Des Dearlove:

Hello, and welcome to the Provocateurs podcast. Our aim with these podcasts is to provoke you to think and act differently through conversations with insightful leaders who offer new perspectives on traditional business thinking. I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50, and this is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte. My co-host today is Steve Goldbach. Steve leads Deloitte’s sustainability practice in the US. He’s also the author, along with Geoff Tuff, of three books, Detonate, Provoke, which, as you can imagine, inspired this podcast series, and now, the final book in the trilogy, Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. Steve, great to see you.

Steve Goldbach:

Great to see you, Des, and I’m extraordinarily excited for today’s guest. I’m going to tell you all about him, but I’m going to lead this off with… there are a very small number of people who have really influenced how I think about things over the years, and I count Spencer Glendon as one of those people. Spencer is the founder of Probable Futures. It’s a pioneering climate literacy initiative, democratizing climate science for global audiences.

He’s got a PhD in economics and 18 years as a partner and director of investment research at Wellington Management, where he oversaw over $1 trillion in assets. Spencer brings a unique financial lens to climate change. His revelation that climate stability underpins all of civilization sparked his own career pivot in 2017, which led to collaborations with institutions like the Woodwell Climate Research Center and Harvard Business School, where he now serves as an executive fellow, and that’s where I happen to get introduced to Spencer. He transforms complex climate models into accessible tools, helping individuals and organizations understand probable future rather than distant challenges or apocalypses. He lives in Boston with his wife, Lisa, and finds solace in cooking, storytelling, and exploring the natural world.

I first met Spencer when he was giving his presentation at a Deloitte executive education session at HBS, and I immediately stage-rushed after the session and said, “We need to talk.” Because what Spencer did for me was he put in a concrete lens to something that I had been mulling over a long time, which is why is it that we’re not seeing more financial implications from the risks that are posed from climate change. Spencer’s simplicity of saying, “It’s not in the model,” just sort of sparked a ton of thinking for me personally and has really changed how I’ve thought about the risk and value creation opportunities from addressing this.

Spencer, welcome, and thank you for your contributions to this space and the way you’ve changed my thinking. But let’s start with your background first. You started your career in finance. You’ve explained to me in the past that you’ve made a career out of figuring out what’s not in the model, almost like the folks from The Big Short, so I’d love you to tell your backstory and how you got to where you are before your pivot towards looking at climate change.

Spencer Glendon:

Sure. Thanks. Well, it’s great to be here. Des, nice to meet you. Steve, good to see you again.

Actually, I started my career in a factory. I was first an industrial engineer. I thought I would help fix Detroit one factory at a time. I grew up… I was born in the late ’60s, and I was born during riots. My mother, who was also born in Detroit, was born when Detroit was the fastest-growing, richest city in the world. And this juxtaposition of a place can be really prosperous and then have terrible outcomes not much longer thereafter really shaped my thinking about everything. I went to work as a quality control engineer and looked around, and there were so many bad decisions being made. They wanted to understand why, but they wanted to do that without interrogating how the process worked and also not talking to the workers. I left quite quickly and decided I’d figure out where things worked better.

What I did at the beginning of my career was go back and forth between places that worked well and worked poorly. I lived and did research in Germany. And then my first real full-time paying job was actually in finance, but in what would not be called high finance. I was a credit analyst at a small bank on the south side of Chicago in a Black neighborhood. I was one of the few white employees. I had sought out employment at this bank, called the South Shore Bank, because I was really interested in how did a bank function in a place where all the other banks had left, where all the other financial players had left. I just helped process loan applications from people who wanted muffler shops or used car dealerships or sandwich shops.

I got a good view of how financial systems try to project the future out. In some context, the future is just really, really hard to project. So one of the things we did almost without exception was wind up making franchise loans, not regular business loans that you would think of, but franchise loans because the franchise simplified the future. It made the future so much easier to foresee.

I was actually recruited from that job to a very different job, but with the same context, which was that I ran a small business lending program in Central Russia in the mid ’90s. In ’94, I moved to Russia, and I helped build a small business lending program in the city of Nizhni Novgorod, east of Moscow, and there it was: how do you get people to project onto financial statements what they’re going to do if they borrow $50,000 for their dentist office, or their brick-making facility, or their accounting firm? We had those kinds of applicants, but this idea of taking a very uncertain future and turning it into a formal spreadsheet was really sobering, really helped me understand that in some places the future is so uncertain that you need to understand much more profoundly, but you need to much more be a generalist looking around at different aspects of society.

Several years later, I was hired at Wellington to be an analyst, to look out for investment opportunities, and this was among people who really were quite comfortable. It was a really comfortable office, nice high floor, big building, great furniture. There just wasn’t a lot of risk around. It seemed like this is a pretty safe place to work, and people started arguing over decimal points. You take these projections out and it just looked like… How could things go wrong? Interest rates were falling every year. What I realized was I was in an environment where the future just seemed something you could be so confident about that risk really wasn’t a concern. People didn’t think that much about risk. Risk was actually, in most cases, just correlation risk of some kind.

I remember a new guy started and he had a new model for upside and downside, and all the downsides were just no growth. There was… nothing really bad happened, and I thought, “This is bizarre. I’ve been around these places where terrible things happen, and now I’m in a group of people who think not making more money next year would be terrible.” I realized this is a cultural group, and it’s not their fault, but everything worked out for them.

This is the early 2000s. I didn’t work with anybody who’d served in a war, I didn’t work with anybody who’d been in a place that had become very violent, I didn’t work with anybody who’d had real chaos around them, and so this lack of imagination was a big problem. But for me, it was helpful because I had said, “Well, I bet I can find some things nobody’s thinking about. I bet I can find some way to be additive,” and so I wound up being a good critic of other people’s models, looking around and saying, “Steve and Des, I’ve looked at your models or the way you invest. I don’t think you’re thinking about this or this.” I became director of macro research and then director of investment research, mostly because I was good at asking questions about what people left out, and that wound up being my career for quite a long time. I spent essentially almost 20 years understanding how other people saw the world and looking for things that they didn’t see, mostly because, to them, the world just seemed so stable, so predictable, kind of boring.

Steve Goldbach:

Can you just share some of the other things that you discovered that weren’t in the model? I remember you’re telling me a story about the Chinese demand for US bonds that had a significant… What were some of the other, it’s not in the models, that you discovered that allowed you to now have the financial flexibility that you have to effectively be giving so much of your own personal fortune back to this issue?

Spencer Glendon:

Sure. I took a job in finance actually because I was frustrated with the inability of academia to engage with the future. Academia is entirely backward-looking. In that, I think it’s worth noting, is a presumption that the past will in some way repeat, that the past is a model for the future. In fact, if you look at how empirical academic work is written, it takes the past in some way, some data set, but it’s written in the present tense that, instead of saying, “We found that in 1994 in New Jersey, this happened. People responded to unemployment benefits in this way.” It’s instead written, “We find that in response to changes and unemployment benefits, people do this, this,” not, “People did in New Jersey at this time this.” There’s this way that academia takes the past and projects it forward.

I didn’t see a lot of answers in the past for the things I was interested in, so going into finance was interesting to me because it was all forward-looking. What I discovered is that some parts of the future finance is unprepared for. I was actually hired after the Asian financial crisis by Wellington because the firm had done pretty poorly in understanding Asia, and they were looking for somebody a little bit different to maybe help them figure out what to do. I had, by this time, lived in Russia and Germany and done some other weird things and I spoke Chinese and they’re like, “Maybe you.” So I went over to China, and what I discovered was this massive country changing in a way that just seemed overwhelming and nobody talked about at work. I asked, “Why is nobody interested in China?” “Well, no, there’s nothing to buy or sell. There are no stocks, there are no bonds. But also it’s a small country, it’s far away.”

I went to the oil analyst, and I said, “What role does China play in your figuring out oil price?” He said, “Well, nothing. I just look at US inventories. That’s the main thing because the US runs the global economy.” I did this funny thing where I looked at the forecasts by investment banks, whole bunch of investment banks, and they all showed China growing at 8% real and some currency appreciation and some inflation, and I said, “Well, that’s going to be a lot of compounding. That’s going to be a big country.”

So I did a little survey. I reached out to the Asia Ex-Japan or the Asia lead person at all these banks and I said, “Can you tell me when Japan and China will cross in GDP? When will China be bigger than Japan?” They were all like, “I don’t know, 25 or 30 years.” I said, “Okay. How fast is Japan growing?” They’re like, “Oh, Japan’s not growing.” “How fast is China growing?” “Well, China’s growing like 8% real.” “All right, that’s pretty fast.” “What about currency appreciation and inflation like?” “Yeah, some of that, some of that.” I said, “Well, if I use your numbers, then it seems to me that China, which is currently a trillion, and Japan, which is four trillion, will be bigger than Japan in about 10 years,” and they’re like, “That’s never going to happen. I don’t know what we’re arguing about.” “You’ve given me two answers. One is that China will be a really big deal in 30 years. The other is that China will be bigger than Japan in 10 years.” They’re the same… couldn’t believe it.

I didn’t even have to have an out-of-consensus view about Chinese growth to have the view that we’re going to add $3 trillion of world GDP to a growing country, and what that meant was that commodity prices would change, that labor prices would change, that currencies would change, and this turned out to be a pretty easy forecast if you had that mindset. When I went to the oil analyst and said, “I think oil’s going to 100 bucks,” he was like, “That’s never going to happen.” It was striking to me that it could just be sort of out of the model, as you say, Steve. It will just be… This is not a relevant input. We do not put China in the model. And if we do, we treat it as marginal. The idea that things that are marginal can become inframarginal, the things that were seen as some little sleepy domain can become central, we had precedent for.

I then spent the next 10 years as an analyst finding more of those things, finding things that were assumed to be outside, didn’t have a price, but could be a big deal. It turns out that if you find one or two of those a year, you can do real well. You can come up with quite a lot of out-of-the box ideas that are investible.

Steve Goldbach:

And Spencer, what you’re describing is literally what we wrote about in Provoke, which is finding the “if” before it becomes a “when,” right; if it comes to fruition versus when it’s coming to fruition. Your China example was a perfect example of “this is about when, not if,” and the world just hadn’t recognized that it had gone through that phase change where this is just a matter of when it comes to fruition. If we look at the world in AI, the when moment for everyone was 2022, but we were talking about machine learning and AI for a long time beforehand, so this wasn’t exactly a new… It was just when it sort of came onto the public sphere and everybody realized it, which is what I’ve always sort of realized about the world of finance, which is, it doesn’t really matter whether your model is correct or not, it matters whether everyone recognizes it in terms of how it affects pricing of assets in the world.

Spencer Glendon:

Yeah. I’ll give another example, which is some work that I did around the same time as my early climate work, which is that there was lots of talk about big data among people in technology. There’d be all this conversation about, “Should you buy this company or this company that was an obscure tech company with a weird name that maybe was going to make some piece of the technology?” And it occurred to me that if it’s a big deal, then what happens, actually, is big companies will do better because big companies have giant data sets.

I came away from a trip to Silicon Valley with a bunch of tech people with just one observation, which was really large cap companies have a huge new advantage, which is their massive stores of data will become legible to them in a way that they weren’t legible before. That’s a pretty boring insight that the big insurance company or the big bank will get better, but that’s what this stuff is, is it makes this stuff legible. And the other insight that came from that is we will get new conglomerates. We will get new tech conglomerates. Because if this data is useful for something, it’s better to be a conglomerate and be able to apply it elsewhere.

Among my investment recommendations were things that I did not foresee when I started this research. It was like, “Oh, I guess this is an insight that large companies will do better and that actually we’ll have conglomerates again in a way we didn’t have them for a long time.” For a long time, the business sense was you need to focus. But if you can manage data and actually receive insight from it across many domains, then having lots of domains will be useful. Those kinds of insights… In that case, what the tech people told me at the time was, “You’re the only person who can explain to the insurance people that they should pay attention.” Because when the tech people show up to the insurance people, the insurance people are like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” but I could show up and tell them a story or put it in terms that were useful to them. Being a bridge between one domain expertise and another application was something that I worked a lot on, and that’s a lot of what my work is now.

In terms of my revelation that climate change was a big deal, I realized there was a domain of science that had a lot of insight that people were not internalizing, but also that they thought was the domain of somebody else. I was like, “No, no, no, this is in your domain. This is actually something you need to know.” What’s actually interesting about climate, and the reason I work on it the way I do and encourage other people too, is that it’s comprehensible. These AI models will remain a black box to effectively everybody, maybe even the people who make them. But talking about rainfall and humidity and heat and how these Earth systems work, anybody can do that. So part of my pitch was, “A, this is in your domain, and B, you can actually understand it,” and that is a powerful thing to communicate. That’s why I got so interested in bringing people together to teach them this stuff, first in finance, and then more broadly.

Des Dearlove:

As you say, you spent 18 years analyzing macro risks in the industry, but… We’ve always been told how the financial markets and institutions are becoming more and more sophisticated, but why did the markets take – well, I think you’ve partly answered the question, partly to do with this insulation factor that you were describing – they’ve clearly taken a long time to price in, sort of, climate change and energy transition risk. Would you even say that we’re at the point now where they’re priced into the markets?

Spencer Glendon:

No, there is a particular thing. I was interested in the fact that in finance, there is no topic you can’t talk about because there might be an angle. Everybody’s interested in some kind of angle. So if you’ve got a little bit of information about something, it might be valuable. All kinds of information are fair game, essentially. But I realized over time that almost all kinds of information can be put into some kind of box, and so you’d say, “Oh, here’s a piece of information that’s going to be relative for Des,” or, “This piece of information can be relevant for Steve,” but there are some kinds of information that don’t have a home.

What I realized… I started working on climate change a little more than 10 years ago because nobody worked on it. It was not assigned to anybody. I don’t know whether this is true of Deloitte. But a lot of Deloitte’s competitors and the investment banks, they do something that I used sometimes as a spur for research, which was these institutions would produce a study about something, big data or the future of something once a year, and you could tell six people had worked for six weeks on something, they’d published it, and then they’d all gone back to their day jobs. That thing never actually became anybody’s job. I would collect these sort of annual… The Economist would do something about some topic and then just stop talking about it for another 11 months. So those kinds of things would often sit around like, “I don’t know. It seems like machine learning might be important, but nobody seems to talk about it. It doesn’t seem to make a difference, or it seems like…” So climate change was that way.

But the reason I came to understand that it wasn’t a sign was twofold. One was there wasn’t a price, but the other was that climate was so stable previously. The moment that really changed for me in my professional and personal life was trying to figure out whether climate models were good models, surrounded by models of all kinds, cashflow models, investment models, people putting together models that would give a signal about whether to buy or sell. Most of those models are pretty bad. If they’re right 60% of the time and they’re random the other 40, that’s a great model. So I started reading old climate science journals, and I was like, “Oh, my god. These people have been right for 40 years for the right reasons in the right way at the right scale. I think this is mankind’s first good forecast, and nobody’s using it. It is not part of the conversation. How can that be? How can we not be using it?”

Well, it turned out though that the climate hadn’t changed for basically 12,000 years. The average temperature of the atmosphere was stable for 12,000 years with very little volatility. And if there’s one thing nobody works on in finance, it’s something that doesn’t change. If it doesn’t change and you assume it’s never going to change, you don’t assign anybody to it. It’s just set. What I realized was this is probably the deepest assumption in everybody’s model, which is that the climate is stable. That idea that this thing was so stable, it hadn’t changed in thousands of years, was embodied in all kinds of behaviors, and so imagining it changing was really hard.

Steve made a comment about apocalypse. What was easier for people to imagine was not that Boston, where I live, would get really swampy, so swampy and hot in the summer that every building would need a new HVAC system, or that New England would become a center for wildfire because periods of rain and dryness would work such that you would have real wildfire risk here. It was just easier to imagine apocalypse. People could talk about Mad Max, but they couldn’t talk about, “Well, what if all the plants that live in Massachusetts are just in the wrong place, and we need all different plants here?” That kind of specificity, there was no imagination for.

It was easier to imagine apocalypse, and so what I realized was there’s a real shortcoming both of imagination but also of a process for getting this awareness into everybody’s work. I make this comparison… I happen to work throughout the IT boom in this way, or the spread of the internet was, at the beginning, most people didn’t think the internet was their problem. You put that over to the webmaster. The idea that everything became an information business took a long time for most people to realize, and it’s really that kind of a process that we’re going through. My realization that nobody thought this was their job, they couldn’t imagine how it would change, and it was the most fundamental assumption in every model made me think, “Oh, boy, this is going to take a long time to reprice.”

So what happened was very interesting, and I’ll end here, which is that, once climate change became a thing at all, people were like, “Well, that must be a new domain, so we got to stick that somewhere. We stick it in the new stuff. We’ll create a sustainability department, and we’ll create venture for climate.” Venture is where you put new things, so all of a sudden you had climate venture and you had sustainability departments, and everybody else in the institution wasn’t their problem. It was somewhere else. It was put into a box.

Des Dearlove:

So if we can… Your organization, Probable Futures, makes climate data more concrete. As you say, it helps somebody in one domain understand what perhaps is going on in another domain. It makes it real. It cuts through the layer of insulation. I guess narrative’s important to that. Stories are important to that. How do you do that bridging? If we can then pull back a little bit, what are the learning points for leaders in general? You happen to be kind of bridging and spanning the financial world and the climate change world, if you like, but these things apply all over the shop for leaders. How do you do that? How do you make these stories specific so that people can comprehend that they will affect them?

Spencer Glendon:

Yeah. The three words we use to describe this work if we do it well are it’s vivid. It’s not an abstraction. The other is it’s resonant. It makes sense to you. It relates to something you care about. And the other is it’s useful. You can do something with it. So if we can make climate vivid, resonant, and useful, then it can be very powerful to people. I actually left Wellington and left tradable finance, tradable finance in particular, because actually it’s very hard to do that. It is all abstractions all the way down. The standard office building for an investment firm might as well be a spaceship. It’s just screens and views out over some abstract landscape. But if you can go to people who have some physical domain that they are part of, that they can see, that they care about, then you can say, “Well, let’s talk about what it is in this context that is vulnerable.” You can do that with anybody.

I bring the credibility of finance and the language of finance, but mostly what I bring it to is not to finance, but to people who are decision makers in all kinds of other domains. We tell a variety of stories to get started, and then people elaborate from there with their own stories. “Oh, that’s like this.” A story we often tell is a story about olives. Olives are the first orchard, first crop ever planted as an orchard as far as we can tell, and I ask people, “Would you plant an orchard today anywhere in the world?” Because for an orchard, while you’re planting a fruit or nut tree, they’re pretty fickle, they better have the right climate conditions for them, and then you better be really sure it’s the same climate for a long time in the future because it’s a terrible business, no yield financially for 10 years and the real value comes after 20 years. So you better be pretty confident that that climate’s really, really stable.

When I say that to people, they’re like, “Huh, I guess I never really thought about exactly how stable I assumed it was,” because this isn’t about… It was vaguely stable. It was literally the same ranges. Now, there were colder years and warmer years, but that range stayed the same for so long that people just assumed it was an enduring property. You say, “All right. Tell me something in the physical world that you care about, go into anybody’s office building, at what temperature outdoors do you think this office building will stop functioning well?” That is not a question most people have thought about, but it’s not a hard question to think about. I’ve been in London office buildings where it was 95 degrees Fahrenheit or 35C outside and the front doors were open because it was hotter inside, because the air conditioning was overwhelmed. It was not prepared for that range.

The idea that you’re out of range becomes disorienting to people because they had not thought about the building as being a deliverer of climate services under a set of specific circumstances. And then you say, “Look, every single thing around you, your house, your food, all assumes stability. So, now, tell me something you care about. Let’s talk through whether maybe it’s going to be out of range too and, when it’s out of range, what happens?” This is easier with people who are not dealing in very short-term transactions and it’s easier with people who are not entirely in abstractions, and those people actually have huge voices in the modern world now. AI and the rest is all abstractions, and the news cycle and media is all very short term, so it’s actually hard to… You have this headwind of people thinking today or the next hour is germane, and abstractions are where we live. But if you can ground people in the physical world, you start to see things coherently.

What’s been revealed over time to me is people say, “Well, that must be a big problem for the insurance companies,” and this is where it’s really helpful to know a fair amount about finance. You say, “Oh, no. It’s not a problem for the insurance companies.” The insurance companies are the only ones who understand this. They are in the risk business. You who are relying on insurance have made a very large assumption. If you look at a bank that’s lending money for a mortgage, they’ve made a 30-year commitment and they say, “Yeah, but the insurer’s on the hook.” “Oh, but the insurer only wrote a one-year policy. Insurer can back out any year.” And the borrower, well, they have a longer term commitment even than that. They have an open-ended commitment.

So, very early in this process, I reached out to someone at one of the big European reinsurance companies. I said, “So, tell me how you’re thinking about this,” and they said, “Oh, there’s a very simple rubric for this, which is, the first time there’s a flood or a hurricane, it’s a problem for the insurers. The insurers have to pay. The second time, maybe it’s a problem for the insurers. But the third time and from then on, it’s a problem for the equity and debt holders,” because the insurers are out. The real question is, “Does anybody want to live there or do they want to build something there? Do they want to own something there?” What he then explained was, “You have a $5 million building or $100 million building or a $200 million building and you think, ‘Wow, I’m going to get $200 million worth of insurance for my $200 million building.'” He said, “There’s no insurance for the land value. The insurance is just to replace the windows. The real value is the place, and nobody insures the place.”

Those kinds of insights like, “Oh, I can’t buy insurance for my location,” is the kind of awareness that people say, “Oh, I had a limited model. My model was too small. My model was actually quite… There were big assumptions in my model.” It’s finding for different audiences the way in to them starting to think about their own challenges, their own issues. As Steve said, we teach at Harvard and some other places, and we just ask the audience, “Hey, has climate affected you?” And then the audience immediately erupts with, “Yeah, yeah.” In the session that Steve was in, one of his colleagues said, “In Hokkaido, in Japan, we need air conditioning now. That’s never happened before.” Now, does that translate into a strategy for a company? Not really, but it socializes this idea of like, “Oh, this is different, and we might need a new model.”

Steve Goldbach:

And Spencer, what I particularly appreciate about the way you’re going about this is this is not a religious argument in some way. This is just very pragmatic. It’s like, “What do we take for granted in the physical world?” The one that always resonated with me was just the grades of asphalt that are being used in different locations. It was resonating for me because I have a home on Cape Cod, and I had a tree down in a storm, and so I tried to take advantage and take the wood from the tree to use for summertime fire pits in my backyard. I created a little place to cure the wood on my driveway, covered it, and it turned out that my grade of asphalt for my driveway was insufficient, given 90 degree temperatures have historically been uncommon on the Cape, but now are relatively commonplace. The darn thing just melted my driveway into a few holes.

My new portfolio includes infrastructure, and, to some extent, climate and infrastructure are both things that we historically set and forget and just assume that they will be there. You’re basically just saying like, “Look, I’m not talking about policy. I’m not talking about what we do. I’m just saying we need to understand that we have these risks in how our societies have been constructed, that we are walking towards a place where we’ve assumed that the range will be narrow, and the range is actually quite a bit wider, and we need to take advantage of it.” You’ve told me a story about the specifications for a hospital you’re working with. I think it would be interesting to share how they’re thinking about it as well.

Spencer Glendon:

Sure. Yeah. First, just to say, the way I frame it is I don’t really care what you value, but I’m really confident that whatever you value is based on a stable climate. The evolution of it, its validity, its stability, its strength is based on a stable climate. I happen to have grown up playing hockey outside. Nobody plays hockey outside where I grew up anymore because winter’s too unreliable, and there are things like that that are mundane, that are prosaic.

Let’s take the example of the hospital. I live in Boston. There are many famous large hospitals here, and they’re thinking about how to attract people from around the world. They want to serve people from around the world, so they need to think about how prepared they are for the future. They’ve reached out to people, including myself, for guidance. This is a good place to note that global warming, the best way to understand it is not in temperature terms, but the temperature is just a measure of energy. The system just has more energy. What’s happened is greenhouse gases have trapped energy, and now we just got more energy bouncing around, doing stuff around the surface of the Earth. Well, a more energetic system can exist in more states, more things can happen, more things are possible.

You look back to the early part of the 20th century, there just weren’t that many big hurricanes because the system had a lot less energy. As the system’s gotten bigger, gotten more energetic, the possibility of much larger hurricanes has gone up, and the possibility of hurricanes much further north has gone up because warm water now exists further north in the Atlantic and further north in the Pacific. Both on the coast of Japan and the eastern coast of the United States, big hurricanes can happen further north because the water’s warm enough to generate this kind of a storm.

So if you’re a big hospital in Boston and you want to be ready, you ask, “Well, okay, we’re at one and a half now. If we get a little bit warmer over time, how big a hurricane should I be ready for?” And the answer is, “If you really want to be prepared for the one in a hundred a year storm, you should be prepared for 205 mile an hour winds,” and those 205 mile an hour winds are going to have projectiles in them. If you want your glass tower to be safe, you should buy glass that will not explode when hit by a projectile at 205 miles an hour, and so that’s what they’ve done.

That idea that that’s an engineering problem as a form of adaptation is a good way to illustrate that there are things we can do, there are good questions to ask, there are kinds of investments they can make. So if you take that hospital, that building, I think the number is like it’s 5% more expensive, the building is, because they got ready for the kinds of climate change that are likely, but it is more expensive, but it’s a cost that is avoiding a future loss.

Now, if you think about that hospital, what are they planning for? Well, they want to be able to keep operating under those extreme circumstances. But they also understand that under those extreme circumstances, other people are going to be a mess, and so people are actually going to come to the hospital. The hospital’s actually going to be… By being resilient, the dynamics of who comes to the hospital are likely to change. What’s actually come out of that same project is an investment by that hospital and by a number of other regional businesses in the downtown Boston area to actually create a pool of money to create a more resilient neighborhood system because what you don’t want is there just to be a few buildings that still have the lights on and everybody else is in trouble.

I had a conversation with a Nigerian oil company recently about that very thing. They said, “The rains are getting so intense that the nearby communities are washed out, and so they come to the oil processing facility because our facilities are built with high engineering standards.” That company is now going out into neighborhoods and improving the infrastructure, not because their employees live there, but because they see that the risks for the people around them are changing and they don’t want to have this chaotic environment when heavy rains come.

Des Dearlove:

You’ve mentioned the word adaptability, and it seems to me that that’s at the core of what you’re saying. There’s people out there saying, “We need to stop the climate change. We need to push a button, and it all stops. It goes back into its box.” I don’t think you’re saying that. I think you’re saying what we have to do. That’s the name of your organization, Probable Futures. There are lots of possible futures. One would like to think that one sort of genius of our species is our adaptability, and yet we don’t seem to be approaching change with that in mind. It seems to me that’s part of what your message is. 

Spencer Glendon:

Yeah, correct. That’s exactly right. It is a genius of our species. Actually, the thing that I’ve come to understand better over time is that our species has a… That genius can be employed well or poorly. We are adapting. We’re actually adapting very quickly. We’re adapting to the idea that the weather’s worse, and that is a very strange form of adaptation is just accepting: “Well, I guess LA burns some of the time, and I guess our kids are going to live in a lousy place, and I guess that’s just the way it is. I’ll just adapt my expectations to that.” I would say that’s a poor form of adaptation. In fact, we talk to both children and adults, and the children say, “It seems like the parents know, the adults know, the future’s going to be bad and aren’t really doing anything about it.” It’s very interesting when I talk to leaders how much they talk, not about their businesses, but about their family homes and their children.

One of the things that I think is very helpful about this work is it anchors you back in place, and I think that’s one of the big risks of modern business is that it is placeless. This happens to actually be what my dissertation was about. Rich people are mobile in America. Poor people are immobile. When I present to a garden club or to a town, they ask, “What are we going to do?” Generally, when I present to rich people, they’re like, “Where can I go?” And this idea that we need to be rooted in place, that civilization is rooted in place, gets you to adaptation, gets you to say, “All right, what are we going to do? Because the climate has already changed quite a bit, and it’s going to change further.”

The other reason to talk about adaptation in this way is that it motivates decarbonization in a different way than it did before. I think decarbonization was presented as a solution to a problem people couldn’t really imagine, and so it was often framed as moral and not as a conscious choice between two worlds. The two worlds that we’re offered were the solution where it all goes away and the apocalypse where it dominates everything. We call this probable futures because we’re actually already in a world where we’re not going to solve it and go back. We’re always going to live in some relationship with climate change. Let’s think about that range and choose, have agency, “Which part of this do we want to live in?” How warm a world do you want to live in is a question that’s very different than, “Do you want to solve climate change?”

One of the ways we put this is we want to manage the situations, the climates we can’t avoid, and we want to avoid the climates that are probably unmanageable. That idea of making it clear like, “Hey, this is probably a really unstable world. At 3 degrees C, basically all of the trees are in the wrong place and almost everybody who lives near the equator is exposed to temperatures higher than the human body can tolerate,” that’s probably not a stable world. That’s probably not a world where you have a narrow specialty and you don’t think about the climate. Hopefully, what we do is get people to engage and make decisions that make their communities more stable or institutions more stable and, in the process, motivate in a different way, not a better or worse way, but a different way, engagement with a broader sustainability initiative.

Des Dearlove:

Steve, I’m going to leave you to the last question. I think we’re running out of time.

Steve Goldbach:

Well, Spencer, yeah, the thing that I want to come back to with you on this is you once told me that because… We’ve been doing a lot of collaboration lately and it’s been brilliant, and you once told me that, “I don’t show up for sustainability conferences. I want to spend time talking to business leaders.” The thing that you’ve taught me is that this is the importance of, if you want to drive sustainability, it’s about getting it into the boardroom, into general management. Can you share a bit about that philosophy and how you arrived at that and your conclusions and your provocations for our audience?

Spencer Glendon:

Sure. It comes back to two things. One is, this is not a specialist domain. This is: everything rests on a stable climate. Humans were nomads for 190,000 years, and then they settled around 9,500 BCE, which happens to be right when the climate settled. It really doesn’t make sense to settle in place if the climate is changing. In fact, there’s early economic work that says, “Don’t worry about climate change. We can all go back to being nomads.” That’s a world of generalists, not a world of specialists, and I realized, “This is a general problem.” Where do general issues get processed? Where do general issues get discussed? They get discussed at the board. They get discussed at the C-suite level. That further down, everybody’s got a limited domain.

So what I would notice when I talked to people in my firm, in other firms, was they would say, “Yeah, somebody should work on that.” And then I’d go to the board, they’re like, “Man, I don’t want it.” They could tell. If it was a big deal, it was their big deal. Realizing that this needs to be at the board level, at the C-suite level, in order to be a cultural norm or standard became pretty obvious to me. The other part of that is that, I don’t think this is true of you, Steve, and I don’t know you, Des, but I’m going to guess, a lot of people do their job and they don’t think of that as a legacy, and so there’s this sense of being transient, being transactional, and they don’t want to think of themselves as transactional people, but this is a real legacy issue. Talking to people who lead organizations, who make decisions about long term of the firm really makes a difference, and that’s where this lies. Some of it lies in socializing it across the firm and making strategic choices.

One of the biggest banks in the world, when they came to us, sustainability all reported to the director of reputational risk. That’s where it sat. It was all reputation. Thankfully, now, it sits in the C-suite with the chief risk officer. Things like that send a signal to everybody, but also lead to process change. I think that we’ve seen that pretty consistently that, at mid-levels of organizations, people tell us to talk to somebody else. At the highest level of the organization, people are like, “Oh, I guess this is my job, and I need to figure out how to make it other people’s job.”

I’ll maybe end with the woman who was the head of a big school district in America. She’s like, “Once I understood this this way, I realized, actually, it was everybody’s job and it could be turned into people’s job, parts of people’s jobs.” She said, “I thought about it as existential until I realized it was a set of things about the physical world, and we could figure out when to have recess, what to serve for lunch, what to do with the parking lot for the facilities manager, the school lunch manager, the school nurse. These were things we could make practical throughout the organization that would make the kids way better off.”

I’ll give you a simple example. Kids don’t offload heat very well, so high temperature is much harder on kids’ bodies than on adults. After a hot night, kids are not very smart. Even the smartest kid is cranky and grumpy and not very smart because their body has suffered. They’ve not had a good night’s sleep there. Why is this relevant? Well, we take a lot of tests in America at the end of the school year and the beginning of the school year. And, increasingly, at the end of the school year and the beginning of the school year, it’s hot. It’s way hotter than it used to be. Should you take a standardized test on a really hot day after a really hot night? Are you really measuring that kid’s aptitude? That’s not inventing cold fusion. It’s adapting to climate change, but it’s also taking the physical world seriously in a way that can be a policy.

But until the head of the school district said, “This is the kind of thing we need to work on,” the organization didn’t embrace it. There are so many things like this. And if I can just put in one plug about why I still do this 10 years later, the world gets more interesting when you see it this way. There are all these things about the world that you’re like, “Wow, I never thought about asphalt before,” and now it’s like, “God, asphalt’s pretty cool. Pretty amazing that it has these specs.” And then wires, like, “Oh, man, power wires and power plants and trees, all these things that…” I was a big ideas guy. Now, all these small facets of the world are interesting to me, elicits wonder and we share it together, and so it’s contagious.

Des Dearlove:

And that’s the joy of moving from abstractions to physical reality, which is, again, one of the things you’ve been talking about.

Spencer Glendon:

It’s a real joy, yeah.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. I think abstractions have become a bit of a problem all over the place.

Spencer, it’s been a real joy talking to you. Unfortunately, that’s all we have time for.

Spencer Glendon:

That’s enough.

Des Dearlove:

That’s good.

Huge thanks to our guests, Spencer Glendon, and to you all for listening. This is Provocateurs, and we’ve been Des Dearlove and Steve Goldbach. Please do join us again soon for another episode of Provocateurs. And if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please hit the like button and share with your friends and colleagues. Until next time.

Stuart Crainer:

Hello and welcome to The Provocateurs Podcast. My name is Stuart Crainer and I’m co-founder of Thinkers50. In Provocateurs, we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. Our aim is to provoke you to think and act differently through conversations with some fantastic people. This is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte. And so my co-host today is Steve Goldbach. Steve leads Deloitte’s sustainability practice in the US. He’s also the author along with Geoff Tuff of three books, Detonate, Provoke, which inspired this podcast series, and now the final book in the trilogy, Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift. Steve, great to see you.

Steve Goldbach:

Great to see you as well, Stuart. And I’m very excited to be back to talk with our amazing guest today. Today we have Samuel Monnie who calls himself the reformed marketer, who is now a marketing reformer. He is the co-founder and co-CEO of Purpose Hive, which is based here in New York City where he spends his time helping organizations make sense of the shift towards more values-driven markets. He’s had a broad career leading brand and business growth across companies like Braun, Campbell’s, Grainger, Safeway, and Proctor & Gamble. He also spent time as the senior vice president of revenue at Sustainable Brands. And along the way, he’s been in the classroom teaching international business and more recently brand strategy at DePaul University in Chicago. He’s originally from the UK of Ghanaian heritage and has lived and worked in Germany and Switzerland and now calls the New York area home.

And as I’m sure we’ll hear, he’s been a very loyal Manchester United supporter through thick and thin. And I do want to share a personal anecdote about how Samuel finds his way onto this podcast. So I first met Samuel at a sustainability dinner hosted in, I think… In and around Climate Week 2024 or soon thereafter. And what was particularly endearing to me at the time was I had made a remark at dinner that someone had said was a little spicy and sort of accosted me in a public way, which I kind of felt bad about because I didn’t think it was so spicy. And Samuel came to me afterwards and said, “I actually really liked the point you were making, it was about the importance of storytelling in the world.”

And then – we had not stayed in touch – and then we ran into each other at a conference and immediately recognized each other. And he was kind enough to come see Geoff and I speak amongst the other two or three people that were there in the room, so he had a lot of empathy and we reconnected. We said, “We got to have him on this podcast.” So Samuel, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Samuel Monnie:

Thanks for having me so much. And just I think a little embellishment to the story of correction is, I think actually I brought up the storytelling during the conversation. So I think the point you made, I came back in to the broader group and talked about the importance of storytelling in the space of climate sustainability and purpose and all those areas. And I think I was sort of a marketer in the room full of experts and I just thought, “Well, okay, I’m going to say what I’m going to say and I hope it lands.” And I think it did. So fast-forward to today and here we are.

Steve Goldbach:

Here we are and it was appreciated. I think we can get into that story as part of our conversation and the importance of it. But you’ve described yourself, as a, as I said in the intro, reformed marketer turned marketing reformer. And both Stuart and I felt like that was a provocative way to introduce yourself. What do you think needs reforming in the world of marketing?

Samuel Monnie:

Well, the full quote is, “I used to be a reformed marketer. Now a marketing reformer because I believe that business should serve humanity and not vice versa.” And I wrote that all by myself. I’ve been in marketing for a number of years. I’ve sort of taught it. I’ve studied it and got the degrees in it and practiced it at the companies that you mentioned and just felt that the constraints of the stories that marketing is… There’s these four Ps of marketing. Product, price, place, and promotion, which have been around since the ’60s. They’re great, but they don’t explain the full world that we’re in right now.

And I think expanding it and bringing to life the stories that were always there is really the part of the reformation and reforming I’m trying to bring so the aspects… So these four Ps that I’m sort of saying, product, price, place, promotion, sort of old and can be expanded to include people… Purpose, people, progress, and prosperity. Those are the ones that I feel that I’ve always been there and can be more brought to life in the space of marketing. So it’s like purpose and shifting demands and behaviors to be more inclusive and equitable, just to have that positive impact. That’s what purpose can do. And then you’ve got the aspect of people and the leadership to be a bit more compassionate, a bit more engaging, a bit more imagination and serving people. You’ve got progress, which is really about this idea of better solutions that raise the bar for everyone. So everyone’s got to benefit from this, not just a few.

And then prosperity. So listen, I’m in business as well. You’ve got to make money if you’re in a commercial system. I get it. But prosperity means that everyone thrives and everyone can be… It can use nature and humanity in a more balanced way. And so yes, you can still make money. I’m trying to change, reform the commercial system, but prosperity means that everyone wins and the system’s truly thriving. So those are some of the elements that I’m bringing to life and championing and storytelling about and working on to have that positive impact.

Stuart Crainer:

So when did you see the light, Samuel? In your marketing journey, which is working in Europe, working in the States, a variety of organizations, at what point did your ideas about marketing practice evolve and change?

Samuel Monnie:

Well, I like to think that I was always… I was one of those pesky students as an undergrad that was questioning the professors. And I remember I got in trouble. Well, I was always asking questions. And so when you’re being taught this stuff, I say, “But what about this? What about that?” And so I was always wrestling with the orthodoxy of marketing. And as I continued to study and then practice and grow and learn, I became more open. And I lived in Germany and in Switzerland and my heritage is Ghana. So I would travel the world.

And I remember one place I went, we went out for a meal in Malaysia. I was in a global role and took us to this restaurant and said, “Oh, is it okay because the restaurant has food served on banana leaves?” And I’m thinking, “Wait, that’s great. You’re using a natural resource and it’s free and it’s better and it fits. So this is not ‘sustainability’ or…” It’s like, “Oh, that makes sense.”

So as you’re exposed to all these experiences and these life experiences and these customer experiences, and I started realizing that I was trained more or less in one way of doing marketing. And it was kind of, “Sell more. Growth at all costs.” And slowly but surely, I started asking more of these questions and these questions that were showing up in my life, I needed to manifest and bring to life. And I think my biggest blessing, if I was a superhero, my superpower would be curiosity, but there’s a weakness with curiosity. You keep going at stuff and looking at things and opening doors…And for example, I studied in Northern Ireland and for those who are not so familiar, there was unrest and conflict between communities of Catholic and Protestants. And basically 17 people told me not to go to Northern Ireland, “Oh, you don’t want to go there.” 17 people tell me not to do something, guess who’s going to go because I have to experience it for myself. And I loved it. I got my masters there and it was such a great experience. So I’ve always been that… The curiosity has, I think, forced me to do better, know better, learn better beyond my discipline. And so with all these life experiences and the humbling stories that one of the brands I worked on was Duracell. Duracell make batteries. And it was only a few years ago as I’m going through this process, I suddenly thought, “Well, what happens to the battery when you finish using it? What do you do with it? How do you get rid of it? Who does that? What’s in it? Is it safe? Is it okay?”

I’m thinking, “Wait, how come I didn’t think about this stuff when I was working on the brand?” And it’s because you’re in this system, you’re in this process, you’re in this context that’s forcing you in one direction. And as you look up and as you look around and you speak to your colleagues and you start to explore other solutions, you can grow and you can suddenly realize, “Oh, there are other ways of doing things. And fast-forward to a time, I think around a decade ago, I was working within the Campbell’s company and I suddenly adopted the sustainability team there because they were having more fun, they had great solutions. You’d read the sustainability report. “Wow, there’s so many great claims in there, so many great stories.” And so I was hanging out with them and realized, “Oh wow, there’s this whole area of sustainability and purpose and positive impact that is part of commerce and part of business that can actually be the unlock to growth and more revenue and more creativity and discovering that and realizing, “Oh, it was always there from the beginning.”

And I can tell you a couple of examples. Actually, I’ll tell you one quick example. So saying it was there from the beginning, one of the brands that Campbell’s owned was Pepperidge Farm. Pepperidge Farm was founded by a woman called Margaret Rudkin. Basically, she had a son who had lots of allergies and asthmatics. So he was put on a diet of fruit and veg and just nothing processed, couldn’t take any processed food. And I think she traveled and she discovered some foods overseas. And so she came back and said, “Look, I’m going to try this bread, which is whole wheat and just nutrients in there.” And everyone said, “Nah, it’s not going to work.” Anyway, the son loved the bread. The bread was… He didn’t have any allergies or reactions. And long story short, she became an entrepreneur and Pepperidge Farm was born. So basically she was trying to solve the problem of food that her son could eat.

That was the premise. That was the purpose. That was the founding of this organization, this company that became hugely popular. And so I thought, “Wait, there’s this story about Margaret…” And it was kind of there, but it was always there from the beginning. And so for me, purpose in business and this reformation I’m trying to drive is, it’s… Pardon the pun, it needs to be sort of baked in, not bolted on, but often you’ll find it’s actually there. And so this idea that there’s a separation is not the full story of marketing or business or companies or organizations. So let’s tell the full story and have the opportunity to do more. So for me, it was that aspect of reflecting on my own journey, realizing that I was actually part of the problem and what I could do to be better. And actually from the seat of marketing and branding, you can actually have that positive impact, work with people in the system to improve things.

Steve Goldbach:

And Samuel, so I want to delve into this a little bit further. I could imagine that people listening to this podcast could hear you saying there is a conflict between purpose and profit. And you and I have had enough conversations to know that the whole point of what you’re saying is that there isn’t a conflict, that actually leveraging the four Ps that you say purpose, people, progress, and prosperity actually makes for better marketing outcomes. I think you even led with that. Can you share a bit about how you think that that mechanism works, what it is that… Why it’s not a trade-off, but why it instead leads to better outcomes?

Samuel Monnie:

I think there’s a misconception that they’re at conflict, but actually it opens up more tools, more opportunities, more avenues to actually grow. And this is not my opinion. And so this is where I’m going to drop some data and I’ve written down a few things just to make sure I get it right. So if you look at, for example, the eco-consumer, Kantar says there’s a $450 billion market. Walton did a study that purpose-aligned companies have a sales lift of 11%. And then there’s Edelman, their survey, it hovers around 60% of people make brand choices based on their values. So the idea that there’s a conflict, the data says people are deciding based on values, based on their beliefs, based on these elements. And so harnessing that in your business helps you grow more. Understanding that helps you serve more people. And so these work interdependently, symbiotically, and not as antithesis.

And I think that’s the aspect to suddenly realize, “Oh, actually these are ways that we can delight people. We can meet more of their needs. We can serve more people. We can include more people in this.” I think both of us right now are wearing AirPods as we’re recording this. And what I love is a big company like Apple… And I’ll talk about smaller companies, but a big company like Apple has been on a journey. They started bringing accessibility, I think in the early to mid 2000s into their OS systems and then brought some features to the phone. And then they launched AirPods Pro 2, I think it was, a couple of years ago, 18 months ago, which has a hearing aid functionality. And so that’s an example where they started from, where they were, and they evolved and iterated and incorporated something that now it’s not a separate product, or it’s not over there. And they’ve just normalized supporting people with hearing challenges, which happens to a lot of people, happens to a lot of people as they age, and they’ve just put it into the core of their proposition.

Yes, it’s a slightly premium price product, but they have a better story to tell. They have a new story to tell. It works just as integrated into the core product. It makes sense, includes more people. And so there’s a win from doing that. And so accessibility isn’t something we think of as an afterthought, or for just people with disabilities over here. What if we all benefit? There’s no trade-off or compromise. It’s actually core. So hopefully I’m answering your question by showcasing how if you see it as additive and inclusive, then you get more ways to solve a problem versus less ways or a distant way. We’ll get to it when we have time, we’ve got bigger things to focus on. This is actually a big thing you can focus on now.

Steve Goldbach:

Well, what I particularly love about it is the idea that people buy what their values are because one of the frameworks that I’ve always really valued in the field of marketing was that of Byron Sharp’s, which is very… I love the simplicity of it, that people buy from products that have physical and mental availability. And physical availability now, you can take to the digital world where it’s just easy to purchase, but mental availability comes, as we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast, through something that doesn’t create any cognitive dissonance. And when something’s aligned to your values, that’s a great example of mental availability and creating that. And the more that you can create mental availability in your products, as you’re saying, by serving multiple markets at once, with your example just now, I think that’s a tremendous example.

Samuel Monnie:

Yeah. And what I love about that is I feel good about it and I don’t currently have hearing challenges. So I feel better that I just buy a product, but it helps other people who have this condition. So I feel good. Oh, great. But also they’re included in the core product. So it’s additive, but it’s also, I just feel a bit better about myself and I feel better than I’m having a positive impact by using and buying something that has more utility for more people. So there are these other just deeper things about, to you say, when you’re thinking about values, it’s, “What it means to me? What do I stand for? What do I believe in?” And I want to, Samuel Monnie wants to do something that has a positive impact. I’m not alone. Most people have values. If you live in this world, you make things based on values and decisions.

And as with the time of recording, there’s a lot of businesses and brands now realizing that this is not something that they can avoid. The values-driven concept is about loyalty. It’s about trust. It’s about advocacy. It’s about reputation. It’s about people. People have these feelings and these thoughts. And I’m a Brit, but we’re based in the US right now and there is this politicization of a lot of these issues where it’s left or right, so people don’t want to get involved in politics.

When it comes to the ingredients in food, that is a huge community of people on, inarguably, both sides of the aisle, believe that these ingredients shouldn’t be in our foods. And so now if you’re saying, “I’m avoiding politics,” you’re avoiding 70%, 80% of the market because it’s not politics that’s driving, it’s values that are driving them. And so the stories I tell are very much about how to think about the world and explain it in a way as a marketer, as a business, as a brand leader that is relevant for the world we’re actually in.

Some of these old models, I think, constrain us. But if you actually realize, “Oh my goodness, this is the most human thing ever to make a choice based on wanting to do something better.”

I’m not naive. I’ve been in business and I’ve been in brands where you’ve got to hit your numbers and you’ve got to deliver, but if you can actually see the opportunity and possibility and grab those aspects, you can actually win with more people and more stakeholders and more communities and ultimately make more money. So yes, I said it. I’m trying to shift commerce here. So this is about the system of economics and making money. An example that I love is the Unilever brand and business. If you go back to the 1890s, I wasn’t around… None of us were around then, but the story is that there’s a global pandemic-

Steve Goldbach:

Well, Stuart might have been! 

Samuel Monnie:

I’ll let you have that discussion later on. But people were dying of disease. And so they launched Lifebuoy, which was a soap that was antiseptic and disinfecting, carbolic soap. And to solve a problem that people are dying of disease, hand washing, cleanliness is good. It solves the problem. It reduces the issues. They’re making a commercial product that they can sell at a profit and making money. So this idea that purpose was always there, was always there. It’s actually something that’s solving a real human problem, commercializing a solution, making money from it, and it’s a win-win. And so this opportunity is abundant and surrounds us. So sometimes we’ve got to go back to the stories of how business and marketing was founded from the get go and realize that these opportunities, these possibilities, our imagination, our creativity, our solution-based approach that can help more people and more people thrive have always been there. Let’s grab onto those. Let’s hold onto those and bring them to the fore.

Stuart Crainer:

Is the big difference now, Samuel… I’m just kind of thinking about it, that purpose and values now have the data behind them? You can point to any number of research findings which show that they’re good for business. They’re not philanthropic or altruistic. They’re actually good for business. Do you think that’s true and do people get that now?

Samuel Monnie:

I think there is a misperception that there’s a gap between them. And so I showcase a lot and I shared some examples of some data that people want it, but the majority of people make decisions based on their values, or there’s a purpose. There’s another resource that I love. And New York University, they have their sustainable market share index. They’ve been measuring in the CPG consumer packaged goods or in overseas, sometimes called FMCG, fast moving consumer goods categories. They’ve been measuring 36 categories like toilet paper and paper towels and I think shampoo and lotions and floor cleaners and diapers and various categories in those CPGs. 250,000 products, been doing it for 12, 13 years.

And the market for sustainably marketers, they’re saying, “What percentage of the products in these categories are sustainably marketed?” That’s gone up in 2024 from around 23.8% to be precise. And it’s gone up in 2025 to 25.4%. So from around 24 to over 25% of those categories are sustainably marketed. And so the reality is that we just need to look at what people are doing and buying. And that data I’m quoting is not survey data or self-reporting. It’s actually what people are spending money on. And I’m a Brit. I was in the UK a few weeks ago and I was shocked because I went to the grocery store, had a little situation at home, needed to buy some toilet paper, went to the store, and I was bombarded with most of the shelf… Half the shelf was recycled toilet paper in paper packaging. And it was just all over the shelf. And there was a smaller section for the stuff wrapped in plastic. And it was like, “Ooh, who does that? Who wraps in plastic in 2026? Who would do that as a brand?” And it was just normalized.

Now, these retailers aren’t doing it out of charity. They need to make money. They need to make a margin… So they’re only doing this because it sells and makes the money. That was the conclusion I gave, that retailers are selling stuff that makes the money, ta-da! So when these things are just what you see in everyday categories, you suddenly realize, “Wow, this is real. This is huge.” And so sometimes it takes just walking into a store not on autopilot. So I tell that story about… I was a bit provocative because on my LinkedIn post I said, “Who gives a crap about the values? Ha ha ha, pardon the pun.” And there’s a brand which is huge in UK, and I think some of the other… called Who Gives A Crap.

Anyway, let’s not digress. But my point being that look around and you’ll see that this is not fringe or niche. This is actually quite common when it comes to people… Especially people’s health, what they eat, what they put on their skin, what they ingest, especially on… Those are areas that people are much more sensitive to what’s in it? Where’s it made? How’s it made? Where’s it come from? What’s happened? What’s the impact of doing it? And you’ll see that people are spending their money based on these values and these decisions. And so it’s not an opinion, it’s evidence backed and evidence proven.

Steve Goldbach:

You often talk about the learn, unlearn, relearn cycle, which lays out the idea that real progress requires not just learning new things, but actually unlearning what no longer serves you before you can relearn. How can management teams do that collectively? What’s that process look like? What’s a productive way to relearn? I remember when I was in the… I think one of the most effective ways is to just spend time with consumers is a great way to do that because it’s an experience. But how do you promote that learning in your practice?

Samuel Monnie:

I think the premise came from a quote I love, Alvin Toffler said, “The illiterate of the future are not those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” And I love that because it provokes you to think, “Okay, what are the things I’m learning that I need to hold on to? And maybe it’s things like… Okay, purpose actually does lead to greater creativity, greater possibility. What do I need to unlearn?” And hopefully from the vibe I’m giving… I’m not playing it safe. I’m not staying timid and just keeping your head down and hoping it doesn’t come to you because the world is changing. And I feel that the relearn aspect that I really push is about starting from where you are. It’s about progress over perfection. And I know in business, it’s the hardest thing is to say, “I don’t know,” especially if you’re in a group full of senior people.

“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. I’m going to go and learn.” And if you can recognize… Because the Apple story I told from before is that they started 20 years earlier and slowly iterated to become better. So start from where you are. You don’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be ideal. The conditions don’t have to be just right for us to do this thing. It’s making those steps because it’s about being more connected to humanity. As you said, talking to people and hearing what they have to say, really embracing it and embedding it and responding to it and incorporating it. And I think as a marketer and as a brand leader, it’s humbling when people share with you what they’re going through. And if you can take that on board, use your imagination, use your creativity, respond to culture, you can actually have more reasons to be relevant to them, have more ways to show up for them and have more ways to impact them.

But remember, and the other thing I talk a lot about is it’s not only people outside – if you’re a brand or a company – it’s also the people who work for you, your employees. Until the AI and robots take over, there’s still a lot of humanity in business. And Gallup’s survey says that only a third of people are engaged at work, but like two thirds of people are disengaged at work. They’re looking for more meaning. They’re looking for more care. They’re looking for more community. They’re just looking for more substance. And so if you change your organization’s number from a third being engaged to 40% being engaged, increase it by seven points, that’s a huge increase in productivity. So if I’m the CFO, I’m thinking, “Right, people are happier. People care more. They’re more connected. They’re more communicative. They’re more collaborative. They just find more in what they’re doing. That means they’re going to be more productive. That means they’re going to show up. That means there’s going to be less attrition. They’re going to be less sick. And that’s all measurable stuff so we are going to make more money.”

So this is again about just running a good business, is doing this and incorporating it more.

Stuart Crainer:

I think Sam, you kind of got to one of… Why I’m skeptical about some of the discussions about purpose, for instance, that there’s a sense that some of it’s performative, like purpose is like everyone had a vision in the 1990s, or whenever everybody had a vision, and now everybody’s kind of rediscovering that they’ve got a purpose. How can you cut through that kind of performative aspect? How do you know it’s genuine?

Samuel Monnie:

You know it’s genuine when it’s coming from a place of really understanding who you are, understanding your audience and doing something that matters. I’m a storyteller, so I’m going to bring another example. There’s a recent example from AXA, the insurance company, and they’ve had success from an initiative which was about the three words, which is, “And domestic violence. And domestic violence.” So what they did was, which I thought was genius, was retrospectively adding those three words to 2.5 million insurance policies. And within days they had hundreds of people take advantage of it. I think in the first year there was like 1,300 people who used that. So this is about saving lives. This is not performative. It’s not just a campaign or a slogan.

Steve Goldbach:

Sorry, can you just expand? What did they do to what they added it to? Can you expand on the story a bit to contextualize that-

Samuel Monnie:

Yeah. So what they did was within, I think, their insurance policy, so home insurance policies, they actually included the aspect of “and domestic violence” was something that they would provide support for the insured person. And in that context, it was in the body of the policy so people could literally reach out for help and support in a very, very difficult situation which affected many, many people. And they did it in a way that you didn’t have to make the effort. It came to you. It saw you. Understood that this was a real challenge, a real problem for some people, and made it easy for you to actually access that support.

And I want to get the numbers right. There’s like 1,200 people reached out within the first 10 months to take advantage of this thing. And what they’re now doing is rolling it out, I think, to Italy. And more of the insurance companies are now saying, “Wait, what did you do? How did you do this?” But what I love about this is a way to change what you do and offer to the marketplace in a way that is not performative. It’s actually substantive and meaningful. And some of the data showing that sales went up, new contracts went up almost 10%.

So you’re also essentially selling more, but this could be a system-wide change. They did two million people. If all the companies start doing it and making it just a norm and an offering, you’re supporting millions of people in a really meaningful way that touches hearts and humanity. And it’s basically saving lives. So that is, for me, an example of how you can actually integrate it. Yes, you can communicate it, you can make it a campaign, but this is something that is helping people and helping humanity. And it moves from performative to actually really personal and really meaningful and really touching the experience that people have with your proposition. Now, insurance is not necessarily the sexiest category in the world, but now all of a sudden, they’re winning awards. They’re winning creative awards. They’re getting attention. And for something that is about humanity and us and not necessarily another issue.

So if insurance organizations and companies can do it, I feel that… I talked about insurance, I talked about tech, I talked about food companies. So this is something that is possible to many, many people, many companies. But that story I love because it’s very personal and very visceral and very real and very human and very meaningful. And so you can do it in a way like that. That’s a story to inspire folks to see, “Wow, actually, how do we change what we do and offer?” So I link that back to the CEOs who said, “We’re there for you,” during COVID. But you can actually be there for you in a meaningful way that isn’t just a TV ad and a look to camera, but actually in the core of what you offer in a valuable way that literally will save lives.

Steve Goldbach:

And maybe that’s a good place to start to close this podcast, which is I hear you challenging this notion that… I think one of the skepticisms that people have about the relationship between purpose and marketing and business performance is that it is performative. We see it in the world of sustainability with concerns about greenwashing. And I think what you’re saying is there is absolutely profit to be made when your actual demonstrated behavior aligns with the core values of the consumers that you’re trying to target. And there should be nothing controversial about it. It’s actually just caring. Is that a provocative idea you wish people would embrace? Is there another way you’d say that?

Samuel Monnie:

I’m going to write that down hopefully. Well, we’re recording this, so I’m going to take you in favour… Absolutely! It’s this idea that purpose and performance are not intention, they’re actually driving each other. They’re reinforcing each other. They’re integrated. And it’s about these conversations and decisions that are hugely values driven, but human experiences. This is about humans and helping brands and people and companies connect more deeply with them to build more trust with people. And you have that possibility. You have that potential. And so see that and be about it and know that from some of the stories I told, that was always in business. This was always in this idea or this ideal of this cooperation and this system that works together. And so know that it’s just as about business and profit to care and to support and to inspire and to solve these problems.

Business absolutely has that obligation and that responsibility, communities, society expects you to do that. And also you’ll be rewarded commercially. And so this is not something that can only live in philanthropy or nonprofit. It actually can be the core to your brand and to your business and to your growth and to your success today and onwards in the future. And so that’s what inspires me to keep doing what I do because that’s a story of not just hope from a… They say that, “Hope’s not a strategy.” But without hope, your strategy will fail. And so for me, this values-driven approach is something that is true, it’s real, it’s measurable, and it’s happening. So it’s just about being about it.

Stuart Crainer:

And in many ways, the most beautiful expression of purpose and performance is sports. And in particular, Manchester United, the British soccer team who I know you’re a supporter of. And I think it’s an interesting example because it shows some of the complexity of what you’re talking about, Samuel, because what should the purpose be of a soccer club? To make money? To win trophies? To entertain? And communities. Where are the communities and who are the community? And it’s got many of the issues are embedded there, showing some of the complexities, I think.

Samuel Monnie:

Yeah, it’s very complex. And when you talk about community, that’s the thing. I’m based in the US. I used to live in the South of England. I’d travel up to Manchester to watch the team and it’s a global organization. It’s a global brand of people from all over the world that support the team. But also if you look at the players who play for the men’s team and the women’s team, they are also people from all around the world. So it’s a very inclusive space. It brings people together. And what I love about sport is… Especially the football tradition, soccer tradition, is that you’ve got a stadium of 70,000 people all singing together.

And if you say to most guys, “Oh, when was the last time you sang with other guys?” “Well, who does that?” But in a sporting stadium, you have a community and you have this feeling. And what we know is that commonality is huge and has a positive impact, but it’s the aspect of they have their local communities to support, but they are part of a global community. I know we digress a bit from this, but for me, the power of sport and music and these other aspects to connect people is huge. And so from a brand perspective, obviously as a Manchester United fan, I think we’re the best, but I shall continue to enjoy the upward momentum that this sporting team has. And I’ll be watching them from a distance from my TV screen. I may or may not be singing along with the audio from the fans in the stadium.

Steve Goldbach:

Well, I’m glad that the two of you can agree on your sports enjoyment. I’ve been a long-suffering Toronto Maple Leafs fan and we’re going to suffer for another few years, it seems, on our end. So I’ll let the two of you enjoy. All right. Well, before we wrap up, Samuel, is there a way that people can find you on the interwebs? Where can they reach you?

Samuel Monnie:

They can absolutely reach me. So they can reach me, samuel@purpose-hive.com. So samuel@purpose-hive.com is the website, Purpose Hive. There’s a contact form in there, so you can find us on the internet, or you can find me on LinkedIn where I’m pontificating, sharing and looking to inspire and storytell about all things values-driven, purpose, and positive impact. So LinkedIn or through samuel@purpose-hive.com.

Steve Goldbach:

Samuel, thank you so much. That’s all the time we have for today, and thanks to all of you for listening. This is The Provocateurs Podcast, and we’ve been Stuart Crainer and Steve Goldbach. And please join us again soon for another episode of The Provocateurs.

Mikko Leskelä:

Hello and welcome to the Provocateurs Podcast. I’m Mikko Leskelä, the CEO of Thinkers50. In Provocateurs, we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. Our aim is to provoke you to think and act differently through conversations with some fantastic people. This is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte. And my co-host today is Kulleni Gebreyes, vice chair and US life sciences and healthcare industry leader at Deloitte. Kulleni, it’s so wonderful to see you.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

It’s absolutely wonderful to see you and it’s amazing to be back. I am incredibly excited to talk today with our guest, André Hoffmann. Welcome. And for those who don’t know André, André is the co-founder of Intent. It is an international platform, accelerates sustainable solutions. He’s also the vice chairman of Roche Holding, the international pharmaceutical company. He’s the author with Peter Vanham on a book, The New Nature of Business: The Path to Prosperity and Sustainability. And in it, André and his co-author argue that we must move beyond financial capital to recognize the value of three other forms of capital, natural capital, social capital, and human capital. We’re going to hear more about that today. André is also a member of The B Team, which is a group of business leaders aimed to catalyze a movement of leaders driving a better way of doing business for the well-being of the people and the planet. I think André, you say it’s using common sense, and so I know we’re going to get into a lot of these themes as we talk today. André, welcome to the podcast today.

André Hoffmann:

Thank you very much, Kulleni. Thank you very much, Mikko. Very nice to be here and thank you for having me invited.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Wonderful. So André, maybe let’s jump in. You’ve got so many incredible stories to tell, but you also have a fascinating backstory. So your great-grandfather, Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, pioneered the nascent pharmaceutical industry and started Roche. Your father, Luc Hoffmann was one of the founders of the Worldwide Fund for Nature [or the World Wildlife Fund as it’s also known]. So you’ve got the industrialist influence, the entrepreneur influence; you’re a dedicated conservationist – the environment influence on the other… So tell us what it was like to grow up to be you and how did it impact your view of business and the natural world and how they come together or are in conflict with one another?

André Hoffmann:

Well, hello to everybody and it’s of course a very nice way of introducing this conversation. Yes, I was born in a family which had two characteristics. The father was a famous zoologist, very interested in birds, in particular, the ornithologist. And he spent a lot of time at an early age trying to establish migration patterns of birds and that led him to establish himself with then his wife, but at the time on his own, in the place called the Camargue. The Camargue is the delta of the Rhône River and it’s one of the sort of obligatory stops for birds who go from Europe to Africa and that’s where they tank up before they do the crossing of the Mediterranean.

And so I grew up in a place which was very much a nature reserve. But at the same time my father is also the grandson of the founder, as you just mentioned, Kulleni, Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, the pharmaceutical… We prefer to define ourselves as a biotech company, but we’re in health and we are into looking after patients. And so the idea of being able to look at about two things at an early age was a great help. My father invited a lot of scientists who came to his reserve in the Camargue to study nature. And so I grew up with people around the place, A, speaking English, which is why I speak English and not Schwiizerdütsch [Swiss German], but also people who are interested in talking about what truth is, what science is, how do we understand what nature is if we don’t have some sort of technological background?

And then later on in life, after I completed my studies, I went to the board of the company –  and I’ve been the vice chair of Roche now for nearly 30 years – and what I found the most common between the two things was this idea of science. How can we use new ideas to do something different with our societal model? And so I’m now a father of three living in Switzerland and trying to continue to push with this idea that the system deserves to be the most efficient possible for all of us. And so that’s why we should be constantly probing the borders of what it is that is acceptable.

So in a nutshell, that would be what I do. Being the vice chair of an international business like Roche is quite an onerous job in terms of time. But it also left me a little bit of time to be able to go and do other things and in particular to understand impact and try to promote the use of impact. 

Kulleni Gebreyes:

André, I will say your point of view truly resonates, as a physician who now has entered the business world, I think, in bringing to different world perspectives makes us all better leaders. So thank you for that great response.

Mikko Leskelä:

André, coming from that background, you still describe yourself as an environmentalist and capitalist and also an optimist. How on earth can you be all of those three at once or how do you balance those things? How does that show in the work that you do that you are all three of them?

André Hoffmann:

Well, I would start with a little anecdote. When I started entering the business world… because after having left my home in the Camargue, I went to work in the stock exchange in London for a while and then I took a degree and I worked in a number of different companies before joining the family business. And the question I often had was, “What is nature? What can we as businesses do for nature, the conservationist side?” Because when I left home, I also started working a bit with WWF, which my father co-founded and where I volunteered in different projects but also then joined the governance of the international organization as a treasurer.

And after you look at these things, you have to realize that in fact nature is not just something that you need to protect, it’s the life support system on earth. And so trying to do business in an environment where nature is not looked after, is not part of the system, cannot be very productive in the long term. So when I arrived and asked my fellow business people, “Hello guys, what are we doing for nature?” They would say, “Ah, don’t be ridiculous. We make money.” So nature is somewhere else. “It’s in the Amazon. It’s in the Camargue. Let us make money. When we finished with making money, we give you a little bit back for your birds in the Camargue.”

And that sort of fundamental mistake of believing that the same people are living in different silos is just absurd. As the image I use in the book, we all swim in the same pool and if one side of the pool is damaged, the other side suffers as well. So the idea of saying there is one type of humanity which only creates value through exploitation, and on the other side of humanity there is a part of the world which has to restore what has been destroyed, it’s just not very coherent. So that allows me to say that business can be a force for good if it’s well managed, and I‘m an optimist by nature… That’s more difficult to explain, especially in current circumstances. But being a capitalist and a conservationist is not contradictory. That’s what I wanted to say.

Mikko Leskelä:

I do understand that once you get the idea that business is actually part of nature and companies are part of nature, it makes you by default also an environmentalist. But the part that I wonder the most about is that the optimist part in everything that you see outside right now happening and everywhere, do you still consider yourself an optimist and how do you do that?

André Hoffmann:

Well, perhaps again, there is this notion of public good towards private interests. When companies were started, it comes from the Latin com pani: eating bread together. So the idea was to bring resources, pull resources together so that you can do something together for all. And then the industrial revolution comes around: the business of businesses. Business mantra has developed in the late ’70s and then suddenly we start saying, “Well the best way to measure the performance of a company is that it is profitable,” which, by the way, is not illogical. If you want to have prosperity, you need to create the wealth somewhere. So let’s have each business producing wealth and once the wealth has been produced, it’ll serve humanity.

The problem is that it is a little bit short-sighted because it’s a very narrow lens. The idea of saying, “I will make profit at all cost and I will then give it back to society through salaries and through dividends and through shares, prices, whatever, it misses the real point. The real point is that success is something else than just financial success. Success is contribution to society. And we can discuss that later on a bit more if you want, but what I’m trying to say is that businesses were successful because when I was born we were 3.5 billion, we are 8 billion now, and we live good lives on average. So the idea of saying that profit comes first has been a successful way of coming to a prosperity, which by the way is in trouble at the moment. But again, that’s another subject.

What I’m trying to say is that if you just concentrate on building up prosperity, it gives you the authorization of deciding that you don’t need morality. You don’t need to be decent. It’s not your problem. Your problem is to make the money and you push it out to society and then society can deal with what Milton Friedman called the externalities.

And it’s not even a question of right or wrong, it’s amoral. It’s not immoral or moral, it’s amoral. You just don’t think about it. And I think that is what has created the most problem in society as a whole, the sort of pushing back of the responsibility for your behavior onto the others. If you look at the way we live our lives, a lot of the big issues, we have delegated solutions to these big issues to others. I would like personally to die at home, but I’m not sure I’m going to be allowed to do that because the medical system insists that I should go into a hospital where all sorts of diseases will be treated and perhaps some created. So I don’t want to go into that sort of conspiratorial conversation because that’s really not the purpose. The purpose is to see where does responsibility start and where does it end?

Kulleni Gebreyes:

André, you’re challenging us and provoking us to think differently about how purpose and profit can and should align, how prosperity and sustainability… That we should make progress on both at the same time instead of picking one or the other. And I think there’s another provocation you have in your book that says, “Don’t just think about how you spend money in terms of giving money. Think about how you make money.” So if I merge all of these things together, the question to you is… So what kind of leadership do we need both in the business world and across all the other industries and sectors to make progress on this path of prosperity and sustainability actually working together? How do you think leaders should rethink their style of leadership and how they show up?

André Hoffmann:

Well, thank you for the question, Kulleni. I think that’s absolutely fundamental. One of the side effects of focusing on short-term profit maximization is that you look at life in business but also in public life, also in NGOs, also in governments, you look at this in terms of the difference between cost and income and about using the financial instrument, the financial models to describe a situation. Well, I’m afraid that’s not how we live our lives. We do have values. We do have decency as we said before. And these things have to be taken into account as well. So my idea would be to say that there is a way of looking at the consequences of what we are doing in other ways than doing it just on the financial pattern. So we need to go to this definition of the three capitals you alluded to in your introduction.

Whenever we do something, whatever walks of life or business it is, we have impact on three big capitals. The social one, us. Why do we talk to each other? Why is one plus one often more than two? If you talk about common projects, what’s our social responsibility to each other? What’s the social contract we choose to execute? All this relationship, rights and obligations among people.

The second big capital is of course the human capital. Us individually, the really very simple question, are we happy? Are we where we want to be in life? Are we doing every morning something that allows us to say that we live our values? It sounds trite when I say it like this, but try and experience one day when you’re in front of a mirror, have a look and decide, “Am I today living my values? Can I take my values to work for instance, or will my boss ask me to do something in order to get to the profitability, which is not something I believe in?” Or the opposite? In an NGO, “Is my boss not completely unaware of the consequences of what he’s trying to do by pushing too much one sort of agenda?” And it doesn’t have to be the boss, it can be you as well. Taking your values to work is an important part of happiness is what I’m trying to say.

And the third one of course, and that’s where I come from because I’m a conservationist, as we said in the introduction. The third one is nature. But nature is not the tiger, the panda, the iconic species, the Amazon. No, nature is us, all of us. Nature is life. Biodiversity is nothing else than life. If we don’t together do something for life, we’re going to run out of it. Do I have to continue the sentence? And it’s quite clear that’s what’s going to happen there. I define nature as the life-supporting system on earth. And if we destroy it, well, we have no life left.

I’m sorry, I got slightly waylaid. I wanted to talk about these three capitals because I think that’s one way of measuring what success actually means in a business. A business that is only delivering quarterly increases in profit is not really helping the society as a whole. Suddenly we have this new definition, what is business? Business is not something that makes money. Business is something that serves a purpose. You were kind enough to talk about Roche, our company, before. We have defined our purpose in one single sentence, doing today what the patients need next. So that means that everything we do in our company is because we think about the patient and not because we think about the shareholders. Now, as a majority shareholder of the company, it’s embarrassing to have to say that, but you do not work the company for shareholders. Work the company because it contributes to society, to the social capital we were just talking about.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

André, that really resonates. And we talk about this at Deloitte all the time, especially in life sciences and healthcare, which is… We are a business, but we are in the business of creating value and then we capture some of that value we create. But the goal of the business is to actually improve healthcare and advance the science of health as well. So I love the description of the inseparability and the interdependency of the three forms of capital that you’ve described.

André Hoffmann:

Because of course what we do is that we measure the fourth one, we measure the produced capital, and we have good systems for this. We’ve been doing financial accounting for… I don’t know how many generations. What we don’t really have yet is an impact accounting system that truly, truly works. There are lots of attempts at the moment. There’s for instance no legislation about it. There are a couple of attempts at introducing impact accounting for quoted companies, but certain… There are a bit of headwinds at the moment to be able to do that officially, however it appears in a number of companies on a voluntary basis. And I think that should be important elements for companies to report on.

Mikko Leskelä:

André, why I think your concept of those four different kinds of capitals is fairly revolutionary is the fact that if you truly think about them as capital, of course you understand with financial capital, it’s not just enough just to preserve them, but they should actually accrue interest or they should grow. And when you apply that to the human capital, it kind of flips. We are not to exploit human beings or employees or anybody anymore, we should actually add to their wellbeing in every form. Maybe the most difficult kind of capital that you described to understand is the social capital. Could you use an example of how at Roche you view the social capital and whether there’s something that you actually can measure whether it’s increasing or not?

André Hoffmann:

So the notion of measurability, of being able to put the number into something is a very interesting one into the context of these different capitals because we assume like mathematics or like physics that most of the things are linear, A plus B equals C. Well, if we look at nature, and again, the conservation inside of me wants to look a lot at nature, nature is complete chaos. There’s absolutely no logic to it. It goes all over the place all the time. It does the most extraordinary things. It reinvents itself every quarter of a second. It’s everywhere.

And so the idea of saying, “We humanity, we have a big brain and we have now identified how things work and we’re going to do something about it,” it’s a bit naive. It’s perhaps also a bit difficult to realize. So it’s difficult to give you a true number onto what the social capital and how you get involved in social capital benefits. But there are many ways in which you can give evidence in an anecdotal way. A company which looks after its employees is a more stable company than a company that only rewards them and forgets about the rest. What can I give you? A building site where people hate each other is a dangerous place to be. You have to understand what unites a group and what brings us together in the same direction. And that, as I said before, is a question of clearly defining the purpose.

You are not coming to a company because you want a salary. You’re coming to a company because you want together to do something for the purpose of the company. And I think that’s a dimension we often forget. It’s so much easier to measure a salary. It’s so much easier to measure the perk. Have you got the Ferrari? It’s so much easier to simplify things and that’s a tendency we humans have. And that’s dangerous because the world is complex. And I think we see that more and more now.

So as you can see, I’m avoiding your question because I don’t really have an answer. I can tell you things that we all know. Kulleni did in the introduction, referred to common sense. You have to be a bit careful with common sense because it gives you an excuse for a lot of things. But it is true that if you act in a way that does not correspond to the feeling of being humans, you start behaving in… You invent yourself a reality which is not the right one. You can’t even lie to yourself if you’re not careful.

Mikko Leskelä:

From your difficulty answering this, I get that it has to be something a bit more qualitative when it comes to the social capital. And I see a flip side to this. When you understand business as a part of nature, or as a part of social systems, you actually have the possibility to see business as a beautiful thing also, don’t you?

André Hoffmann:

Yeah, I am coming back to my definition of business as a company of before. If you can really use the incredible spirit of entrepreneurship, which has driven humanity for a long time, if you can look at it in a way where success is not just increasing the dividend, but in a way where success is the positive contribution to the common good, that’s an incredible thing. That means that we humans together can do things which were unthinkable a couple of decades ago. Innovation. Innovation is nothing else than doing something that hasn’t been done before. And if you start time and time again to do things that haven’t been before, and if you keep in mind the common good, you could make such a big difference. And I believe that business as a force for good is in fact one of the only solutions for solving the big problems of humanity.

If you look at the big groups who can make a difference, look at companies managed for profit. Well, all they do is to regenerate money. Look at NGOs, all they do is satisfy the members. And if they go away from the mission, the members will be unhappy. Look at universities, all they want to do is to publish and put in a drawer. Once you publish, you’re a happy person. I’m sorry, you’re obviously a university person. I’m so sorry! You know what I mean? Businesses run for impact. Businesses run for positive impact on society. Could be a big part of the solution, in fact.

Well, in the US you talk a lot about philanthropy. This is again what Kulleni said before, it’s not how you spend the money that matters, it’s how you make it. And so it’s important that we should continue as businesses to produce the contribution to prosperity that we are producing, but taking into account the planetary limits and try to make sure to not break things when we are doing it. Because the idea of saying, “I cut the forest, I get 100 and then I give 10 back to WWF so that they can go and replant it,” is just absurd. I need to take 10 every year. And then everybody’s happy.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

As I connect, André, your response to Mikko’s question and just the broader implications of how we think about it, it reminds me of a conversation I had with my grandmother. My background is I studied ecology and evolutionary biology. So everything you’re saying in nature connects. Then I became a physician and practiced and now in the business of life sciences and healthcare. And as I was explaining all of this to her, she looked at me. This is decades ago, and she said, “Why do you all have to measure something to make it seem valuable?”

And that moment popped up in my head because she was surprised at our inability to find value in something we couldn’t measure. And she’s like, “Can’t you just feel it and see it?” And so you’re taking me back. 

Kulleni Gebreyes:

André, as we think about this incredible book that you’ve just published, I’m hoping you can share with us why now? Why did you take the time and energy to publish it now? What inspired that and what are the outcomes that you would like to see as a result of this book and your perspectives being out in conversations?

André Hoffmann:

Yeah. Well, I’m coming back to the beginning of our conversation. When I was born, there were 3.5 billion people. Now there are 8 billion people. The 8 billion people on the planet today live on average, healthier lives, better lives, longer lives, better educated lives. And I think the whole totality of this is something that indicates that the way of producing prosperity in business has not been the bad solution. We have brought forward living standards for humanity. We have perhaps even empowered part of humanity to come to life, which wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

But you can also see that this prosperity model is showing some cracks. If you look at the facade of our common house, you can see it’s cracking all over the place. And I would see the symptoms of these cracks in the three different capitals we just looked at. Nature, I don’t have to tell you. Climate change, pollution, plastics, persistent organic pollution, et cetera, et cetera. You look at society. You go towards the human capital, you have exactly the same things. “What am I going to do? How come that I’m not going to get a better job than my parents? How am I going to be able to participate in society?” All these things are very much inside our daily lives. And so we need to address these symptoms and how do we address symptoms? By proposing a cure. And so I wrote this book because I thought it’s time to sort of ask the real question, what is success?

Success is not just a growing bank account or the materiality that comes with it. So of course you need the minimum. There’s absolutely no shadow of a doubt that you do need… You need a bed. You need a house. You need the education of the children. You need the food. You need all these things. Of course you do. And by the way, the strong should help the poor in that context. But that’s maybe another conversation. So you need that, absolutely.

But anything over it is a little bit more complicated. I can’t imagine that the richest man on earth is 350,000 times happier than I am. There’s a plateau at some stage. It stops. And so we need to understand these dimensions. We also need to make sure that we address these issues by understanding the origin, the root causes of this. As you said, my father was one of the founding members of WWF. WWF when it started raised funds for saving the elephants in East Africa. Well, I’m still a member of WWF. I still receive letters every three months telling me we need to raise funds for saving the African elephants. So clearly we have succeeded in protecting the elephant because it still exists. But you haven’t solved the reason why the elephant is under pressure. 

So let’s have a look at this. Let’s have a look, not just at the economy, but let’s have a look at the way we live together. And there comes this idea of the three capitals. And from the three capitals you can see that there is one element that really is lacking in the way we have constructed business. We haven’t got a price on nature. We consider nature as being without any price. So we use it because it’s cheap and we lose it because it doesn’t have a price. And so how do we reconcile this by putting nature on the balance sheet and how can we… Once it is on the balance sheet, and you talked about the increase in value in the balance sheet before. Once you have it in the balance sheet, how do we manage it in a way where we don’t just exploit it, but we also thrive on it?

I give you a very simple example, the tree. When I look at the tree, I look at the value of a tree, it’s the equivalent of the wood that it contains. In other words, the tree is dead and that’s where I get the value. But the tree alive has much more value. It’s connected to other trees. It’s part of a system. So this idea of putting a price on life, it’s something that we really need to work much harder on.

And life is not just well-being for individuals, it’s also a societal system. It’s a system that works together. So for me, the idea of taking my pen and the skill of my fellow co-writer to together describe what it is we could do for society by using business as a force for good and by inventing a new nature of business was a natural development. I use it as a basis for my advocacy. I do as much advocacy as I can. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve accepted this invitation. Thank you very much for having me on. But then there’s also other things that go with it. I just said some very rude things about the foundations and business, but from time to time we do need philanthropy. 

And the idea of saying, “I’m going to buy myself indulgence by investing into nature on a no return basis,” it’s not enough. I need to make sure that nature is not in danger to start with. So yeah, all that to say that there are things in my toolbox, which I’m trying to use. I’m, of course, influencing Roche as a company as much as possible to be a sustainable business because our future is by saving life and if we save life at the cost of other things, we are probably not doing the right thing so let’s sort of look at it holistically and things of that nature.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

André, as a fellow capitalist I will tell you I absolutely love the idea of business as a force for good. And you bring up the concept of the tree. I’m hoping you can tell us a little bit more about even the frame that you’ve described in the book, which is the roots, the trunk, and the crown as the new nature of business. Would you mind sharing a little bit about that analogy that you’ve used also for the new nature of business?

André Hoffmann:

Yes, of course. The logic of trying to look at the way a tree incorporates itself in the system is very similar to the way we should be conducting business. We need to be deeply rooted. We need to build a strong trunk and we need to be able to receive the lights from the leaves and from the sunshine. And I think the combination of these factors is what should make us successful in business. You cannot just be running after an idea and making a maximum amount of it and then walking away. So the winner takes all of the flipping of the young investment is a dangerous thing to do. You need to be rooted, you need to be really part of society, and you need to build a strong trunk. And of course, you cannot do that without photosynthesis. So you need the other side as well. The tree also is a good example of how you can contribute to society by becoming part of a forest rather than by standing alone in a schoolyard or something like this.

Mikko Leskelä:

André, in your book, in the very beginning, you talk about the company founder myth and how it is misleading. Now, coming from Roche, that also has a very strong founding story. What do you mean by that? What’s the myth of the founder and how is it misleading?

André Hoffmann:

Well, one of the reasons why this book has achieved a little bit of notoriety is because I did not talk only about ideas. I wanted it to be… As I just said, rooted into something that actually has happened. And so I decided to use my family history to explain how society functions, and we have this absolute admiration for people who are financially successful. So the idea of saying that somebody has filled his bank account just because he was at the right place at the right moment, the right idea, doing the right things, is I think a little bit of narrowing of what really happened.

My great-grandfather was successful, but he also committed a lot of trial and error. And I think that what I’m trying to write about in the book is that he’s the result of the free capital we just described. The fact that he was on the side of the Rhine made the difference because at the time, that was an important part of what business was in Europe. The fact that he was also the result of a long series of social development in his town and the fact that he was helped by his father and all these things together mean that the single person who changes the world is a little bit of [inaudible 00:37:34]… we are all part of a group.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

So André, it’s 2026. There’s no conversation you can have in the business world or even in the private world without asking about AI. And so I can’t believe we’ve waited this long to ask you about AI. But as you think about the new nature of business and Roche as a biotech company and all the forms of capital that you’ve discussed, how do you see AI enabling or creating additional challenges with the proper use and use of business as a force for good? But how does AI enter and become integrated as part of this picture of the new nature of business and all the different forms of capital?

André Hoffmann:

Well, there’s one thing that we can learn, yes, from nature again, is that it’s not a question of identifying what are the factors for deciding. It’s a question of making sure that you understand the interrelation, interdependencies on the different factors. So AI allows us to apprehend, use, rationalize, analyze humongous amounts of data, things we haven’t really started thinking about in the past.

Past pharmaceutical research, just to give an example, would be based on a hypothesis. You identify parts of the disease pathway that can be treated. You identify a molecule and you try to match them. And then from time to time, it works. From time to time, it doesn’t. But the way we do it with AI is exactly the opposite. We actually look at reality, at facts, at data. We put them on the table and suddenly out of the data emerges a pattern which gives us the theory we can then go and test. And that’s a bit of a… It’s reversing the rules. It’s saying we need a bit more humility. We cannot always understand it all. We need to hear what the world is telling us before we act on it. So I find that’s the major benefit for AI in the research world.

Now, for the healthcare, for the health systems, to be able to spend more time understanding symptoms, into treating symptoms is, of course, a wonderful benefit for the patient population. And that is something that we perhaps in the past have not been able to integrate in a way which really makes sense for the individual patient. So the long-term result of this ongoing analysis of AI could be really very, very significant for healthcare. I have to make a little bit of an aside here. We talk about being in the business of health. In fact, we are in the business of disease. Our job is to cure. It’s not to maintain health, but if we were able to remain healthy, we could make a big difference. And the combination that we have at Roche of diagnostic equipment and biotech research allows us to be closer to this than we’ve ever been before thanks to artificial intelligence.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

André, we have written quite a bit about longevity as well as increased health span. So I think that what you’ve closed that response with also makes a lot of sense because there is more value we can create by keeping people healthy instead of curing them after they’ve been ill. So that really resonates for me as well.

Mikko Leskelä:

Guys, we are reaching the end of the Provocateurs Podcast episode, but there’s one question that we ask every time we have somebody here as a guest. And the question, André, is that we’d like to hear, what is the one provocative idea that you wish more people in the world would embrace right now?

André Hoffmann:

Well, as a synthesis of what we’re trying to do, we are neglecting nature because we take it for granted and we take it as limitless. We keep on thinking that clean air, fresh water is not only for free, but that there’s enough of it for everybody. That’s just simply not true. If you don’t start looking after the stock, after the capital, we are going to lose it. So when I talk about business, I would like to think that the real science, the real genius of business would be to create something that allows us to use life, to help life, and to stop thinking of nature just as a stock that we can use. We’ve been liquidating nature and social capital. Social capital as well, of course, just to create an artificial value, which does not help us to continue to help nature and social capital.

Do you understand the contradiction? We are using it as something that is a resource. I position as husbanding it as if it was a long-term factor for success. And I think that’s really what I would like people to go home and think about. How can we every day in our daily occurrence in the social, human, and in natural capital, make a small contribution to this long-term value? How can we be good ancestors? How can we make sure that the next generation is going to benefit from the same life as we have?

Mikko Leskelä:

That’s a beautiful guiding principle for us. Kulleni, any concluding remarks from your…

Kulleni Gebreyes:

Yeah, I would say doing now what patients need next and business is a force for good, André, are words and motto to live by. And you’re also reminding us that we’re all like fish in a tank and we don’t know that we need that water and we’re in that nature and we need nature not just for ourselves, for generations to come. So thank you for sharing your thoughts with us today and putting in the world such incredible content, and book, in The New Nature of Business. We appreciate you!

André Hoffmann:

Well, thank you very much. And I’m very glad that I reminded you of your grandmother! That’s a real compliment.

Kulleni Gebreyes:

It’s always a good day.

Mikko Leskelä:

Yeah. All good things to an end. That’s unfortunately all the time we have now. So thanks for our guest, André Hoffman. Thanks to you for listening to this podcast episode. This is The Provocateurs Podcast with Thinkers50 and Deloitte. We’ve been Mikko Leskelä and Kulleni Gebreyes. Please join us again soon for another episode of The Provocateurs. Thank you everybody.

André Hoffmann:

Thank you very much. Thank you.