In this free online event, we explored how regenerative thinking is redefining leadership and opening up new possibilities for how we work, innovate, and lead with purpose.
Hear from our renowned line-up of speakers in this appetizer for the Thinkers50 London Summit taking place in November:
Des Dearlove:
Hello everyone, and a very warm welcome. I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50, and I’m delighted to be your host for today’s Thinkers50 LinkedIn Live event.
As you are joining, please do feel free to drop a note in the comments and let us know where you are tuning in from. We would love to hear from you. And throughout the event we encourage you to share your thoughts and questions and insights in the chat, and we’ll be selecting a few questions for the live Q&A. So do please join that conversation.
Let me give you a quick overview of what’s ahead. We’ll start with a conversation between Professor Julia Binder from IMD, and Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever and co-author of Net Positive. Paul and Julia will be exploring what being a regenerative business means.
After that, Julia will stay with us for a panel session where she’ll be joined by Charles Conn, long-time chair of Patagonia, and Harvard professor Linda Hill, co-author of Genius at Scale. Then, after a short break, we’ll hear a keynote from another Harvard professor, Tsedal Neeley, author of Digital Mindset. Then we move into a Q&A with Kate O’Neill, author of What Matters Next, and we wrap up the session with some closing reflections.
Now, if you already know Thinkers50, or you are attending the London Summit or Awards Gala in November, welcome back. And if you are new to us, or rather we are new to you, we’re very glad that you’re here.
Thinkers50 is best known for our global ranking of management thinkers and our Distinguished Achievement Awards, which celebrate bold ideas that are shaping the future of business. Right now we’re in the process of rolling out the shortlists for this year’s awards, and the big reveal happens live at the Awards Gala in London on the 3rd and 4th of November.
If you’re attending the daytime London Summit, then you’re in for an incredible program, filled with thinkers, leaders, and doers exploring this year’s theme, which is regeneration. And if you’re curious about how to join us in London or just want to find out more about our work, our team will be adding links to the chat throughout today’s event.
So that brings us to today. Now, today is a prelude to what’s happening in London on November 3rd and 4th. A sneak peek, if you will, of what’s to come. But it’s more than that. It’s also a rich standalone event with timely insights and meaningful conversations.
Our theme for this year’s Summit, and it couldn’t be more timely in my view, is regenerative business. So what do we mean by that? Well, regeneration goes beyond sustainability. The idea has its roots in agricultural practices such as cyclically rejuvenating soil and plant life. When you extend that to business, the goal of regeneration is to make systems better, to give back more than we take, to replenish the planet’s natural resources, and to make communities and society more equitable and resilient. By redefining what types of value to prioritise, regenerative businesses contribute positively to the environment, to society, and to the economy, creating a circular and inclusive model of growth that benefits all stakeholders, including, and this is important, including future generations.
At its heart, regenerative thinking is about moving beyond doing less harm, to actively doing more good. And that brings us perfectly, I think, to our first two guests.
Paul Polman and Professor Julia Binder
To kick us off, we are joined by two people who are shaping this conversation in a profound way. Paul Polman is the former CEO of Unilever and co-author of the landmark book, Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take. Paul and his co-author, Andrew Winston, are also Thinkers50’s #3 ranked thinkers. And Julia Binder is Professor of Sustainable Innovation at IMD, a Thinkers50 Radar thinker, and author of the Circular Business Revolution.
We’re absolutely thrilled to have them here to set the stage for us today. Julia, Paul, the virtual stage is yours. Please take it away.
Julia Binder:
Thank you so much, Des.
Paul Polman:
Thank you.
Julia Binder:
Well, it’s a pleasure to have this conversation with you today. I’m really looking forward to this for quite a while already. And I think Des already started to define a little bit what he thinks or how Thinkers50 defines regenerative business. In my teaching, I always refer to the alphabet soup of sustainability. Because by now we have so many terms floating around. So I would love to, a) hear your perspective, what do you think about regenerative business, the term? And also, how do you contrast it with ‘net positive’, a term that has been largely popularised by you and Andrew? And just to see a little bit, where do you see it aligning? Are there any differences from your perspective as well?
Paul Polman:
Yeah. No thanks, Julia, and thanks Des as well for explaining it so we don’t have to do it anymore. But in general, I would say net positive is a business that gives back more than it takes on climate, on nature, on society, if you want. But it’s often still framed as doing more good than harm. But it still has a harm element in there. Whilst, if you stock truly regenerative, which is really what we try to capture in our book, if I may say, it actually goes beyond net positive. See it as a continuum. It actively restores or renews or strengthens the systems it depends on. And indeed, we talk about ecological systems, social systems. There’s also economic systems. And with an objective of making humanity flourish. Life will do well, even if humanity is gone. But we have to protect humanity, actually, above all, now and for generations to come. And that goes through an integral protection of nature and understanding that we are an integral part of nature.
So net positive is responding directly to the emergency that we find ourselves in. Soon the Stockholm Resilience Institute will inform us that we haven’t passed six of the nine planetary boundaries that define our overall health, but that oceans have been added to it and that we have seven planetary boundaries that have been exceeded, actually putting us in a very dangerous zone, as you’re well aware of. New frameworks are being established increasingly. Think about the TNFD or the CSRD, or the ISSB, which are pushing companies to move forward. And not surprisingly, the signals from the marketplace, being it from consumers or from civil society etc, are increasingly picking up for business to move to a more responsible model.
So I would say regenerative business is not just net positive, but it’s probably the next higher level evolution, if you want. Most companies are in the compliance mode, unfortunately, doing the minimum necessary. Some might be a little bit more sustainable and have CSR reports of reducing emissions or plastics in the oceans or deforestation. In many cases, unfortunately, well below what science demands. Net positive businesses really think about how can I contribute more than I actually extract? But there still is an extractive thinking in there. Whilst regenerative thinking is truly systems change.
It is actually a thinking of opportunities, a thinking of abundance. Think about… I was just talking to some people about water. Grundfort, a Danish company, but think about net positive water replenishing more than you actually use. Think about, as Des was saying, regenerative agriculture, restoring soil or biodiversity to a better state than you actually found it. And increasingly, companies like Walmart or IKEA or Caring, are very responsible. And I know that Charles Conn will be on the program later, but Patagonia is actually probably one of the better examples with interface, or what I tried to do in Unilever, of what it means to move to a truly regenerative business, including social justice in your value chain, if you want to.
But think about their regenerative organic certification program, soil health restoration, carbon draw down, animal welfare, social fairness of farmers, and the list goes on. So that is really regenerative thinking, and it requires regenerative leadership. Unfortunately, we can talk about that a little bit more later on, but traditional leadership is still too much focused on efficiency short term, on the profit zone, on the shareholder value. Sustainable responsible leadership is still about less harm, but regenerative leadership thinks about planet earth, thinks about future generations, and thinks about making things better than they truly found it.
So that’s system thinking, that’s future stewardship that requires as much a strong inner core as we know in this environment as an outer core.
Julia Binder:
You’ve touched upon so many important aspects already. I mean reflect on a couple of these. You talk about the signals for change, right? I do that quite a lot as well, to say we’re still building business a little bit how we would have done 50 years ago, with the same logic that basically globalisation, all the ideas that we’ve taken for granted, abundance of natural resources, all of this still holds profit maximisation as something desirable. And yet there are important signals for change. And you mentioned a couple. And I think just a couple I want to highlight.
I think the importance of frameworks is very important, let’s say CSRD, TNFD, TCFD and others. And yet at the same time what we’ve seen a lot is, with CSRD and others, some companies that would fall in a tick-the-box kind of mentality, right? So basically, rather than really adopting this new mindset that you mentioned, oftentimes these frameworks almost reduce your thinking to exactly the kind of reporting guidelines they were provided with, right?
So I think there might be a trade-off. And yet at the same time it’s important, obviously, to get some kind of frameworks to organise and compare, let’s say, these kind of advanced across the companies.
And maybe the other one that I want to highlight before I give it back to you, Paul, when you talk about signals for change, until recently, and I would say until November last year approximately, we were in, let’s say, almost like a honeymoon phase of sustainability and CSRD and all of this whereby basically everybody agreed we should do more. And there were a lot of pledges out there. I would not say that action was following quickly, but there were a lot of pledges out there. But now we see that the wind has shifted. So we have a lot of headwinds in sustainability. It’s more difficult to place a topic on the agenda. It’s not as easy anymore to say that all stakeholders demanded. I think we see some shifts here.
You and Andrew published Net Positive in 2021. What has changed since then? How has your thinking changed? What has been maybe a positive surprise and maybe where are some of the things where you think we need to pick up on speed and then change in our thinking?
Paul Polman:
No, you’re raising several points. I was writing them down, Julia, if I may. But obviously we have to watch that over-compliance doesn’t become ticking the box and stifling innovation. I hear so often many companies saying, I’m spending more money now on the compliance side and more people on filling in the charts and the boxes than I can actually spend on running my business or driving innovation.
The leading companies that are doing well in this environment, challenging as it may be, are the ones that actually move from risk, and seeing this as a risk mitigation, to actually seeing this as innovation and the driving of opportunities. The ones that move from seeing this just as a cost and compliance to actually seeing it as an investment for future resilience and success. So we see indeed a little bit more of a bifurcation. And companies that were paying lip service a little bit or wanting to play the game and keep kicking the can down the road, are not doing so well in this environment.
I think you can still show, in general, that companies that are moving forward seriously on this agenda, are increasingly also valued higher by the marketplace. So it is true that there are headwinds today, there are no questions about it. The politicisation of many of the things you’re talking about, the greenlash, the short-term pressures, the AI disruptions, the geopolitical tensions that are there, it’s driving many CEOs back to the here and now instead of the right balance between taking care of your business now but also managing your business for the long term.
And then obviously in some of the jurisdictions in the world, it has become an outright deliberate attempt to derail this agenda heavily financed by the vested order. I’ve always said that as this transition moves forward, the voices of opposition are getting stronger, and they’ve succeeded to some extent, not only in hijacking the global agreements like the plastic treaties or the COP processes, but they’ve also hijacked politics in what historically has been a very important country in the world, but we shouldn’t get sidetracked by 350 million people, when frankly the bulk of the 8.5 billion people in the world want to move forward.
“Frankly, we’re linear thinkers with exponential problems.” – Paul Polman
Climate science has not really softened. Nature loss continues, inequality fuels unrest. And frankly, climate change doesn’t really care who’s in the White House. And citizens all across the world want healthier, fairer, more sustainable, and more inclusive lives. And so the energy transition that we are seeing is inevitable. The only question is how fast can it go and how fast does it need to go? And are we well-prepared for that? And frankly, we’re linear thinkers with exponential problems, and that’s probably where the biggest challenge is.
But even with what you see in the U.S. now, which is a setback undoubtedly, which we cannot afford, undoubtedly, with pressures put increasingly on other countries, via trade wars or boycotting negotiations that are not very helpful, we still see the energy transition moving forward. Last year we spent $2.1 trillion on just getting greener energy. It’s up again between 10 and 15% over the first six months of this year.
Countries like Pakistan have put half of their grid now on green energy, and we see Africa moving very quickly to solar. China investing, in a period of one or two years, the installed capacity of Europe. Things are moving, and that’s because the economics work. So what has changed and has become more clear, is that we have a bigger issue, and that we need to accelerate. And I think the book helped with that thinking of what companies need to do practically to be part of that and to capture that value and be successful. But the two things that really help us right now in my opinion, despite the setbacks we talked about, is technology. Technology curves are going down and cost curves are coming down exponentially. In two or three years time, solar will again be 70% cheaper. And we’ve seen that with all forms of green energy. We always underestimate the speed with which these cost curves go down, and the adoption of it. And that’s very positive.
And by the way, you see it in the U.S. as well, where the president wants to keep coal plants open, but the coal plants themselves are saying, “We don’t want to continue to lose money.” The energy costs now in the U.S. are going up, and it can clearly be demonstrated that it goes up in the bulk of the states that are not embracing the green agenda. So consumers are paying the price for it, but that’s technology.
And the second thing that has drastically changed even more so over the last four or five years, is the cost of not acting. It’s now not anymore a few people, but it’s millions of people that have to be displaced because of droughts or of the floodings now, or of the incredibly changing weather patterns that we see all across the world. Consumers are starting to understand that they’re paying for it, in their cost of food, in their healthcare, in many other parts of, call it their wallet. So the cost of not acting is now becoming much higher. And it’s actually, with the combination of this better technology available to us, one of the biggest business opportunities that we have.
So the problem is there. We underestimate the cost curves when we look out, and we also underestimate the cost that we have. And as a result, we discount the future investments too much, and make too little of it. But there’s many good things that are moving. We see the financial market actually moving, not backtracking. Despite the newspapers making noise about bad news, there’s a lot of things going up. We see investments going up, we see all the growth in the economy being in the green economy, if you want to.
And frankly, companies that have backtracked and that are being called out, rightfully so, I personally wonder how many were really committed. So to some extent it’s a little bit of a shakeout. So what you need to do in this environment is stay the course, build resilience in yourself and in your business, embrace the science that guides you, see this turbulence as an opportunity. It will not get less in the next few years. Stay committed to your purpose, obviously. And prove, with clear action, that if anything, the business case is stronger now than it has ever been in. And organisations, between you and me, Julia, like Thinkers50, are wonderfully placed to provide that clarity to people on how to navigate this turbulence. And that’s why some of the things that they’re putting on and the November celebrations, are going to be absolutely crucial.
Julia Binder:
Yeah. And I love that this year actually the focus of the entire event is around regeneration, which I think shows that we can double down even in times of headwinds.
Paul Polman:
Absolutely.
Julia Binder:
And I remember, a lot of what you just said reminds me about an interview that I saw that you gave just after the election in the U.S., and you said that the train, so the green train, has left the station. And I used this to quote you a couple of times. Because I think this is what you mentioned before. Basically we are already on these S-curves, we are already reaching a tipping point. Solar is cheaper than the non-renewable energies and all of this. So I think electric vehicles are now really on their S-curve as well. So we are reaching all these tipping points.
And in some ways, if you want, under Trump now in the U.S., we see basically a focus on markets that seem outdated and that don’t seem to be future-proof for many companies. And business leaders sense it, right? And it just sends wrong signals, I think, from the regulatory bodies. I think also that the watering down of CSRD that we’re anticipating a bit with the omnibus now, is just not a good signal. I think should we have reduced the complexity? Yes. Should we reduce the scope? No.
And I think it’s what you said, right? I think in the end, one of the things that I’m wondering, it might be a bit controversial, maybe the headwinds have something good in themselves. And what I mean with that, is that we were in the past years good at celebrating ourselves that we’re all so sustainable, everybody’s having a pledge, net zero here and there, but actually actions didn’t really follow. And I think what we see right now is what Warren Buffett said, when the tide goes out, you see who was swimming naked. And a little bit is what you’re seeing right now. A lot of the people who are swimming naked. It was just a pledge and they could just walk away and nothing’s changing in the strategy of the firm.
So I think maybe the headwinds right now, they push us, they force us to become much more strategic when it comes to sustainability, move away from these feel-good initiatives to say, “Okay, what is it that we really do that is integrated in our core business production processes?” And maybe by that we as a community mature as well. So I think obviously this is not a feel-good time right now, but maybe it’s a very important step in the right direction. At the end we’ll look at this period hopefully, and say it was painful, but an acceleration of our efforts.
Paul Polman:
I think you’re right. And again, there’s a lot in there, but you’re right, it is a little bit of a moment of shakeout and reckoning and there’s more emphasis now on showing that it actually is good for business, that it goes to the bottom line, less virtue signaling. And we have to acknowledge as well that in some of these areas, like perhaps, this might be controversial, but like the DENI, or even some of the sustainability areas that we went a little bit too far and didn’t see the practicality sometimes of it, or take the other party with you.
And today what is more important is what I think is the ABCs of leadership, be very adaptive and find out why the situation is happening, bridge to the other side, to work together in different ways, have a different narrative etc, and then collaborate differently.
So we do need to adapt. There are learnings in there. But on the other hand, it’s estimated that about… We need jobs and 25 million jobs are getting into the green economy now, according to the International Energy… IEA, International Energy Agency. We see the demand for green steel going up tenfold. I was just talking to a company. The circular economy is soon going to be worth over four and a half trillion dollars. Sustainable financing is moving. So it is right that some of these things have not been fully implemented, but that’s the case in any change process of this magnitude. And there is always a little bit of free writing stuff, but I think in general, we were moving, otherwise we wouldn’t be spending $2 trillion.
The message to Europe, which you mentioned, but I want to be clear in my Dutch style, you don’t give into bullies, because then they bully you more. The countries that gave in on the terrorists were being asked to do more. I mean, look how they play around with Canada, some other things. So you have to stand up. And it would be an outright tragedy if we give into the U.S. who’s trying to pedal its fossil fuel as part of any negotiation, or punishes countries if they don’t take their LNG or oil. And Europe has to watch it, that we don’t weaken the environmental standards, which the citizens of Europe want, to keep our relationships with the U.S. on a healthy footing.
So there are some morals that are being tested right now, and I think the voice of the private sector in this environment is very important. You take the European Deforestation Regulation. Now there’s talk about watering it down again, after postponing it and kicking the can down the road. And that’s under pressure from countries outside of Europe. Brussels needs to get a strong message that the bulk of the business community, the responsible people that think longer term, and there are enough of them, don’t accept this backpedaling.
And unfortunately right now, especially in the U.S., that courage of not speaking up against the bully, is unfortunately surprising people. And then you create a vacuum in communication that will be filled by the other party. But wherever you look, this thing is moving. The ones that don’t move, I think increasingly put themselves at risk and at a competitive disadvantage. And perhaps at the end of the day, the biggest benefit of the U.S. president’s current actions and undermining of science, undermining of values, undermining of democracy, undermining of political independence or political risk independence, all that is going to happen, is slowing down their economy. And frankly, that might be the biggest benefit they give us in terms of lower consumption of the bad things.
Julia Binder:
Watching big growth in real life.
Paul Polman:
There is always a silver lining in other things, but this is an enormous opportunity. And sticking our heads in the sand or being silent is not only irresponsible, I think it actually violates, for companies and boards, their fiduciary duties, if you want my opinion, I’ve always lived by the slogan, it’s better to make the dust and eat the dust, and in this environment there’s even more of a need for it, if you know what I mean.
Julia Binder:
Absolutely. And we talked a little bit about Europe. I mean, honestly, I think at this time Europe is at a very interesting crossroads, whereby America is going back in time and China is actually accelerating. And I think increasingly I just feel that business leaders are looking in the wrong direction. We’re looking at the person that is extremely loud and vocal and basically trying to be very destructive. And what we are overseeing is that China is very deliberately and very forcefully walking in future markets and starting to dominate all of the future market opportunities.
And I think this is where Europe needs to decide whether we are being overshadowed and just listen to the U.S., or whether we are actually seeing where the big future market opportunities are and what role we could play? And I think there are important opportunities, as you rightfully outline.
Paul Polman:
Tremendously. Europe missed the boat on battery technology, on solar. I see people writing like, “Oh, we missed the boat to China and others, so we shouldn’t concentrate on this and just make our fossil industry stronger.” I mean, it’s even amazing that papers write that, and that everybody stays silent when these things are being said, because then you normalise them.
We looked at 32 technologies that are needed for the green transition, and frankly, in 26 of them, China has a competitive advantage, and including in the number of patents that are written and owned. So the U.S. is obsoleting itself and probably accelerating the decline of this U.S. dominance in deciding world politics. We’re going to go rapidly to a multipolar world. We’re going to have different trade relationships, different political alliances are being formed. Some of them will be healthy, others we need to actively be involved in to make them work.
“At the end of the day, it’s a question of leadership. Do we have the willpower?” – Paul Polman
But I think at the end, more good will come out of it by creating a more multipolar world. And hopefully at the end of the day, a more responsible world. The status quo is not good, and where we came from is not desirable to go back. But we have the technologies to address these issues. In many cases it’s cheaper. We have the funds, the financing to do that, especially if we spent more money on, frankly, keeping the old system alive, than what we need to invest in new systems. The cost of climate change and the peripheral subsidies are estimated anywhere between three and $5 trillion. The energy incremental investments in the energy revolution are about of that magnitude.
So it’s not a question of money and it’s not a question of technology. So at the end of the day, it’s a question of leadership. Do we have the willpower? In our book, we talk about leadership being purpose-driven and to the service of society, having a high level of empathy with the issues that are going on. Because these two factors make you more courageous. There’s definitely something to be said for sticking out your neck and carving a new road that nobody has walked.
And then the ability to inspire this moral leadership and the desire to build these transformative partnerships. And what we see is that the leaders that have those are doing very well, and their companies are doing very well in this environment, and the leaders that don’t, that shrink back to management at its best, are actually paying the price for this. A lot of companies now, when we talk to employees, where the employees are thinking “When it’s the end of my bonus cycle, I’ll leave, because I’ve seen the company over the last seven months change 180 degrees in their values, and that’s not the company I joined, nor do I want to be associated with that. We did a study called Conscious Quitting, and we found now that over 60% of employees are thinking of leaving their companies. And that’s probably one of the reasons why we see engagement scores go down so fast lately, that’s a ticking time bomb for any company. If you can’t even keep your own employees motivated to the highest degree, you’ll never win in the marketplace either.
Julia Binder:
Paul, these 30 minutes went extremely quickly, I feel like we were just warming up.
Paul Polman:
Sorry about that.
Julia Binder:
And you’ve shared so many different pieces of advice already, but I think… how about we end with one piece of advice that you have for the next generation of business leaders. And I remember a lot of the things, right? You said we have the technologies, the markets are there, the stakeholders are lining up, so leadership needs to change, we need to venture towards more regenerative leadership. What’s one piece of advice that you would give the next generation of leaders? You were one of those that, in your role at Unilever, but also beyond then, you were the one that was also pushing the boundaries, because the most easy one is to say, okay, the economic framework really captures me, I can’t do anything. So, what’s your one piece of advice that you want our listeners to take away?
“There is no business on a dead planet” – Paul Polman
Paul Polman:
So, I am a little bit concerned by, even in the climate community, I hear too much the discussions about being powerless, or fearful, or dominating discussions that discuss the latest actions of the U.S. president, and then tomorrow’s different actions, and that’s reaction. People are in a reactive mode. And I think my biggest message is don’t believe the myth of powerless, no great story that I’ve read to my seven grandchildren ends where the heroes said, “And then we gave up.” That’s not us, and that’s not what it should be. So, you have more influence than you think, through the choices you make, the coalitions you join, the examples you set. And Wangarĩ Maathais said it very well, she was a Nobel Prize winner from Kenya, when she said, “There comes a time in the history of humanity when we’re called upon to rise to a higher level of consciousness,” which she called the higher moral ground.
Well, I cannot think of a better time than now. So, take that agency, take that responsibility for why we’re here on this planet Earth, and set the bar high. Even if it makes you feel uncomfortable at times or open to criticism, or skeptics and cynics, because there are many around, it is just the right cause of action. So, in the short term that you’re here on planet Earth, make a difference. Realise that it can only work if we strive for dignity and respect for everybody, equity, compassion. And that a world that only works for few and less and less for the many is a world that we certainly don’t want to hand over to our children and grandchildren, but it doesn’t work for business either. There is no business on a dead planet, as you well know.
Julia Binder:
Couldn’t agree more, Paul. So, for me it sticks: make a difference, find your area of influence, I think that’s a very important message. Paul, thank you so much. Des, over to you.
Paul Polman:
Thank you Julia, and thanks for what you’re doing.
Des Dearlove:
Huge thanks to Paul and Julia, Paul, inspiring, every time I listen to you, I want to get up on the barricades and fight the good fight. So I hope other people feel inspired too. We have to say goodbye to Paul now, but we are thrilled that Julia is staying with us for the next conversation.
Julia Binder:
Pleasure.
Charles Conn, Professor Linda Hill, and Professor Julia Binder
Des Dearlove:
And I’m so pleased to see so many people from all over the world joining us as well. I was just looking through some of the comments and the places you’re in… All right, a grey and dull Harrogate, well, it’s pretty grey and dull where I am too. I’m just outside London. There’s people joining us from the Netherlands, our friends from Oman, from Belgium, Helsinki, Germany, Barcelona, Transylvania, Edinburgh, Singapore, Uganda, Munich… It’s just wonderful to have so many of you join us, and thank you for making the effort. I’m sure with the time zones it must be late and it must be early in some places, but we do thank you, and it means a lot to us.
So, in the first session we heard about the “what and why” of regeneration. The next session is all about the regenerative organisation in practice: the “how” of regeneration if you like. How do we organise teamwork, corporate governance, and everything in between? And we are delighted to be joined by Charles Conn, chair of Patagonia and co-author of The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times, and Professor Linda Hill, co-author of Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation, which by the way is also shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award this time round.
Charles, thank you for joining us, I’m going to-
Charles Conn:
It’s great to be here, thanks Des.
Des Dearlove:
I’m going to come to you first. I mentioned your role at Patagonia in the intro; you’re also a best-selling author and have a wealth of experience across multiple organisations, so we do want to tap into that too. But Patagonia is such a great case study for this regenerative business idea, so let’s start there. The original Patagonia mission statement was, which was a perfectly good mission statement, “To build the best products, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” Which, it’s a great mission statement, but over time the company began to embrace regeneration, and in 2017 you changed your mission statement. Tell us what the new mission statement is, and tell us a little bit about that journey, how you moved from a perfectly good mission statement to an even better one.
Charles Conn:
Yeah, well, the short answer is… Well, sorry, the new mission statement is really simple, which is, “We’re in business to save the home planet,” that’s it, that’s the whole thing. And you’re right, the old mission statement was perfectly good, and the short answer about how it changed is Yvon, Yvon came into a board meeting and he said, “I’ve been thinking, I think the old mission statement is good, but it’s not good enough. It’s not propelling us fast enough or far enough toward the critical alignment of business with planetary health.” And I think it’s a classic Yvon, right? Yvon is an experimentalist, and maybe that’s a critical element of regenerative organisations too, which is… What experimentalists do is notice something, conceive a better solution, build a prototype, take it into the field, break it, and then go back to the drawing board and repeat. And I think that’s how he approached the mission statement.
This is an organisation, I think people think places like Patagonia are cushy organisations because we’ve got a good brand and all of that kind of stuff, they’re not, it’s the opposite of that. These are uncomfortable organisations because the answer is always, that’s good, we can do better. And I think that is exactly how Yvon approached the mission statement. And it took us a couple of years to be frank, like, what does it mean to wake up every day and to be in business to save the home planet? It’s still a business, but the purpose is stark, and it does make you reframe, with a different lens, every single business decision that you look at. I’ll note parenthetically that it also ultimately is what led to the change in our capital structure. For Yvon, ultimately aligning business with being in business to save the home planet meant that he and his family gave away all the shares of the company to a set of foundations only on behalf of the Earth. So, he aligned the capital structure with the mission, with the new mission.
Des Dearlove:
And how does that, you’ve introduced the thought about innovation and being an experimental, and of course, we’ve got Linda here who’s one of the world’s leading experts on that stuff, so I’m really excited to hear her input, but just quickly, how does that change, that switch, how does that alter, and having planet Earth as your only shareholder, how does that change the way you think about strategy and everything really, compared to old school thinking?
Charles Conn:
Well, it’s kind of a funny dialectic, which is in some sense you wake up the next morning, you’re still in business, there’s still an accounting function, they still tell you whether your margins have gone up or down by a 10th of a percent, and in another sense, everything is different. Everything has to be different. And so, I think ultimately what it means is that purpose and a set of values have to guide everybody’s activity. And that’s a good thing, right? It means you replace the simple but corrosive idea that everything is about profit, the 1970s idea, and you replace it with this much more difficult concept, which is we’re in business for a particular purpose. In our case, it’s an environmentally-focused purpose. I think what it means in our case is that we work hard to push strategy down to the people who are actually doing innovation and encountering customers. Strategy shouldn’t be a C-suite only activity, maybe there are some giant decisions that should be made by boards and C-suites, but you should push it down.
I think it means we work wherever we can in fluid cross-functional teams. I think it means we give those teams the best tools they can, and I think that does include new tools like artificial intelligence. I think it’s critical that we don’t use those as substitutes for human problem solving and creativity, and I fear that that is one of the things that is happening with AI. So, I’d say it’s work in process, I don’t think we have it cracked. Professor Hill’s going to no doubt chime in a second, I bet she’s got it way more cracked than we do.
Des Dearlove:
Well, I’m going to bring Linda in because when you mentioned fluid cross-functional teams, it’s like it’s almost got her name on it. Linda, let’s talk about leadership and about innovation. One of the characteristics of a regenerative organisation is the ability to work across boundaries, and that’s something you talk about in Genius At Scale. You talk about the ABCs of leadership for leaders. Tell us a little bit about how that works, and how… Because I think we’ve still got this strange notion that innovation is something that happens in these secret labs or it’s only open to some people, you know what I mean?
Linda Hill:
Yes. It’s a privilege to be here, and to be with the other two panelists, so thank you very much for the invitation. So, I have been looking at innovation for a little over 20 years now, and I must say I’m an academic and I love to study people like Charles, who are actually doing it, to understand what makes the difference. And we ended up with the ABCs of innovation because about 10 years ago we wrote a book called, Collective Genius, which in some ways was about the A. So, what the ABCs stand for are architect, bridger and catalyst. So, when we first looked at these exceptional leaders of innovation, that as leaders who had built teams or organisations able to innovate time and again, we found that those leaders understood that leading innovation was a little bit different from leading change, even though they’re both rather interconnected.
And that is leading innovation is not about saying, follow me to the future, it’s about creating an environment in which people will be willing to co-create that future with you. So, it requires a different way, a different mindset about leadership. Followership is different from co-creation. Co-creation is fundamentally about can we collaborate together, can we experiment together, and can we learn together? So, developing leaders who know how to create those environments, the culture and capabilities that will allow for co-creation, even within an organisation, that is the architecting role, is tricky, and therefore we see there are not a lot of organisations that can innovate time and again. What we began to see when we looked at innovation starting about I guess seven or eight years ago, we found two things. One is we need to innovate more because it’s a very dynamic, very complex, and as the pandemic showed us, a very interconnected world.
So, I think this is a good opportunity for us to think about regenerative models because we all realise through the pandemic just how interconnected we truly are. So, you need leaders who know how to capitalise on that interconnection and build the kinds of partnerships and ecosystems necessary for business to play a positive role in society. And one of the positive roles is to build profitable businesses so that people have jobs. So, I want to be real clear about that, you need to have profitability. So, what you need now are leaders who know how to build those partnerships and to catalyse those ecosystems. And those are movements over ecosystems. So going to social models, social movement models, to think about how we can get business leaders that can do this is actually very helpful.
And I find it interesting, I’m sitting here at the Kresge Foundation, which is a foundation that does place philanthropy, it’s all about cities and regions, and pulling together the three sectors to figure out how to reinvigorate Detroit, New Orleans, wherever it may be. So, what you need are leaders who are not only strategic thinkers, but leaders who are fundamentally systemic thinkers. Because we’re talking about large scale change, and we need to have change across the three sectors. And one of the leaders we had the privilege of studying was the former CEO of Renault, not a leader who’s in our book. But he wrote a letter to the EU, to the citizens of the EU, about what it would take to have a competitive automotive business that also could meet the sustainability goals of the EU.
And what he talked about was leadership that was more collaborative. In Collective Genius, we said most innovation, this is what we’ve known for decade, for, I don’t know, forever. Most innovation is not about an individual, a genius, having an a-ha moment, it’s about a collaboration of people with diverse expertise, diverse experience, figuring out again how to collaborate, experiment, and learn together. What we see now, if you want to be able to innovate at scale, and that’s what we’re really focusing on, the implementation part, with any kind of speed, organisations are discovering they cannot do it alone. Not that they ever did it alone. But what you see is you need leaders who can think about, okay, who are we really interdependent with? Who do we need to build partnerships with, if we’re going to get access to the capabilities and the talent we need to do what we want to do to deliver on our purpose?
Also, we see is that a lot of this is about really not only partners who are right at your boundary, but actually working with, how do you facilitate multi-party, co-creation with parties who are way outside your boundary. Now, what we’re finding is leaders are not necessarily comfortable even taking on these assignments because many of us have grown up thinking as a leader you want to have control, but by definition all of these leadership roles are ones where you have no formal authority, or if you have formal authority, it’s extremely limited as a source of power. It’s really about building social connection, social fabric so that people have a sense of mutual trust, mutual influence, and mutual commitment to some shared intention.
Even though your organisation might have a different purpose from mine, as I’m working towards fulfilling my purpose, I’m also working towards fulfilling some shared intention or ambition we have, which is what is needed to do the kinds of actions, or take the kinds of actions and do the decisions we need to make to be more regenerative in how we do our businesses.
Des Dearlove:
Okay, I’m going to bring Julia back in. Julia, thank you for hosting the conversation with Paul, fascinating. It’s always great to hear him in conversation, and you and I have been in these sorts of situations before. But you seem to be in agreement with Linda. The word ecosystem came up, becoming regenerative, it’s about ecosystem strategy rather than sort of single company strategy it seems to be. Do you want to speak to that a little bit?
Julia Binder:
I was exactly reflecting about the same. I think we were talking about regeneration, with Paul we talked about systems change. So, regeneration cannot happen in the current very rigid economic profit maximization system, and system change, and this is where Linda and Charles come in, requires ecosystem play, because regeneration and circularity and systems change is not a single company game, and yet we are very much organised in silos. And this is where I think Linda mentioned the barriers to hurdles, that we have very practical when it comes to how we now implement these changes. I think it’s already a step forward that we talk about innovation and regeneration, or systems change, because oftentimes we are very much in this quick fix mentality where it was like our core products and business and processes were pretty much untouched, we were doing business as usual, and then we would do some quick fixes, oftentimes like let’s plant a tree here, let’s improve packaging, everything that would not touch the core of the product.
So, I think one of the positive things that I’m seeing is that we’re now finally really at the core of the product that we know needs to change, the processes need to change, and you know that from my perspective, I think we really need to move away from a linear economy. Because we’ve been talking a lot about climate, but sustainability as the planetary boundaries show are much broader, and then when we talk even about climate, energy is 50%, we need to talk about the other 50%, and this is resource usage. And I think this is where we really need to entirely rethink how we organise our economy. And now, the big question is how do we get there? Because I think here we’re largely in agreement, and now the big challenge is how do we not lose the businesses on the way? And I think this is where I believe one of the things we need to do is much better create clear business model opportunities.
So, what are, for instance, in my case, regenerative or circular business model opportunities? And this cannot be only environmental impact, it needs to recognise business value. Because by definition a business model needs to have a business case, and some in the sustainability community are almost allergic against a business case. But I think it needs to make business sense, otherwise we’re losing the mass of businesses on the way, and then we don’t have systemic change. So, I think, we called our book, The Circular Business Revolution, and yet we think it’s an evolution that will get us there. Retrospectively, if we look at this and say it was a revolution, but it is happening step by step and we see it, and Paul mentioned the S curves that we’re hitting, but I think it’s really about how do we find the right balance between impact and business, and how do we not lose the stakeholders on this path.
Des Dearlove:
Yeah, and I think a lot of people tuning in… Charles said it earlier, “You’re Patagonia, people think it’s easy.” One of the things that people come up against I think is, it’s straightforward, all the time you’re making a good profit, I don’t think it’s so challenging. The tricky bit comes, it’s those two things, and I absolutely buy into Paul’s message about it not being a trade-off, but how do you align these things so that you can do what Patagonia does, and be profitable, and create jobs? I’d be interested, how do you maintain purpose against headwinds, I guess, is what I’m asking?
Charles Conn:
Well, look, I think we’re in headwinds right now. I think when you look at the mood of consumers, the thing we call people who use things everywhere across the world, is dark, even though the actual economy isn’t that dark, and stock markets are buoyant. I think we’re in a headwinds kind of mood, and I think we have to be honest about this trade-off question, which is of course, there’s no trade-off in the long term. The goals and both positive and negative externalities of business have to come together with what works for people and planet in the longer term. In the next 10 minutes, there often are real trade-offs, right? You have to deal with the fact that costs are going up quite a lot faster than revenue right now for many businesses around the world. And that is a real headwind, and it’s folly to pretend that businesses don’t need to contend with that.
And to… I thought Julia, I loved the way you brought the conversation back around, which is ultimately we don’t want to, and really probably can’t afford to, lose this creative engine that is at the heart of free market capitalism. It does a good job of allocation of resources, it does a good job of innovation. We know it does a terrible job with negative externalities and with distribution. But how do we keep that engine working, including when we have headwinds, in this new world? We know it can’t be command and control, Linda told us about that. Julia told us about that, that doesn’t work anymore, but it also doesn’t work if we go one step outside businesses, which, Des you encouraged us to do, we can’t have command and control there either, we have to have inspirational values-based leadership at the next levels.
And I think our societies are now contending with, nowhere more so than Europe, do we move away from command and control and businesses, but we keep command and control and how we regulate, and obviously that has to change too. We have to allow for innovation and creativity, that’s what Linda works on inside an environment where also, we need to manage the negatives that come along with free markets.
Des Dearlove:
I think your point about capitalism is… Capitalism is the ultimate sorting machine.
Charles Conn:
Yes.
Des Dearlove:
The problem is, it will only sort what you program, what you ask it to sort, and at the moment we don’t factor in the externalities, so it doesn’t take account of them. It’s potentially a good system with a little bit of rewiring. Linda, coming back to you, Charles was talking about, we’re talking about keeping purpose, do you see certain characteristics… Some of the leaders that you are talking to, obviously, they’re able to withstand the headwinds, they keep on keeping on, I think Paul said, “It’s better to make dust than eat dust.” They have that sense of moving forward. But what for you stands out about those leaders?
Linda Hill:
Well, I want to say these leaders do truly believe that values create value. So, one of the things we found when we did Collective Genius was really all of the organisations we studied, people had a sense of shared purpose. Why are we doing the work? And fundamentally, when you’re talking about innovation, as a number of leaders told us, you don’t actually have the answer, you can’t say, I have the vision, follow me. Now, everyone we’ve studied has been a visionary, but again, it’s about how do I actually unleash and harness the talents of individuals in my organisation, or of potential partners. So, one piece of the puzzle, and I’m going to go back to control, all of the leaders that I’ve studied are actually, they are business people who need to build profitable businesses, and they’re very aware of negative externalities, and they’re very transparent about it. They don’t fool themselves.
However, I’m going to go to two of the leaders that we studied, two different… I don’t know if they’re different ends of a spectrum. It turns out that two of the leaders we write about, actually three, because one is a couple, we write about are in agribusiness. One is in Africa, working with SMEs, trying to make sure they collaborate more so they can create food justice and sustainability; the other two is a couple in Italy who have seven or eight Michelin star restaurants and establishments, as well as they have a number of food kitchens that are very dignified food kitchens. So, you have, here’s one serving luxury, if you will, but also in the food business, and providing the food for people who have food insecurity, and then you have a woman in Africa, who’s creating this whole collection of people to work on SMEs to make them more robust so that Africa can feed itself and change its narrative.
Both, very similar beliefs, this is values driven business, we’ve got to make sure that we make profit, we’ve got to create jobs, etc, we don’t get it perfectly, but guess what? We’re trying. It’s about the “could”. And we are moving, this is the evolutionary part I think that Julia is talking about, they know that the revolution’s only going to come from lots of evolution. So, what they’re doing is building capacity in all of those individuals and all those organisations they work with so that those organisations can maneuver and navigate even when they’re not there. But one of the challenges they face is that, as one leader described, is what she called the crab mentality. People don’t actually think that collaboration is going to lead you to a better place, that one plus one equals three. They don’t believe it. And talked about how long it took to get people in SMEs to trust each other, for instance, in Africa because of scarcity.
So, I think what we have to see is how do you help people understand that once you begin… What they do, like the catalysts, who are creating these movements across ecosystems, they seed opportunities for people who normally don’t collaborate with each other, to actually see what happens if you can do that. This is very complicated, difficult work, emotionally, and time-consuming work to get SMEs in different countries in Africa, to see that if we actually do some things together, guess what? Life gets better. And it can take… How long does it take to build trust when people have not trusted, particularly in environments where there is scarcity? So, I think that whole process is you need leaders who are tenacious, truly driven by a set of values, and the thing that happens when it comes to control, for instance, is often when we think about ecosystems in business, we build these ecosystems and we want to be the gatekeepers that basically control the flow and maybe even get more of the share of the value created because we are the ones who were at the hub.
But what you see with these leaders, and maybe they are more generous in their spirit or something, I don’t know what it is, is no, we’re not a gatekeeper, we’re a facilitator to get these multi-party collaborations to start wherever they can start, and once we’ve seeded them, to get the move and activated that movement, then what tools can we use to actually cultivate those movements? And I want to tell you… A very important set of tools or digital tools and data. So, what you see brought into these ecosystems is can we create a single source of truth? Can we do that? Can we use these digital tools to scale faster? Another businessman we’re looking at is also very involved with education, primary education reform in India, and an Indian outsourcing company, etc. Again, seeing these tools, digital tools and data and AI, not as disruptors, but enablers.
So, what you might see to get this going, and I think it’s a real possibility for us now, and so the other thing we’ve been looking at is how digital tools and data do help the innovative process, which is really, again, just a way of problem solving. We collaborate across our differences, we know how to experiment and learn with, we do it with speed, and we do it with some discipline. So, I think that there are possibilities that we have now that we didn’t even have 10 years ago because of some of the digital tools and the data and even AI, used properly, and I am very excited to see how these business people aren’t saying, you know what? We can’t do this, it is systemic. No, they’re getting started, they’re doing what they can do. They are purpose-driven, they are values-driven. And we have a venture capitalist in the book who’s doing business this way.
So, again, these are people who understand about capitalism, and there’s different versions of capitalism, as we all know, it’s not practiced the same way in every country, and we can learn across countries. But what we do see is that they’re not waiting to find perfect solutions, they’re admitting what they’re not doing right, but they are getting started. So, I heard Paul at the end of his, I didn’t hear the whole conversation, I was in the private studio, but he talked about the courage. I think the courage is, yeah, you know what, do you believe in people? I think the only leaders who can’t do this are leaders who don’t believe in the positive of people, who don’t understand, as you know, we write about, everyone has a slice of genius, and how do you actually unleash the diverse slices of genius in our world and then leverage them to come up with some solutions?
Because there’s nothing like human ingenuity, as we saw with the pandemic. Look at the unusual suspects who collaborated with each other to get us through that. And the different ways that we led, as compared to the ways we often lead, to get us through what was a world crisis. So, I think the way we need to think about scaling and regenerativity is to think about impact on all the different stakeholders we want to impact, to include the shareholders. And so, that’s what I see these leaders do, that’s why they think systemically and not simply just strategically. And there are going to be trade-offs at various times, and now with costs being what they are, I’m continuing to follow these leaders, they’re going to be making adjustments. And so, they’re not going to maybe move as quickly in some ways that they wanted to because they actually have limited resources. That doesn’t mean they are not tenacious and persistent about being real clear about what they value, what those trade-offs are that they’re making, and they will admit it. They’re people who are really very, I think, pretty self-aware about what they’re doing and their impact because they are impact-focused. So the last piece I will say, for instance, one of the organisations I think we think about scaling as being “growth” as opposed to just impact generally on different stakeholders. Two leaders we had the privilege of studying were the leaders who built out Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi.
Now, Cleveland Clinic was sitting in Cleveland, Ohio, and it can give access to world-class care to a certain, I don’t know, thousands of people. By moving to Abu Dhabi, they created the possibility of having impact on millions of people. That for them is about what scaling is, positive impact, but how do you pay for that healthcare? Guess what? They learned how to do value-based care in Abu Dhabi in a way that they never really had to practice in Cleveland. And so now, they’re bringing that back there and learning how do we provide more affordable healthcare? How do we build better relationships with the communities surrounding the hospital in Cleveland? And they’re learning that by working in another part of the world; because of the learning capabilities they have built as they’ve tried to scale that business. So I think what we need are leaders who are willing to take what might look like giant steps, but for them, they know they’re giant steps that have risks that we need to manage, but they’re not doing it alone.
They are doing it with people in the organisation bottom-up as well as top-down, who in fact are very aligned on the same purpose and they’re doing it with partners who they understand have different priorities, constraints, and capabilities, but fundamentally get that there’s this shared intention that if we work towards it, we can make progress for our businesses as well as for the world. So I do think that they chunk it, which is why I mentioned Kresge, where it’s about a city or a place that you can get your arms around. They chunk it and start working there and build the ecosystems there, get the practice of what that takes, and then they slowly but surely expand or scale their impact into other locations. But we are not going to get it all right. And I think the best thing we can do as leaders is admit those negative externalities. And when we are making choices that, you know, they’re not ideal, but this is our reality. But at the same time, we’re very aspirational about what we are moving towards to… our purpose.
Des Dearlove:
We’re going to have to make a choice. It’s not ideal too because we are running on shorter time, so I’m going to have to… Listen, conversations that are coming out of this session, I can only tell you everybody that the conversations only get more intense and more interesting when we meet in London. But Linda, thank you so much. Julia, thank you so much for both sessions. Charles, an absolute pleasure. We are now going to take a very short break, a five-minute break. We’ll be back eight minutes after the hour. Thanks to our panelists.
Julia Binder:
Thank you.
Charles Conn:
Thanks all. Good to be here.
Linda Hill:
Thank you.
Professor Tsedal Neeley
SESSION UNAVAILABLE
Kate O’Neill
Des Dearlove:
That’s very thought-provoking keynote is also I think the perfect segue to our final guest. Kate O’Neill is a world renowned technology and strategy expert, and the author of What Matters Next: A Leader’s Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions in a World That’s Moving Too Fast. There it is. Wonderful. Wonderful to see you. Welcome.
Kate O’Neill:
Wonderful to see you.
Des Dearlove:
We’re going to take some questions from people tuning in a second, but before I do, I think I was particularly struck by the subtitle of your book, and I think it will definitely resonate for a lot of people tuning in. The need to make human friendly decisions in a world that’s moving too fast. It certainly does seem to move too fast to me, but the question is, is the world moving too fast or am I just moving too slow?
Kate O’Neill:
It’s all relative, isn’t it? It’s the echoing of what I heard from a lot of CEOs and other leaders in preparing for the book that in speaking as a keynote speaker and hearing from audiences during Q&A and during the sort of one-on-one interactions after, so often what I was hearing from leaders was, this is so useful. The vocabulary, the frameworks, everything you’re giving us is so needed. And I’m so scared and hamstrung by the complexity of the decisions that we’re facing and the way that everything seems to be accelerating, the urgency of everything. So we feel like we need to make bigger decisions than ever that have wider reaching, farther reaching consequences, and it’s all happening so much faster or it seems to be. So, that’s the tension that I think a lot of leaders have been feeling, and that was what I specifically wanted to address with this book.
Des Dearlove:
I mean, you’ve got some great frameworks in there. I mean, it’s really interesting, because I think people need tools. People need something to get hold of, particularly when the world is moving as quickly as it is. Tell us a little bit about the Now-Next Continuum and how that works.
“We don’t have to predict the future to prepare for it.” – Kate O’Neill
Kate O’Neill:
Yeah. The Now-Next Continuum is the linchpin of the whole book. It is a way of saying, let’s demystify the future, because I think a lot of times what holds us back from making good future-ready decisions is that the future just feels mysterious, it feels like this unknowable area. And it is of course in one respect, but in another respect, it’s really just a continuation of the past and present. And so we have the ability to look at the past and say, this is what’s known or what’s knowable. We have data, we have reports, we have facts that we can look to, and then we can use sort of the trajectories of trending information to give us insights on foresight about what we can expect in the future, what we can start to prepare for, and what we can be more ready for. So one of the things I like to say is that we don’t have to predict the future to prepare for it.
All we really have to do is really understand the context that we’re in and do the best we can at asking good questions, distilling the partial answers that we gather from them into insights, using those insights against the context that we’re in, the environment, the landscape, the trending externalities, and then be able to make a timely decision. That’s our approach, but at the same time, what happens through that process is that almost like exhaust from that process. There’s this foresight that comes from that. We start to recognise that there are things that are going to matter or are very likely to matter in the future, but they don’t necessarily matter right now or we don’t have to act on them right now. And I call those bankable foresights. So it’s the beginning of being able to say, look, we can make a decision that’s now, and we can start to think about what we can anticipate about the future, which leads us to what our next steps should be. And we can begin to make incremental steps toward the progress we see that we need to make toward that future.
Des Dearlove:
Give us an idea of what would be a bankable foresight, but also perhaps some organisations that are better at some of this stuff than other organisations, some sort of exemplars.
Kate O’Neill:
Yeah. So the classic example I often bring up, because it’s formative for me, was that I was one of the first hundred employees at Netflix, and I got to witness Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, the co-founders of Netflix, making incredible decisions in that context. This is ’99, 2000, 2001 with an 800 pound gorilla sort of breathing down their necks in the marketplace, and being able to have the insight and the foresight to invest into R&D into what we were then calling set-top boxes, which is the predecessor to streaming as we now know it.
And that’s six years, seven years, eight years ahead of when we see Roku as the first standalone player in 2006 and Netflix having its first dedicated streaming plan in 2007. So when you think about that as a Silicon Valley startup in that era of the late ’90s and early 2000, that sort of heyday of the .com era. And they’re working so fast and everything is just so high pressured, and there’s a big competitor that threatens to eat your lunch every single day, yet you’re still making this far-reaching investment and being able to see that far into the future. I think it’s really, really visionary, it’s really, really inspiring, and it calls to mind a lot of what we’ve heard throughout the day about the kind of vision, like Charles Conn talked about, the headwinds and the idea that there’s no trade off in the future, but in the next 10 minutes there’s a trade off. And being able to overcome that next 10 minutes and be able to think longer range and make those investments is truly inspiring to me still.
Des Dearlove:
We’ve got Kate for a little while longer, so please do put some questions into the chat. This is your big opportunity to put a question to Kate. You mentioned Reed Hastings, and Reed, of course, wrote a book with Erin Meyer – who came through the Thinkers50 Radar and then came into the Ranking – and they won the Talent Award a few years ago, and I got to spend a couple of days with Reed. One of the stories he tells is about how he went to Blockbuster and offered to sell them the company at a very sensible price, and they said, “Nah, not Netflix, that’ll never come to anything.” I bet they wish they knew what mattered next. You can look back on it, but yeah.
Kate O’Neill:
Yeah. Yeah, there’s a couple of examples I mentioned in What Matters Next, and that is one of them. I talk also about Kodak, of course, missing the digital camera moment. We can think of RIM missing that sort of BlackBerry moment where they have the BlackBerry’s out in the field and they still miss the moment of the PDAs transitioning into smartphones. There’s all these classic examples of you’re there, you’re already one of the big disruptors in your space, yet you miss the pivot to the next disruption or you miss the opportunity. And I think part of that, the way I interpret it, has to do with commitment.
And it has to do with being able to say, “Look, there’s a next step, a next level that we have to take this to.” We’re very comfortable here at this level. We like being the leaders in this space, but we are not necessarily ready to disrupt ourselves and go to that next level. But I think one of the takeaways for me in the research and the preparation of this book is you have to disrupt yourself or you’re going to get disrupted, right? And that’s something that I think really ties into this regeneration theme as well.
Des Dearlove:
Yeah. And on that disruptive, I’m just looking across it as an interesting question about AI and how we use it. Obviously, you are that wonderful thing that straddles the human side and the tech side. Frank is asking basically, “Do organisations use AI to discipline workers as it were, to make people more efficient as it were? Or do we use AI to liberate people and allow them to be more creative?” And this is the classic thing, and I think Tsedal talked about it as well, is the fact you can’t just drop AI or new technology into old processes and silos. So we’ve built these machines based on command and control, and they were built to be efficient rather than necessarily innovative or creative. How do we do that? Because that’s disrupting yourself to some extent. The organisation has to take the plunge and say, “You know what? I’m going to let this AI loose rather than try and control my people until I know what the outcomes are going to be.” Have I got the confidence to sort of trust them to be creative with it?
Kate O’Neill:
Yeah. And then it goes back great to what Professor Hill was talking about, and so much of that discussion too, right? There’s so much there. And I think I’ve certainly seen the full range, right? I’ve seen the organisations that approach AI deployment as disciplining and reining in employees, and looking for every opportunity to cut 15,000 people from their customer support function and that sort of thing definitely happens. I think that sort of thing stands out for its short-sightedness though and we start to see that… As you see examples of newsrooms that cut editors right away when ChatGPT was released and then went, “Oh, we’re a little red in the face now, we need to bring people back because we were a little too aggressive with that. We need humans in the loop on that.” And then you see other organisations, and these are the ones that I think really are the exemplars of this, where they’re thinking about how could we use these technologies to make people more effective at serving other people, at fulfilling the purpose of the organisation? How can we make sure that the customer support people are able to, that we can roll out conversational AI or chat bots, let’s say in a customer support function, to use that example and have it field the 70 or 80%, the Pareto principle of the incoming calls, and those are the easy ones. I lost my password. I need to access the account. I don’t have my access. Those kinds of things are very, very easy and customer support, humans don’t necessarily need to be the ones addressing those things. It’s the ones that require more context and require more emotional intelligence and require more good judgment calls. Those are the things that we need people to be involved in, and those are the skills that we laughingly call soft skills, which are really human skills and we really need to be cultivating human skills alongside that AI capability and really using the complement of those to really bring out the best in those resources.
And we can think, too, about it. I’ve been speaking a lot to hospitals and hospital associations over the last year, and there’s been a few examples of really great use of AI inside of clinical environments. One was an ambient listening tool that was recording the conversation and transcribing it. And the patient, when looking at the notes from the office visit, said how listened to they felt by the doctor because they were suddenly seeing nuances of what they were saying captured in the notes that they’d never seen before in office visit follow-up notes. The doctor meanwhile may or may not have actually picked up on the details of what they were saying, but at least it’s in the record. So it’s searchable. It’s something that the dots can be connected. And so I think these kinds of things do actually lead to better care. They do lead to better education. They do lead to more transformative opportunities for us and more regenerative opportunities for us.
Des Dearlove:
You are partly talking to the next question, which Sandra is asking, “What gives you the most optimism right now about our ability to shape a more human-centered AI future?”
Kate O’Neill:
Yeah. Thank you, Sandra. That is really important and I ask this question a lot of my guests on my podcast, The Tech Humanist show. I ask it a lot of the CEOs I work with, and I think it comes back really consistently for so many people to the idea that there are examples of how this can be used well to elevate human judgment and human goodness and human purpose and how we can think about humans outside of the organisation and humans inside of organisations really flourishing as a result of good deployment. And we don’t see every example of being a good deployment, but there are ways that every deployment could become a good example. So I’m really encouraged about the possibility of that.
I’m not in any way, and I make this very clear as often as I can, I’m not in any way a techno-optimist. That’s not my deal. I don’t think that technology is the solution to all things. I think though that technology is an obvious solution to so many things. And if we do it right, if we think about climate for example, if we think about the force and capacity and power of using AI in ways that align with the sustainable development goals, that’s the only way we’re ever going to catch up to the backfall that we have right now from those 17 goals. And if we think about the ways that we can improve life on this planet for everyone, every human, every living being, it’s only going to happen through the scale and capacity that we get through AI and other technologies. So I think if we can shift our mind, if we can bring our mindsets around and really get in alignment with what’s possible, then I think we really do stand a chance of knocking this out of the park and really transforming the way that we’re going about this.
Des Dearlove:
Sarah’s a little bit more skeptical or a little bit more…
Kate O’Neill:
Fair enough.
Des Dearlove:
“Are we heading into major disruption without any guardrails with AI across all of society and organisations?” I mean, you said you’re not a complete zealot.
Kate O’Neill:
No, this is a conversation I’ve been having… Thank you, Sarah for the question. I’ve been having this conversation with the media all year ever since Trump came into the presidency in the U.S. and there’s been this with Elon Musk in the DOGE office at the early part of the year with the deregulatory environment we found ourselves in. And I think that that was disconcerting for a lot of people because we all intuitively understand that there is something valuable about regulations even though the capitalist in all of us pushes back on it and says, “Well, we don’t want those. We want to operate in a free market, unconstrained and unfettered by regulations.”
But we know that there’s something that gives us, and it’s putting your finger on what it is that gives us. And it is the boundaries that say, “Look, someone else has constrained the safe space to operate within. Somebody else has said, this is not permissible. This is not good for people. This is not good for society. We don’t want you doing this.” And so you get to say, “Great. Nobody else is going to do that either. Let’s just go excel in the lane that’s available to us or figure out a new way to bring innovation to that lane or to another lane that hasn’t been figured out yet.”
All of that is still possible. But I think what happens in a regulatory environment is that the onus is now on business leaders to take that responsibility upon themselves to do self-governance, to try to… Not only because as I have actually in my notes for my closing remarks here, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because that actually sets you up for success later on. When the mood changes, when the market changes, when the headwinds change and there are going to be new laws, new regulations at some point down the road, you can assume that. And so to prepare yourself for that, to be truly future ready means that you’re adaptable to what’s coming, what you can already anticipate is likely to come.
Des Dearlove:
Another question from Camilla. “As we rethink business through the lens of regeneration…” I’m glad. I was going to try and bring it back to the whole regeneration theme.
Kate O’Neill:
Yes, please.
Des Dearlove:
And Camilla’s doing my work for me. “What role do you see for technology in creating organisations where people leave with more energy than they arrived with, where tech supports renewal rather than exhaustion?” And I think Camilla’s also touching on something important that when we are talking about Thinkers50, when we’re thinking about regeneration, we’re not just thinking about environmental concerns, as important as those things are, we are thinking about how do we regenerate people? How do we re-skill people? How do we give people another chance? It’s a much broader issue. And I think Camilla is picking up on that.
Kate O’Neill:
Yeah, that’s such a great observation and great question, Camilla. Thank you for that. I think that we have the opportunity to think about the technologies that we’re bringing about and the moment that we’re bringing about in ways that are all about uplift, right? How can we think about how AI empowers us to do more of what we like to do? Not in a way… I think it’s always rubbed against me the wrong way. In the earlier session, Tsedal gave such a great history of AI and I’ve been working in this space for 30 years, and people would talk about the idea that we should automate away the meaningless parts of our jobs and the meaningless parts of our lives. And I think that’s fair and true. It’s obvious to do that. At the same time, you have to think about that at scale.
You have to imagine a world where everything is automated, but all we’ve automated are the meaningless things, and that seems like dystopia in and of itself. And so I worry that that’s not the right focus. It is one of the focus areas, but I think we also have to think about meaning as the core component of human experience, as the human condition. And we need to think about how could we do automation? How could we do AI? How can we do technology? How can we do business processes with meaning in mind? How could we make sure we’re building more meaningful jobs for people? And if we are going to automate meaningless things and meaningless tasks and we look for ways to elevate humans into higher capacity job roles and do up-skilling and re-skilling, how can we be thinking about meaning in all of those areas? And purpose is the shape that meaning takes in business.
So we’ve got that opportunity to think from that what Charles talked about, what Paul talked about, really keeping that purpose orientation. And then you start thinking about how does the business fulfill its purpose? How do the people outside of the business come and meet the business? What is that alignment? How can we use data to make that single source of truth that Dr. Hill talked about? How can we talk about using technology to amplify and accelerate that alignment rather than just accelerating the business objectives? All of these things are possible. I think they just come from a disciplined approach at looking at it from the right orientation as opposed to being led by technology or led by profit.
Des Dearlove:
We’re going wider. We’ve got a question from Marcus here, and he’s right. We do talk about AI a lot, perhaps too much. “How do you see some of the other technologies that are obviously going to be important?” And he mentions blockchain, quantum, and other rising technologies. How do you see those in the context of humanity?
Kate O’Neill:
Yeah, it’s a great question, Marcus. Markus, I assume!
Des Dearlove:
Yes.
Kate O’Neill:
Guten Tag. I think that we do talk about AI perhaps too much, but I do think that those intersect with AI, those topics are very much part and parcel of the ecosystem of the AI tools and technologies. Blockchain, I’ve seen some incredible uses. I talk about in my second to last book, A Future So Bright, some of the examples I’ve seen of blockchain deployments of relief resources being distributed in countries where the distribution channels were being overridden by corrupt powers and relief was being sent in, food and money and things like that to these areas. And it was uncertain that the relief was actually meeting with the people who needed it. So to use blockchain to be able to certify that the right goods are getting to the right place, it’s an incredible tool. It’s an incredible use of that tool.
I think quantum is another technology that we just haven’t seen enough of yet. We’re going to be seeing incredible opportunities and it’s really about scale. It’s really about being able to… It all comes back to in my mind what we are faced with is being able to solve human problems at scale, and we have plenty of them. So being able to use greater capacity and greater power that comes from quantum and the speed that’ll come from processing with quantum chips and quantum computing, it’s going to afford that opportunity so much more if we have our focus in the right place. So it ties back into the same question, the same discussion that Camilla’s question brought up and Monica’s question brought up. The idea that we can weave these things together and really think holistically about how we’re solving human problems and planetary problems at scale using the available technologies, using all of our available resources.
Des Dearlove:
Aaron asks, “Is there an infinite productivity loop,” that’s a good phrase, “that we can create when we unleash the power of construction and creation to coexist with,” Schumpeter’s idea “with creative destruction?” The idea that the economy and the organisations are constantly being destroyed by this creative destruction process.
Kate O’Neill:
Yeah. Aaron, you’re a big deep thinker and I like that about you. I actually do have in my notes from my closing remarks, something that will tie in, I think, to this. But I do think that that is a really healthy way to bring this regenerative idea to a very concrete place, is to tie it back to natural cycles of life and death and really think about how death is not the end in natural systems. We have the ability for new life to arise as a result of death. So what happens when in business where we have to sunset a product, there’s usually we sunset a product because we have something greater to bring about in its place. We’ve decided that our focus needs to be on this one thing and we can’t be distracted by all these other things anymore. So we need to uplift. We need to make our focus be on what we believe our new strategy to be, our new purpose articulation, and how that’s going to meet reality.
But there’s genuine grief in that for people. And I think really, respecting the idea of psychological safety, what Dr. Amy Edmondson talks to us about and what so many others have talked to us about, to really respect that moment as something that’s hard and that change is really hard for people. Inside of organisations, one of the things that holds digital transformations and other kinds of transformations back is that cultural difficulty and the behavioral difficulty of getting through the moment of feeling grief and feeling a stuckness about not wanting to let go. But I think that we have plenty of examples we can look to of where, just because something gets sunsetted, or that we’ve decided not to work on this thing anymore, doesn’t mean we don’t still have exciting futures in front of us. And I think there’s just as much potential in front of us now as there ever was, if not more. So we have a lot to look forward to in my mind.
Des Dearlove:
Okay. I want to leave enough time for you to make your closing remarks, but I do just want to put one more question to you. Bas is – and this is something that we alluded to as being part of the way we see regeneration – and he says, “I love involving the future, kids, to help shape the future no matter how complex. To regenerate people, organisations, the Earth, even the universe,” ambitious, “also, in synergy with AI. What is your view on the potential role of kids,” and I would extend that to say the next generation, to really think about next generation, “in addressing business challenges?” And how we think moving forward about regeneration in action.
Kate O’Neill:
Bas, what a great question. I am going to point you to an example that’s so exciting and so heartfelt for me. My friend Manav Subodh has an organisation called 1 Million for 1 Billion, and it’s through his organisation every year that I speak at the United Nations headquarters. And what he does is work with kids in India. And they have projects where they’re trying to build projects that will solve a problem for starting out maybe 10 people in their community, and then they learn how to scale. We’ve solved it for 10 people. How do you solve it for a hundred people? How do you solve it for a thousand people? How might you solve it for 10,000, a hundred thousand and so on? And these kids learn, and I’m talking from I think the age groups are 10 to 18, that they’re working on these projects. It’s incredible.
The kids that have the most successful or the most exciting projects get to come to New York to the UN headquarters and present their projects. And folks like me are there as judges, but of course we’re not judging. We’re giving them all kinds of accolades and encouragement. But you see things like that and kids are really thinking, they’re really thinking in connective ways. They’re thinking about how to use technology. They’re thinking about how to solve problems for their elderly neighbors, for their mentally unwell neighbors. They’re trying to think about how to make things better environmentally. They’re trying to think about the future in ways that we absolutely need to get out of the way and let them do, and not just get out of the way, but give them resources, give them power, give them the ability and coaching to do what they so well can do and bring those ideas into our organisations which are well-staffed and well-resourced and partner with them. I think there’s just incredible opportunities to adopt the model that Manav has with 1 Million for 1 Billion, and I hope people will look into it and support it.
Des Dearlove:
Okay. Well, I’m going to get out of your way in a minute, but I just want to say to people tuning in, please do before we, we are going to hear Kate’s closing remarks, but do please share your big takeaway in the chat. We’ve been talking about this stuff now for two hours. What are you taking away from this session? Please do share your thoughts and observations and insights. Now, I’m going to get out of your way, Kate, and let you give your closing remarks.
Kate O’Neill:
Thank you so much, Des. Well, I love all the ways we talked about regeneration over the past few hours. There’ve been so many ways, and I thought one of the weakest ways to open remarks like this is by offering a definition of a keyword. And I’m a professional speaker, so I’m not going to do that, but I am a language and word nerd. So we definitely are going to look at the layers of associations and related words for the word regeneration. We’ve already done that a few times today anyway, but right away we have to notice the word generation. And we’ve talked about some of the meanings of that word, but one of the things I haven’t heard as much about is, we just actually spoke about, it makes me think about generations as an age cohorts. And so shout out to my fellow Gen Xers, the forgotten generation.
But for me, this cognitive connection sparks thoughts about generational progress. It’s how each new generation aspires to surpass the previous one. And with each generation we try to do better. And for that matter how every parent, or at least every caring, well-adjusted parent wants their child to exceed their own achievements and reach higher goals and live a more fulfilling life. And that made me wonder, how is that possible? How is it that we achieve greater outcomes with the same amount of energy? And reflecting on that question I feel leads us to an array of topics at the heart of regenerative thinking, energy, knowledge transfer, the cultivation of wisdom, but especially the transformation of efficiency into renewal. And so if you remember your high school physics class, and I only barely do, you might recall the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy increases over time. Simply put, systems naturally move toward disorder.
And this principle along with the arrow of time points to the inevitability of death and decay. The first law, however, has already informed us that energy is neither created nor destroyed. So this two-step in nature sets up the most fascinating possibility. New life emerging from death, the reinvestment of energy into something greater. Okay, one more flashback to high school physics. You may also recall that energy comes in two main forms, kinetic and potential. So in fact, one way to think about business is as the opportunity to transform economic potential energy into kinetic energy, converting possibilities into action, that perspective seems to offer a fresh lens on sustainability. How do we maintain the flow of kinetic energy? How do we preserve the potential energy sources we transform into action? Which leads to a powerful question. What are the energy sources that fuel you and your business?
Consider what they are for every stakeholder in your business, but reflect especially on what energizes you personally. Are you fueled by service? By invention and discovery? Perhaps by connection with inspiring individuals such as those here in the Thinkers50 Community. And I can tell you there is nothing like being in London for that Gala and Summit. If you haven’t registered to go, you absolutely should. I invite you though to write yourself a note right now. Take a moment, write yourself a note to spend some time later identifying your energy sources. Just make yourself a little reminder. Because then, set yourself up for success by drawing from them sustainably, nurturing them generously, and transforming them into new, more powerful sources of energy for others. We need sustainability now more than ever to hold us accountable environmentally. But if we want to appreciate the real meaning of sustainability, we also need to think about it beyond the environmental sense as a whole business discipline because sustainability also implies that you and your partners need to be able to sustain your own energy or burnout will follow.
It requires markets that can sustain your business model or disruption will follow. It demands that your team sustain knowledge, curiosity, expertise, and insights throughout the organisation or innovation will fail. And it necessitates that your customers and stakeholders sustain confidence in your business or trust will erode and loyalty will diminish. So sustainability, efficiency, and regeneration are all a bit related. Sustainability asks, once we tap our potential, how can we maintain forward motion? Regeneration asks, what modest inputs could we transform into extraordinary outcomes? And efficiency asks, how might we do more with less? If you know me and my work, you know that my background and expertise is in human-centered technology and strategic decision-making. So bear with me as I explore this set of ideas, efficiency, energy, sustainability through the lens of tech as well.
So most people know Moore’s law, computing power doubles every two years. Well, less well-known, but perhaps more relevant to regeneration is Bell’s law. It states that every decade computational capacity increases a hundredfold creating new computer classes. Each generation becomes smaller, yet more functional from mainframes in the 1960s to smartphones in the 2000s. But even less known and even more relevant for this discussion is Koomey’s Law, which focuses on energy efficiency rather than just raw power. It states that the energy efficiency of computing doubles approximately every 1.5 years. This principle has become increasingly important as computational demands grow and energy concerns mount.
In a regenerative context, Koomey’s law suggests that even as we demand more from our systems, we can simultaneously reduce their footprint through efficiency gains, potentially creating systems that give back more than they take. Of course, there’s Jevons paradox to consider. Greater efficiency can sometimes lead to greater consumption rather than less. That’s on us, but rather than debating whether we need more or less energy, regenerative thinking asks, how do we design systems that create more value per unit of energy invested? If regeneration is like the elusive perpetual motion machine where what you extract, you replenish, what you take out, you put back in, then it is inherently sustainable. But is it scalable? That’s the crucial question. How do we make regenerative practices scalable in our current environment of rapid acceleration and too fast change?
“Economies are not just about money, they’re about people.” – Kate O’Neill
We have to think holistically in terms of systems and ecosystems and change the way we look at entire economies. Remember that economies are not just about money, they’re about people. And it’s not sufficient for financial capital money to regenerate itself. Our regeneration efforts should extend to all forms of capital, human, social, intellectual, and natural. A truly regenerative business model recognises that all of these capitals are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Perhaps the most valuable insight regenerative thinking affords us is in acknowledging the inherent value within systems themselves beyond their monetary worth. What does a business leader need then, in order to make the most of regenerative thinking? When projects fail, how might we reinvest those resources into new initiatives that propel our energy forward?
When we gain efficiencies from AI, could we channel that capacity into developing our human resources? Rather than eliminating jobs for efficiency, can we transform work to be more meaningful and purposefully challenging? Instead of pursuing growth as an end in itself, can we prioritise impact? I warned you, I’m a word nerd. There is a Greek word, metanoia, and I’ve long since left the faith tradition in which I first encountered it, but it continues to strike me as a profound construct. It means transformation of mind or spiritual conversion or renewal, and it implies that something must die for something new to arise. It also implies that from something very small, something much bigger can emerge. Can we aim to leave the world not just a little better, but genuinely better than when we found it? Like good, caring, well-adjusted parents, can we find it in us to equip the next generation to have better than we have, to do better than we’ve done?
In my recent book, What Matters Next, I explored the tools of decision-making amid uncertainty, and they include two sets of tools, generative and analytical thinking. We have plenty of so-called generative thinking right now with generative AI, but the kind of generative thinking we need from humans consists of creativity, imagination, and empathy. So if you’ll indulge me, I’ll wrap up here by looking at the title of my latest book, What Matters Next, as a guide to how we finish. And one hint in What Matters Next, is something I often say in my keynotes. Machines are what we encode of ourselves. So why wouldn’t we encode our best selves, our most enlightened ideas, our most egalitarian views, and our most evolved understanding of the world and each other? The same line of thinking extends to business as a whole.
In an era where AI vastly expands our power and capacity, while we simultaneously face enormous climate challenges that threaten our ecosystems, escalating human rights issues across the globe, and deepening social inequities that require our immediate and sustained attention, why wouldn’t we build more regenerative businesses? Businesses that not only pursue sustainability through resource reuse and investment, but also refine themselves through human wisdom. Businesses that whatever they may harness of generative AI, also tap deeply into all the skills of human generative thinking, creativity, imagination, and empathy. Businesses that are capable of and committed to becoming more efficient, more responsible, and ultimately more ready for whatever the future holds. Thank you all and please make sure you sign up to join us in London for the Thinkers50 Gala and Summit.
Des Dearlove:
Okay, thank you. We are nearly out of time, but we were a little bit late starting again, so please indulge us. We’re going to just hold you, keep you for another couple of minutes. Massive thank you to all our guest speakers, Paul Polman, Julia Binder, Linda Hill, Charles Conn, Tsedal Neeley, and Kate O’Neill, and to all our sponsors and partners for making today and the Thinkers50 Summit possible. If you want to learn more about the London Summit, there will be a link in the chat. We do have a stellar lineup of speakers including, well, Kate, among others; Andrew Winston, Paul’s co-author for Net Positive; Linda, who you met earlier, Julia, who you met earlier. We’ve got Dan Pink, we’ve got Amy Edmondson, we’ve got the former CEO of Lego, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, and many, many more, both leaders and thinkers. I think we’ve still got a few daytime tickets left, so if you’re interested, please do get in touch.
What else can I say? If you like this event, do follow us on LinkedIn. We’ve hosted over a hundred LinkedIn Live events. The recording and transcript from this session will become available on our website. Sign up to the newsletter, link in the chat, so you can get notified when the recording and transcript are available. It just remains for me to thank our speakers one more time and say a special thank you to all of you who tuned in today. Someone said that, I think it was Paul, that “We are linear thinkers facing exponential challenges.” And I’d like to think at Thinkers50 that we invite you to become exponential thinkers, facing exponential challenges, but having an exponential impact as well. So I’ve been Des Dearlove. Thanks for your company and your insights. Please do join us again next time, and I hope to see you at the London Summit in November.
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