going to make it?”-conversation is so common in our field, and I get it from people new to the field, just executives going, “Hey, are we going to make it?” And those are really hard questions to answer. I think what I’ve come to in recent years, and I’ve written about this a lot, is that we are in a chaos mode, but we’re in a very yin-yang thing, if you want to take an eastern philosophy view, which is we are both winning and losing.

I was listening to a podcast about clean tech and in the last couple years we got close to two trillion invested globally in clean technology. That is, by any measure, a lot, and it’s building a ton of renewables. The estimates of what we need to try to hold the world to 1.5 or 2 degrees warming are five-six trillion a year. So it’s a lot, but it’s not enough, and that’s my whole field, right? Everyone’s at the table now, but the percentage that really get how important net positive thinking is, regenerative thinking is, it’s still tiny. So it’s dealing with duality. I find that’s the challenge I face. It’s really hard for people. I feel this election year where 60-70% of the world is voting, there’s a duality. We don’t know what’s going to happen.

And I hear in so many things, people seem to need a conclusion, whether it’s depressing or not, like we’re all going to die, right? Climate’s going to kill us, or clean tech’s going to solve it all. Or I know this person’s going to get elected or that person. They need an answer, and it’s much harder to deal with the fact that we really don’t know, that elections could go many different ways. That’s just the world today. We don’t know. Pundits get on TV and have to say something, so they declare, but it’s so much harder to deal with the unknown, and so I work on that. There’s meditation, there’s physical exercise, all those things that help you feel more resilient personally, but just try to deal with that duality, that things can be good and bad at the same time.

So I don’t know any other way because I can’t tell myself this is all going to work out. Who knows? And I can’t tell myself that it’s all bad either because why get out of bed? Why even try? I don’t don’t know. How do you guys do it? I mean, it’s a fight for everyone right now, right? The world’s not easy. I think we’ve never been at a more complicated, volatile time. I know every society probably thinks that the Greeks thought they were probably at the end of humanity, but it does feel pretty serious now, right? We’re at the global level on all of our problems. How do you guys deal with it?

Des Dearlove:

Well, I would say the same thing. We all have our mental health challenges and we also… I think conversations with the kids can go both ways. So I was having a conversation with my son last night. He’s 26, and he was saying the world’s suddenly become much more dangerous. He can feel it. And my reply was, I’ve never known a time… I wasn’t around when the Cuban Missile Crisis was happening. That was before my time, but I’ve never known a time that felt quite so up in the air and quite so volatile. Probably not a very cheery thought, but that’s where we are. But in a way, that’s what drives you on, isn’t it? The fact that maybe some little incremental thing that we can do at the individual level, as well as at the society level, can just nudge it a little bit in what we think is the right direction.

Andrew Winston:

Well, and just quickly before, I want to hear your answer, Kulleni, I think one of the things I’ve heard at a sustainability event from an Eastern philosophy perspective was just the idea of I am enough, sometimes to just stop and say, I’m doing what I can, right? I’m not going to solve the world’s problems. And a friend of mine who works in education, trying to make the world better through education said something about us, in our 50’s now, that you start to realize you’re not going to see the whole grand change that you’d like to see. It’s probably beyond your lifetime. And that acceptance of, oh, I thought the world would get to justice and clean and net-zero when I was 20-something. I’m going to see all this. I don’t think I will, right? And that’s the nature of every large move towards justice or equality or a better thriving world is it’s a journey. It’s a continual journey. I think just letting go of “I have to solve it” is very relieving. So, I’m sorry I jumped in there.

Des Dearlove:

No, and it’s always a dynamic situation too. You can never take democracy for granted. You can never take justice … These things have got to be fought for again and again and again, constantly. Sorry. Kulleni.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

No, I was going to say it’s interesting. So Andrew, I’m from Ethiopia and I actually grew up in the middle of a civil war in the famine of the 80’s. And so when people feel, “Oh my gosh,” I’m like, “Okay, it’s just another day,” right? And I also practiced as an emergency medicine doctor for 10 years, and so uncertainty and disaster are my comfort zone, but I think it is really interesting, but it becomes more frightening now that I have children. Right? So it’s one thing when you say the world is uncertain for me. It’s another when it’s uncertain for those that you care about and feel responsible for. And so when I think about it, I do meditation as well. I think that’s a huge source. Physical activity helps, and then it’s just the very next step, right? It’s just like what’s the next incremental thing that you can do to make a difference? And in that frame, though, as I think about it, I wonder, I mean, when you think about the future, are you optimistic? And if yes, why? And if not, why not, about the future?

Andrew Winston:

Yeah. Before I answer that, just listening to your background, I don’t know why you’re interviewing me. I want to hear about, you’re an EMS doctor, you’re a consultant now, Ethiopia!

It’s really interesting because, right, in the part of the world you grew up in, there were places that were in complete collapse that are a lot more stable now. I have a colleague in sustainability, a professor, she works in Rwanda quite a bit now. They’re trying to be a sustainability hub, right? I mean, it’s remarkable because if you looked at that 20 years ago, you’d be like, that’s impossible, right? So there are these incredible turns. I find actually listening every now and then to historians, they have this longer view of, we’ve been in these periods where everything looks like it’s coming apart, and then sometimes it swings off, maybe not through an easy time, like a civil war or something, but it swings through and you get to something better.

Look, I have a standard answer about this, the things I’m optimistic about, and it’s funny, when I give talks and do my work, part of the point is to be optimistic or to paint a picture of “Here’s what companies are doing,” without lying. Not saying everybody’s doing this, but here’s what can be done. And people say, I’m so optimistic, when I get off the stage, which is really funny to me, because to my family, I kvetch a lot. It’s part of my heritage. Provoking is one word. I call myself a professional nudge, what my people would call it. So optimistic, it’s pretty hard not to see the move to clean technology, it’s pretty unstoppable. I mean, there’s efforts to stop it, but it’s really going to be difficult to stop it.

And I start most of my talks now with pictures from the second week of the pandemic, third week, fourth week, when the cities were all clear, the air was clear. And I start from there and say, look, this was this vision we got. It wasn’t the way to get there. We don’t want to shut down the economy, but when we paused, the air was clean, and that’s what net-zero will look like. We forget what we’re shooting for here and how beautiful that is, just on the air, just on net-zero, let alone trying to get to a more just society. So I’m optimistic about that. I’m optimistic about, in general, young people, you can certainly feel about it in multiple ways. There’s indications in every direction. But in general, people like Greta Thunberg and teenagers, they have tools to mobilize in a way that were never available. They can get millions of people in the street sometimes, and their just general demands for what they expect of companies, I think will drive real change. It has to. And that gives me some optimism, young people. Even the protests in all the colleges, universities in the US, we can have huge … I mean, these are really complicated issues. The Middle East is the most complicated issue in human history, but there’s something so inspiring about the level of energy, even if I’m not sure it’s pointed in exactly the right way, or I would like to see it pointed to save our democracy.

There’s this energy that comes up that … Look, in my 50’s, I don’t have that energy, right? It’s just, I raise my kids and you just want to see that next generation yell and be wrong and be right and just get moving. So that gives me optimism. I think there’s so much that’s, again, yin-yang, right? AI? I’ve got a piece coming out on AI and sustainability just called, “It’s Complicated”. It could be a total disaster. It could also do an amazing amount for sustainability. I don’t know what to say. I’m optimistic and pessimistic, so most of our big things are both.

And as you said, you’re fighting it all the way? It’s hard. That gives you optimism in what you see, people fighting. They’re fighting for justice, they’re fighting for climate, and there’s millions and millions of people, and millions of NGOs, and that feels good. The data on the ground doesn’t support a lot of optimism sometimes. We are, by definition, losing on climate just by emissions are still rising. That’s not a pessimistic statement, that just is. I’m looking forward to the point where that turns. I think it’s soon-ish. The data center energy explosion is maybe a problem for that right now, actually, it might slow down the actual global level of energy and emissions pivot that’s coming, but it’s coming. China looks like they might be at peak emissions soon, if not now. That’s amazing, right? Sinopec, the Chinese oil company, says they think they’re at peak oil demand, peak gas demand. That’s astonishing in human history. We’ve only grown, right, forever and ever. So those things make me optimistic. I don’t know. Do those resonate? Anything I should be also optimistic about?

Kulleni Gebreyes:

No, I grew up listening to Bob Marley and I always say that one of his quotes that I keep close to my heart is, it’s, “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.” And I think optimism is the only choice that we have, even if it’s just as a love letter to our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Des Dearlove:

No, that’s a great thought. We are running out of time, but I just wanted to ask you one more quick question, Andrew. I think you’ve hinted at it a little bit, and it may be part of the optimism thing. What’s next for Andrew Winston? What are you working on?

Andrew Winston:

Well, so I’ve spent more of the last year, year-and-a-half, doing a fairly new area for me. I’m not an academic, so I don’t come through the teaching world, but doing some exec ed development. Paul and I launched a couple classes, as you know, with Thinkers 50 and ExecOnline. It’s been a really weird time for sustainability, as we talked about earlier, including investing in things like learning and development. Things are kind of on pause. That’s a part of this quiet green-hushing. There’s just been a lot less investment. I don’t think that’s going to last. There’s just too much going on. So I think classes like this are going to matter. Paul and I are developing LinkedIn Learning classes. I’ll probably do one with him and one or two on my own. That’s another path to reach people. I’m just trying to find different paths, because there’s a whole other conversation about media. I came through media as one of my first industries. I’m just not sure people are reading anymore. I mean, if you look at airports, train stations, like the book space, magazine space is tiny now. I mean, it’s just been dwarfed by food basically. Everything’s food and self-checkout, and so I’m trying to find the right ways to reach people, and I think it is through other means, classes, videos. We clearly have a generation that probably prefers a series of videos to a three-hour book, even though I think you can get much more in a book.

So courage is the theme I’m focused on. Paul and I are talking about a podcast as well, because there’s not enough podcasts out there, we figure. But really, it’s partly about, I’m just not sure a book is the right format anymore. And I’ve been having this conversation with a lot of people and I don’t know if there’s an answer, but I’m just looking at other media to try to get to people and have them think about these issues in a different way, as much as possible.

Des Dearlove:

Okay. We’ve got Paul coming on the Provocateurs soon, over the summer, so we’ll have to think of some different questions to ask him.

Andrew Winston:

We speak differently in many ways, and it’s compatible, but he has different stories, much more global, and he’ll talk about sitting with Bono or whatever. I don’t know. It’s a different world.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

That’s great.

Des Dearlove:

Well, we’ve thoroughly enjoyed having you on, and as always, it’s great to hear from you and to hear that there is some optimism and there is some progress, which is always good to know. So Andrew, a huge thank you. I’ve been Des Dearlove with Kulleni Gebreyes and we will look forward to you joining us again next time on Provocateurs.