Announcer:

Please welcome to the stage Geoff Tuff, Des Dearlove, and Anke Hampel.

Geoff Tuff:

So, hi everyone, I am  Geoff Tuff. I lead sustainability globally and in the US for Deloitte for all our energy resources and industrials clients. I am co-host of this podcast along with Steve Goldbach, who many of you have probably seen up here over time, and Kulleni Gebreyes from Deloitte. And we lead this podcast with Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer from Thinkers50. Our aim is to provoke you to think and act differently through conversations with insightful leaders like Anke who offer new perspectives on traditional business thinking. And today we’re coming to you live from our stage at Climate Week in New York City 2025. And it’s really live, as you can tell.

So this is a collaboration, as I said before, between Thinkers50 and Deloitte. My co-host today is Des Dearlove. He is co-founder of Thinkers50, which is best known for its global Ranking of management thinkers and its Distinguished Achievement Awards, celebrating bold ideas that are shaping the future of business and that can make a positive impact on the world. Des is also a former columnist to The Times of London and co-editor of the best-selling Financial Times Handbook of Management. He’s an associate fellow at Oxford University and a visiting professor at IE Business School in Madrid. So Des, great to see you again.

Des Dearlove:

Geoff, great to see you too. And it’s great to be here in New York for Climate Week and I’m super excited about our special guest today. Anke Hampel is chief sustainability officer at ABB and a member of the board of directors of ABB Germany. ABB is a global technology leader in electrification and automation based in Zurich, Switzerland. ABB helps industries to outrun. This means running at high performance while becoming more efficient, productive, and sustainable, enabling industries to outperform. The company has been around for a while. The company has over 140 years of history and around 110,000 employees worldwide. Anke has a background in finance, procurement, supply chain and innovation management in the consumer goods and packaging industry. She’s married and the proud mom of two sons. Anke, welcome.

Anke Hampel:

Thank you.

Geoff Tuff:

I’m worried we’re going to give Anke a whiplash as she looks at me and now looks at you, but hopefully that’s going to be okay. So let’s start by just talking a little bit about you, your journey, how you came to be where you are today. I know we were talking before we came up here about how some of it has felt a little bit random, but tell us your story.

Anke Hampel:

Thank you. Thank you first of all for having me for this special edition of Climate Week New York. Very exciting to be here with you. And yeah, being part of this podcast which had people on in the previous episodes that I really admire, Paul Polman, Andrew Winston, who actually happened to be here today, yesterday in this audience.

How did I get here? Actually being back in New York is a full circle moment. I’ve been here first in ’99 doing an internship and got offered a job in consulting and in parallel there was a job offer, a longstanding job offer from Procter & Gamble because I’d done a case study week there and this was the time of the dot-com bubble and people were just looking for talent and I was like, okay, I have no idea about finance, let me do finance, because in my international business studies I focused on a bit more general management.

So I started at P&G, made the decision for P&G because I really was inspired by the purpose, improving the lives of consumers. So what you will see here is a bit of a theme. I’ve been on this continuous quest for how to combine profit and purpose. It’s not an easy one, it’s a long one to talk about. And a bit of this we will do today. In 2017 actually I was back here in New York working on M&A with the beauty giant Coty for the ones who know. And this is when I actually got a call from Tetra Pak, the packaging company, who’s selling on an annual basis 160 billion packages that actually have the potential to be the most sustainable packaging in the world. It’s a family-owned company. And I decided to actually go for this opportunity because I wanted to see how it is if you’re running a business without the quarterly analyst pressure.

And what I found was actually some of the pressure’s good. It gets you to do things that actually are expected. Sustainability, one of them, ABB is actually one of these companies having the quarterly pressure and going with a very strong purpose. In a family-owned business, you really have to see how the long-term projects are still brought to life. And when I joined Tetra Pak, I gave an interview and I said, “My job is to eliminate my job.” Why did I say this? Tetra Paks, I hope everyone is familiar with them, it’s the milk packages, juice packages, they contain aluminium, which is the most efficient barrier we have in the world. It’s just six micron, but it makes it hard to recycle. And so after six years I was done, the first paper-based barrier was launched into the market, and that’s when I got the call from ABB and was offered the job to lead sustainability globally.

And that’s also when imposter syndrome kicked in. I have to be honest because first I was very excited talking to the CEO and he talked about the art of influencing. I was like, “Okay, I can do this.” But then having the expertise for sustainability I obviously don’t have or had at that time. And I was asked to come with my business understanding, and I think that’s super important of what we are trying to do in sustainability today. We have to speak the business language, otherwise it’s not going to work what we are trying to deliver. And I decided to take a course in Cambridge and then another one in Yale, and with this started fully prepared. 10 days into the job, this was in December ’22, I was asked for my first presentation in the EC. That went fairly quick.

Two months into it, first board meeting and there I remember an interesting debate with a seasoned sustainability professional, Geraldine Matchett. She is at the board of ABB but also at the board of Nestle and Swiss Re, and she had been in the business for more than 20 years. And we were discussing about emissions. And just because I had just studied the whole thing and things are evolving super fast in sustainability, I was actually able to have a strong argument and was able to convince her of this is the way to go. And so I’m sharing this because it’s the right time to encourage more and more people to really feel, okay, I can do this. Sustainability is not something that someone else does who’s an expert who has been in it for 20 years. No, everyone can and should do it. That’s the best way that we are going to combine purpose and profit and that’s why I’m here and very proud to be.

Geoff Tuff:

It doesn’t sound like all that random a journey, I have to say, Anke.

Des Dearlove:

Let’s talk about ABB. What are the company’s sustainability goals and how are you working towards them? I mean, it’s the company obviously … in Europe it’s a very famous company, but it may not be so well known in the States.

Anke Hampel:

I’m aware of this. We had a few questions, but what we are driving now is our mission, which is helping industries to outrun. It’s a bit of a stopper, but it’s “outperform leaner and cleaner”, and that’s how we’re defining it. The purpose of the company is to make progress for a more sustainable and resource-efficient future by providing technology leadership in electrification automation. So we are an electrification automation company, as you said before, with a very long history. And when I came in I found a reasonably good sustainability agenda, but the targets were there but not everyone was working against it. It was the time when lots of commitments were made. And so one of the first things, it was like okay, we have made a net-zero commitment, let’s get to this. And so one year into the job, we got the approval to go for net-zero targets, got them validated by SPTI, which these days is not any longer as obvious, but we still have a lot of companies doing this because they want to show this is credible, what we are doing.

And then this is really something we are making strong progress against. We just published our climate transition plan, which is a new requirement, but we are also proud to do this to show that we actually know how to get there last Monday. So you can all find it online. It explains in detail and a lot of people also internally came up and said, “Wow, finally, I’m really clear what we are doing.” And so we are set out to, we have these commitments and we are following through with them and that’s super important. When it comes to resource efficiency, we have already since 2020 a target to deliver 80% circularity for our products. And circularity is not yet defined. So what did we do? We came up with our own framework. It takes all the life cycle phases of products and then puts KPIs against them and that’s how we are measuring.

The NGOs that are working on this, one of them being the World Business Council of Sustainable Development, are planning to actually publish the global circularity protocol at COP30 very soon. And then we have been able to obviously inspire with the work we have been doing and how we are measuring. So we look forward to many more companies adopting this and obviously bringing this to our suppliers, to our customers, to our value chain. So that’s a very important one. Included in there is zero waste to landfill by 2030. And then we are also measuring senior female leadership, employee engagement, health and safety. So we have a very complete set.

And by now we have integrated this really into how we are running the business. So everyone is talking about integrate and strategy. We actually have now for the second year run the long-term performance planning process, five-year forecast, financial targets, sustainability targets next to it at division level. So we have in total 18 divisions, all of them have to make their five-year focus on all these KPIs on a quarterly basis. These are reviewed with the board as well. So we have really gone the next step and the expectation is whenever you commit on sustainability, anything you will have to deliver, there are investments required, which means they need to be included in the financial targets and commitments you’re making. So that’s really full circle strategy inclusion.

Geoff Tuff:

And I know we’ll be getting a lot more into the business of sustainability and the economic gains you can get from it. But let’s actually talk about the stuff ABB makes. So you’re at the heart of the power sector in many ways. There’s a lot of conversation, there has been a lot of conversation this week at Climate Week about the importance of meeting growing demand in the power sector, finding ways to decarbonize heavy industry, etc. Tell us a little bit about how ABB plays in that space and the role that you’re playing with your customers as they think about having the same sort of decarbonization goals.

Anke Hampel:

Good question. So I already talked about enabling a more efficient future. So the industries that we are touching the most is power, transport, buildings, and mobility. And together these account for 95% of total global energy-related emissions. So a significant impact with everything we are touching when it comes also to sustainability, but of course helping these industries also, as we talked about before, to grow and to be successful. And we are in this sweet spot of electrification automation. One of the topics of climate week is power on, electrification of everything. So we have so many industries that are benefiting from electrification.

We talked just before coming up here on stage about this insight that is not very well known. Not all forms of energy are transformed into a hundred percent usable energy. A lot of energy gets lost. We’re talking about some more old-fashioned energy sources, 30% down to 20% is actually useful energy. And so this is not what is clear to everyone. When you are moving to more current ways of generating your energy, electricity, you’re actually making sure it’s usable a hundred percent. And that’s an important piece-

Geoff Tuff:

Which is a really important point because we talk a lot about meeting the demand and being able to generate more energy and actually it sounds like we’re wasting a lot along the way and that’s something that ABB helps with.

Anke Hampel:

That’s why ABB actually has created something called The Energy Efficiency Movement because we want to make sure people understand there’s a big opportunity there. Energy efficiency will help us with this current demand increase. We are not just in an energy transition, we are in an energy expansion or transformation process that leads to expansion. We’re talking about the AI part, I think 300 terawatt hours were required in 2020, and we’re expecting 1000 terawatt hours for AI use by 2030. So we really have to make sure that any energy that’s produced is used in the most efficient way. And that’s one of the things we are really doing with our products.

ABB is also the biggest provider of electrical motors and drives, smart variable drives. For the ones who don’t know, if a motor is running full, flat out, I’m sure you have seen motors all around, they are existing in the smallest form and huge large motors. I’ve never seen as many large motors as ABB is producing, going obviously to our sites, which is very exciting. And all of these motors benefit if you actually are regulating them. If they run full out, whether there is a load on there or not, we are wasting energy. So variable speed drives can be just installed on existing motors and they then reduce the energy consumption depending on when actually the activity is needed. So you will not shut down the motor but you will actually modulate what’s happened.

And that’s an important insight that many companies have not really gone after. The energy efficiency audits that we are offering to our customers and that we are promoting via this movement that already has now 550 companies who joined are just one way to actually understand what is driving inefficiencies in how I’m using energy. And there is this insight I learned coming into this industry. Engineers love to have big CapEx projects. Coming from the airport on Sunday here, I talked to the CEO of a big multinational and he was saying, “You’re right, it’s not sexy to invest into CapEx projects, but energy efficiency is about all these little smart motors that you have everywhere in the operation, in your air conditioning, everywhere. Check if they’re efficient.”

We actually are currently innovating to provide the highest efficiency class for our motors. It’s called IE6, especially for smaller motors. And it’s an innovation we are very proud of because as a leader in this industry, we of course have to drive innovation forward. Efficiency is key here. And the investments are not that big. They payout, the ROI for these investments, very often now is three months, six months, one year. And people are not aware of it. We are not sufficiently driving this opportunity and it actually could provide energy abundance in many areas. And that’s something very close to my heart, to our heart. When we are talking about electrifying everything, we also need to combine it with the highest opportunities on energy efficiency and, of course, then automation, going into the most efficient processes, making sure there is no waste in how you’re operating, allowing digitization to really find the sweet spots, ensuring there are smart solutions that take the energy at the moment when it has the highest renewable content, for example, in the grid. So there’s so many offerings that can help us to do the right thing and not all of them are being picked up.

Geoff Tuff:

Des, I think Anke is making us redundant. We could have just come up here and said, “Anke, tell us about sustainability.”

Des Dearlove:

What I was really interested in though is one of the things that we’ve seen happen in the last 18 months, is you get much more of this making the business case. Some of the things you were just talking about, I mean, why has it taken so long for us to be having this kind of level of conversation and how important is the narrative and the logic? Because, I mean, obviously sustainability can be painted as a bit fluffy, but in actual fact, once you start looking at the data, it’s very compelling. In fact, it’s an overwhelmingly strong case.

Anke Hampel:

Yep. I think we have been for too long looking at sustainability as a nice add-on, I would say. 

And what we are doing, and that is exactly where my business background is coming in, talking the language of the customers, making sure we talk about resilience. We have been discussing a lot around sustainability leaders. What’s the new word? If we shouldn’t use sustainability any longer, okay, let’s go for resilience, competitiveness, all of these things are actually what we are doing. If you drive process improvements, if you are driving continuous improvement, if you’re making smart investments that actually help you to be more efficient, productive in what you’re doing, using smart solutions, predictive maintenance, all of this, AI of course, is helping you to make much better business decisions and your business more efficient, lowering cost and carbon. That’s the other the two Cs.

And for too long we haven’t done this. We looked at sustainability, okay, there is this add-on. An example for us is circularity, actually, because we had this 2020 target, it was established, and when I came in I was like, “Where are people working on this?” Also, the customer demand is there. And once you show what it means to have a take back option, bringing your products back and making sure they’re being either refurbished, reused, all the good things that circularity bring, we are able to offer this, we are offering this today. But to tell the story in a compelling way we haven’t done. We talked about, “And this is a circular product.” We didn’t talk about, “This helps you to bring your costs down. This makes sure there is security of supply.” When we talk about scarce materials, copper will be a scarce material. Are we sufficiently introducing copper, recycled copper in all we are doing? No.

I myself going to copper suppliers and trying to really have a, “What is it? What does it take in your process to introduce the recycled content?” Connecting them with the recyclers, it’s a lot of hands-on, it’s rolling up the sleeves because it’s not easy. It would have been done if it would have been easy, but the opportunities are tremendous and they are all business opportunities. There are opportunities to make your business more resilient and competitive. So if we use this language, I think there’s a bigger chance to actually drive the success that we didn’t see so far.

Des Dearlove:

And language is so important at the end of the day. I mean, it’s amazing. And the narrative, that’s what I’m feeling, is the narrative is getting stronger, it’s more assertive.

Geoff Tuff:

So Anke, part of what I think I hear you telling a story about is a shift in your business model. And I don’t know how dramatic a shift it is, but a lot of the time when we’re speaking with chief sustainability officers and out in the sustainability space, the core challenge, the same core challenge is innovation, and any other time. And so I’d love to hear a little bit about your thoughts or your experience at ABB. Has the innovation and the business model shift been something that has been gradual that you’ve just kind of done with your customers over time or did you make some big, bold moves along the way, or was it a mix of both?

Anke Hampel:

I would say it’s a mix of both. If I just picked the example of AI, ABB has been working with early forms of AI for the last 40 years. So predictive maintenance-

Geoff Tuff:

And I thought AI was just invented last year. I’m kidding.

Anke Hampel:

That’s when it came to your home. No. So that’s an example where ABB has been on the forefront of doing this, have been innovating. We talked about the 140-year history. There’s plenty of IP you wouldn’t think about that actually goes back to the roots of ABB. For the ones who don’t know, there is ASEA, which is a Swedish company, and then there’s Brown Boveri, which was a Swedish, sorry, a Swiss company, easily mixed with Swedish. And it was really born out of innovations in the space of electrification. And so if I think about switchgear, the switches in your home, the ones when the power goes off, this is an invention by an early part of what ABB  acquired. It was an acquisition from more than 175 years ago. So it’s a pattern of acquisitions, in-house innovation, and then continuously looking at the portfolio.

What happened over the last year is that the portfolio has been a hundred percent aligned to the purpose. I described the purpose before: driving technology leadership and electrification automation. Our portfolio, the 18 divisions, are all aligned to this. They’re continuously scrutinized to check they are operating “on purpose”. And I have to say it makes it extremely easy. There are these requirements for reporting where you have to go into what percentage of your products are sustainable solutions. And for us, it’s everything. I’m not forcing anyone in the organization to say, “Please tell me which of your products are sustainable.” All of them deliver against this purpose and hence against the sustainability agenda that we have.

And so I think this scrutiny in making sure if you’re purpose-led, all your business elements should actually go along with it, has led to this innovation powerhouse, I would say. And I’m still learning, I’m a bit more than two and a half years on the job. I love going to our sites, to our R&D centers. Each time I’m learning something. One of the things that I’m happy to share in terms of innovation, is that we should be going for many more DC microgrids. What is this? So direct current. The original form of how electricity was invented. We are today, because the way grids were constructed, the legacy of it, we are converting DC to AC and when, after the energy generation and then when it comes to applications, we very often go back from AC to DC. Alternating current, direct current. Each time we do this, we lose 7% of energy, and this also means that emissions  are lost.

The minimum we could do is wherever renewable energy is generated on-site, keep them in a DC microgrid and use it directly without forcing back-conversion. And we’re not good at doing this. This knowledge has been there for some time, but the adoption is very slow. It’s maybe another story like the energy efficiency. We know these things for a long time and we are very slow in adopting. Some resistance, some we have always done it this way, but a lot can- 

Geoff Tuff:

But it does seem and sound consistent with the movement generally in the power generation and the need for more on-site generation and microgrids and what have you. So it’s the right time to make that shift.

Anke Hampel:

Exactly.

Des Dearlove:

Another term that we are hearing increasingly is regeneration, which seems like it’s the sort of next thing from sustainability. So if sustainability is typically seen as doing less harm, then environment regeneration goes further, it’s about doing more good. I mean, Paul Polman was here yesterday, and a year ago he was sitting in the seat you’re sitting in actually doing the podcast with us.

Geoff Tuff:

It might’ve been a different seat but roughly the same area.

Des Dearlove:

Obviously, his terminology is to be net positive. That was the name of the book with Andrew Winston. Do you feel that movement is coming, that we’re going to go beyond sustainability, or do you think that’s a pipe dream?

Anke Hampel:

Very good question. I wouldn’t think it’s a pipe dream because of how interconnected our systems are. So when we talk about doing no harm, which is what sustainability is, net-zero impact, this is what we can support with the business agenda. But if we think a little bit ahead, which businesses should do, which our board should be doing, that’s what our board of directors are being paid for, they have to make sure that it is a long-term vision that takes future risks into account when you are working on your current business model.

So the things that are coming our way are quite challenging to deal with. We can expect stranded assets. We will have a physical impact of climate change. It was also at Climate Week last year, the statement of in the next, there were 200 CEOs in the room and the statement pretty much from the European Bank, from Swiss Re, the insurer, and the business leader was in five to 10 years, all of your businesses here in the room will have been hit in some kind of form by the impact of physical risk coming from climate change. Today, this was last year, but I don’t think this has changed, or gone down, 25% of these risks are insured. The outlook is that in about five years we can expect 1% to be insured.

Geoff Tuff:

Not insurable anymore.

Anke Hampel:

What cannot be insured cannot be financed. And I really saw the wake-up call of CEOs in the room. So taking not only this, okay, I’m doing no harm, I’m here doing the right thing, is this question that Paul and Andrew Winston have been asking, is the world better off with my company in it? I love this concept because this really makes you scrutinize, what am I doing here? Am I taking all the impacts into consideration? A typical example is water. You can easily say our company, okay, doesn’t have a major water impact. We had our sites in India actually working on water-positive. Sounds very good. It’s in line with this bit, the net positive movement.

But what it does is it only looks at your own site and it doesn’t take into consideration what happens to the water basin. So you might end up in a few years not being able to actually have water to run your operation, and not have water for the community where your employees are coming from. And so if you don’t take the wider ecosystem into consideration, you will be running into challenges. And so that’s really about business continuity, about smart business. Think about the impacts that are there outside of your own operations, because eventually they will impact you.

The same applies to biodiversity. It’s very easy to say biodiversity doesn’t have any impact or we are not impacting. It’s always this mentality assessment, correct? Inside out, outside in. What are we doing about it? Eventually, if food supply is breaking down, which is one of the predictions, we have reduced our biodiversity over 70% over the last 50 years. If this is going to happen, we will have a problem running our business if our people, the most important resource, are not able to be fed. So thinking about this is extremely important. An analogy we are using also is when we look at M&A, we’re actually looking at, are we the best owner for this? Would it be in any better place if we owned it? And it’s a similar concept of really making sure this is the right solution and this is really helping us to do the right thing moving forward.

Geoff Tuff:

So, Anke, I’m reasonably sure that many of our listeners and everyone in the audience here would find everything that you’re saying quite motivating and hard to argue with. But for the leaders that are responsible for actually delivering that, and, I mean, let’s be clear, leaders are compensated not in long-term outcomes most of the time, it’s in short-term delivery of profit today and tomorrow and in the next quarter. When we think forward to the types of leaders we need to get to those types of outcomes, first of all, what types of characteristics would you be looking for as you think about the next generation and what advice would you have to those leaders as they step into both sustainability roles but also broader C-suite type roles in the future?

Anke Hampel:

I’m extremely fortunate. As I said, I joined ABB because I got this call and it was a great opportunity. What I found were four company values that actually are perfectly aligned with mine, and I would like to share them here because I think thinking about your values and your purpose is extremely important for any young leader. If you haven’t figured out your purpose and your values, it’s very hard to know where you’re going. So for ABB, these are care, curiosity, collaboration, and creativity.

Geoff Tuff:

I was going to guess it was a C. So-

Anke Hampel:

There’s another C. And it’s actually something that I love to do in my work. There is maybe one more which doesn’t come of course in a company, which is family for me. But these are the five values. And if you’re clear on these and are really living them, bringing them to life in your private life, in your business life, you actually have a good chance to know what your compass is, where you’re going, and stay true to yourself and deliver what is required. And so look for this purpose in the companies you’re joining, make sure the values that are there are something you can align with, and stay the course. That would be my advice.

Geoff Tuff:

That’s great advice.

Des Dearlove:

Someone yesterday said, I’m just picking up on some of the things we’ve been talking about, somebody yesterday, I wish I could remember who, said, “Sustainability without a profit has no impact and profit without sustainability has no future.” And that seemed to me to go right to the heart of this stuff. But you’re absolutely right. If our leaders can’t look beyond not just the next quarter but the next couple of years to see that this is all systemic, and that word, one of your Cs, that word, collaboration, seems so integral. How is ABB sort of encouraging collaboration? Because you can control what goes on inside your own company, but a lot of the benefits that we need require us to work together.

Anke Hampel:

Yes. No, and thank you for bringing this forward. Actually, the person who said this remarkable statement yesterday was Cecile, a fascinating woman, CEO of Bel Corporation.

Des Dearlove:

You’re right.

Anke Hampel:

And I think she really made the point on collaboration being one of these elements that will take us from where we are today, sometimes maybe stuck and not able to see what’s ahead, but just to get started, collaboration is an easy one. You reach out, you find what’s your common ground, and then move forward, which… maybe I want to use another statement that was used yesterday. Paul brought forward the ABC rule: adapting, bridging, and collaborating. And I loved this one, I will be adopting this, another one.

Des Dearlove:

He also said collaboration is not illegal.

Anke Hampel:

Exactly. No, but adapting, as he described it, was really something where you should listen without judging. Correct? It’s not easy for all of us at this time. It’s very easy to go with polarization as it’s happening. So active listening to find the common ground, and that’s something I’ve been doing over my career is really bringing different partners together. It aligns very well with my personal purpose, which is connecting passion to create something bigger, to have a positive impact that you wouldn’t have been able to do on your own. And for this you really have to find these smart points. Even if there’s someone you don’t feel very comfortable with, there’s definitely something you will find. So challenge yourself to reach out to people that you don’t feel comfortable with and try to make this an experiment: okay, can I find something where we have common ground? And that’s an important exercise in business, of course, because the low-hanging fruits for innovation and for supply chain optimization, ecosystems thinking, are all gone.

We can only succeed in this challenging transformation that’s ahead by finding these sweet spots between different partners. I’ve done this especially in my innovation management period. I was negotiating very complex IP agreements and this was only possible because we really found, okay, what is in it for this company? What exclusivity could you get here? And it’s hard work. It’s something you have to really invest in, sit together, understand each other, and then bridge – the B in the ABC. If you resist on your opinion, on your position, you will not find this common spot, the sweet spot. And I assure you it’s always there. You have to look for it. But bridging is the only way. You have to move. You have to find smart solutions, creativity, another of these values, and care, of course. This gets you then to collaboration.

So active collaboration, being something where you keep looking out for what the partner’s needs are. They might be changing. If a business relationship gets stuck, very often it’s because somehow the needs have shifted and you cannot assume that things are still where they are when you agreed on something. So continuously actively engaging, working with partners. Also, the word partnership comes in, of course. I’m very choiceful when I use partner versus, for example, suppliers. But in an ecosystem you have to think that your suppliers, depending on where you operate, which industries, they had better become your partners because some of the resources in the future will become extremely scarce. So if you don’t build these long-term relationships, not having these partners might make you the second or last choice, and then there will be some other consequences that you would like to avoid. And for this collaboration, it’s very helpful.

Geoff Tuff:

So, Anke, I know it sounds like you had a fascinating dinner last night. You’ve spent a lot of Climate Week meeting other chief sustainability officers and other senior executives. What is the number one barrier to achieving the types of successes that ABB has under your leadership? What are some of the key barriers that you’re hearing out there today that you think we need to be focusing on?

Anke Hampel:

There is a statement that actually it’s the most strategic time to be in sustainability because this is the moment you have to decide, you have to decide on one of three Fs: flee, freeze, or fast-forward. And I love this because it really will make the difference for you if you decide to move forward right now, and that’s how I would describe what we’re doing at ABB, so we are forward-looking, proactive in what we are doing. There are other companies who are freezing. We see this very heavily right now. The other term you’ve heard for this is green-hushing. Or even fleeing. We have seen lots of companies staying away or giving up on the commitments they have made.

So I really believe that with what we are seeing right now, the ones who decide to go fast-forward will have a competitive advantage. The things that are happening in the world right now, they’re not going away. And so if you engage actively, you have a chance to actually drive the profit out of it. And for this, yeah, there are leaders, CSOs that I’m talking with, who are seeing exactly this. There is this discussion that we will be moving from molecules to electrons. Or the other statement I heard is that this political fragmentation will be resolved by nature and economies, because these forces are there and if you actively work on them, deal with them, create proactive solutions out of it, competitive advantage, you actually will be on a very interesting site for your business.

The challenges, of course, are are our boards really taking the long-term perspective? That’s something we’re not seeing everywhere. Sometimes boards need to be reminded of what their responsibility is, especially when it comes to sustainability. And that’s something some of my peers are struggling with as we speak. But it helps to, it’s a moment of resilience, personal resilience, supporting each other, sharing. I’m actually now on a mission to engage with CSOs of our customers to really understand where their needs are. And I’m sure we’re going to find business opportunities out of it.

Geoff Tuff:

That’s more of the collaboration point.

Anke Hampel:

Exactly. So this will help them, will help us, but also it will help to have this connection and really understand what is making our customers drive and industries drive moving forward.

Geoff Tuff:

Yeah, that’s great. Des, I’m going to give you the last question but I’m going to do a warm call to our live audience here. If anyone does have any questions for Anke, we’ll open it up after Des’s last question and please do speak up if you’ve got them.

Des Dearlove:

Well, it’s something we always ask on the podcast: what is your provocation? What would you like people to take away from listening to the podcast? What would you like them to think about as they go about their business?

Anke Hampel:

I’m a strong believer in innovation and continuous improvement. And so the question I would encourage all of you to ask is when you start a new job, a new role, or take on new responsibility, what would it take to eliminate my job? And I told you I did this at Tetra Pak and I delivered. So this is for me a source of innovation, inspiration, continuously challenging the status quo. And that’s what gets us to drive change, to make an impact, to be courageous. Not always easy, but ask this courageous question even if you’re ready for some time in your role, and, of course, you can challenge, is this really applying to CEO, CFO, CHO, let me exclude these, but I think for any other role you can ask this question and actually you will find some great insights if you really challenge yourself with this.

Des Dearlove:

And it’s interesting, too, that that fits with the regeneration, the topic we’re talking about. We all need to regenerate, we all need to replenish, we all need to reinvent ourselves. Fantastic.

Geoff Tuff:

Great answer.

Anke Hampel:

Thank you.

Geoff Tuff:

All right, so I think we do have time for a few questions. Who would like to go first? We have a mic in the back or mic in both aisles here, coming down your way here.

Des Dearlove:

Gentleman here.

Speaker 9:

Thank you very much. Super inspiring to hear you talk and I’m going to leave here with a renewed sense of excitement about the future. So thank you for that. ABB is deeply involved in sport, so I come from the world of sport, and I’m just interested to understand why you decided to go down that path and what role sport plays in driving innovation at your company with things like Formula E and-

Anke Hampel:

Sport, correct? Okay. Driving sport. So for me, sport is an important part. We talked about resilience, regeneration. So I think for all of us it’s important to understand that if you don’t use your muscles, you’re not regenerating and using the muscles. So this is your thinking, your brain muscles, your body muscles. So for me, sport is an example of regeneration that any of us should be using and understand that there’s a moment in life when you’re not any longer drawing from unlimited resources. And we were talking about how you’re building in your sports, even in a busy Climate Week, it’s an imperative to do this, to stay healthy, because otherwise you’re not resilient. Sleep and sport, the two S, I think are really what will help us moving forward. These are tough times. It’s not all an easy walk in the park. And so sport actually helps you to get new ideas, step back, think, and then move forward.

Speaker 9:

Okay, I wasn’t expecting that response. I was thinking more of your sponsorships that the company does with things like Formula E and NASCAR and-

Anke Hampel:

Okay.

Des Dearlove:

But really interesting-

Speaker 1:

It was a good, personal response.

Des Dearlove:

Fantastic answer.

Anke Hampel:

Yes, you’re right. So for the ones who are not familiar, I’m sure many of you know Formula One, but actually ABB is working as a key sponsor for Formula E. So that’s the electrical version and obviously it stands with what we stand for, which is electrifying everything. We are a very proud sponsor. And what it drives is innovation. So we have been able to advance the charging system, fast charging, which you can all imagine is a super important deliverable for the electrification of mobility. And so the innovation we see and continue coming out of Formula E is indispensable for our innovation program. So it’s not just the right thing to do, it’s also showing the world, especially people who are maybe very skeptical, of which we have a few, we really hope to inspire with the Formula E concept. And we see Formula One somehow trying to move in the same area now, but here we are. We have been first, we’re driving Formula E, and we will continue doing so very proudly.

Geoff Tuff:

Do we have another question out there? Yep. In the back. Sorry, we’ve got one-

Anke Hampel:

Maybe I can share. There’s a Formula E car, I think, 12th Avenue.

Geoff Tuff:

Oh, is there? Go check it out.

Anke Hampel:

Yeah, we have it here at Climate Week. So check it out.

Geoff Tuff:

In the back middle, and then we’ll come up closer here. You’ve got a mic already? Yep.

Speaker 6:

Hi, thank you so much for your time. As you may know, the United Nations General Assembly is occurring right now, right? And I think it’s a really powerful reminder of how global of a challenge and how global of an issue sustainability is. So I wanted to take the time to ask you how do business leaders engage with global markets and really tackle this for the global challenge that it is?

Anke Hampel:

Beautiful question. Thank you very much. I think we are already at 99% of emissions, so it’s a huge part, is outside of the US. So we have to keep going. And I think many business leaders understand this. Things are evolving extremely fast when it comes to renewable energy, electricity, to adoption, the exponential growth we have been talking about, it’s there, it’s happening. And as I talked about before, resilience is a new opportunity, energy security. What you are enabling is many, many countries can reduce, eliminate their dependence on fossil, which means you actually are in control of your own energy security. And on top comes all the opportunities we talked about that electrification brings. So these are things we are definitely engaging with with the leaders of the world.

We have our CEO here this week. He had an important meeting last night with leaders linked to the UNGA, to the Atlantic Council. So we are definitely engaged. We are taking our leadership role extremely seriously. We are a part of and enabling this energy transition and expansion. And with this, we cannot do it on our own. We need to collaborate with civil society, with governments, with our partners in the industry, setting standards, moving the needle. So it’s definitely a topic that’s very close to our heart. I hope this answers your question.

Speaker 6:

Thank you.

Geoff Tuff:

I think we have time for one more, Des. One more? Okay. Yes. We’re going to hand up here if we could just get a mic.

Nelson:

I had one over here.

Geoff Tuff:

Oh, sorry.

Nelson:

Geoff.

Geoff Tuff:

Oh, there we are. Nelson, go for it.

Nelson:

I’m hearing a tremendous amount of optimism, refreshing amount of optimism, in who you are as a leader and how you think. This is a tricky one, but how do you make sure that that optimism isn’t just seen as a wish that you’re putting into the universe, but it’s actually something that’s translating down into the culture and a culture that takes action against that optimism?

Anke Hampel:

Beautiful question. Thank you. Actually, it’s about engaging with all the people who know better than me. I’m not the expert. So I’m a business leader with a function expertise, but this can go in all different areas and I’m only as good as the teams around me, or they are better, I would say. So there is humility in what I do. I hope my teams actually see this, they can confirm this. I love going to the teams and to the sites around the globe understanding their ideas. One of the examples we have, we have a Mission to Zero initiative for our sites. So sites can qualify and it’s really employee engagement, is grassroots ideas, is all the ideas they want to bring forward, they put it in the Mission to Zero program and they get validated. We have now 26 sites globally. I think next one is going to be announced in November.

And the employees take extreme pride. In all interviews that we have around the globe, our CHO told me, sustainability comes up as a reason for why people want to join ABB. But unprompted, people just say, “I want to, that’s what I want to work for.” And so this helps me to keep going because this is the pride. You want to work for a company that has pride. I’m showing this. It’s real. And so I’m working really to inspire this in people and I see this coming back and this gives me a lot of energy and positive hope.

Geoff Tuff:

It comes across loud and clear, I will say. Now we’ll do the final question.

Speaker 8:

Okay, final question. Thanks for your leadership and really inspiring career. The question is something you said earlier about not having a definition of circularity. I wonder if you could dig into that a little bit more. Maybe the other guys on the stage here could talk about that from the Deloitte perspective. I’m really curious about the state of that definition and where do you think it’ll end up?

Anke Hampel:

I can take it.

Geoff Tuff:

Yeah, go for it.

Anke Hampel:

I am not concerned about the definition because we know what it takes. The definition is more about are we measuring it? Are we really driving the progress? Are we creating the business case? That part we can definitely do better, but we know what needs to be done. So you go into designing your product for disassembly. Last night, I was very fortunate. I was at a dinner where I met an entrepreneur who was part of our startup competition. We are investing heavily into startups to get the outside innovation. And he had set up a platform. I always wondered how you can make sure you deal with all the local legislation on recycling and waste management and so I was struggling, okay, do you go per country? And then you go across the whole product portfolio that we have, which is very, very different, from very small, very big equipment pieces. And he actually gave me the confidence that both is possible. He has a platform, he receives our bill of material, finds local partners, and then enables them to do the disassembly.

And the next step now that I will be working on, and we agreed last night, to really make sure this knowledge he has from the disassembly goes into our product design. So that’s the eco-design in the face. So these two things, obviously, as always, roll up your sleeves, bring people together, link and leverage. And that’s an important part across this whole value chain.

When you think about designing or using recycled content, very often we talk about downcycling. Is it really possible to use this recycled material to deliver the same technical properties that you need? There are solutions. There’s innovation needed. Sometimes you have to think around, put all the different players of the value chain together and do it. So again, it’s about getting started, doing the obvious things, and the definition will follow.

Geoff Tuff:

And I will say I had been eavesdropping, excuse me, the same conversation, and I have to admit, I’ve always thought about circularity as recycling, trying to get as much material back from the world into the recycling process so it can be reused and reused. But there was a large part of our conversation last night which was actually about refurbishing and reuse as opposed to recycling. And that really did expand the way that I think broadly about circularity and the opportunities, especially for industrial companies that make machines that could last a lot longer than they have historically if you just think about that part of the circularity process too.

Anke Hampel:

Maybe I can add, 70% of the scrap metal just from the US is exported to Southeast Asia. This metal is used, it’s needed here. You really don’t need to make any effort. We’re working on this with Apple right now to really find the sweet spot of how to keep this recycled scrap here. And the other important part is transparency. We have a QR code on our products and this QR code gives everyone who’s scanning it the opportunity to see what this product delivers when it’s taken against our circularity framework. We have third-party verified environmental product declarations on there. So transparency is extremely important so that there is no risk of greenwashing if you’re claiming there are circular elements in your product life cycle. I hope this answers.

Geoff Tuff:

Des, I think we’re almost there. Any final thoughts from you?

Des Dearlove:

My final thought was that you haven’t mentioned your book.

Geoff Tuff:

One of the few times that I haven’t mentioned our book! So I do actually think, we may have a slide that can go up to talk about it before we close things out here, Steve Goldbach and I do have our third book coming out on October 21st. It is the third book in our so-called Accidental Trilogy. It’s called Hone. And it was interesting, Anke, you were talking about staying true to your desired course of direction when you were talking about purpose. And actually a lot of the book is about trying to help leaders be purposeful to defy drift. So for those of you that are here in the audience, please feel free to go and get your free copy of the book. For those that are watching this afterwards, please do hit the same QR code and you’ll find an easy way to go and buy the book for yourself. And the good news is we’ve gotten some good feedback from the book. So thank you for letting me use some of your podcast to plug our book.

But with that, sadly, we are out of time. Huge thanks to our guest, Anke Hampel. And thanks to all of you for listening. This is the Provocateurs podcast coming to you from Climate Week in New York. We’ve been Geoff Tuff, Des Dearlove. And if you’ve enjoyed our chat, please check out our other episodes of the podcast. You can find them anywhere where you look for your podcast. We’ve had some great guests in the past. It comes out roughly monthly, but you can find episodes from Paul Polman, Amy Chang, Chip Bergh, Shelley Zalis, Katie McGinty, Karthik Ramanna, Eileen Collins, a whole bunch more. So with that, thank you all very much and we appreciate the time.

Stuart Crainer:

Hello and welcome to the Provocateurs podcast. I’m Stuart Crainer, 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. Provocateurs is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte. So, my co-host is Steve Goldbach. Steve leads Deloitte’s sustainability practice in the US and is also the author, along with Geoff Tuff, of two best-selling books, Detonate which came out in 2018 and Provoke which inspired this podcast series. A new book from Steve and Geoff entitled Hone is published in September 2025. Steve, great to see you and can you please tell us more about today’s guest.

Steve Goldbach:

Great to see you, Stuart. I am excited to be here as always and I’m particularly excited for our guest today, Selassie Atadika. And I met Selassie at the Time 100 Climate Awards where Selassie was an honoree, one of Time’s Climate honorees that evening alongside amazing people like Mia Mottley and Michael Bloomberg and, frankly, she stole the show as far as I’m concerned. I was completely bowled over by her story, her achievements and the broad scope of everything she does, she’s got a diversity of activities that is super cool. She’s an award-winning chef, she’s a chocolatier and I will attest to the fact that I’m not a chocolate fan and they disappeared from our kitchen very, very quickly including from me. She is a thought leader in redefining food systems through the lens of sustainability, biodiversity and cultural heritage.

She’s the founder of Midunu, a nomadic dining concept, and Midunu Chocolates and has become a global advocate for sustainable agriculture and ethical trade and she uses her platform to highlight the untapped potential of African foodways. Through her efforts, Selassie not only educates but inspires audiences to act whether by supporting local food systems or advocating for sustainability in agriculture or rethinking roles in the global food landscape. Selassie, welcome.

Selassie Atadika:

Thank you!

Steve Goldbach:

I would love, maybe just for a fun place to start, do you want to share the fun little story of how we came to meet at the Time dinner?

Selassie Atadika:

Well, I went to the Time dinner and my brother was my plus one and, at the end of the night, we were just going through who were the people that we met that are really interesting people that we need to follow up with. And he was like, “You need to talk to Steve,” and I’m like, “I don’t have Steve on my list. Did I meet Steve?” And he was like, “No, you didn’t,” I’m like, “Well, how is Steve’s name on this list?” He was like, “I met him in the bathroom during the intermission.”

Steve Goldbach:

Indeed, your brother was next to me in the bathroom. And normally, there’s a rule, you don’t talk to the person next to you in the bathroom but somehow we got to chatting and your brother was just such a wonderful and engaging person and shared that, it was right after your award, so he shared that he was with you. And we talked about our mutual love of food and the fact that, 100 years ago, my wife and I had had a brief investment into an East Village restaurant and we just started connecting over food. And as you mentioned, food is such a cultural influence that it brought a couple of guys together to talk about their love of food and– 

Selassie Atadika:

Yeah. At the end, it was the restaurant, it was sustainability and it was writing. So, it was, yeah, a lot of dots that connected.

Leading Through Deliciousness

Steve Goldbach:

Indeed, indeed. Well, given all of what you do, how do you describe yourself? How do you describe what you do?

Selassie Atadika:

I know. People are always like, “What’s your title?” I’m like, “From which perspective?” I think, for myself, I like to say that I’m just a food advocate. I lead through deliciousness, that’s what I do. I think when I talk about sustainable food systems, the only way we’re going to win is through deliciousness because, once something tastes great, everybody’s on board.

Stuart Crainer:

I like that, leading through deliciousness. The world’s going to sign up for that, surely. And can you explain a little bit more about Midunu and nomadic dining, the origins of it and what nomadic dining means?

Selassie Atadika:

Yeah. So, I started the company Midunu in 2014. I moved back to Ghana after over a decade working with the United Nations and doing humanitarian work and I really had had all these amazing experiences around the continent that I felt I needed to share with others through a plate. Sadly, when a lot of people in the continent have a chance to travel, they’re going to Europe or to America, but that’s what we’re doing and we don’t really know what our neighboring countries are doing. And so, I wanted to give people a chance to experience this but to also see the economies that we could actually create and problems we could solve by really getting to understand and fall back in love with our food.

And so, I started this dining concept in Accra and the idea was sharing what I had tasted, seen with people here in Ghana and using what I call my philosophy new African cuisine and what that means to me is where we have culture, community and cuisine intersecting with environment, sustainability and economy. So, when we eat what grows here, we are respecting the environment. When we eat what grows here, we are putting money back into the local economy. When we eat what grows here, we’re respecting, most likely, our culture and there are stories that come from that and, for me, the community that grows but also the community that’s consuming can interact. And so, that’s what I was doing. I think a lot of people may have misinterpreted it as nouvelle cuisine or the pretty cute plates of food but for me it’s really about intentional plates, intentionally redesigning a food system that respects what is in front of us.

And for me, when I came back, I’d been traveling around, I think I hit over 44 African countries at that time and I was showcasing this food on a plate and I wanted to share this nomadic lifestyle that I’d had. And so, the dining experiences started off by moving from location to location within Accra, we now have a fixed home but I am also sharing this internationally. So, doing dining experiences around the world, sharing the lessons that I’ve learned from the African kitchen from plant forward to communal dining and shared plates.

An Innovative Business Model 

Steve Goldbach:

So, my understanding is that it’s, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s not only, certainly from the point of view of a North American and a European, an innovative cuisine but certainly local cuisine but it’s an innovative business model. You’re not there day in, day out, you have to reserve a spot or it opens periodically. How does the business model of Midunu work?

Selassie Atadika:

So, there’s two main components of it, the first is dining experiences, those are both … Actually, I would say there’s three components. There’s the dining experiences which is what people can experience in Accra but also internationally, there’s the chocolates that people can experience and that right now is in the US and in Ghana and the third piece is our hidden piece which is our research and documentation of what’s in our food system. So, what I realized is I really wanted to bring in local ingredients, particularly underutilized ones, and I saw that I didn’t have that information. Everything was handed down mother to child and that connection was getting weaker and weaker and so I needed to just go and meet auntie so-and-so in the village or down the street and start asking her questions.

A lot of those queries have led me down paths that have taught me so much that I want to share and it didn’t make sense to keep that as a traditional restaurant model and I knew that doing a 9:00 to 5:00 seven days a week was not going to allow me to do the research that was required to contribute to this conversation. So, the dining experiences is a way for us to showcase our philosophy on a plate, the institute is where we document the information and we’re sharing that, the chocolates is also another way of sharing that which is a bit more flexible and fits into what I call … You take something people know, which is chocolate, and then you take what they don’t know which is some of the spices and the conversations around the ingredients in the continent and it creates a space for a conversation and it’s much more accessible.

We actually started exporting in 2020 during COVID when people couldn’t come to us for dinners but we could share and give people a chance to travel around the continent through a box of chocolate. And that was also, for me, a way of having a conversation around how do we fix systemic injustice within the cocoa industry, how do we look at doing things differently. So, yeah, it’s not a usual business model but, for me, it gives me the space to do the research while sharing the flavors with people for them to understand the conversation.

Stuart Crainer:

In some ways, Selassie, it strikes me that the issues you’ve raised in Africa actually apply in Europe and America as well, we’ve become distant from the traditional crops that grow here. I’m in England and I expect to get my kiwi fruit from the supermarket – which have never grown here – and a host of things that don’t grow here and the stuff that does grow here aren’t fashionable anymore.

Selassie Atadika:

Literally, I was in the UK a couple of weeks ago and I remember, before getting on the plane, I had my last mango. I was like, “I’m going to go and experience what’s there,” and I was really enjoying the berries and I ate a lot of blackberries. And so, for me, I try to be intentional about where I am and what that speaks to. I would say that my experience in Ghana has been interesting because I was born here, I grew up here for the first six years or five years of my life, moved to the US and, when I came back in 2014 full time, I realized that a lot of the food that I grew up eating, I didn’t see. Growing up in the US, it was funny because, in elementary school, none of the kids really knew what to do with myself and my siblings, they were like, “They’re from Africa,” so they’re thinking what questions to ask.

So, it was like did you have a pet lion, did you live in a hut, all these questions would come at us and the only one I really entertained was what did you eat. And I remember having a list of all these beautiful ingredients, particularly if I’m thinking about yam, cassava, plantain, all these dishes and, when I came back, all I saw was rice. There was another dish that my mom used to make that I wanted to recreate, it uses blood from a goat and so I was thinking, there’s hayas, there’s budang, there’s all these blood sausages that are around the world, I wonder how I could play with this dish into a sausage. I couldn’t find anyone to teach it to me and I was shocked but I also realized that so much in our food system in Ghana had changed and that needed to … Well, I was just scared that a lot of the things that I ate growing up would no longer exist.

And the interesting thing is I’ve had this conversation with people around the world and we’re all suffering from the same thing. There are people who have had dishes from their grandmother, great-grandmother, aunties or wherever that they’re not sure or they see it also on the decline. So, that’s the one thing that brings us all together.

Steve Goldbach:

And one of the things that I can imagine that you think about doing is thinking about bringing foods with great heritages into the eating styles of today, food also progresses and is a showcase of our time. So, how do you think about having … In your cooking and your approach to food systems, how do you think about having both a leg in the past and also a leg in the future knowing that we’ve learned a lot about presentation and health? How do you just balance that aspect in your food leadership?

Selassie Atadika:

I’m smiling because there’s literally a principle in Ghana, we have these symbols, they’re called Adinkra symbols and there’s one specific one, it’s called Sankofa. And if you see it, it’s an image of a bird or it looks like a chicken and it’s facing forward and it has its neck turned back and in the mouth is a golden egg, it’s just an egg and basically it means go back and get it. So, the idea is that there are lessons in the past, there are things from our past that we need to understand and respect but they need to move forward. It’s not about this super romantic idea of nothing changes, everything is dynamic, culture is dynamic so, in fact, I think what we have to do is evolve with what we have or it’s lost.

So, I’ll take some of the ingredients I see in Ghana. So, there’s one of my favorite spices called prekese, it’s a pod from a tree and it’s currently at risk of being endangered due to deforestation. They don’t like to be planted in monocrop style, they need to be amongst other trees. So, I love the spice and I’m trying to use it as much as possible because, if we don’t, it’s going to be gone. So, when I went to the market, I would ask women … When I first came back because I hadn’t seen it before growing up in the US, I said, “What is it used for?” and they said, “Oh, it’s used for palm nut soup.” So, I’m thinking to myself, if we don’t use it for something else, that’s it, that’s all the life that this one spice has. So, I put it in chocolate, I put it in desserts, I use it as a dry rub on different types of dishes that I’m roasting or grilling and, therefore, this spice now has new legs that, hopefully, people can grab onto and be excited about.

The first time most people have ever tasted prekese that are American, I think … I have it in my chocolate, I think a lot of the people who’ve had prekese in my chocolates, it’s the first time they’ve ever had it. And it’s interesting because someone like Steve, like yourself would be like, “Ooh, what is this thing? It’s interesting.” It’s caramel, buttery notes and you’re going to be interested by it. Somebody else is going to be like, “Ooh, it’s on the arc of taste list so I’m excited about it.” Somebody else in Ghana will be like, “It reminds me of this soup my grandmother made.” So, all of us are going to be excited about it for different reasons and you might be a foodie that’s never had this and like, “Wow, it’s something I’ve never tasted in my entire life, I’m finally getting a chance to have it.”

So, there is a dynamism that needs to happen within there and I think, at the end of the day, if we want all of these things to survive, we need to make sure that whatever comes from our past has aspiration attached to it. So, if you’re in the village and someone is telling you to eat the same thing, by me zhuzhing it up and turning it into something, it becomes exciting. Perfect example, when I moved back to Ghana, fonio was not readily available here. Fonio is an ancient grain from West Africa, it’s climate smart, really wonderful. If you read about it, it’s like the quinoa of Africa. So, it’s this grain that does really wonderful things but, in Ghana, it was considered poor people’s food. And even in the regions where it grows, it was really only consumed when millet was not available so it was a lean season thing you ate because you had to and so a lot of people don’t want to touch it.

And interestingly enough, fonio is now super cool in the West and now Ghanaians are like, “Oh, wait, it’s from here. Oh, let me try it.” Ghanaians, we’re late adopters. So, whatever it takes to get us to the party, someone else has thought it’s cool, it’s aspirational now, now people want to eat it. And so, that’s given it a new life and it’s interesting to see the conversation had to go out and then come back in but, at the end, it was aspiration.

Food As a Tool for Transformation 

Stuart Crainer:

One of the things you’ve said, Selassie, is that food is more than a meal but also a tool for transformation and I think we’re getting a sense of that from what you’re saying. But can you explain a bit more why food is more than a meal and the transforming elements of it?

Selassie Atadika:

Yeah, absolutely. Food touches on almost every single aspect of our lives. When I even think about it from a point of view of policy, most ministries and sectors are touched by it and, unfortunately, some people see it as survival and other people see it as just a pure luxury. But if we break it down, most people, hopefully, are eating two times a day, there are those of us who are eating maybe lots of snacks in between but, if we’re saying that we are eating two to three times a day, that’s a lot of money that’s in the system globally. So, what we eat, by choosing to eat something that is … We’re stimulating an economy because we’re paying for that ingredient, you’re making choices about land use, you’re making choices about who’s growing, who’s eating, who cannot eat, school feeding programs determine what we’re growing. I am trying to think, health outcomes are also linked to that. We’ve got culture that’s coming through, we’ve got labor in terms of the type of food you eat and how you eat.

So, all of these things are interlinked. When I think about my experience in Ghana, some of the food systems choices, for example, rice was special occasion, the labor attached to growing rice changes and so, traditionally, you didn’t eat it all the time because it was expensive and it was difficult to grow. Fishing, there’s no fishing on Tuesdays in Ghana because we leave the ocean a day to rest. These rules were there for a reason and so it’s not that you don’t eat, it’s that you are respectful of how you eat it. When I think about even the way that nomadic communities are eating meat, meat for them is their wealth so you want to keep as many cows as you can. You’re not slaughtering a cow every afternoon and, when you do, you’re eating every single aspect of it because you know what it took to raise that cattle.

And so, these are some of the things that I think, when I think about how do we make change, I think sometimes food systems change is complicated because a lot of people need to come to the table but, at the same time, it’s also as simple as us making the right decision. So, I always say what are you voting with your fork? What have we voted with our fork in the way we’ve decided to eat? You have made a decision about what you value and that value is what the ecosystem is also pushing back on. When I think about some of the Scandinavian countries, when I see some of their policies, it’s, well, this is going to have a negative health outcome so we’re going to have an extra tax on that so that it covers the health sector. So, what are we going to do? Are we going to allow the market to … How do we influence the market as well in terms of how we see things?

If you can pay for it … If you look at Ghana, a lot of the negative health outcomes are foods that are for poor people or people that are under a certain budget because they don’t have the money to make better choices. So, you are laboring your economy by not making some of those decisions and supporting to make sure that water is cheaper than soft drinks or whatever it is that policy needs to look like, how do we think about designing the food system that we want.

Steve Goldbach:

System design is a very challenging thing because you’ve got all these different actors in a system that have individual motivations for what drives them. Where have you seen food system design done well and what’s the story that you see behind that and what other things would you like to see implemented in food systems around the world?

Selassie Atadika:

I think the Nordic countries seem to have done a really good job thinking it through in terms of their taxation, in terms of the policies and also putting investments in where they belong to allow certain things to happen. I would say one of the areas that we really need to think about, and I’m not saying that just because I’m an African, but when you look at the population in the next 50 years, the continent that we really need to think about is the African continent but, at the same time, we’re the dumping ground. We’re literally the dumping ground for everything nobody wants and no one can sell anymore. So, if you think about some of the soft drinks that people are not drinking anymore in the US and in Europe, they’re cheaper here than water sometimes. When you’re thinking about even poultry… So, the story around poultry in Ghana is that local chicken is twice as expensive as imported chicken. Now, the imported chicken comes to Ghana cheaply for many different reasons, subsidies, farm subsidies in certain countries, other countries, maybe the chicken has been in the freezer for too long and it’s considered not safe for local consumption so they sell it off to the continent. But when the chicken lands here, it’s half the price of local chicken and so what’s going to happen is most Ghanaians are going to want to buy the cheapest one so they can feed their families and the local poultry farmer is now going to be out of business which means he’s going to be unemployed, which means, which means, which means…

So, the question is I don’t even know who’s actually making that decision about our food system but we need to make that decision actively. So, that’s just, for me, one example, there are other examples of other things being dumped in our markets but, if we’re not careful about how we support and ensure that we’re making the best decisions for particularly a very young population in the continent, we’re asking for problems in the future.

Steve Goldbach:

And that’s certainly one of the complexities of system design is all the unintended consequences. Stuart, you look like you were going to ask a question, I just wanted to jump in with that thought.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. But I think it’s, from what you say, Selassie, it’s about intentionality at all stages from the plate to the planet and, actually, the system and the system.

Selassie Atadika:

It’s one system. It’s actually one system, right?

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. And the food system is underappreciated as a system. Because it’s on your plate in front of you, you tend to forget about the political and the other forces that work in it. So, in many ways, it’s thinking of it as a system is the starting point as well as the end point.

Selassie Atadika:

Absolutely. I’ve been doing something like research around rice and seeing and hearing about IMF policies in the early ’80s and how that’s completely changed the diet in Ghana. So, these are things that … Unfortunately, because food ends up being this monolith in a way but, at the same time, it’s each policy has, I guess, what is it, the butterfly effect, it’s happening and so subsidies on rice in America in the ’70s had a massive impact on rice consumption in West Africa in the ’80s.

Stuart Crainer:

That’s interesting. You are Yale’s inaugural Global Table Fellow, which I need to ask you about. What a wonderful title. I would love … We all aspire to be a Table Fellow. And you’ve lectured at Yale and another really exciting recognition of your work. So, tell us more about that and your experience at Yale.

Selassie Atadika:

Yeah. So, that was last year and I had done two events with Yale earlier where I went in to speak to them. Yale has had a long history of championing plant-based, plant-forward eating and they’ve worked to make sure that their campus has … I think it was around 80% plant-forward dining. And so, their interest in me was around the work that I’m doing in plant-forward cooking and eating based on lessons I’d learned from the African continent and this was the third one, invitation from them. And as the fellow, the idea was how do we bring together programming beyond the dining hospitality space. So, my first invitations were from Yale Hospitality and the second or this third invitation included the Schwarzman Center as well as the McMillan Center. So, these were three different parts of the university, academic, social and the dining services coming together, I ended up teaching a class on environmental studies and, interestingly enough, that week it was on cash crops and so I was like, “You want to talk about cocoa? Here we go.”

So, it was really wonderful to have a chance to talk to students in the classroom as well as get into the dining services and help students come up with a grain bowl using fonio and them learning how easy it is to really just come up with something delicious using different ingredients. It was wonderful also being able to take over one of their dining facilities. So, I created a menu that was African and was plant-forward, it was based in the rooted section of the dining hall and it ran for about three months.

And one of the small just moments that I saw was students who were just like, “I feel seen. I feel seen on the menu, I feel seen having my dishes and food that I call home here.” It was also nice to see students who’d never tried it before but were from other parts of the world who felt the connection to it because some of the flavors felt like home. When we were doing the grain bowls, there was a student telling me about how his grandmother had made a dish and there were flavors in that dish that was letting him think about his grandmother.

Steve Goldbach:

So, Selassie, you’re a Yale Table Fellow, you’re a Time honoree, you’re an accomplished chef, what’s next in your world? What are the things that you’re working on today that our audience should know?

Selassie Atadika:

Well, I’m writing a book and it’s really about the lessons that I’ve learned from the African kitchen and how they are a large foundation of what I believe the world’s answers … Let me rephrase that. I’m working on a book and it’s based on lessons that I’ve learned from the African kitchen and I believe that these lessons will teach us a lot and are the answers that the world is looking for to solve some of our food system change issues.

Steve Goldbach:

And that’s in progress right now. I know from prior conversations, I think you’re working on that.

Selassie Atadika:

Yes, it’s in progress. It’s definitely in progress and back to writing so, yeah.

Steve Goldbach:

Excellent.

Selassie Atadika:

The other things that I’m looking forward to working on is actually just policy work and engaging more on that. I think, for me, I am ready to go much farther beyond my table in terms of creating impact in terms of organizations that are looking for fresh perspectives or people who actually have been working in the field and understand what some of the real bottlenecks are and the challenges that exist to creating change. So, policy work, advisory work, writing.

Stuart Crainer:

The amazing thing about kitchens is that they touch on so many different issues, innovation, leadership, logistics, creativity, sustainability, customer care, they’re all there. One of the things I liked, I read one of your blogs when you talked about kitchen leadership and you said leadership looks like a chef reimagining a source because the market didn’t have onions that day, a chocolatier tweaking a formula to work with a new harvest batch, a server reading the needs of a room better than any script. It isn’t leadership by hierarchy, it’s leadership by resilience, by creativity, by care and it’s women holding the fire steady. And it is really fantastic, really nicely written as well but the leadership lessons from the kitchen are incredible and that is at the heart of your work in many ways.

Selassie Atadika:

Definitely. And it’s interesting because, in Ghana, people don’t know what to do with me. They’re like, “She’s a cook, she’s a cateress, we don’t really know,” but food is at the heart of everything I would … Without food, the world does not go around and understanding it, managing it, controlling it is the beginning of everything. If I’m not wrong, I think it was in the, I think, ancient Greek culture, it was the chef, the priest and the doctor were the same person. Because of food safety, you had to bless the animal, you weren’t sure if you slaughtered it …

Sorry, it was a butcher, a priest and a chef were the same person because you actually had that much control and knowledge of what’s happening in the system. So, I always say we can make what nurtures us or, unfortunately, if it’s done wrong, it could actually have a huge negative effect on people. I always tell my team, the women that work for me, you could either kill somebody or you can nurture them. So, we have all of that in our hands to move forward with.

Steve Goldbach:

And just to the “you could kill someone or nurture someone”, it’s a great way to make sure people are purposeful and thoughtful and intentional in how they think about food. Maybe just a question to end on, Selassie, is where we started. So, you were one of seven global honorees at the Time 2025 Earth Awards and we said some of your fellow Earth Award winners. What does an honor like that mean to you and how are you thinking beyond the writing of your book, of using the platform you now have to create a better planet for the future?

Selassie Atadika:

Yeah. It feels heavy sometimes but it also feels where I want it to be and where I’m supposed to be. So, for me, I will answer it in a slightly long-winded way. My dad was a bit nervous so, being immigrants to the US, being the oldest child, I actually went to school to be pre-med and, when I decided that I wasn’t going to do that and was going to major in environmental studies and geography, my dad was quite concerned. And then when I decided that I wanted to become a chef and go to culinary school, he was like, “Two Ivy League degrees, I can’t believe this.” But for me, I’ve always felt that it was important to have somebody who understands the importance of food and the world economy and the environment and all of these things. And so, I’m grateful that my work is being seen, I’m grateful that people understand the importance of what food has to offer to the conversations around sustainability.

In terms of what this means to me in the next phase, for me, it’s going to be moving far beyond my table in Ghana, it’s now about creating the impact that the continent needs in order to be seen as a player in sustainability and in terms of food system change. It’s being able to impact policy work both by African nations but also by partners who are putting money into the continent or investing in the continent. And it’s being able to actively create opportunities for smallholder farmers in Africa to be able to have living salaries, living wages, things that are supporting of them. And for me, that’s really what this is about, it’s really about having their voices, their work seen and their work valued. And hopefully, I think and I believe that, hearing and seeing all of this, it’s win-win. So, if we’re actually sharing some of the knowledge that’s coming from the continent and how we have had this resilience for so long, it’s going to impact positively on the food system and in what and how others outside of the continent are eating.

Stuart Crainer:

We’re going to have to wait a little while for the book, Selassie, by the sound of it. How do we find out more about your work now? 

Selassie Atadika:

Well, yeah, you can reach me on my website, it’s selassieatadika.com, and I’m also on LinkedIn, Selassie Atadika, and I’m sometimes on Instagram but mostly the best way is my website.

Stuart Crainer:

Brilliant. A great conversation, Selassie. Leading through deliciousness, you can’t get much more persuasive than that, I think. And helping us link the plate, the planet, really important issues. And I think the issues for Africa you’ve highlighted, the issues from Africa as Steve’s highlighted, the systems thinking affects everybody in the world and it’s just changing the way people think about food is a tremendous challenge but fantastically important. So, thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you, Steve, and thank you everyone for watching, we look forward to seeing you again soon.

Steve Goldbach:

Thank you so much, Selassie.

Des Dearlove:

Hello and welcome to The Provocateurs Podcast where 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 incredible people. 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 two bestselling books, Detonate, which came out in 2018 and Provoke, which inspired this podcast series. And the final book in the trilogy, Hone is forthcoming and will be with us and available in September this year, 2025. Steve, it’s great to see you.

Steven Goldbach:

Des, it’s great to see you too and I’m really excited to be back on the podcast and I am super excited to have Eileen Collins join us today. Eileen is one of those inspirational people that you hope to meet once in your lifetime. She is a retired astronaut from NASA and a former Air Force Colonel, and in 1995, she became the first woman to pilot a space shuttle flying the discovery to the Russian Mir station. In 1999, she became the first woman to command a space shuttle mission. The STS-90 was launched with a Chandra X-ray Observatory payload, the newest space telescope since the Hubble, it would go on to capture X-rays not previously seen in deep space images, capturing astonishing images and new data. Eileen’s final mission in 2005 was commanding the return to flight mission, the first since the space shuttle Columbia disaster. Eileen – and now Eileen is the time for you to pick up that book – is the author, together with Jonathan Ward of the 2021 book Through The Glass Ceiling to the Stars, the story of the First American to command a space mission. She is also the subject of a landmark documentary film, Space Woman, which premiered in November 2024. And where can they find the documentary, Eileen?

Eileen Collins:

Well, the documentary is not available yet to the general public. We’re hoping by the end of 2025 it’ll be out there. So I’ll be posting it or eventually get a platform so everyone can see it.

Steven Goldbach:

That’s amazing. And we hope that it gets picked up and if we were to list the awards and honors that Eileen has received it would literally take up this entire show. But I would just note that she was recognized by the Encyclopedia Britannica as one of 300 women who have changed the world. Eileen, welcome. It is great to have you. It was great to get to hear you speak earlier this year at our Chief Sustainability Officer Summit in Westlake, Texas. Des, she was amazing. And so maybe Eileen, a place to start now that we’re all acquainted with your amazing background is just what’s your back story? How did you arrive at this moment with all these honors? How did a little girl from the outside of Elmira, New York grow up dreaming of being a pilot and then an astronaut?

Eileen Collins:

Well, thanks. Well, first of all, Des and Steve, thanks for inviting me. It’s great to be here. I’m happy to share with you and your audience the things that have worked for me and actually things that have not worked for me. To answer your question, I think it was really having a passion for something and for me that passion was flying. I had this burning desire in me. Honestly, I don’t know where it came from, but I just wanted to fly. And it might’ve been a sense of freedom. As much as I love the little town that I grew up in, I love the people there, I have this explorer gene in me where I always felt like I had to get out and do something new and different to find something new and different to really understand the world that we live in. And I think that’s a big general description.

The outlet for me that was something I actually could do was to fly airplanes. I had to raise the money myself. When I was 16, I started getting part-time jobs. They were all really whatever I could get. I worked in a hospital, I worked in a pizza restaurant, I worked at my church, I worked at my school. Any money that I could make … I worked at a golf course. But any money that I could make, I saved for flying lessons. And by the time I was 20 years old, I had enough money to get a license and that was when things really started taking off. But to answer your question, I think it really is having a passion and maybe seeing something in the world that is missing that you think that you maybe have the ability to go out and fill that. And there weren’t many women pilots back in 1978 when I first went into the Air Force, the US Air Force. So I think that all came together.

Des Dearlove:

But it can’t have been an easy journey. You make it sound as though it’s all very matter of fact. And even saying it’s one thing to be a woman pilot, but to be an astronaut. What do you think propelled your ambition and made you think that you could break through and do this?

Eileen Collins:

Well, there were a couple of specific things to answer that my hometown, Elmira, New York, is also the location of the National Soaring Museum gliders. There’s a glider field called Harris Hill, which is right across from the National Soaring Museum. And when I was a kid, my mom sent me to summer camp up there … And not to fly. That was too expensive. But we just had a regular summer camp that was nearby and I’d watch these gliders flying overhead and I would say, “What would it be like to be in one of those?” And my dad would take us to the airport. It was cheap entertainment. For your listeners, if they have kids, you don’t have to spend a lot of money on your kids. You can do cheap stuff like we did. We’d sit on the hood of the car at the airport and we’d watch planes take off and land. That was fascinating to me.

So I started reading books. Now my mom took us to the library. That was just something to do. It was free. Back in those days she just dropped us off and went and did her thing and us kids would run around the library. And I found books. Books were my door to the world outside of my hometown. Of course, as a kid, I read, you can name it. I read books on horses, dogs, bugs. Nature was always interesting. But when I found the section on flying airplanes, I started checking out books and reading them and there were so many. Fate is the Hunter is one that I’m thinking about. God Is My Co-Pilot. There was a book called The Stars at Noon, which is about Jackie Cochran who started the Women Air Force service Pilots in World War II. And in that book I went, “Oh, look at all those women pilots. Maybe I could do that someday.”

I think that we need to encourage our kids to read books more. Today they’re all on their phone and they’re looking at what their friends are doing and living, I want to say, not a full life. And I think if you really want to live a full life, find books on great people that did great things. And I think Jackie Cochran was one of those people who she came from nothing and she worked her way up in the world and she started this amazing organization for women pilots that really helped in World War II. And she became a role model for me. And I think that that really answers your question. I think very specifically reading books. I also read books about military pilots. Now, there were no women military pilots back, obviously, in World War II that actually fought in combat. But the men, they were still my role models and I loved reading about their interesting adventures. And of course wars are horrible. Nobody wants to go to war. But it was really the flying part that captured my imagination. The airplanes, the way you fly an airplane and the kind of people that they were. And I think that’s really what made me decide to apply to be an Air Force pilot.

Steven Goldbach:

Speaking of the people in the culture of flying, I think oftentimes the public who doesn’t have the insight into what one of these takes often hears that it was a successful mission and they assume that everything just goes to plan and goes easy. But I’m sure that in any of these missions that we all perceive on the ground as perfectly successful, lots of technical challenges in flight, and that’s got to be both … You’re in space, so that’s nothing simple, I guess it’s safe to say in space. So how are these kinds of challenges resolved in space and does it take a special culture to be able to address these challenges and how do you create that? I’d be curious if you could just tell a few stories in that vein.

Eileen Collins:

Yeah. A couple of questions there. Those are really interesting great questions. I think my first answer is the training in the practice. We have what we would call a training team. They were a set of instructors. They each had an area where they were really an expert in a specific system on the space shuttle and nowadays the space station, not just how this system works, but how it fails. So the way you really learn about a system … Now in system, I’m talking about the space shuttle main engines, the space shuttle propulsion, on orbit, propulsion, maybe the hydraulics, the electrical, the computers, how do all the systems work, how do they operate normally? But you really learn about a system when you learn how it fails. And so we would work with our training team. And by the way, as we got more advanced, we worked with mission control, which were different people. They were still engineers, but they were the ones that actually worked in mission control during an actual flight. And our training team would work with us really for a much longer period of time in helping us understand the system.

And we would simulate segments of a mission, whether it was launch, entry after the mission, some on orbit phase like rendezvous, and we would fail systems. Maybe the auxiliary power unit failed or maybe engine number two failed, maybe a set of maneuvering jets failed. And we had to immediately make a decision as to how are we going to complete the segment of the mission and when that’s over, how do we bring back the systems that failed? All of that we learned through study and training. Sometimes study is really kind of hard to motivate yourself to get started, but the way we did that was we would compete with each other. And if you were the one when the malfunction hit, if you were the one that knew the answer, good on you. So those kind of things would really motivate us. I would say practicing and whether it’s choreographing or in our case, setting up simulations that really motivated us to study and then it motivated us to do well when the actual … I want to say training period was taking place. And then you hoped it never happened in orbit.

My first, my third and my fourth mission had some pretty challenging failures on them. I talk about that in my book, so I won’t go into any detail now, but I really want to answer your question. It’s in preparation. And let’s say for example, so one of the things I do today is I’m a speaker, even if it’s a speech I’ve given before, I do it out loud three times the day before I’m scheduled for the speech. It doesn’t matter how often I’ve done it, I still need to practice.

The other thing, okay, so I’m going to switch to your second question, which is on developing a culture, because you could talk forever about a culture and I would say the culture in the astronaut side of the space shuttle … I think we really had different cultures, but the culture on the astronaut side was really one of being the best you can possibly be. And that has to do with the type of people that we hired. People that you get along with. And we know we’re all fascinated with … Like you can watch these space shows on TV where maybe the astronauts don’t get along with each other or there’s some human interest story going on over there. Well, in general, those things don’t happen. In general, the crew works together. We help each other out. If somebody’s getting behind on something in one segment of the mission, somebody will, Hey, can I help you get ahead on your schedule? Can I do some of the task for you? And in training, we try to help each other out. And I think that has to do first of all with the type of people that we hire, but secondly, with the type of leadership that we have. The crew commander as well as, I would say, your training team lead, your flight director, are all people that want the mission to succeed.

And we like to compete as far as what we know, but we don’t like to compete as far as anything that would hurt the mission, if you know what I mean. So I think that that’s just a very brief description of the type of culture. I want to say that … And I don’t want to get too far ahead because you’ll probably ask me later about leadership. But it’s what I call humility, and that is really not being quiet and shy, I don’t think humility is not being quiet and shy. Humility is a willingness to listen and to share and to help other people around you do their best.

Coping with Stress and Danger

Des Dearlove:

We are going to ask you about leadership. Of course, we’re going to ask you about leadership. Not every day we get somebody who’s led a space mission on the show. We’ve had some great people, but you are unique, so we are going to ask you about that. But just to stick with some of the technical problems and without wanting to spoil the book, because people I’m sure will want to read all the things in the book, but on your 1999 mission, so that was STS-93, the initial launch was halted half a second before the engines were due to fire up due to a faulty sensor, which was giving the indication that there was a fuel leak. You’re sitting on top of this machine and half a second before you’re supposed to fire up the engines, which presumably the engines would’ve all had to be replaced. It’s a huge thing and you’re down to the last half second.

One thing I want to ask is … Two parts to this question too. How do you cope with that stress and danger in such a matter of fact way? But the other thing I find amazing, and I think people listening to the show will find amazing is for you to talk about being a speaker. I know I’ve heard you talk about when you went to the Clinton White House and you had a panic attack. You’re going to meet the president. For goodness’s sake, the thing you’re doing when you’re sitting on the spacecraft on the launch pad and you’re cool and calm and yet you are about to meet the president and you suddenly have a moment. And I was very taken by what you said that you had to become the shuttle commander. You almost switched personas, separated yourself from being Eileen and became the shuttle commander in order to meet the president. Talk us through some of that.

Eileen Collins:

That is very, very true and it is amazing what the little techniques you come up with when you’re faced with a situation like that. Now, the first part of your question is about on my third mission when we had the launch countdown taking place, and my answer to that is you are on the launch, you’re on the rocket and you’re watching the clock countdown and you’re inside of 10, nine, eight, seven and then the clock stops and it was bouncing back and forth, eight, nine, eight, nine, eight, nine. The clock that I’m looking at, and I had never seen that before in training. Well, here we are just like a split second from engines starting, and my thought was you have to be ready to either launch or to scrub. You have to be ready for both of them. That is what comes through training and through thinking through these scenarios before they actually happen to you.

Of course you have to think through thousands of scenarios and most of them never happen. So this one happened, and I think my first thought is what do I have control over and what do I not have control over? I do not have control over the launch countdown clock. I can stop it, but I can’t restart it. As commander, I can stop the clock. That’s another question. There are times when you would as commander have to stop the clock. But I heard the word cut off on the radio that was coming from the launch control center, so I knew that there was something bad that happened. I have to be ready at that point, well, we’re not going to launch, but I have to be ready to get out as quickly as possible. So I’m not worried about me. There’s no emotions except possibly my heart is beating faster and I’m thinking, thinking, thinking. We might have to do what’s called a mode one, which is where the crew has to unbuckle and run out as fast as we can. And we take a slide wire. It’s like a zip line that you would take from the launch pad down to the bunker.

If there is a hydrogen leak or even an oxygen leak, which is flammable … I’ll just leave it at that. You could have a bad situation. We train for that. So I’m sitting, I’m listening, I’m ready to do an immediate mode one. I’m listening. I told my crew we’re going to be okay. The other thing is you don’t want your crew to panic. So, “Hey crew, we’re going to be okay. We’ve seen situations like this before. Everybody listen to the radio. Let’s get ready to …” I don’t want to say the words mode one because people might start leaving. I said, “We want to get ready to get out in case they call.” And so these are all the things. I’m running these things through my head. We also had that particular launch, we had two serious malfunctions. We ended up launching three days later. We had two serious malfunctions going uphill. We had a hydrogen leak out of one of our engines, and we had an electrical short in one of our AC buses, and the crew had minimal work to do on those, but we really were thinking we have to be ready for the next failure. So it’s all training, training, training.

Now you mentioned the White House. Before I flew that mission and I had been named as a shuttle commander, I got word that the White House wanted to announce the first woman space shuttle commander from the White House, and Bill Clinton was the president at the time and I had to prepare a few remarks. So I prepared a few remarks and headed up there. I thought it was okay. Brought my family with me and we went in. We met the president. That was fine. The moment of panic was when we left the Oval Office I looked across the room and there’s this room called the Roosevelt Room, and that’s where normally the president will make announcements. It’s quite a small room, but I saw a bank of cameras along the wall. I saw some famous reporters that I recognized. Sally Ride was sitting in the front row, and it was the first time I met her, by the way. And all these famous people were in there. And I looked in the door, I just snuck a little peek in the door, and that’s when I had what I would call a panic moment.

I had never physically panicked in an airplane. There’s only two times in my life that I think I panicked. The first time I was 13 years old and I was almost in a fight. That’s a whole other story. And this was the second time. I felt sweat start at the top of my head, and the sweat went down to the bottom of my feet. And I turned to my husband and I said, “I’m not going in there. I’m done. I’m not doing this.” Because he tried to talk me out of it. I knew I had to go in there and make my little speech. I started thinking, just go in there and be the woman commander. You’re not Eileen anymore. Just go in there and be the woman commander. Be what people expect you to be. It’s only going to take 10 minutes and it’s going to be over. And so I did it. It was over. I went back to work and I was happy after I went back to work because I am a pilot. I’m an operational person. At least back in those days, not very good on camera. I had not trained for that except maybe a very small amount of training. But I was not prepared for that.

What is the lesson to be learned? You have to be prepared. I really think if I had practiced and trained for walking in a group of people that were putting their cameras on me, if I had trained for that, I think I would’ve been better at it. And that’s really the answer. I could go on and on, but that’s really the answer to the question. Prepare, train. Understand what you’re afraid of. Everybody’s afraid of something. I’m trying to think of a good example. Understand what you’re afraid of. I don’t like bugs for example. I used to read books on bugs so I could learn more about them when I was a kid. If you really understand what it is that you’re afraid of, I think that gives you a feeling of control over it. We don’t always have a hundred percent control over everything. We have to realize what we control and what we don’t control. But I think if you read and understand and learn and expose yourself a little bit to the things that you’re afraid of, it will help you have more courage in life to do the things that will really make a difference.

Des Dearlove:

It’s good to understand that even someone like you, has things that alarm you or can make you panic because I think what we tend to think everybody else, certainly someone with your career and your background, that you are immovable, fearless, but we all have something and that’s what makes us human. 

Breaking the Glass Ceiling at NASA

Steven Goldbach:

The thing that I take away from that is it’s amazing how the capacity of the human brain to invent fear in just any situations that we aren’t used to. And we can be fearful of things that have no foundation in reality. And you’ve trained your brain to not be fearful of some incredibly precarious situations through your preparation and through your experience. And it just goes to show the capacity of what it takes to prepare for those kinds of situations. But the brain is eminently trainable. It’s just when we come across the unexpected, it can be fearful. Speaking of things that are novel, the title of your book is Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars. So let’s talk a little bit about how it was difficult to break that glass ceiling at NASA and how you were novel to many people and how you helped them overcome their – sense your capabilities and those of your fellow women.

Eileen Collins:

Yeah. I would say yes, I was the first woman to be a shuttle pilot and commander, but there were still other women before me that did other things. For example, there were several women mission specialists … Sally Ride’s the most famous that actually flew on the shuttle before me. Now Sally, she took the brunt of the silly questions and people asking her, how are you going to do your hair in space and what kind of clothes are you going to wear? Questions that the men didn’t get asked. And Sally was really offended by that. She told me actually before my first mission, she called me on the phone and was talking a little bit about some of the things she had to deal with with the press and those things bothered her. She was very intelligent and she wanted to talk about why are we going to space. She was an arm operator. Robot arm operator, and she was doing experiments. So she really took the brunt of it. I took a little bit of it, but I think having Sally’s, I want to say mentorship was a big help.

There were also several women mission specialists in the astronaut office. They were doing fantastic work as they are still today. And just very professional. They weren’t out there promoting themselves because they were women. They just didn’t do that. And I didn’t really honestly didn’t do that myself. People came to me. But I didn’t want to flaunt the fact, oh, I’m the first woman and try to make myself famous because of that. I wanted to be the best pilot I could be. So I think to answer your question, for me, I took on that role as a challenge. You’re going to be the first woman pilot and this is when John Young, who was the Apollo 16 moon walker, called me and told me I was hired and I would be the first woman. I took that on as a challenge and I wanted to be the best I could be. So I studied probably twice as hard as I really needed to. Tried to prepare for situations that honestly may never happen, but I wanted to be ready because I wanted to be the hero. I wanted to be the one that came in and saved everybody, AKA Star Trek or some of these science fiction movies that you see. I wanted to come in and be the hero, so I was preparing for that.

And so I really think that I stand on the shoulders of the women that went … Oh, and I want to mention there were women flight controllers and there were also women that went … They were called the Mercury 13 way back in 1961. They went through the physical testing and mental testing. They proved that women have the ability to be astronauts, and then as I mentioned earlier, the women Air Force service pilots, the World War II pilots that flew airplanes. So I really think I stand on their shoulders. So knowing about them and actually working with some of them I think really helped a lot. I think mentorship is important, and I like to tell people, if you don’t have a mentor, try to be a mentor to try to help someone. And I like to mentor men as well as women because I think it’s important that we help everyone that is … Maybe we see somebody that needs help, it’s important that we reach out to them. So I hope that answered your question.

I think probably the feeling I get mostly from your question is how happy I was to have the challenge to be the first woman pilot and commander of a space shuttle. I was actually very happy to have that challenge because I like to work hard and I like to really push the mission of space exploration because it’s a mission I’ve always loved as far back as I can remember, I love the mission. And I wish we were farther into that mission. It’s expensive to explore space. And I get disappointed when I see how slow it takes to get people back to the moon and onto Mars. But I think that’s what keeps me even today, staying active as much as I can in the space business and helping promote that mission. So that’s the challenge I love.

Becoming a Collaborative Leader

Des Dearlove:

I’m going to take you a little bit back to leadership. Talk about your, perhaps a little bit about your personal style. I know the word humility came up in conversations earlier. But you’ve talked a lot about training as well. Did you consciously train your leadership style? Is it something that evolved as you were doing as your career unfolded, or is it something you thought right now, now I need to train as a leader?

Eileen Collins:

So that is a very interesting question. I would say that when I joined the Air Force, we were given leadership training. It was not a choice. You didn’t like, “Oh, I think I’ll take a course in leadership.” Everyone was given leadership training and it was everything from reading about techniques of leadership and reading about great leaders to actually doing exercises where you would go out with your little group and they would give you a challenge and you’d have to figure it out. And they were mostly physical challenges. If you would watch how people in your group … Some people would like to take over and some people would sit over there and they try to figure out the answer, and some people were just completely out of it and you felt bad for them, but you’d see all kinds. I never liked that leadership training because there would be conflict that would come out, there would be tough decisions. And you can imagine this in the field. I’m sure many of your listeners have done these leadership training courses in the field. Even though I don’t like them, I recommend doing them. It’s something that’s hard and uncomfortable, but it makes you better.

And so we did a lot of those back in the military. I even went through survival training and in my book, I talked about how survival training, the challenge of that changed me. Both the physical side as well. They had a POW camp and we were all “captured” by the “enemy” and we went through this prisoner of war. I say POW, it’s prisoner of war training camp with the Air Force. So I had done all that training when I came to NASA. Now, the civilians that come to NASA, they get sent to different leadership training courses. Like there’s a cold weather survival. I could name a bunch of them. There’s one in the Rocky Mountains. There’s an underwater program down in the Florida Keys. It’s not necessarily built for leadership training, but you still get leadership training from some of these. And they’re really good. You learn about yourself. You will do things in these leadership … I say you will. I surprised myself because I did things I didn’t expect that I would do.

So once I came to NASA, I felt like I had my leadership style established, but not totally true. I was more of an autocratic type leader in the military because I thought that’s what they wanted. And I would tell people, oh, you should do this or you should do that. Honestly, I don’t think that works. It definitely did not work at NASA. But back in my later years in the Air Force, I learned that I needed to be more of a collaborative type leader. So my leadership style changed when I was … I’m going to say in my early 30s if I finally came around that Eileen, you don’t have to know it all. You really have to know your people and know which people to put in which roles. That’s a very difficult thing to do, at least for me. So one of the things the leader has to do is know their people enough to say, “You need to be in this position, this job. You need to be over here.” And put the right people in the right places and then give them the authority to do their job. Don’t micromanage them.

And I had to learn that because I was a micromanager and I was more of an autocrat, and I had to stop doing that. And I think being at NASA, working with people that really knew what they were doing, highly motivated, intelligent, I was able, once I became a shuttle commander, I’d tell my crew, okay, you’re in charge of deploying the telescope, you’re in charge of logistics, you’re in charge of this system, whether it’s on the payload or on the shuttle and let them do their job. And I think I finally learned that after making mistakes throughout my career.

I had a student way back when I was in my 20s. I had a student tell me, “Ma’am, could you not talk to me so much in the airplane?” And I went, “Oh, I didn’t realize I was talking to you that much.” I said, “Okay. Well, let’s do that. I’ll stop talking and let you …” Apparently my talking was interfering with his thinking. So I started talking less. Once I became a shuttle commander, I remember one of my crewmates, Wendy Lawrence, was in charge of all the logistics transfer to the space station and back. And at that point in my life, I had matured to the point I said to Wendy, you’re in charge of the logistics. I’m not going to tell you what to do. If you have a problem, come to me and I’ll help you solve your problem. Please just keep me up to speed on what you’re doing and make sure we talk to each other. And I let her do her job. I left her alone and she did a great job. And so I think through a series of mistakes … I talk a little bit about them in my book. I think I became the right leader for the particular position that I was in.

I wasn’t perfect. I look back and I think there were other things I would do differently, but I think I was the right leader for that last mission that I flew because … We can probably get into this later. I felt it was my job to keep people working together. I didn’t want conflict to develop. If it did develop, I wanted to help make sure that they worked together, that they didn’t work against each other.

Steven Goldbach:

And that’s where I want to dig in a little bit, Eileen. How do you think about in a situation where one small thing can become a really big thing in the context of a space mission? I’m trying to think about how I would deal with analogous situations if I were a leader. And you talked about trying not to micromanage your team. And this is a situation that I could imagine that lots of leaders would say, “Well, I need to micromanage this because anything that goes wrong could be disastrous.” And so how do you build up a sense of trust that someone is going to be sufficiently detail oriented and what you’re managing is that person’s attention to detail rather than the individual tasks themselves. I find it interesting that you are focused on the way the team is working together rather than the outcomes in how you’re describing it. So tell us a little bit about that orientation and how you trained yourself on that front.

Eileen Collins:

Well, outcome is important. Outcome is very important. And I think to me, I see that as mission. We had a mission obviously, but the mission was broken down into about 12 main objectives. And as the commander, I had to make sure that I was ultimately responsible along with my flight director, he’s on the ground, but I’m ultimately responsible up in space that those specific number of objectives are completed and they’re listed in order of preference. So if there’s ever a conflict, the solution goes to what is the higher priority. Which by the way is one of the techniques I used to resolve conflict is which is the higher priority.

I would say the best training to be a shuttle commander … This was a joke. I used to say this when I commanded my second and last mission. The best training to be a shuttle commander is to be a parent. Because you started your question with the little things, conflict can build over little things that ultimately are not important. And if you’re married, you know exactly what I’m talking about because you see married couples that go at it over something that is not important at all. It’s like who cares? And I think it ends up being a little power struggle, and I see this over in my family, I just see this over and over again. And I would say what you’re arguing about or what your conflict is about, where is that in the order of priority? If it’s where are we going to go eat tonight? I don’t really care. That’s not important.

Or what color is my shirt going to be? Because we do actually have to make those decisions. What color shirt am I going to wear in space on the day that we do the crew picture, what shirt are we going to wear? We get a crew picture taken and what are we going to put in there? We have a patch. How do we design the patch? These are things the crews work together on, but ultimately those are nice things and we need to have them, but we don’t want conflict to develop over them. We certainly don’t want conflict to develop over a mission objective. So I’m not sure if I’m answering your question or not, but I will say it was important to me as commander to know what are the … I’m going to say what was the number one strategic objective of our flight? The last one was to get the shuttle flying again safely after the Columbia accident. Everything that I did, I came back to that number one objective, get the shuttle flying safely again after the Columbia accident. And then we had broken down into objectives and it was everything from resupplying the space station to making sure that we did an exterior survey of the shuttle.

I’m not going to get in too much detail, but one of the causes of the Columbia accident was a breach from the heat shield. So we do an external survey. We had to be able to repair certain types of damage that might’ve happened to our heat shield. We had to safely run room dock with a space station, transfer 5,000 pounds of logistics. If whatever conflict we were having didn’t deal with those main objectives, it was like, “Okay. Make a decision right now and get it over with and put it behind us because we need to stay focused on the important parts of this mission.” And I found myself doing a lot of that as commander and keeping my crew … And my crew is great, by the way. They were wonderful, but you want to keep everybody … Because even I was getting lost on, okay, so what are we going to do when we go out with somebody on some social event? Let’s just do it. It doesn’t matter. Let’s not let conflict develop about it. Let’s do those things, but don’t let conflict break down crew cohesiveness.

And I would say the biggest thing that was causing conflict was how much money was available for this mission. We didn’t have money to do everything. We had to decide for example, repair techniques. There must’ve been dozens of repair techniques to repair a space shuttle heat shield during the spacewalk. You couldn’t possibly fund all of them. So as we went along, some of them had to be down selected. Can’t do that anymore. It’s being down selected. But then you had to get those people, those engineers on board like, “Hey, we loved your idea. It was great. Just didn’t have the money to do everything, so now I need you to get on board with this other idea and work with them.” And sometimes that’s really hard to do.

And I think because people take it personally when their little project is not going to fly, so get them on board with another team, work together. It’s amazing how people get really personally and emotionally involved in what they’re doing in their work. And that can be something really difficult. And I found that’s where it’s important for a commander to make the effort to talk to the people individually and keep them motivated as part of the mission. Even though their pet project wasn’t … That’s not the right word, pet project. Even though their assigned project was not selected. I just use that as an example, but there were several. Keep in mind that last mission I flew was after an accident where seven people lost their lives so emotions were running very high. And I ended up finding myself in a role where I was calming people down and helping them get refocused on getting the shuttle flying again.

Des Dearlove:

You’re talking about mission, and I’ve heard you say in the past that you had your own personal mission, not to be the first woman to do it, but to be the best pilot you could possibly be. When we talk about mission in that kind of context, we use the word in business these days, we use the word purpose a lot. I’m not sure whether there is a difference between them. But how important is it to define what we’re trying to do in terms of a higher calling so that you can do that very process you’ve been describing where you’ve got something higher to appeal to, which should and can obviously diffuse potential conflict?

Eileen Collins:

Yeah. Well, the higher calling is space exploration, getting people off planet earth into space, living and working on space stations, returning to the moon, building research stations on the moon, learning how to live and work on another planetary body like the moon, and eventually sending people to Mars. Planet Mars, which is much farther. The moon, you can get there in three days with, I would say, conventional propulsion, chemical propulsion, like just your normal rocket engines. Three days to get to the moon. But it’s six months to get to Mars. Sometimes it takes two years depending on … Planets move around. So sometimes it takes two years to get to Mars.

We need to, I want to say develop the equipment that will keep the astronauts alive while we’re on the surface of the moon and get that to be very reliable equipment. I’m talking water recycling, carbon dioxide, recycling, just life support systems. Get them working. And you got the moon, it has dust, it has no atmosphere, it’s got radiation, it’s got all of these threats to your life. But we’ve got to get those working on the moon well enough so eventually when we go to Mars, we have a failure on … You don’t want to have a failure on Mars because you’re so far away. And it takes so much longer to get back or to send equipment. So that would be, I would say the higher calling.

Three Fundamental Elements of Leadership

And back to just want to say one other thing about leadership styles to touch on one thing you asked. What I learned in the military, three elements of leadership that are the basis for everything else, the first is knowledge of your job. Just knowing you don’t need to know everything, but you need to know what is the mission. You need to understand the mission. The second one is people, I mentioned earlier. Getting the right people in the right places and always communicating. And the third is integrity. And that is a whole nother subject. We think integrity is honesty, which it is, honesty, but it’s also trusting that the person will be honest with you in the future. There has to be that element of trust in leadership and that’s something that takes time to develop and those techniques I talked about earlier. So those three things I learned as a second lieutenant in the military a long time ago. I never forgot them because they worked. Now there’s more. That’s not everything, but to me that’s the foundation. Knowing your job, knowing your people, and having a sense of integrity.

Steven Goldbach:

Eileen, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. I think we are unfortunately out of time in our podcast, but we would love to continue to have you develop lessons and we’ll make sure to share when the documentary is released and link to the book. Last very quick question, who else do you admire and should we have on this podcast? Who would you recommend that we speak to?

Eileen Collins:

What first comes to mind is one of the Apollo astronauts. Now there were 12 men that walked on the moon. Only four of them are still alive and two of them are pretty active. One is Harrison Schmitt. He was a senator after he left NASA, but he’s a geologist and he walked on the moon on Apollo 17. I think if you could get one of those four. Or even Gerry Griffin who’s still active, he was a flight director during Apollo. I would recommend a book called Apollo Race to the Moon. And although it talks about how the Apollo program happened, it helps you realize how to do difficult missions. And I would say any of those Apollo flight directors or astronauts … Their availability, it’s very hard to get on their schedule.

Des Dearlove:

We’re very, very fortunate and very grateful for getting you so thank you so much. But that’s all we have time for. Huge thanks to our guest, to Eileen Collins and to you all for listening. This is The Provocateurs podcast. 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 and we’ll see you next time.

Des Dearlove:

Hello, and welcome to The Provocateurs Podcast. I’m Des Dearlove, 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. My co-introducer, my cohost today is Geoff Tuff. Geoff leads Deloitte’s sustainability work globally in the energy and industrial sectors. Geoff is also the author, along with Steve Goldbach, of two bestselling books. Detonate, which came out in 2018, and Provoke, which inspired this podcast.

Geoff, as ever, it’s great to see you.

Geoff Tuff:

Likewise, guys. Great to see you. I feel like I need to start off this introduction by saying something completely outrageous, but I’ll resist the temptation. The reason for that will become apparent in a moment. It’s great to be back here. I’m really excited to talk with you, Des, and with today’s guest.

Today’s guest is Karthik Ramanna. He is a professor of business and public policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. He has served there as director of one of the world’s most diverse leadership programs and continues to do so. He was previously a professor at Harvard Business School. Karthik’s main gig, I think, and we’ll find out more about it, is studying how leaders build trust with a variety of different stakeholders, especially stakeholders who may not see eye-to-eye with exactly how they see the world. He is the author of The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World that has been recently included in the Thinkers50 Best Management Books of the Year for 2025.

Karthik, first of all, congratulations on that, and welcome.

Karthik Ramanna:

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Geoff Tuff:

Yeah, absolutely. Maybe we’ll just start with a bit of your backstory. We had some chit-chat before we started recording here. I understand a little bit about your background as a student at MIT. Tell us about where you came from, how you came into the world in which you’re exploring the ideas of leadership today.

Karthik Ramanna:

Sure. I got my PhD from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. I started my career as a fairly quantitative economist, writing fairly esoteric articles for other academics. I used to teach required courses in financial accounting in the Harvard MBA program. My first job out of the PhD program was as a professor at Harvard Business School. I did that and I absolutely loved it, but then the financial crisis hit. I had my own little personal crisis. I said, “Well, the great problem in the world isn’t that there aren’t enough MIT-trained economists teaching Harvard MBAs how to make more money. It seems like there are other problems in the world. Maybe I should be focused on them.”

I had a conversation with my dean at the time and he had this crazy idea. He said, “Why don’t you take some time off and come back, and teach the leadership course in the MBA program?” I thought it was a crazy idea because I was a quantitative economist. But I had a year off to go self-educate in leadership, so why not? I did it, I came back, I taught the leadership course, taught it for several years thereafter. Absolutely loved it and couldn’t imagine doing anything differently now.

Geoff Tuff:

If I could just ask one quick follow-up question, Des, before you jump in. What was the tie? When your dean suggested that, what was the link to leadership that he either saw in you or your body of work that you had done up until that point?

Karthik Ramanna:

Quite frankly, there was very little.

Geoff Tuff:

Just a random suggestion.

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah.

Geoff Tuff:

Content with that.

Karthik Ramanna:

I don’t know whether it was that “here’s this crazy economist in my office complaining about the fact that he doesn’t want to teach finance anymore. Maybe if I give him a crazy idea he’ll say okay, I’ll go teach some more finance.” I don’t know what it was. Quite frankly, I had no qualifications at the time to do anything leadership. I effectively had to self-educate from the bottom up, but I absolutely enjoyed that.

I taught the leadership course. It was called Leadership in Corporate Accountability. I taught that course for well over six years in the required program before I was recruited away here to Oxford, to become the director of the public policy program at the School of Government.

Geoff Tuff:

Right.

The Evolution of The Age of Outrage

Des Dearlove:

Well, I can’t think of any better background to teach leadership than being an MIT-trained economist. It makes perfect sense in a strange sort of way. I thought you were going to say “I’ve always been interested in leadership ever since I was a small child.” But actually, in a way, coming to it with a different perspective is probably really helpful.

Let’s talk about the book, because that’s obviously the next stage of this journey. Why did you write The Age of Outrage? Obviously, it perfectly fits the times. Why did you write it now?

Karthik Ramanna:

Again, I had no grand plan to write this book. I came to the University of Oxford in part because Oxford was building a school of government. They were looking for someone to serve as the director of the Master of Public Policy program. When they reached out and said, “Hey, is this a role that you’d be interested in,” I was intrigued. Initially, I thought they’d made a mistake because it was a job at the School of Government, I was at the business school. I had never taught at a school of government. I said, “I’m not at the Harvard Kennedy School, are you sure you have the right person?” But they said, “No, no, we’ve heard that you might be an interesting candidate, throw your hat in the ring.” It was a global search. I did, and lo and behold a few months later, I had the job.

I remember I showed up here on campus at Oxford about one week before the students did. That first year, we had about 125 students from 70 different countries. They ranged in age from 22 to 52. There were some very seasoned students who were running a workforce. There was one guy who was running a workforce of a half-a-million people. Then at the same time, there were some people at the beginning of their careers. About a third of the class were rogue scholars. They were necessarily very, very much at the beginning of their careers, but they were very bright.

I remember looking at that class, again 125 people, from 60, 70 countries, and thinking, “Gosh, Karthik, at the very least, don’t screw this up.” Then I said, “But more aspirationally, it would be helpful if you left them at the end of the year with something that was worthwhile.” Look, these people believed passionately in improving public service. They all believed passionately in improving the practice of government. But they come from such different parts of the world that they can’t agree on what constitutes good government.

I said, “Look, we’re living in this polarized world. I don’t know how to lead in it, you don’t know how to lead in it.” I did the thing that many academics quite frankly do when they don’t know the answer to a question, which is I offered to teach a course on it. I started to offer this course called How to Lead in a Polarized World. I was very honest with the students. I said, “Look, we don’t know the answer. What I will do is every week, I will invite someone from my professional network who is running something.” My rule was that they had to be operationally in charge of a complex setup. We had CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, we had the commissioner of London Police, we had the mayor of one the largest cities in Brazil, we had the governor of a province. The idea was you were operationally in charge of an organization or a system.

Every week, they would come to class, we’d have a different guest speaker. And say, “Bring us your hardest problem in this age of outrage, but don’t tell us what you did. Just bring us the problem and let’s see if we, as a class, can fix this, make it better. Bring us your best piece of reading, something that really helped you.” It could be anything. It could be an article from the Harvard Business Review or it could be a poem from Shakespeare, whatever you want. That was the format. I taught that course for six, seven years. In fact, I still teach the course. But after all those years of teaching it, I said, “Well, it’d be a shame if we lose this collective wisdom.” I said, “Well, maybe we should just put it down.”

What I did was I wrote an essay, it was about 12,000 words, and I sent it to my editor at the Harvard Business Review. I said, “This is a pitch for a piece in the magazine.” David, my editor, he said, “Well, it’s too short and it’s too long.” I said, “What do you mean, David?” He said, “Well, it’s too long for the article, but we can edit that down. The article, maximum length is 5000 words, we’ll take care of that. But it’s too short, because it should be a book.” He’s the guy who put the idea in my head and then HBR gave me the contract. Boom, there we go. That was the book.

It wasn’t planned. It came out of the course, quite frankly. And the course came out of the fact that I didn’t know how to do my job.

Des Dearlove:

We should probably say that’s David Champion, to give him his credit.

Karthik Ramanna:

Indeed.

Des Dearlove:

You’re not the first person to say how helpful he was. Just a shout-out to David. It’s appreciated, I know.

Geoff, you look like you were going to ask a question.

What Makes This the Age of Outrage?

Geoff Tuff:

I want to go back to the beginning because what I heard in the genesis story of the ideas in the books was coming into a very diverse class of different aged people, different thinkers, different backgrounds. It actually sounds like the kernel of the idea was not outrage, it was just different points of view. And the fact that, even at a small level, even though it may not be an incendiary argument, people have different points of view.

The lessons within the book I assume are lasting lessons and they probably could have been applied at any point in the past as well. Have we always lived in a polarized world, either very polarized or somewhat polarized? Do you think the ideas apply universally?

Karthik Ramanna:

Well, there are some elements of the ideas that do apply universally. The course was titled How to Lead in a Polarized World, so there’s some elements of polarization that have always been part of our history. In teaching the course and eventually in writing the book, the idea was how do you … The phrase we used in the public policy program at Oxford was how do you build the unlikely coalitions that are needed to drive progress in a world where people have different perspectives, different points of view. Throughout history, we’ve needed to build unlikely coalitions to get things done.

But then, there is something different about the zeitgeist of our time, and this is this age of outrage that we’re talking about. In my mind, there are three things that really make this moment distinctive. The first is we’re dealing with a profound amount of uncertainty even in the course of one generation. AI promises to be as disruptive if not more disruptive than the industrial revolution was. We also have to deal with climate change and the fact that shifting weather patterns could mean the collapse of North Atlantic trade winds, or monsoon winds, or things like that. We have to deal with demographic shifts. By the year 2050, half of all the people under the age of 18 in the world will be just in sub-Saharan Africa because the rest of the world is getting older. You look at all these things, the world in the course of just one generation, 25 years from now, will look radically, profoundly different. That’s one thing that’s getting people really anxious, what I call a fear of the future.

The second thing that’s different about our times is if we were just dealing with this fear of the future and we had deep trust in our institutions of governance, maybe we’d be okay. But we’re dealing in this moment where we feel like these institutions that were supposed to look after us, that were supposed to do right by us, they’ve not necessarily done a great job. The narratives that people feel they were sold over globalization or the cultural shifts that have happened over the course of the last 25, 30 years, those narratives people now experience less positively. The sense that the institutions that govern us have given us a raw deal, that’s the other thing that’s happening.

The third thing that is happening is perhaps a cause of the first two, the fear of the future and the raw deal. We’re seeing a shift away from this enlightenment mindset of global humanism that’s effectively defined the way the world works since the end of World War II at least, to what you might call an economic or cultural nationalism. Which is to see the world more in terms of us versus them. Othering, “lenses of othering” is what I call it in the book.

These three things. Of course, throughout history we’ve dealt with moments of profound uncertainty, moments of deep distrust, moments of othering. But having all three manifest at the same time and manifest to the degree to which they are, and throw into that, in some sense, the catalytic factor that is social media, and suddenly, boom. You end up with what I call the age of outrage.

Geoff Tuff:

Yeah. I’m sure we’ll dig much deeper into the whole topic of othering. I do want to ask one quick follow-up. That is, have we had any moments in history at any point, or have you seen an example of an organization, or a culture, or a region, or whatever it might be, where there has not been polarization? Where there has actually, I don’t know if the opposite of polarization is harmony or not othering, but is there even such a thing in our history?

Karthik Ramanna:

Well, there were certainly moments of great collective optimism. Now again, they might have been bifurcated across. For instance, the period right after the end of World War II through to about the early 1950s when the notion of the iron curtain solidified, you were potentially dealing with this moment that there’s something different about how we might manage the world. Right after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Frank Fukuyama wrote a famous book now called The End of History where he said, “Well, we figured it out. Liberal democracy and free markets, that’s the solution, and the rest of history will be a little boring.”

There have been these moments where … Now, it may not be that Frank was right or wrong. It may be that we screwed up the opportunity. Point is that there have been these moments of great promise, but we’re very far away from one of those moments right now unfortunately.

Geoff Tuff:

Too true.

Managing Outrage vs Managing in the Age of Outrage

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, that is true. In the book, you make a distinction between managing outrage and managing in the age of outrage. What does that distinction mean, and is that important?

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah. In my mind, it’s really important for the following reason. Managing outrage, to me, is an element of crisis management. Which is important and it’s not easy, but we know how to do it. We’ve done it in the past. You bring in a PR team, they’ll figure out “okay, how do you deal with this,” et cetera. Then the rest of the organization goes on doing what they have to do.

The problem with the age of outrage is the velocity and the magnitude of these problems is so large that, if you took a traditional firefighting approach to it, crisis management approach to it, you’d very quickly exhaust the organization. Because when will you have time to do the fire prevention? When will you have time to do all the learning and growth, and all the real stuff that the organization needs to do in order to sustain and thrive, and so forth? You’ve got to therefore have a different approach to it than crisis management.

That’s where the notion of it needs to be built into your organizational culture. It needs to be built into your organizational processes. We say just like finance, and accounting, and marketing are skills that any general manager needs to have a working knowledge of. You can’t be a manager of a large organization and say, “Oh, balance sheets, I don’t do balance sheets.” Well, that’d be a disaster. In the same way, you can’t now be a general manager of an organization and say, “Oh, managing crises, I don’t do that. I outsource that to crisis management.” Well, that is your job now because of the world we live in. We’ve got to find a way to make it your job without it taking away from all the others things you got to do.

Des Dearlove:

I think what you’re saying is outrage is the new normal.

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah.

Des Dearlove:

It isn’t the exception as in it’s a crisis, it happens once in a while, this is how we have to manage now.

Karthik Ramanna:

I think so. Sadly, that is at least for the foreseeable future until we’re able to resolve some of this anxiety around these forces we’ve talked about. That is going to be the situation, yeah.

Creating Active Listening Networks

Geoff Tuff:

Let’s then dig a bit more into this as it applies to leadership within organizations. It doesn’t have to be companies, it can be nonprofit organizations, governmental organizations. Not everything is a crisis, but one could in theory construe everything is a crisis if one so desired. How do you draw the line? If your central challenge as a leader with an organization is to keep the organization on track, fulfill the purpose that you have in the world, if you’re a for-profit organization, return to your shareholders, et cetera, when do you need to react to outrage, perceived crisis, what have you? Where should you just let other natural mechanisms take care of it?

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah. That’s a great question. I think part of what the book talks about is this framework for managing in this age. It is about creating systems of active listening to help you understand when something really can become a crisis and when it’s not. What really effective organizations are doing in this moment is not being surprised by things as they come their way. That’s because they have these active listening networks with potential antagonists. When something like this happens, you’ve had warning. You’ve heard about it sometimes weeks, sometimes months in advance because you’ve seen it emerge, then perhaps develop slowly, perhaps then develop more quickly.

Geoff Tuff:

Can we unpack that a little? What is an active listening network? What does it look like?

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah.

Geoff Tuff:

How do you set it?

Karthik Ramanna:

Let me give you an example of someone who did that. I’ll give you an example from a particularly difficult scenario. Which is this woman who was appointed as the first Peace Commissioner in the north-central Nigerian state of Kaduna. Kaduna State in north-central Nigeria, like some parts of the country, deals with a lot of violence. Priscilla Ankut was the woman who had been appointed as the first Peace Commissioner in this region.

She’s a technocrat by training. She had served as a technocrat in the African Union. But really, in East Africa rather than West Africa. A large difference between the cultures, and so forth. But she’s ethnically from Kaduna State. She came, she took this job. One of the first things she did, being a technocrat, a data-driven type of person, is see where is this violence coming from. She starts plotting the violence over time, like a good data-driven manager might. She sees that it’s not random. In fact, it’s almost like a sign wave, there’s a cyclical pattern to it. She’s like, “Oh.” Then she says, “What is predicting this?”

Of course, what’s predicting it is elections. Every time you get close to an election season, violence is manufactured because of course it benefits election outcomes. What she does is say, “Okay, well where is this violence coming from?” Well, it turns out it’s coming from a few provocateurs on social media that start saying things that are incendiary, and so forth. What does she do?

She reaches out to some of those people in an ad personam capacity, they will have certain political roles and religious roles. She doesn’t reach out to the organizations that host them, she reaches out to them in an ad personam capacity. She creates this little club which she calls the House of Kaduna Family. When I first hear this, she’s describing this to me, I’m thinking, “That sounds corny as hell. What does that even mean?” But you think about it, it’s brilliant.

She brings these people together and she gets them to know each other. This is well in advance of the election, a couple of years before the election.

Geoff Tuff:

Do these people have aligned points of view or not at all?

Karthik Ramanna:

No, no, no, they don’t.

Geoff Tuff:

Right, okay. Yeah.

Karthik Ramanna:

That’s the point. They are provocateurs across the spectrum, and she’s bringing them together and they’re getting to know each other. There’s this great line from Michelle Obama where she says, “You can’t hate someone when you know them.”

When the election season comes around, it’s not like obviously the violence magically disappears. But that now, suddenly people know each other. When things get really tense, she’s able to bring everyone in the same room and say, “Hey, guys, we all know each other. What can we do to deescalate the situation?” That’s not the first time they’re meeting each other. They’ve been talking about what their kids do, they’ve been talking about what they did for religious holidays, this and that.

That’s the sense in which I say creating this active listening network, and not necessarily of just people who agree with you, of potential antagonists. That’s what really smart organizations … Because she figured out, “I can’t be surprised by the fact that there will be violence around elections. If I’m surprised by that, I’m terrible at my job. But what I can do is figure out how I might turn down the temperature on it.”

Geoff Tuff:

Great example.

The Five-step Framework for Maintaining Calm

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. A lot of the book is about how you deescalate, how you turn down the temperature, and how you, yeah, you bring some calm where there’s aggressive behavior. You’ve got this platform for calm. Talk us through the stages of that because it’s fascinating.

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah. It’s a five-step framework. The first stage of it is what I call turning down the temperature. When people often read that, they think that it’s the manager has to turn down the temperature of everybody else around that they’re managing, et cetera. I’ll be honest, I wrote that chapter for myself because I’m not a particularly zen guy or anything. I get really worked up about everything. I was like, “How do I turn down my own temperature?” Because my students were aggravating the hell out of me. What can the behavioral science and the neuroscience of aggression teach me about why I get aggravated, why I’m prone to aggression, and what I might do about it? That was my perspective in writing that, it was entirely selfish.

It turns out that there are actually some really simple things you can do from the neuroscience of aggression to mitigate that. First, we’re really triggered by what you might call ambient conditions. For instance, if you’re in a hot, crowded room, you’re far more likely to be triggered to an aversive response than if you’re in a cool, comfortable room. If you find yourself in that kind of situation and have to respond managerially, get yourself out of it because you can’t trust yourself to do the right thing. If you’re in a room with a rectangular table rather than a circular table, you’re more likely to take an adversarial stance. Again, really simple stuff, low-hanging fruit.

Next stage of it is your emotional response is triggered by the last few things that have happened in your mind kind of thing. This age-old advice of sleep on important emails, that kind of thing, all that makes real sense. If something’s really important, it’s actually cathartic to type out an email that expresses your full emotion, but then not to send it. Then sleep on it, come back to it the next day. Chances are you will tone it down, if you even will send it.

The third thing is probably, to me, was the most, I guess, surprising because we like to think of ourselves as rational beings. We like to say that once we’ve had a chance to sleep on it, we will come to the right decision. But what we think of as our rational, cognitive part of our brain is in itself shaped by what behavioral scientists call knowledge structures. Your knowledge structures colloquially might be your lived experiences. If I have got a certain set of lived experiences, then the assumptions that my brain implicitly calls on when it’s doing a rational analysis of a situation are such that I will come to conclusion A. If someone has a different set of knowledge structures or lived experiences, they will come to conclusion B. Both have the same flawless logic, but they’ve made different implicit assumptions which are hidden to us.

In fact, the best argument for surrounding yourself with a diverse, trusted team with different knowledge structures is just that. Because if you have the team with all the same knowledge structures, you’re all going to be observing the same situation and analyzing it with the same biases. That is, again, simple, quick, low-hanging kind of stuff to make you a better manager. Then quite frankly, it works with everybody else, too. If you start living this as a manager, you can in some sense, infect the rest of the group with what it takes to turn down the temperature.

Leading with Trust

Geoff Tuff:

Let’s talk about what this looks like in practice when leaders try it at their organizations. Presumably, there’s a way to introduce or to act within organizations in a way that doesn’t further polarize. But there has to be some part of the organization, if you have two sides fighting, some part, or some individual, or some collection of individuals must feel some distress in whatever the intervention might be. Talk to us a little bit about how when you practice this, you can minimize the distress and minimize the further polarization.

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah. Two really important things there. The first is your observation that no matter what you do, there’s going to be some distress. The fact is that there’s this underlying polarization. You’re not going to make the polarization magically disappear. When we think about the causal factors for the age of outrage, you’re not going to make those magically disappear, just like Priscilla was not able to make the violence in Kaduna magically disappear.

When we think about this, the goal is not to avoid disagreement. It’s to disagree without being disagreeable. Often times, people confuse that and say, “Oh my God, the way to manage through the age of outrage is to not take a stand on anything.” No, no, no. If you do that, A, people won’t trust you because they will feel like you’re inauthentic. And B, you really won’t be able to lead. How are you going to make the decisions that you need to make in order to get things done? This is not about saying, “I don’t want to disappoint anyone.” You’re going to disappoint lots of people if you’re going to lead in this age of outrage. But do it in a way that is less disagreeable. There’s a way to drive an agenda that doesn’t make people more pissed off than they already are.

What does that entail? That entails often giving people more agency for how the decisions land with them. Giving people more agency with how they might implement the decision. What we saw with really successful managers navigating through hard decisions was not the absence of making hard decisions. Of course, they wouldn’t be good managers then. But the ability to work with their teams to say, “Okay, how would you like this decision to land? How would you like to implement this decision? What are the conditions under which you would own this decision?”

Really successful managers created the trust where they turned the power structure around. They had enough trust with their teams that they were able to trust their teams and their teams were able to trust them with that implementation. It’s that reciprocity between I’ve got to make and implement a hard decision that I might not have bought in, but part of what makes this acceptable is I’m in the driving seat in the implementation. The manager trusts the employee well enough to say they’re not going to sabotage my project as part of owning that implementation. That is what really successful managers have done.

Des Dearlove:

Maybe it’s just universal, but we’re programmed to want to win discussions, to want to win arguments. Even our political institutions. I know you’re based on Oxford, but a goodish part of them is founded on two sides battling out and one side winning. Maybe that’s not so helpful if we’re trying to find common ground. If that’s going to help us get through this age of outage, do we need to question that whole premise that’s a win-lose?

Karthik Ramanna:

I think that the key is that it depends on what the purpose of your organization is. In the School of Government where I was helping with the public policy program, I said our goal is to create public leaders for this world that is highly polarized. A few doors down the road from us is the Oxford Union, the famed debating society. The goal there is to create great debaters. I personally go there and debate. I was once invited to debate to defend the role of bankers in the financial crisis, which is the opposite of what a lot of my research has been about in that area. But I went there with great theater. You got to put on a tux and then you debate, and you drop the cleverest argument you can find. You watch as the audience stands up and applauds and your opponent picks up the pieces. That’s the theater.

There’s a role and place for that kind of theater. But in this School of Government, that’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to create world-class debaters, we’re trying to create leaders for an age of polarization. Then there’s a different mindset that you need to take in this moment when you’re in here. As individuals, we will be called to take on different identities and we will be called to represent ourselves differently in different scenarios. That’s important to have the good judgement to recognize when that is needed and when it’s not.

When we’re here in a school of government or when you’re in a position of public leadership, or managerial responsibility in a private company, you’re suddenly saying, “Well, I’m responsible not just for what I say, I’m responsible for how my words land on others.” That’s a big difference between being a leader and a debater. When I’m in the Oxford Union, I’m not responsible for that because I’m there for the debate. But when I’m a leader running an organization, when I’m a manager of a team, how others experience me is a huge part of how effective I am.

Des Dearlove:

But the Oxford Union is where we’ve trained our politicians.

Karthik Ramanna:

It is, yeah.

Des Dearlove:

What we’ve ended up with often, and I think you can see it even, is possibly world-class debaters rather than leaders.

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah, I think so. The thing that gives me great cause for optimism is now that this School of Government exists and it is a few doors down from the Oxford Union, our students both engage in the theater and the magnificence of debating in the Union, but they also engage now in the importance of leadership development. Hopefully, that will make a difference in the world going forward.

“Ideas are everywhere, implementation is everything.”

Geoff Tuff:

What’s the end game here? I’m not presuming you’ve thought about the end game. But if I roll the tape forward and imagine everyone reads The Age of Outrage, are we working towards a place where polarization decreases and we become less outraged over time? Or are we working to a place where, yeah, outrage will flare up here and there, but we’re just better suited to be able to handle it when it comes? Or is there some other outcome in between?

Karthik Ramanna:

Obviously, I think polarized societies is not a great thing. But very often, the structural causes of that polarization are legitimate and they need legitimate solutions. Eliminating the polarization as a pure matter of cosmetics is not helpful either, if we’re not addressing the structural causes of polarization.

One of the things I make clear about my work and has been a necessary part of being the leader of the public leadership program at Oxford was that this is a book on process, it’s not a book on policy. There’s a whole set of issues on policy, and in my other research I’m very engaged on matters of public policy in specific domains. That’s a good, and important, and useful set of conversations we need to have. But conditional on policy, how do you actually get that done?

Somebody asked me, “What was the most important lesson you learned?” I said, “Ideas are everywhere, implementation is everything.” This is a book on the process. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have the conversation about ideas, you have to have that conversation about ideas. But then, how do you put that idea into practice? That’s what this is about.

The hope is that if we’ve done the hard work on the ideation and we do the thoughtful, careful work on the implementation, we will both structurally address the legitimate causes of polarization and we will depolarize. That’s how I would tackle that.

Geoff Tuff:

Yeah, that’s great.

Temperate Leadership

Des Dearlove:

Interesting. The final chapter of the book, which I enjoyed very much, I have to say, focuses on the need for what you call temperate leadership. I like the way you reach back to Plato and Aristotle, and you make sense of a lot of human history actually. Including some of the foundational myths that are possibly causing us some discomfort now. I also liked the way you linked that to Jim Collins’ idea of level five leadership. Tell us a little bit about temperate leadership and where it comes from.

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah. The classical Greeks spoke about four cardinal virtues. They were courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. Courage gets a lot of play in the management literature, courageous leaders, et cetera, particularly in business schools. Then justice and wisdom, obviously we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. The case method of education which I use in my teaching is all about wisdom and building that kind of good judgement.

The thing that perhaps gets the least play in leadership education is this notion of temperance. In part, because temperance is probably seen almost as a weakness. It’s seen as a compromise of some sort. But actually, that’s not what temperance is at all. Temperance is an ability to know when to let go in a particular context or scenario.

If you think about some of the most tempered leaders over the course of the last few years, two names to me come to mind. One is Nelson Mandela. Mandela of course was a freedom fighter, and so forth. Had a fairly violent youth, and so forth. But when the moment came, when Mandela for instance becomes first president of democratic South Africa with universal suffrage, he could have made himself dictator for life. He could have made himself king. But he said, no, what was important was to create a process for South Africa to navigate what will be the next 100, 200 years, et cetera. That’s where he puts it.

That’s what we mean by temperance, is knowing when to pull the reins and when to let go. He has this quote that’s perhaps apocryphally attributed to him where he says, “Leaders must lead from ahead, but not too far ahead.” That’s another way of getting that… this notion.

Carbon Accounting

Geoff Tuff:

Des, if I may, I think I may steal the last question here because I recognize we’re probably running out of time. As I am wont to do on occasion, I may make it a somewhat complicated one. I think clearly, Karthik, you’ve met the profile of provocateur that we’re looking for. There’s lots of other things that you’ve done in life. I’m fascinated by your experience with greenhouse gas accounting and some of what you’ve been trying to do E-liability as a challenge to traditional norm around the accounting. I’m not asking you necessarily to go directly to that. Between the body of work that you have in your past or in front of you, the two-part question is what’s next? And what provocation would you like to leave our listeners with from this conversation?

Karthik Ramanna:

In terms of what’s next, the thing that I’m focusing my energies on is how do you align the interests of business in a market capitalist society with the decarbonization necessities that we have today. My diagnosis with why the climate movement has been relatively ineffective at addressing decarbonization is because it has seen decarbonization and it has framed decarbonization as a cost rather than a basis for competitive differentiation. Obviously, there are costs for decarbonization. But if the benefits of decarbonization cannot accrue to those who are better at it than those who are worse at it, then you don’t have an incentive in the market system to really fix it at scale.

If you don’t have a thriving economy with energy abundance, then we will very quickly plunge into even deeper, darker problems than those being produced by climate change. We’ve got to find a way to square that circle. Part of what I’ve been engaged in through the work of the E-liability Institute has been a system of carbon accounts that is technologically agnostic and ideologically neutral, that simply counts carbon as it moves through supply chains. So that companies can focus on reducing their emissions in their products and services, doing it in a way that is energy abundant and meets consumer demands, but getting rewarded for it.

The problem with our current carbon system is it’s like… imagine what would have happened if the Securities and Exchange Commission had said to companies, “Oh, you don’t know what your profits are this quarter? No problem. Just report the industry average and we’ll call it a day.” There’d be no incentive to compete. We’ve got to move away from that system and that’s part of the transformation that I seek to drive.

It’s hard to imagine this today, but 90 years ago, the term generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, didn’t exist in the English language. Every company that traded on the New York Stock Exchange made up its own definition of revenue, and asset, and liability, and all that kind of stuff. That was a huge problem. We created GAAP, it was a very good invention. Can we not do that now with this urgent challenge? But also, reward those who are really good at it. That’s the next problem I’m working on.

Geoff Tuff:

Lest it sound like a 90-degree turn from Age of Outrage, I’m actually hearing exactly the same themes. Stop the rhetoric that’s preventing us from making progress in driving sustainability and driving decarbonization, and actually get down to pragmatic solutions. I see the strong thread through all of that.

Karthik Ramanna:

Splendid. Thank you so much for having me.

Geoff Tuff:

Absolutely.

Des Dearlove:

The thread is tremendously strong, but we are out of time. I have to say huge thanks to our guest Karthik Ramanna, and to you for listening. This is The Provocateurs Podcast, and we’ve been Des Dearlove and Geoff Tuff. Please do join us again soon for another episode of Provocateurs. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please hit the button and share with your friends and colleagues.