Regenerative Business & Sustainability – Thinkers50

Driving Regenerative Growth: why we need a mindset shift

mtapscott — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:55:28 +0000

By Matt Gitsham, Director, Sustainability Impact Lab, Hult International Business School

For decades, economic success has been measured by one dominant metric: GDP growth. This conventional model prioritizes productivity, technology, and sales, aiming to maximize profit and investor returns. But while this approach has driven prosperity, it has also accelerated resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and climate instability – threatening the very systems we depend on.

Regenerative growth challenges this paradigm. It asks us to move beyond “doing less harm” toward creating net-positive impact – in other words, restoring ecosystems, improving soil health, and ensuring clean air and water for future generations.

This requires a fundamental shift in mindset: from growth at any cost to growth that actively heals and strengthens the planet and society. Leaders in particular need to rethink the goals and success measures they are aiming for, and then consider carefully how they play their leadership role. What signals are they sending through how they behave, the stories they share, the questions they ask? What can they do to encourage others around them to re-orient towards new regenerative success measures too?

Why do we want growth?

We talk about growth all the time, it’s held up as a good thing and something we need to be aiming for, but why?

Growing the economy means increasing the number of goods and services produced and consumed overall. Economic growth is seen as the main pathway to improving wellbeing – it theoretically means more income per person, and more jobs, which enable better access to food, housing, healthcare, education and technology, all of which are stepping stones to better quality of life. It also means more tax revenue for governments to invest in infrastructure, healthcare, education, and social security, similarly contributing to better quality of life.

Growing a business means increased revenues, profit, market share, customers, production capacity, employees, locations. Business growth is seen as a good thing because this means more return on investment for shareholders, more to invest in further growing the business, and more to share around through pay rises and bonuses. Businesses that are growing help grow economies, helping improve everyone’s quality of life.

What’s the problem with growth?

Growth can improve quality of life, but not necessarily. Because of what is counted and not counted, we can ‘grow’ but in the process hurt people in the workplace, supply chains and communities, and burn fossil fuels and cause pollution, driving climate change and biodiversity loss, all of which makes quality of life worse, not better. And growth doesn’t necessarily benefit everyone — the rich may get richer while others stay poor, seeing decline in quality of life.

In other words growth is not automatically good. What grows, how it grows, and who benefits really matters.

How is regenerative growth different to conventional growth?

Regenerative growth addresses these questions: what grows, how it grows, and who benefits.

Regenerative growth is squarely aimed at improving quality of life, creating value through activities that enhance and restore nature and communities, rather than harming them. It means leaving things better than how you found them.

This means growing some things but not others, using some means to achieve growth but not others, and paying attention to how the benefits of growth get shared.

It might mean, for example, growing wind and solar industries, but not oil and gas. It might mean growing food and health businesses that help improve nutrition outcomes, but not growing tobacco businesses.

The tables below highlight the differences between conventional growth and regenerative growth.

Conventional Economic Growth	vs Regenerative Economic Growth
Goal	Goal
GDP Growth.	Life getting healthier, fairer, and more resilient for people and the planet — now and for future generations.
Success Measures	Success Measures
Productivity Technology Skills Infrastructure Innovation Market openness Size of workforce Good governance	All conventional measures, plus: GHG emissions declining Biodiversity gain Soil health Clean air and water Falling poverty & inequality Access to nutritious food, water, housing Life expectancy Educational attainment Improvements in physical and mental health

Conventional Business Growth	vs Regenerative Business Growth
Goal	Goal
Increase profit and maximise return on investment to investors.	Achieve a net positive impact on the environmental, social, and economic systems in which the business operates.
Success Measures	Success Measures
Increasing sales New customers Innovation Efficiency Leadership & culture	All conventional measures, plus: Are we removing more carbon than we emit? Are we restoring habitats? What % of materials are circular (reused, recycled, biodegradable)? Are we replenishing more water than we use? Are we improving soil health? Measures around living wage, job security, wellbeing, training and career pathways Improving human rights in value chains Who benefits from profits generated, how fairly they are shared?

So how do we drive regenerative growth? What do we need to do more of? What do we need to stop doing?

The first thing we need to do is change the measure of success we’re aiming for. Rather than the success measure being just growing the number of goods and services produced and consumed in an economy overall, or profits and return on investment to shareholders in a business, we need a wider set of success measures that tell us whether we are improving quality of life, communities and the environment in the ways we are growing.

A regenerative economy doesn’t just ask “Did GDP go up?” — it asks: “Is life getting healthier, fairer, and more resilient for people and the planet — now and for future generations?” This means adding measures that tell us if ecosystems are regenerating, and whether poverty and inequality are falling.

So for a business, it’s not just “Did we make more profit?” — it’s “Did we make life healthier and systems stronger?” Depending on your sector, this would mean adding measures of business success like: are we removing more carbon than we emit? Are we restoring habitats? What % of materials are circular (reused, recycled, biodegradable)? Are we replenishing more water than we use? Are we improving soil health? It would also include measures around living wage, job security, wellbeing, training and career pathways, improving human rights in supply chains, and around who benefits from profits generated, and how fairly they are shared.

A regenerative food company, for example, might measure success not just by profit margins, but by biodiversity and soil health improvements, fair prices and wages across its supply chain, improved nutritional outcomes, and eliminating food waste.

You could say the UN Sustainable Development Goals are a good starting point for thinking about a framework of goals to be aiming for if seeking to grow regeneratively.

With this wider definition of success, we would want to be pursuing many of the same activities as we would for conventional growth, but always asking the question, would this activity help us achieve our wider success measure, or set us back?

For example, to increase economic growth we would still want to invest in infrastructure, but in a way that led to reducing and removing carbon, and increasing biodiversity, rather than in a way that would lead to increased carbon emissions and less biodiversity.

To grow a business regeneratively, we would still for example be looking to grow customers and grow sales, but perhaps through innovating to bring to market new products and services that help customers be regenerative. We would not want to grow sales through products and services that lead to customers emitting more carbon, or exploiting more workers, or harming health. When it comes to investing in marketing, we might be thinking about how we help encourage shifts to more regenerative lifestyles. When it comes to investing in people, we would be investing in paying a living wage, improving physical and mental health, and improving human rights for workers across our supply chains.

What do business leaders need to do to drive regenerative growth?

For those in leadership roles, driving regenerative growth starts with thinking differently about what your job is and what counts as success. Your own personal success in your role is defined in terms of the contribution you have enabled to improving quality of life and enhancing ecosystems rather than simply growing profit.

From my experience talking with business leaders, this shift in thinking leads to a range of leadership activities in the business to drive regenerative growth, starting with helping open a conversation and create space for building shared understanding about regenerative approaches within the business and what should be approached differently.

This means a lot of listening and humility, and it also means developing the skills for making the case for a different approach. It means reshaping how the business articulates its purpose, vision, and strategy. It means using a different set of tools to guide decision-making. It means recasting success measures within the business, and thinking about what people get encouraged to achieve, and are rewarded and penalised for. And it means leading by example – how are you seen to prioritise regenerative outcomes in the decisions you make?

It also means playing an advocacy role in the wider ecosystem around the business. How can you partner with customers, suppliers, competitors and others through multi-stakeholder initiatives to drive regenerative approaches across whole industry sectors? How can you advocate to help build consensus around shifting to government policies that support regenerative economic growth?

The call for a new growth paradigm

Our models for driving conventional growth were built to fix the problems of a different era. Today, we need regenerative growth, and this needs a different approach from business leaders. As professionals and leaders, we need to ask ourselves: Am I leaving people, places, and ecosystems better than I found them?

Matt Gitsham is the director of the Sustainability Impact Lab at Hult International Business School. His research specialises in business and sustainable development, human rights, and organisational change. Matt is a member of the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2021.

London’s Circular Paradox: Why Startups Can’t Plug In

mtapscott — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:53:14 +0000

London’s Circular Paradox:
Why Startups Can’t Plug In

By Nikhilesh Sinha and Satrupa Ghosh

In 2024, we experienced an average temperature 1.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels, which exceeds the terms in the Paris Agreement. Environmental degradation accelerated across every measurable axis, and we are depleting resources faster than they regenerate, concentrating waste in landfills and oceans whilst extracting virgin materials at an unsustainable rate.

Business as usual with the linear take-make-waste economy is a hazard to our collective health and the future of the planet. We need to rethink how we produce and consume. And fast. With many national governments stepping back from global sustainability commitments, and the richest corporations going all-in in the AI race, it may be up to cities and smaller businesses to drive the change. The question is, can they work together?

Cities are where most of us live, work and create, generating four-fifths of global GDP but also 70 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Through the centuries, they have fostered institutional innovation, incubating modern finance, as well as universities and public infrastructure. The contemporary challenge is circular transition – engineering a closed loop between production and consumption to eliminate waste.

Some cities are taking this seriously. San Francisco has committed to eliminating municipal waste by 2020, Copenhagen is targeting 60 per cent recycling by 2030, and Amsterdam plans full circularity by 2050. But this shift isn’t limited to the global North. Bogotá, Taipei, Singapore, Manila, and Nairobi are all pursuing ambitious circular economy strategies, suggesting urban sustainability is becoming a global priority.

London was rated the world’s most circular city in 2024, with a plan to hit net zero targets a full decade before the rest of the UK. The city’s ambitions involve rethinking how products are designed, produced and used. Along with food, plastics, electricals and the built environment, the City’s Circular Routemap has committed to transforming the textile sector. One of the fashion capitals of the world, London’s love affair with fashion comes at a steep cost. Its textile consumption produces over 2 million tonnes of greenhouse gas annually, amounting to about 17 per cent of all emissions linked to the consumption of goods within the city.

In response, a new generation of circular entrepreneurs have picked up the gauntlet, challenging the fast fashion model that offers profits at the cost of planet. Born-circular fashion businesses from clothing swap platforms and repair services, to rental models that make designer wear accessible without ownership, embody the circular principles London champions: keeping materials in use, designing out waste, and regenerating natural systems. While legacy brands have launched circular initiatives like Patagonia’s Worn Wear, Levi’s SecondHand, and Burberry’s ReBurberry, these programmes represent a fraction of their overall revenue and operations.

The Disconnect

Circular businesses in London should logically piggyback on the city’s circular initiatives to enhance their circularity and scale. Yet most local circular startups operate in silos, building parallel networks rather than seamlessly connecting with London’s circular systems. The city’s ambitious circular economy plans appear to be blind to the synergies that could be leveraged through coordination with and incorporation of enterprise-level circular flows.

Why is this, and how can we bridge the divide between the circular business and the city? The trouble is that circularity at the city and enterprise scales is not synonymous. Most circular economy thinking was developed for businesses, not cities. Influential frameworks like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s ReSOLVE principles focus on what individual companies can do: optimise their operations, close loops between suppliers and consumers, and design out waste within their supply chains.

These work well at the enterprise level, but cities operate fundamentally differently. Circular businesses create closed loops within their operations, whereas circular cities need to optimise across entire urban ecosystems. The urban circular loop is more complex, coordinating across many different functions and actors in ways that individual enterprises need not.

One way to think about this is to imagine the city as a giant organism, with all of the city systems resembling metabolic flows, pulling in resources, transforming and distributing them throughout the city. In a circular metabolism, the flows would constitute closed loops, like blood vessels supplying oxygenated blood, and then looping back to the lungs for replenishment.

For this to work, we need more “connective tissue” of shared infrastructure, coordinated policies, and governance frameworks that allow individual innovations to plug into wider urban resource flows. A repair shop can’t create circular impact without a collection infrastructure to gather materials or sorting facilities to process them. A rental platform multiplies its impact when connected to local repair services and textile recyclers who supply designers with regenerated materials.

The Case Studies

To understand the blockages in London’s metabolic flows, we looked at three circular fashion startups, each pioneering a different circular strategy: Closwap operates a peer-to-peer clothing swap platform through a digital marketplace and community events. Circular Way and Stilbaar have created what they call “the world’s first fully circular fashion store,” buying back all of the clothes sold and either refurbishing them or sending them to textile-to-textile recyclers like Evrnu or Circ. HURR offers a full-stack rental solution, facilitating both peer-to-peer rentals and providing turnkey enterprise solutions for brands like Selfridges, and has reportedly surpassed £100 million in fashion rentals since launching in 2019.

Closwap’s gamified platform reduces CO2 emissions by approximately half compared to buying new, while matching “the three Ps of fast fashion: Price, Practicality, and Pace,” as co-founder Maria Remy puts it. Circular Way uses chip technology to track each garment’s lifecycle, enabling customers to transfer the market value of end-of-use garments toward new purchases – what CEO John Atcheson calls a “frictionless” circular shopping experience. HURR’s hybrid model handles the logistical complexity of returns, cleaning, repairs, and customer support. These businesses make circular fashion workable in practice, recovering value, organizing logistics and tracking garments through successive uses.

Yet despite operating in the world’s top-ranked circular city, all three share the troubling reality of scale and impact. Closwap’s community swaps remain neighbourhood-level events. Circular Way contends with borough-level regulatory variations and fragmented infrastructure. HURR operates outside Extended Producer Responsibility frameworks, with no targeted incentives or tailored regulations for rental models.

The city offers patchy support through initiatives such as the Pan-London Textiles Action Plan, the annual London Repair Week engaging 40 organizations, and grants from the Mayor’s office. But as Remy told us, “We can prototype a feature in weeks, but securing city support for a borough-wide collection pilot takes years.” Meanwhile, Fashion Director Sandrine Kockum’s goal to “buy back 100% of the clothes we sell” confronts a reality where there’s no infrastructure connecting repair businesses to collection systems to textile recyclers. And Victoria Prew’s vision to reinvent ownership “one rental at a time” scales primarily in affluent, well-connected neighbourhoods because that’s where courier infrastructure and cleaning services cluster.

Blockages in the circular flow

Ambitious as they are, for a city that amasses 82,100 tons of second-hand clothing annually, these startups handle only a fraction of its annual textile flows. Two-thirds of the used clothing collected is ultimately exported overseas, resulting in an opportunity loss where materials that could generate local value instead enter global waste streams. This pattern reflects three structural misalignments between entrepreneurial operations and urban governance, emblematic of the gap between micro-innovation and macro-system inertia.

Temporal Misalignment: Circular enterprises operate on compressed timeframes of quarterly sprints, weekly inventory adjustments, and 24-hour delivery cycles. This tempo mirrors fast-fashion convenience while building sustainable alternatives. London operates on five-year strategic plans, annual budgets, and multi-year waste contracts. This cadence clash forces startups to maintain independent logistics rather than integrate with municipal systems.

Infrastructural Disparities: Startups build their own parallel mini-system because standardised collection points, shared sorting facilities, and coordinated repair hubs don’t exist across London’s 32 boroughs. Services concentrate in affluent, well-connected neighbourhoods, reinforcing socioeconomic disparities.

Governance Gaps: Despite symbolic support, these businesses navigate systems designed for linear consumption. UK VAT applies a 20% rate to repairs, making fixes more expensive than replacements. Extended Producer Responsibility focuses on manufacturers, not circular intermediaries. HURR operates outside EPR frameworks. Closwap’s £5 event tickets can’t offset unsupported costs. Circular Way faces different regulations in each borough, with no repair-specific training programs available.

These divergences create “micro-metabolisms” or circular systems adjacent to rather than integrated with urban metabolism. If the world’s leading circular city can’t bridge this gap, it signals fundamental challenges for circular transitions everywhere.

What Needs to Happen

The circular startups we spoke with show what is possible at the level of individual garments and users. They connect design, use, repair and recovery in ways that echo a functioning metabolism. But they also operate within systems whose scale and tempo were never designed for the small, fast loops these models rely on.

That misalignment limits how far circular startups can push without support. For now, the most practical route for entrepreneurs is to build models that align with infrastructure that does exist: courier networks, community repair groups, borough-level pilots, and textile recyclers design their operations so they can plug into shared systems as they develop. That means treating integration not as a final step once scale is reached, but as a design principle from the outset.

For cities, declaring circular ambitions isn’t enough. What circular cities such as Copenhagen and Amsterdam are doing differently is that they’re not just setting emissions targets. They’re redesigning urban material flows. Copenhagen’s waste ambition isn’t about disposal reduction; it’s about rethinking what “waste” means in the system. That’s metabolic redesign, not just greening the existing model. London’s circular kudos masks a fundamental struggle to build the enabling infrastructure emerging circular businesses need. This means creating shared physical systems, standardised infrastructure across all boroughs, sorting facilities accessible to multiple businesses, resources and repair hubs integrated with transit networks.

The opportunity is substantial. Along with the health benefits of lowering carbon emissions and mitigating the loss of productive land, the World Economic Forum estimates a $1 trillion global annual benefit from circular transition. Localised material loops reduce transportation costs, provide predictable feedstock for manufacturers, generate employment in repair and recovery, and insulate cities from volatile global supply chains. For businesses, integration means access to reliable materials, shared logistics networks, and regulatory clarity. The question isn’t whether circular cities are viable. It’s whether we build the connective tissue quickly enough to capture the value.

Nikhilesh Sinha is Professor of Economics & Finance and Chair of Research Ethics at Hult International Business School. His research in institutional economics, political economy, and urban development has influenced housing policy in India and contributes to debates on circular economy transitions and technology’s impact on governance.

Dr Satrupa Ghosh is Professor of Innovation, Marketing and Entrepreneurship at Hult International Business School. Her research examines venture ecosystems, open innovation models, corporate startup value creation, and sustainability and circularity in regional contexts. She brings a scholar-practitioner perspective, with 20 years’ experience in venture capital and marketing.

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Skeptical Intelligence: Disciplined Doubt for AI-Powered Innovation

mtapscott — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:48:46 +0000

by Ted Ladd and Priyanka Shrivastava, Hult International Business School

Walk into any boardroom, strategy offsite, or investor summit and you’ll hear the same chorus: artificial intelligence will transform everything. Strategy, operations, accounting, hiring: AI is often portrayed simultaneously as the vehicle and the propellant for organisational transformation.

Yet beneath the hype sits a simpler, harder truth: when the volume of machine-generated “insight” explodes, the scarcest resource in a company shifts from data to disciplined doubt. The ability to question well – to identify root problems, probe assumptions, test claims, and use AI as an assistant, not a replacement – is fast becoming a professional superpower. We call this emerging capability Skeptical Intelligence – the disciplined art of questioning well.

Even though Skeptical Intelligence sounds like a rebrand of “critical thinking,” it is not. Since its introduction by Plato in 399 BCE and John Dewey’s popularization of the term in the 1930s, critical thinking has sprawled to include not just intellectual analysis but also personal self-reflection and emotional control. It has been used as a process, a single behaviour, a collection of multiple behaviours, a mindset, a disposition, and an instinct. The term is now so overextended as to be unhelpful.

Skeptical Intelligence is a fourth pillar of capability alongside IQ, Emotional Intelligence (EI), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). IQ gave us a way to measure “raw” intelligence. EI, and its measurement tool, the Emotion Quotient (EQ), helped us take emotions seriously as inputs to judgment and performance. AI purports to put all existing information into the hands of every person. But none of these three, on its own, equips leaders to find the optimal solution to a problem. Skeptical Intelligence fills that gap.

How IQ and EQ Got Us Here – and Where They Fall Short

For decades, IQ was the yardstick to measure smartness. It predicts academic performance and certain forms of professional success. That correlation still matters in business settings. Intellectual limitations cannot always be overcome by training or experience. People with high IQ perform well for well-specified problems with clean feedback loops and single solutions, not the murky dilemmas and trade-offs that leaders face today.

EQ arrived as a necessary corrective. It reframed emotions as useful input rather than interference. Leaders with high EQ listen better, regulate their own impulses, direct other people emotions, and build trustful teams. All of these are essential. Yet the managerial culture that evolved around EQ sometimes drifted toward comfort over challenge: satisfying meetings, thin critique, polite acceptance of flawed information for the sake of improved relationships. These traits may even be counterproductive in opaque, complex circumstances. AI is heralded as a cure, but it may be the cause.

The result is a capability gap. Highly intelligent, emotionally skilled executives are still focusing on dashboards and forecasts that deserve a cross-examination. EQ without skepticism can make smart people very agreeable about very shaky claims. Thus, while IQ and EQ remain valuable, neither equips leaders to interrogate the increasingly opaque decisions made by intelligent systems.

Why Do We Need a Fourth Pillar Now: AI

AI systems now write, recommend, price, forecast, rank, allocate, and deny at industrial scale. They are also fallible in systemic ways: biased training data, spurious correlations, brittle generalization, seductive visualizations, and confident responses that seem certain but are not, in fact, accurate. None of this makes AI useless. Yet AI is consistently and systematically prone to errors that require human discernment.

As AI improves, it also gets better at responding with conviction. Concrete language, declarative sentences, assertive but misused terms like “thinking” and “reasoning” all lull even disciplined operators into premature trust. When time pressure and social validation (“the model says…”) are added, the conditions are ripe for cognitive complacency.

Recent, well-documented AI failures have the same ingredients: historical bias baked into training data, opaque features, and leaders who assumed that “data-driven” equals “well-founded.” The fix is not to automatically reject or exile AI from critical decisions. As Kahneman (2011) suggests, leaders must learn to distinguish speed from haste – moving quickly while introducing structured friction at critical junctures.

Those seeking novel ideas will be disappointed. Structurally, AI reports the average answer to any question based on its historical data. Everyone asking AI for an innovation in a particular domain will receive the same answer. Unless… Unless you use AI to question and verify your own ideas.

Skeptical Intelligence (SI) is the capacity to interrogate claims with disciplined curiosity and intellectual humility. It is not reflexive contrarianism. It is not cynicism dressed up as rigor. It is a practical operating system for decision-makers who want the upside of AI without sleepwalking into the downside. SI operationalizes the often loosely applied concept of critical thinking into a measurable, teachable framework.

A few commentators have suggested that, because AI is (or at least seems) better at data collection, analysis, and delivery than most professionals, future leaders should focus on developing their EQ skills because, as yet, AI cannot connect emotionally to people. While EQ and SI can and should coexist in each person and team, our research intentionally positions SI as entirely distinct from EQ.

A Working Definition

Skeptical Intelligence is a repeatable way of thinking that combines four habits:

Curiosity with an edge – a deliberate thoughtful provocation to ask “what would change my mind?” instead of “how do I prove I’m right?”
Epistemic humility – an accurate sense of what you (and your models) know and do not know.
Evidence discipline – an ability to trace a claim to its data, method, and assumptions.
Counterfactual imagination – a habit of generating plausible alternatives and testing the original claim against them.

If IQ helps you solve the puzzle and EQ helps you read the room, Skeptical Intelligence helps you validate that you’re solving the right problem with the right solution based on the right data. It is not instinctive, even with training, because instincts are more prone to human bias. It is the intentional rejection of one’s instinct in order to engage a more disciplined approach.

Based on survey data from 401 participants across six industries, our statistical analysis revealed two core elements of SI: the ability to question new information and the ability to then verify this information within a specified context. We also validated the first iteration of a measurement scale, called the Skeptical Quotient (SQ), that people can use to assess their own abilities.

Our initial findings show that men are more likely to question and women are more likely to verify. When SI and EQ were compared through regression analysis, SI emerged as a stronger predictor of performance, while EQ’s effect became statistically insignificant.

In plain language, SI is more important for people using AI effectively. This does not invalidate EQ. It just shows that EQ is useful in collaborative teams, whereas SI is crucial for individual performance.

Asking questions with nuanced information in complex scenarios may result in rejecting your own initial ideas. In short, you were wrong. If your sense of your own worth is fragile, this conclusion can be so painful that you will not even risk asking the question. This aligns with prior findings linking psychological safety and intellectual humility to improved reasoning (Niemiec & Ryan, 2009: Leary et al, 2017) .

The Skeptic’s Playbook

Critical-thinking scholars have mapped this terrain for decades. We don’t need to reinvent the canon; we need to refit it for an algorithmic world. Here’s a practical short-list leaders can use without a philosophy degree to generate better answers. And many of these steps use AI in a controlled way.

Clarify the problem. AI engines optimize for attention because the most accessible metric they have is the user’s repeated use of the AI tool. This is not necessarily nefarious, but it can descend into self-reinforcing bias toward user affirmation.
Surface and test assumptions. What must be true about the data, the context, and the scope for an AI response to hold? Where is AI consistently limited or biased? AI can point out some of these assumptions and can propose ways to test them, but AI cannot actually run experiments.
Spot alternative causes. Are there existing theories that might arrive at a different conclusion from the same data? AI can help identify and explain these adjacent fields of inquiry, but only if you ask.
Consider counter-arguments. Can you, even with the help of AI, disprove AI’s initial response?
Make your own decision. Do not outsource intellectual rigor to AI. Instead, treat it as an assistant with potentially useful observations that can feed into your human filter for new information.

None of these steps requires you to code. None expects formal training in logic. However, all of them require you to keep your hands on the wheel. Rather, they require conceptual clarity, structured reasoning, and a willingness to challenge assumptions.

How to Insert Skeptical Intelligence into a Team

Skeptical Intelligence scales when it’s institutional, not heroic. Four moves help:

Train beyond compliance. Ditch generic “AI ethics” lectures for scenario workshops that ask teams to pressure-test real models and real dashboards under shifting conditions. Force them to identify the potential sources of human and AI bias in their methods. Make teams defend both the recommendation and the route to it.
Hire for humility. Reward candidates who can say “I don’t know yet” and then show how they’d find out. Curiosity without swagger is a stronger predictor of sound model governance than tool fluency alone.
Reward constructive dissent. Bake “thoughtful disagreement” into rituals and performance reviews. Assign a rotating Red Team to every major decision whose explicit, celebrated role is to attempt to (respectfully) disprove a recommendation.
Celebrate often. Not everyone should get a trophy, but small achievements – like asking a thoughtful question or admitting uncertainty – deserve small public praise from managers and peers. This is where EQ can foster SI.

Some will say, “We already ask hard questions.” Often, that means we ask familiar questions. Skeptical Intelligence formalizes the unfamiliar ones: the questions that probe the scaffolding of a claim rather than its convenience to our plan. It forces rigor before momentum hardens into commitment. Ultimately, embedding SI in organisational culture requires visible modelling by senior leaders – demonstrating that asking better questions is not dissent but diligence.

The Payoff: Innovation and Productivity

Our research found a strong positive relationship between people who have the ability to employ Skeptical Intelligence with their ability to use AI to generate more and better innovative ideas and to use AI for other tasks more productively.

History will remember early AI leadership in two groups. One waved models and decisions through because they “looked right” and delivered a mix of spectacular wins (great!) and avoidable disasters (boo!). The other built muscle around interrogation – fast, repeatable, teachable – so that they could achieve more upside with fewer blind-side hits. This latter group also prepared for new generations of AI and other decision-making tools and types of information more innovatively and productively.

IQ still matters. EQ still matters. But the scarce executive asset in a world of plausible-sounding AI outputs is Skeptical Intelligence – the disciplined, curiosity-driven, humility-infused ability to demand better questions and resist easy answers. SI doesn’t make you slower. It makes you surer about when to go fast.

Ted Ladd is a Professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the Hult International Business School and Instructor of Platform Entrepreneurship at Harvard University, where he focuses on techniques and mindsets for designing and testing AI-powered multi-sided platforms. His most recent book, Innovating with Impact, was published by The Economist

Priyanka Shrivastava is Professor of Marketing and Analytics and Associate Dean, DBA, at Hult International Business School. She is a passionate teacher and mentor, known for her experiential, data-driven approach. Her research interests include AI and sustainability, customer experience, and integrating yoga and mindfulness into leadership and research practice.

Leading Life With Life: A Regenerative Approach to Leadership

mtapscott — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 16:21:29 +0000

How small, life-respecting choices in leadership can renew people, culture, and the systems we work in.leadership

This article is inspired by Thinkers50’s 2025 theme of Regeneration – a theme that asks leaders a profoundly simple question; “What if leadership wasn’t about squeezing more out of people, but about restoring life back into the system?”

While many conversations about regeneration focus on strategy, innovation, or the planet, I want to take the idea somewhere more intimate: into the everyday moments of leadership – how we speak, listen, decide, and coach.

Because regeneration doesn’t only happen in boardrooms or climate pledges. It also happens in micro-moments, in the small choices leaders make to replenish rather than deplete.

A New Way of Seeing Leadership

For years, leadership has resembled running a machine: keep the gears turning, push harder, do more with less. But organisations are not machines. They are living systems, made up of human nervous systems – brains, hearts, emotions, fears, hopes.

When we forget this, burnout becomes normal. When we remember it, regeneration becomes possible. And so a different question emerges, “Are we returning more energy to our people than we take? Or quietly draining the system?

From Sustainability to Renewal

Sustainability is like slowing down a leak in a water tank. Regeneration is turning on a fresh stream. It is less like recycling, and more like a forest restoring itself after a wildfire.

The phoenix metaphor from Harry Potter captures it perfectly: what burns down can rise stronger, if conditions allow it.

In leadership, those “conditions” come from simple human foundations: restorative sleep, a healthier relationship to stress, movement, nutrition, and the sense of belonging that comes from meaningful connection. These are not soft extras; they are the biological fuel of clarity, resilience, and wise decision-making.

The Science Behind Renewal

When leaders coach well, something remarkable happens inside the brain:

The amygdala settles, easing fear’s grip.
The prefrontal cortex brightens, making thinking clearer and more courageous.
The dopamine pathways awaken, bringing back motivation and hope.

This is why I often say: “The right coaching conversation doesn’t push – it replenishes.”

Coaching, when done well, doesn’t fix people. It helps them remember their own power.

Regeneration at Three Levels

A single regenerative conversation can ripple outward, first within the individual, then across relationships, and eventually through the entire culture.

At the self-level, a person rediscovers calm and confidence:
“I didn’t realize I had options.”

At the relational level, trust grows and the air becomes lighter:
“We’re talking more openly without fear.”

At the systemic level, teams stop waiting for orders and start finding solutions:
“We’re beginning to ask the right questions, not just execute.”

This is regeneration in action, quiet, organic, contagious.

Why Leaders Struggle to Regenerate Themselves

If regeneration is so natural, why is it so difficult? Because many leaders were raised in cultures that value speed over sense, control over connection, and productivity over presence. Rest feels suspicious. Reflection feels indulgent. Self-care feels selfish.

But one truth remains: a depleted leader cannot create a thriving system. Regeneration begins at the root with the leader’s inner rhythm. Leaders who operate in a depleted state make poorer decisions, create reactive cultures, and unintentionally drain team performance. Regeneration is therefore not a wellness aspiration; it is a business necessity grounded in the fundamentals of the Five Pillars. Adequate sleep protects strategic judgement. A constructive stress mindset reduces emotional volatility. Regular movement improves cognitive stamina. Stable nutrition sustains energy throughout long decision cycles. And strong social connection lowers burnout risk and strengthens collaboration.

Regeneration in Practice

You can see this philosophy alive in organisations like Patagonia, Google, and Unilever – companies that treat human energy and planetary health not as side notes but as strategic foundations.

They create environments where creativity doesn’t struggle for oxygen, where rest is part of performance, and where people leave stronger than they arrived. When leaders design such conditions, they become more than managers. They become quiet stewards of human and planetary renewal.

And this is where regeneration moves from concept to culture and from a mindset to the system itself.

Meetings, for example, can become small rituals of renewal. Opening with a simple Energy Check-In allows everyone to arrive as humans before diving into tasks. Closing with a brief Reflection Minute or a single expression of gratitude helps the nervous system end the meeting in coherence rather than tension.
Leaders can also nourish the system through storytelling. When teams share “Moments of Renewal” – a brave conversation, a regained clarity, a repaired relationship – it reinforces the kind of life-giving energy the system wants more of. These stories become the compost from which the next cycle of growth emerges.
Coaching shifts tone, too. Instead of beginning with “What’s the problem?” leaders ask,
“What energized you this week?”
“What’s one small step forward you’re proud of?”
Such gentle reframing turns ordinary conversations into regenerative ones, light touches that replenish instead of drain.
Many organisations appoint Regenerative Champions, not as a committee, but as everyday carriers of good energy. People who model renewal in how they speak, make decisions, and interact.
And if regeneration is to become real, we must measure life, not just work – things like energy, trust, meaning, and connection. These are some of the vital signs of a living organisation.

Because performance without vitality is extraction. Vitality with performance, that is regeneration.

Leading Life with Life

Thinkers50’s theme this year reminds us that regeneration is not just an environmental philosophy. It is a leadership imperative. It is the everyday choice to return more energy than we take. To design workplaces where people don’t merely cope, they come alive.

It begins with the smallest system we each lead; ourselves, then our teams and then the culture shaped in every interaction.

And perhaps, if enough leaders choose to lead this way – the world. Big change doesn’t begin with a strategy. It begins with a leader who decides, in one quiet moment, to lead life with life.

Atchara Juicharern, PhD is an internationally recognised leadership strategist, ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC), and CEO of AcComm Group. Honored as the #1 Coach in Asia by the Thinkers50 Marshall Goldsmith Coaching & Mentoring Award and named among the Coaches50, she is known for advancing practical, human-centered leadership across Asia.

With two decades of experience developing executives and building coaching cultures, Atchara integrates neuroscience, systems thinking, and modern leadership practices to help organisations create environments where people and possibilities can thrive. Her work centers on one belief: leaders don’t just drive results – they shape the rhythm of life inside the system.

The Provocateurs Episode 37 | Anke Hampel: Recorded Live at Climate Week New York

mtapscott — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 15:45:17 +0000

Play Video about Provocateurs Episode #37 with Anke Hampel

Thinkers50 in collaboration with Deloitte presents:

The Provocateurs:

podcast series

EPISODE 37

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Anke Hampel: Recorded Live at Climate Week New York

Read the transcript

Anke Hampel is chief sustainability officer at ABB, a global technology leader in electrification and automation based in Zurich, and a member of the board of directors of ABB Germany. With a background in finance, procurement, supply chain, and innovation management in the consumer goods and packaging industry, Anke is driven by a mission to unite profit with purpose. Sustainability, she contends, is a business imperative, not a fluffy add-on. Moreover, sustainability is not the preserve of seasoned experts; everyone can and should play a role.

In this special episode of the Provocateurs podcast recorded live at Climate Week New York, Anke presents the business case for sustainability and shares her learnings:

Integrate sustainability into strategy: align your entire portfolio to your purpose by embedding sustainability targets directly into financial planning.
Measure what matters: apply KPI’s to every phase of the product lifecycle to track circularity.
Collaborate actively: as resources decline, close partnerships across your ecosystem are vital – or you risk losing your place in the supply chain.
Manage climate risk: what cannot be insured cannot be financed – and data shows that climate-related risks are increasingly uninsurable.

Hear more from Anke on why now is the critical time to make a strategic decision: Flee, Freeze, or Fast Forward.

This podcast is part of an ongoing series of interviews with executives. The executives’ participation in this podcast are solely for educational purposes based on their knowledge of the subject and the views expressed by them are solely their own. This podcast should not be deemed or construed to be for the purpose of soliciting business for any of the companies mentioned, nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse the services or products provided by these companies.

Hosts:

Des Dearlove

Co-founder, Thinkers50

Geoff Tuff

Global Sustainability Leader for Energy and Industrials, Deloitte

LISTEN NOW ON

Inspired by the book Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws; Wiley, 2021.

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EPISODE 37

Podcast Transcript

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.

The Provocateurs Episode 36 | Selassie Atadika: Leading Through Deliciousness

mtapscott — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 07:45:16 +0000

Play Video about Selassie Atadika: Leading Through Deliciousness | The Provocateurs Podcast

Thinkers50 in collaboration with Deloitte presents:

The Provocateurs:

podcast series

EPISODE 36

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Selassie Atadika: Leading Through Deliciousness

Read the transcript

Award-winning chef, chocolatier, and founder of Midunu, Selassie Atadika is a Time 2025 Earth Award honoree and Yale’s inaugural Global Table Fellow. In this compelling episode of Provocateurs, Selassie demonstrates how intentional food choices can reshape entire systems.

Food is more than just sustenance, she contends, it’s a powerful tool for transformation, touching every aspect of our lives from economics to environmental policy, health, and culture. Drawing from her experiences across 44 African countries, Selassie’s philosophy of “new African cuisine” – where culture, community, and cuisine intersect with environment, sustainability, and economy – offers profound lessons for addressing global food system challenges, while celebrating local traditions and creating economic opportunities for smallholder farmers.

Discover more about the innovative business model of Midunu – a nomadic dining concept that combines research, education, and culinary experiences – and how Selassie is “leading through deliciousness” to create new possibilities for sustainable agriculture, preserve cultural heritage, and protect the environment around us.

Hosts:

Stuart Crainer

Co-founder, Thinkers50

Steve Goldbach

US Sustainability Practice Leader, Deloitte

LISTEN NOW ON

Inspired by the book Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws; Wiley, 2021.

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EPISODE 36

Podcast Transcript

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.

Feminist Leadership as Regenerative Leadership: Living in the Tensions

mtapscott — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 21:29:35 +0000

by Dr. Deborah Bayntun-Lees

In an era of exhaustion and complexity, sustainability is no longer enough, leadership must become regenerative. Feminist leadership offers a powerful model that restores energy and capacity through cycles of care, accountability, and renewal. Rooted in relational ethics and inspired by natural ecosystems, it reimagines how organisations can give back more than they take, from people, communities, and the planet.

Feminist leadership embodies regenerative principles by replenishing people, relationships, and systems. It thrives not by avoiding tension but by holding space for contradictions – care and accountability, hope and reality, closeness and boundaries. Far from being “soft,” trauma-informed and relational leadership demands emotional discipline, ethical courage, and structural intention, positioning it as a model for leaders who wish to navigate today’s challenges with resilience and depth.

Why Feminist Leadership Matters Now

We are living through an age of depletion. Leaders, teams, and communities alike are worn down by constant crisis, complexity, and change. Too many organisations cling to sustainability as their goal – maintaining the status quo and preventing further harm. But in times of exhaustion and fracture, maintenance is not enough. We need leadership that restores, renews, and regenerates.

This is where feminist leadership offers a radical alternative. It draws on the wisdom of care, the discipline of accountability, and the courage to live inside contradictions. It shows us that regeneration is not only about protecting ecosystems – it is about cultivating human flourishing within our workplaces.

Regeneration as Leadership in Action

Sustainability maintains; regeneration replenishes. Like natural ecosystems, regenerative leadership thrives on cycles of renewal, reciprocity, and transformation. It gives back more than it takes. Researchers Amy Bradley and Katherine Semler have argued that organisations can only ever be as sustainable as the people who inhabit them. If our people are depleted, our systems cannot thrive.

Feminist leadership offers precisely this regenerative orientation. In my work with Rising Sun Domestic Violence and Abuse Service, a UK feminist, trauma-informed charity where leadership is shaped by both survivor experience and allyship, leadership is not a theory but a lived practice. Leaders and staff often carry personal histories of trauma, which makes care not an optional extra but the very bedrock of trust, safety, and performance.

Regeneration here means compassion with discipline: restoring emotional energy, balancing competing demands, and renewing collective capacity through reflection and courageous decision-making. It is a way of leading that prevents burnout by weaving boundaries into care, cycles of rest into productivity, and accountability into hope.

Living in the Feminist Double Bind

Boundaries as a Form of Care

Perhaps the most powerful insight emerging from Rising Sun’s leadership stories is this: boundaries are acts of care. In trauma-informed settings, closeness often develops through shared experience, but trust can be both hard-won and fragile. Without boundaries, care can blur into over-responsibility, and empathy can obscure accountability, increasing the risk of burnout.

One example involved a colleague who was supported for many months through shared survivor experience, where both they and some leaders carried lived experience of trauma, creating a deep sense of empathy, solidarity, and understanding. This connection allowed flexibility and care, but it also blurred the line between support and accountability. When change did not come and the team’s wellbeing was at risk, leaders made the difficult choice to initiate formal processes and support their transition out. This was not compassion failing but compassion with discipline – regeneration through boundary-setting.

The Compassion-Accountability Matrix

The Compassion-Accountability Matrix (see Figure 1) helps to illuminate this tension. When compassion is high but accountability is low, leaders can drift into indulgence or “rescue” behaviours. When accountability is emphasised without compassion, fear-driven cultures take hold. Neglect occurs when both are absent. Regenerative leadership lies in the quadrant where compassion and accountability are held together – care with boundaries, empathy with expectations. This framing makes clear that boundaries are not the opposite of compassion but its partner, enabling both individuals and systems to thrive.

Figure 1: The Compassion-Accountability Matrix

Hope, Grounded in Accountability

Hope is at the heart of Rising Sun’s identity. Staff described the organisation as a “hope merchant” – offering a kind of “unique medicine beyond words” to survivors and colleagues alike. Yet the leadership team recognises that hope without accountability can harm.

As one leader noted:

“Hope alone is not enough. We have to put things in place to make it happen.”

Regenerative leadership turns hope into strategy, pairing belief with structure, emotional support with measurable plans, optimism with honest reviews.

Closeness and Boundaries in a Trauma-Informed Culture

The tension between closeness and boundaries is especially poignant in trauma-informed teams. Shared lived experience builds trust and connection, but also makes difficult conversations harder.

“I’d much rather take the emotional side of things and be a bit tired at the end of the day than have my team feel like they couldn’t come to me,” one leader reflected.

This willingness to absorb emotional labour is admirable, but unsustainable without boundaries. Regenerative feminist leadership means finding ways to hold space for others while also protecting the leader’s own capacity to serve. It requires role fluidity – knowing when to step in, when to step back, and when to invite others into shared decision-making.

The Feminist Regenerative Leadership Tension Map

To navigate this complexity, Rising Sun’s leadership team now uses what might be called a Feminist Regenerative Leadership Tension Map, which highlights three key polarities:

Care ↔ Accountability
Hope ↔ Reality
Closeness ↔ Boundaries

Effectiveness isn’t about choosing one side over another, it’s about learning to move with agility between them. Boundaries aren’t the opposite of care; they are one of its deepest expressions. Hope doesn’t deny reality; it gives us the strength to face it. And closeness isn’t diminished by boundaries; it is sustained and safeguarded through them.

To lead regeneratively, we must resist the temptation to collapse complexity into simple binaries. Feminist leadership calls us to hold the tensions of care and accountability, hope and reality, closeness and boundaries. These are not opposites to be resolved but dynamic forces to be navigated.

The Feminist Regenerative Leadership Tension Map (Figure 2) visualises these polarities. It reminds us that the work of leadership is not to choose one over the other, but to move fluidly between them, without losing either our values or our effectiveness. This map offers a compass for leaders seeking to embody care with discipline, hope with realism, and closeness with the protective strength of boundaries.

Crucially, this requires ethical reflexivity – the daily practice of pausing, noticing ourselves, questioning assumptions, and being open to change in relationship with others. Far from being “soft,” reflexivity demands courage. It ensures that holding these tensions is not only a skill, but also an ethical stance: one that resists exploitative models of power and reconnects leadership to human dignity. The Tension Map is more than a framework – it is a practice of ethical reflexivity, helping leaders hold complexity with courage, dignity, and renewal.

Figure 2: The Feminist Regenerative Leadership Tension Map

Why Regeneration Requires Feminist Leadership

Feminist leadership matters now more than ever, not just for gender equity, but for organisational and planetary resilience. It teaches us how to:

Prioritise human flourishing alongside performance.
See care as a strategy, not just a sentiment.
Use power with others, not over them.
Embrace emotional intelligence as a leadership discipline.
Renew leadership from within, by living in the tensions rather than denying them.

In essence, regenerative feminist leadership helps organisations give back more than they take – from people, communities, and ecosystems. It prevents burnout by creating cycles of care and renewal that continually restore capacity and wellbeing.

So where can organisations begin? Some questions worth asking include:

How do we ensure our practices give back more than they extract – from our people, our communities, and the planet?
Where in our culture are care and accountability out of balance – too much “rescue,” or too much pressure without support?
What boundaries could actually function as acts of care, protecting both wellbeing and performance?
How do our leaders model reflexivity – pausing, listening, and learning – rather than defaulting to control or certainty?
What rhythms of renewal (for people and for the system) are we building into our ways of working?

These questions act as a compass, guiding organisations toward regenerative feminist leadership as a lived practice. More than a programme or initiative, it’s a way of leading that sustains people, strengthens performance, and creates lasting resilience.

First Steps Toward Regenerative Feminist Leadership

If you’re wondering where to start, try these small but powerful shifts:

Pause for reflexivity – Begin team meetings with one reflective question (e.g., What’s one assumption we need to check before we move forward?).
Balance care and accountability – When offering support, pair it with a clear expectation (e.g., I’ll make space for flexibility, and here’s what we’ll need in return).
Name boundaries as care – Frame limits not as restrictions but as protections for energy, wellbeing, and trust.
Build renewal into the rhythm – Introduce cycles of rest and reflection in projects, not just at the end but throughout.

These first steps help organisations move beyond ideas into daily practices that nurture resilience and dignity.

The Art of Living in the Tensions

In an era of volatility and emotional exhaustion, leadership must become a regenerative force. Feminist leaders show us how: by practicing emotional courage, setting ethical boundaries, and building structures that sustain both care and accountability.

Regenerative feminist leadership centres human flourishing, treats care as a strategic strength, shares power in partnership, and makes emotional intelligence a daily discipline. Grounded in presence, reflection, and deep human connection, it renews leadership from within, helping us live with tension creatively, restoring capacity and wellbeing while giving back more than we take from people, communities, and ecosystems. It is leadership that embraces uncertainty with integrity, holds space for hope alongside accountability, and navigates the tensions of our shared future with steadiness and care.

Dr. Deborah Bayntun-Lees is a leadership scholar, practitioner, and educator focused on feminist and trauma-informed approaches to organisational change. Her work explores the ethics of relational leadership, gendered power, and regeneration in complex systems. She is a faculty member at Hult International Business School and co-leads research on regenerative leadership within purpose-led organisations.

References
Bradley, A. & Semler, K. (2022). Running on Empty: Navigating the Dangers of Burnout at Work. LID Publishing. A compelling, narrative-driven analysis of burnout that reframes it not as an individual failing but as an organizational and systemic issue, offering embodied healing practices and collective strategies for restoration.

Rebuilding Relevance: Where Platform Thinking Sparks Regeneration with the Digital Phoenix Effect

mtapscott — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 08:00:51 +0000

Why legacy companies must reinvent how they create value – and leverage the power of ecosystems.

“Transformation doesn’t start with what you do. It starts with where you look.”

Across boardrooms and strategy offsites, one question echoes louder than ever: how can legacy companies regenerate themselves in a platform-dominated economy? Over the past decade, digital platforms have reshaped the business landscape – from how we move (Uber) to how we learn (Coursera) to how we relax (Spotify). But the real opportunity today lies not in copying tech unicorns. It lies in how established organizations can reimagine where they create value. This is the central idea of our new book: The Digital Phoenix Effect.

Research Insight: A View from the S&P 500

In the last three years, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of all S&P 500 companies and their platform-related initiatives. We mapped almost 800 projects that claimed to involve platform dynamics. But when tested against a rigorous definition, requiring multi-sided architecture and network effects in order to trigger stellar growth at quasi-zero marginal costs, only 140 passed. This is a powerful signal and tells us two things:

Platform Thinking is no longer the domain of startups – it is being embraced across industries. However, legacy firms, often still unfamiliar with platform mechanisms, frequently confuse any digital service with a platform, leaving considerable room for improvement and untapped opportunities to create competitive advantage.
Legacy firms surprised us in how they use Platform Thinking – not only to create innovative customer-facing services but also to transform internal processes, such as R&D, operations, customer support, and HR.

To understand where this shift leads, we studied three powerful examples – three “digital phoenixes” that reinvented themselves not by chasing trends, but by rethinking the very arena of their value creation.

Siemens Xcelerator

Siemens, a titan of industrial excellence, faced an existential challenge: its legacy strengths – precision engineering and reliable machinery – risked becoming liabilities in an era dominated by agile digital-native competitors. Customers no longer wanted just superior hardware; they demanded seamlessly integrated digital solutions.

Rather than following the traditional path of costly internal expansions or cumbersome external partnerships, Siemens reimagined its future by embracing Platform Thinking. It created Xcelerator, an open innovation platform powered by APIs, allowing external developers to leverage Siemens’ advanced hardware and extensive IoT infrastructure. This strategic pivot instantly transformed idle assets – an enormous installed base, deep customer relationships, and powerful brand trust – into cornerstones of a collaborative digital ecosystem.

This bold move produced a new service offering and triggered strong network effects: the more equipment buyers joined, the greater the appeal to software developers, and vice versa. Such scalable growth was impossible via traditional methods, and certainly unreachable by any startup lacking Siemens’ immense industrial foundation.

AXA Digital Commercial Platform

AXA faced a critical challenge: climate change had rendered traditional actuarial models, built on historical data, ineffective in predicting increasingly severe natural disasters. Agile insurtech startups, leveraging real-time data, AI, and IoT, swiftly reshaped risk management, turning AXA’s deep underwriting expertise and trusted brand into potential liabilities.

Instead of adopting the costly, rigid approach of internal analytics teams or acquisitions, AXA chose Platform Thinking. It created the AXA Digital Commercial Platform (ADCP), a transactional marketplace connecting AXA’s B2B clients directly to specialized providers in climate intelligence, cybersecurity, and operational resilience, generating powerful network effects and richer predictive insights. This two-sided marketplace empowered clients to actively mitigate risks and offered providers trusted access to new customers, generating powerful network effects: more participants yielded richer data and more precise insights for everyone involved.

Internally, ADCP transformed AXA’s primary value-chain activities, particularly underwriting and claims management, by embedding dynamic, real-time intelligence into daily operations. Leveraging its unmatched idle assets – global risk data, regulatory credibility, and deep client relationships – AXA achieved operational agility and scalability beyond the reach of any startup.

Eni Open-es

Eni faced a critical challenge: mounting global pressures for stringent ESG standards threatened its ability to align thousands of suppliers – especially SMEs – with ambitious sustainability goals. Many smaller suppliers lacked the resources and expertise needed to measure, report, and enhance ESG performance, risking regulatory consequences and market competitiveness for Eni itself.

Instead of launching costly internal consulting teams or fragmented compliance programs, Eni embraced Platform Thinking, creating Open-es – a transactional marketplace linking industrial suppliers with specialized ESG service providers. Suppliers gained standardized, accessible tools to assess, certify, and improve sustainability practices, while providers accessed a qualified market at scale.

Internally, Open-es innovated Eni’s procurement, a support value-chain activity, embedding sustainability directly into compliance and supply-chain management processes. Network effects amplified the platform’s value: more participants generated richer data and better insights for the entire ecosystem. Leveraging unmatched idle assets – deep supplier relationships, procurement expertise, and trusted industry credibility – Eni rapidly scaled ESG transformation beyond what any startup could achieve.

Reframing Platform Thinking: What Legacy Firms Can Teach Us

The stories of Siemens, AXA, and Eni offer a powerful counterpoint to the startup-centered narrative around platforms. They show that legacy firms not only can do platforms – they can excel at them.

Legacy Companies Can Do It – And They Start with Hidden Advantages
Incumbents possess vast underutilized assets: customer trust, embedded infrastructure, proprietary data, and operational scale. These are not obstacles – they’re advantages. The opportunity isn’t to mimic startups, but to mobilize these dormant strengths through platform logic.
Platforms Can Unlock These Assets to Tackle Existential Challenges
Siemens used its installed base and industrial technology to create Xcelerator, enabling developers to build on top of its products. AXA transformed how it manages risk internally, turning insurance into a real-time, proactive service. Eni reimagined procurement, aligning suppliers to sustainability goals through Open-es. These aren’t marginal improvements – they are platform-enabled responses to systemic challenges like digital transformation, climate change, and ESG compliance. Platforms give legacy firms the scale and coordination power to act where it matters most.
We’ve Seen Platforms Shine at the Front-End – But Legacy Firms Can use them to Reinvent Internal processes
Startups showed us the power of platforms for customer-facing innovation, but Siemens, AXA, and Eni highlight the untapped potential for legacy firms – both externally and internally. Siemens proved legacy firms could replicate startup agility externally: with Xcelerator, it created a new digital service ecosystem alongside its core business, attracting external developers and expanding offerings without disrupting traditional operations. AXA and Eni went further, demonstrating that platforms could revolutionize internal operations. AXA’s Digital Commercial Platform transformed primary value-chain activities – underwriting and claims management – by embedding real-time intelligence directly into processes, shifting insurance from reactive protection to proactive prevention. Eni’s Open-es leveraged a support activity – procurement – turning compliance into strategic collaboration, enhancing supplier sustainability, and redefining procurement as a strategic ESG driver. These examples reveal a deeper truth: platforms aren’t just for building new things – they’re for transforming what already exists. The real revolution is not in creating another app – it’s in using platforms to rewire the business from the inside out.

The lesson? Platform Thinking is not about chasing the future – it’s about unlocking the full value of the present.

The Digital Phoenix Effect

Understanding where to apply platform thinking, whether adjacent to the core business, within primary activities, or deep in support functions, is just one dimension of the Platform Thinking framework. Our new book, The Digital Phoenix Effect, introduces this lens in depth, showing how legacy firms chose radically different entry points to spark regeneration. But the framework doesn’t stop there.

A second, equally critical dimension emerges from our research: the five business problems that platforms can solve. These include missing or inefficient transactions, evolving customer demands, innovation bottlenecks, underutilized data, and the lack of strategic insights from data. These are not abstract themes, they are the structural challenges we’ve seen again and again in our fieldwork across industries. And they point to why platform strategies are not just an option, but increasingly a necessity for incumbents seeking to remain relevant.

The Digital Phoenix Effect is grounded in rigorous analysis. We’ve mapped hundreds of platform initiatives across the S&P 500, examined how legacy firms apply platform logic to different parts of their business, and identified the patterns that separate symbolic moves from real transformation.

But this is also a book built for action. It offers a practical, four-step process to help companies uncover and activate the latent power in their assets. It includes workshop-tested tools (developed over three years collaborating with more than 20 legacy firms) like the Platform Thinking Cards Set, and a Platform Thinking Journey GPT to challenge, stimulate, and guide teams through the journey.

This is not a manifesto for disruption. It’s a guide for intelligent regeneration. For legacy firms, the future won’t come from starting over. It will come from seeing the business differently, and building from there.

By Daniel Trabucchi and Tommaso Buganza

Daniel Trabucchi and Tommaso Buganza are professors at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano and co-founders of the Platform Thinking HUB and Symplatform. Their work bridges research and practice across platform-based value creation and digital transformation. They authored together Platform Thinking – Read the past. Write the future (Business Expert Press, 2023) and The Digital Phoenix Effect – How Legacy Companies Can Lead the Platform Revolution Without Burning Everything Down (Platform Thinking Publishing, 2025). Daniel and Tommaso were featured in the Thinkers50 Radar List in 2024.

Towards Regenerative Leadership: How Science Can Lead the Way

mtapscott — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 08:00:46 +0000

Key Takeaways

What is regenerative leadership?
What are the science underpinnings of regeneration?
How does regenerative leadership apply in the real world?
What are the three C’s of regenerative leadership?

No doubt there is an art to leadership, captured in thousands of books and stories of famous leaders. But there is more to guide us – there is a science of leadership underpinning the art that is mostly out of sight and out of mind. Most rigorous studies found in academic journals fail to land on the desks of busy executives, let alone get put into practice. The most recent research brings regenerative leadership into the pantheon of emerging science. This important work urgently needs to find its way into the world’s boardrooms.

What is regenerative leadership?

Regenerative leadership is an emergent domain for researchers – not yet demonstrably proven yet built upon the evidence-based foundation of years of leadership science. In our recent book, The Science of Leadership: Nine Ways to Expand Your Impact, my co-author Margaret Moore and I present nine science-backed capacities as a basis to support leaders on a journey of personal and professional growth: conscious, (see clearly – including myself), authentic (care), agile (flex), relational (help), positive (strengthen), compassionate (resonate), shared (empower), servant (serve), and transformational (transform). These capacities, grounded in thousands of well-documented studies, when put into action enable leaders to serve their teams and organizations to perform at their best.

And while the nine capacities serve as a strong foundation for effective leadership, they are not enough. Given the degraded state of our planet, leaders need to do more. Integrating all of the above, regenerative leadership is an additional domain – a continuous engagement with nature and life on its own terms – that takes the nine science-backed capacities and extends them beyond organizations to positively impacting communities, nations and, ultimately, the planet as a whole.

What are the science underpinnings of regeneration?

The facts are known: the planet we all live on is in a terrible state. Statistics show the human race facing imminent disaster in just a few decades, a century at most. Species are going extinct at unprecedented levels. The air we breathe and the temperatures we endure are becoming less and less capable of supporting life. At its core, regenerative leadership is based on systems theory, environmental and climate science, design and engineering constructs that have been around for over fifty years. They include grounded systems and living systems theories.

Grounded Systems Theory

The grounded systems approach looks at how parts of a system interact with one another and with the system as a whole. Systems theory emphasizes holistic thinking and the interdependence of system components, involving iterative cycles of data collection, coding, and analysis, which are used to develop emergent theories about how systems function and evolve.

Researchers have utilized GST to analyze complex environmental systems by understanding the interactions between natural and human systems. A significant study in this area involved the Human–Technical–Environmental (HTE) systems framework, which helps identify and analyze critical components and their interactions within sustainability-oriented systems. This framework has been applied to various case studies to capture the dynamics of human, technical, and environmental components in achieving sustainable outcomes.

In one example, HTE was utilized to evaluate the impact on energy supply, natural life, human health, and climate change of mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants. The interaction matrix helps analysts design interventions that reduce the impact of mercury pollution.^[i]

Living Systems theory

Living Systems Theory (LST) is a conceptual framework developed by James Grier Miller in the 1970s. ^[ii] It aims to explain the nature of life by examining how systems at various levels of organization (from cells to societies) function and interact. One study focused on incorporating principles from complexity theory and biomimicry to successfully reinvent wastewater treatment approaches by instituting natural systems.^[iii] These scientific foundations help leaders understand and leverage the interconnectedness of organizations with broader ecological and social systems.

Regenerative Business Models

The collective conflict faced in moving to regenerative organizations, is the one between entrenched financial models and infrastructure which sustain businesses, human jobs, families’ welfare, and communities, and new financial models and infrastructure. Regenerative leaders must come up with compassionate, affordable, and scalable strategies that course correct in ways that minimize the damage to humanity and the planet.

In his recent article in The Journal for Field Actions special edition on innovation for ecological transformation,^[iv] researcher Emmanuelle Aoustin describes regenerative business models as:

“Fundamentally, the regenerative business model works with and within the cycles of the living world. It operates ‘within the doughnut’ (meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet) and seeks harmony with life, protecting earth’s life-supporting systems. Beyond the ecological aspects of regeneration, it also embraces social regeneration; enhancing social justice, diversity, participation and collaboration.”

Studies based on the above theories focus on how leaders with a regenerative mindset can create more resilient and adaptive organizations. Currently, regenerative tools are in use across a broad spectrum of organizations dedicated to regenerative principles. One example being the Regenerative Lens: A conceptual framework for regenerative social-ecological system^[v], which has been tested across a number of organizations showcasing its effectiveness and promoting holistic and sustainable business practices that bring about improved environmental stewardship.

How does regenerative leadership apply in the real world?

As an example, let’s meet Bill Reed and his consulting organization, Regenesis. Bill has as deep an understanding of the practical application of regenerative design as anyone on the planet. An acclaimed architect and a pioneer of sustainable building practices, he is a principal of Regenesis, Inc., a consultancy that helps developers build regeneratively – in a way that adds to, rather than detracts from, the living systems that they are a part of.

Bill led an enormous public works project in British Columbia, Canada – the design and construction of two major wastewater treatment plants. The director approached Regenesis because they needed a facilitator, someone to coordinate all the moving parts and make sure the project stayed on schedule and on budget.

“We asked them, ‘Why are you building this plant?’”

“And they said, ‘You know what? We commissioned a report on that,’ and they found it had been sitting unread for the past five years. As it turned out, it was a phenomenally good set of guidelines. We used it to construct a purpose statement that became the driver for the entire project.”

“Ultimately, we took the fifty principles from this report and boiled them down to nine concepts, and from those, one big one: think big. Don’t design until you know what you’re designing for, which is the whole system. For example, the plant was being built on the bay. What do we know about the bay? For place-sourced design, you need to know the essence of a place. An intertidal wetland is a unique place. Every place is unique.”

But that’s not even the final punchline.

The second project Regenesis undertook for the utility was even bigger than the first – $10 billion, the biggest and most expensive public works project in British Columbia’s history. “This time,” Bill said, “When we sat down to discuss purpose, the first thing the director said was, ‘We want to save the orcas.’ It was just a huge, huge shift. This guy had experienced an epiphanic shift in perspective.”

“The big takeaway,” he concluded, “is that regenerative leadership is a practice – a continuous engagement with nature and life on its own terms. Ultimately, it’s honoring the life that is in the system instead of trying to run the system.”

The work that Bill and Regenesis does is the essence of regenerative leadership. What’s especially wonderful about this story is that it’s not even metaphorical. It’s about sewage plants – about cleaning up the effluent we create as human beings.

This real-life example reflects a positive view of the forces of nature and leadership in synchrony. Bill and the Regenesis team demonstrate mastery of attuning to nature’s potential for quality action, then integrating all nine capacities that manifest effective leadership, into an emergent, elegant complex system committed to thriving for all.

What are the Three “C’s” of Regenerative Leadership?

What practices can we do immediately as leaders and organizations if we want to be regenerative? We think a good place to start involves shifting your fundamental mindset as a leader from a “power over” perspective to “power with” perspective that incorporates behaviors, values and actions in the nine capacities. By developing all the science-backed capacities – seeing clearly, caring, flexing, helping, strengthening, resonating, sharing, serving, transforming, and ultimately, regenerating – leaders can have a huge positive impact on three levels: self, other, and system – including the planet.

We believe the three “C’s” below are a starting guide for regenerative action as leaders undertake the journey.

Consciousness: Shift your perspective to see clearly how you are embedded within a system that includes other humans, non-human beings and nature. Track “ego noise” (ego-centricity) and quiet your ego to act with humility.
Compassion: Reflect on the downstream impact of decisions and act with a deeper level to resonate with self, other and planet.
Co-evolution: From a space of courage, creativity, and vision (proven capacities for transformational leaders), make decisions in alignment with the natural systems in which we are embedded.

The science of leadership – built on thousands of studies of what works in the real world – or as we like to say, “science made real”, provides a solid foundation to lead us towards a regenerative way of being. Regenerative leadership is more than just hope; it is a path to reclaim our vitality as humans, re-insert humanity into assessments of performance (and results), and bring us into alignment with the planet we depend upon for our very existence.

— Jeffrey Hull, co-author (with Margaret Moore) of The Science of Leadership: Nine Ways to Expand Your Impact (Penguin Random House, July 2025)

Jeffrey Hull is the executive director at the Institute of Coaching, CEO of New York-based LeaderShift Inc, and a clinical instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School. He is also adjunct professor of leadership at New York University. An expert in the field of organizational and leadership development since 1995, he has consulted with multinational companies in Asia, Europe and the US, and worked on projects with Fortune 100, start-up and non-profit organizations in a wide range of sectors including, legal, health, technology, financial, advertising, and education. Jeffrey is a member of Coaches50.

Regenerative Leadership at the Thinkers50 2025 Awards Gala

Regenerative Leadership is one of the key themes for the Thinkers50 2025 Awards Gala taking place in London’s Guildhall 3-4 November 2025. For more information on the Gala and to apply for tickets, please click below.

[i] Selin, H., Selin, N.E. The human–technical–environmental systems framework for sustainability analysis. Sustain Sci 18, 791–808 (2023).

[ii] Grier, M. Living systems. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1978.

[iii]Stefanakis, Alexandros. (2016). Constructed Wetlands: Description and Benefits of an Eco-Tech Water Treatment System. 10.4018/978-1-4666-9559-7.ch012.

[iv] Aoustin, Emmanuelle. Regenerative leadership: what it takes to transform business into a force for good. Field Actions Science Reports. The journal of field actions Special Issue 25 (2023): 92-97.

[v] Buckton, Sam J. et. al. The Regenerative Lens: A conceptual framework for regenerative social-ecological systems. Volume 6, Issue 7: 761-932 (21 July 2023)

The Provocateurs Episode 32 | Katie McGinty: The economic case for climate-smart transformation

mtapscott — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 07:45:59 +0000

Play Video about Provocateurs Episode with Katie McGinty

Thinkers50 in collaboration with Deloitte presents:

The Provocateurs:

podcast series

EPISODE 32

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Katie McGinty: The economic case for climate-smart transformation

Read the transcript

Katie McGinty is the vice president and chief sustainability and external relations officer at Johnson Controls. In this episode she shares insights from her remarkable career spanning both public service – including as the first woman to chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality under President Clinton – and private sector leadership.

Challenging the persistent myth that environmental initiatives harm the bottom line, Katie explains how sustainability and economic success are not opposing forces but complementary strategies, demonstrating through real-world examples how Johnson Controls achieves significant carbon reductions while generating substantial cost savings for clients.

Key themes include:

The importance of systems thinking in environmental solutions.
How buildings can be transformed from climate problems to climate solutions.
The power of technological innovation through efficiency, electrification, and digitalization.

Drawing from her unique background in chemistry, policy, and business leadership, Katie illustrates how bringing diverse perspectives together catalyzes creativity and transforms environmental challenges into competitive advantages and economic opportunities. Sustainability, she contends, is becoming “strategy essential” for businesses.

Hosts:

Stuart Crainer

Co-founder, Thinkers50

Geoff Tuff

Global Sustainability Leader for Energy and Industrials, Deloitte

LISTEN NOW ON

Inspired by the book Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws; Wiley, 2021.

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EPISODE 32

Podcast Transcript

Stuart Crainer:

Hello and welcome to the Provocateurs Podcast. I’m Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Thinkers50. At 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 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 best-selling books, Detonate, which came out in 2018 and Provoke, which inspired this podcast series. Geoff, great to see you, and can you please tell us more about today’s guest?

Geoff Tuff:

I’d be happy to, Stuart. Always great to see you, and I always seem to be in the position where I get to do the introduction of our guests, which is fantastic. We have a wide-ranging executive with us today who has, as far as I can tell, a fascinating life story, a fascinating business history. Her name is Katie McGinty, and I’ll cover a little bit of her background here, but I’m sure we’ll get into much more detail behind the various stories as we get into our conversation. So Katie is a distinguished leader in environmental policy and sustainability, currently serving as vice president and chief sustainability and external relations officer at Johnson Controls. I think I got that all right. She’s got over 25 years of experience in both the public and the private sectors, and she’s really been a trailblazer in clean energy and environmental protection in this country. She was the first woman to chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality under President Bill Clinton, and she later served as Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Environmental Protection. Katie’s career is marked by her innovative approaches to tackling climate change, to promoting smart buildings, which I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more about and driving impactful net-zero carbon strategies. So welcome Katie. Thank you for being on here.

Katie McGinty:

It’s great to join you. Thanks for having me.

Geoff Tuff:

And I hope I got all that background right. There’s a lot of it.

Katie McGinty:

Yes. But now we have to wake up the audience. Come on.

Geoff Tuff:

Right. Okay. So as a starting place, let’s try to get a sense for the ark of this amazing career. You’ve worked in public service, you’ve worked in law, you’ve worked in corporate governance and senior executive levels. As an undergrad, you studied chemistry, I believe. Is there something that serves as a golden thread through that whole career? When you look back at that massive activity, how do you make sense of it?

Katie McGinty:

Well, as I think about my career and the work that I’ve had the privilege of doing, I often say it wasn’t a plan, but it’s been a pleasure and a privilege. And there are some through lines; that early encounter with chemistry coming from a big family and saying, “Hey, I’m going to college.” It was no nonsense. You’re studying something where I know you’re going to get a good job. But it has served me well because it’s given me a fascination for how we move beyond tradeoffs, how we find the approaches to challenging problems that open more opportunities as we get creative and we come together with different perspectives. And technology is often the difference between win-lose and win-win. As I’ve had the opportunity then to take that early experience in chemistry into things environment, which was definitely not a plan more often than not, I’ve seen the transformation of an issue from something that was very divisive to something that catalyzed incredible creativity, originality of thought and became a differentiator or a competitive advantage or something at the very least that pulled people together rather than pulled them apart.

Stuart Crainer:

And you’re the ninth of 10 children, Katie. You come from a-

Geoff Tuff:

We got to that very quickly, Stuart.

Stuart Crainer:

I think it’s so interesting. It must’ve occurred to Katie if you were the first or second, how would it change your life and perspective? But I wonder how much did that form your career from those very early experiences. Getting things done in a big family, dealing with the internal-

Breaking down the myths around sustainability

Katie McGinty:

Yeah. That actually is part of how I do see the opportunity every day to take something that’s been a problem and be a solver. My dear mother, God rest her soul, if you came up to her with a look on your face like you were going to complain, she’d put up her hand and she’d say to you, tell your troubles to Jesus. And so the expectation was that you were leaning in to solve problems and not to create yet more to do’s around the house. Now, how does that play out I guess through the course of this career? One of the things that I take special fun, I will say, and feel a sense of pride about is trying to break down some myths. The myth being that, hey, if it’s good for the environment, it’s by definition bad for the bottom line. So many iterations we’ve seen of that, I think it still very much limits our thinking and the speed of our action against environmental challenges today.

Now, what’s the connectivity of that? With the rootedness in a big Irish Catholic family, it really is about refusing to take a ‘there’s no happy answer to this challenge’ as the answer. And I guess early on in my career it became imperative and then it became a blessing to bring a diverse group of people with different skill sets to the table. And when you do, you find ways that … Again, you catalyze growth, you catalyze opportunity instead of being just the, hey, you’re losing today and the other person’s winning. From a sustainability point of view, it’s not likely to be lasting in any real or measurable way unless and until a pretty broad array of people can see themselves in a solution and feel a sense of ownership to it, so that then you have troops who are totally bought in when the going gets tough. And every once in a while the going does get tough.

Geoff Tuff:

It does indeed. And so we have a fascinating array of topics I think to dive into. But as a starting place, where did the environmental focus or the interest in sustainability come in your career? When I look back at the roles you’ve had, it looks like it’s always been there, but you said it wasn’t necessarily the plan. When did it become the plan?

A career path from chemistry and law to environmentalism

Katie McGinty:

No. It really was not the plan. So with this background in chemistry and then in law, it was at a time when the United States was at a position of leadership in inventing some basic and core technologies like semiconductors and like the early days of biotechnology. However, it was also a time when we had moved past a driving interest in making things. And so Peter Drucker, for example, talked about the poor prestige of production, and we had said, maybe that’s not where we, as the United States anyway, are interested in playing. But coming back to my family with six brothers and three sisters, most of whom went right into the workforce from high school. It was very important to me the idea that there would be good jobs available where people could put their skills to work and then translate this amazing basic science into commercial products. So I had written a thesis about how to re-onshore that manufacturing, and I won a congressional fellowship, which brings me to the environmental piece, not being a plan. I simply looked up who chairs the relevant subcommittee in the United Senate on technology, and it was one, then Senator, Al Gore. And so that-

Geoff Tuff:

And hence the environmentalism. Now it all makes sense. Now it all makes sense. But please continue-

Katie McGinty:

That was the deep dive. That was the dive in the deep end of that pool. And so then having the privilege to serve as his senior environmental legislative assistant before joining President Clinton in the White House and serving as deputy assistant to the president.

Stuart Crainer:

What surprised me about that, Katie, was in 1995, I was a bit surprised actually there was a council on environmental quality.

Katie McGinty:

Indeed. In fact-

Stuart Crainer:

It wasn’t talked about then really. And I was also surprised you were only 30 at the time. That must have been a hell of a baptism.

Katie McGinty:

Well, Stuart, if we’re going to be technical about it, I was actually 29.

Stuart Crainer:

Excuse me.

Katie McGinty:

The Council on Environmental Quality actually was the foundational organization in things environmental protection in the United States. Established in 1969 with the National Environmental Policy Act. So people have become quite familiar with NEPA, and it was the original statute that looked expansively at federal government actions calling upon federal agencies to stop, look, and listen. Stop and assess what the environmental impact of a federal action might be, consider the alternatives, engage the community, and then proceed only on the basis of that additional consideration and input. And it was on top of that foundation then in 1970 and the early 1970s that we had, as we call the media specific environmental laws that came about. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, etc. But NEPA is that foundational statute, and I still think there’s incredible wisdom in it for the flip side of what I just said in terms of those media specific statutes. They are critical, but sometimes we can get very rigid in our thinking if we’re only looking at one piece of the puzzle.

Well, I’m solving for air quality today. Did I think about the water quality impact? I may or may not have done so. But NEPA almost forces you to put all the puzzle pieces together. And again, it’s just my experience when you do that, you create many more options for solving and tackling the challenge than in a more narrow cast approach.

Geoff Tuff:

So I hear some really important themes from you, Katie, which is Stuart talked about my day-to-day job is out there doing similar type of work in the energy sector, and I couldn’t agree with you more on both your description of really systems being part of the solution here, understanding how an action in one place will have an impact on another, and then also the importance of getting the economics right and making sure that there is a long-term sustainable economic solution even as you may be doing something good for the environment. Where on your journey did you really get to learn that? And you can comment on either the systems component or the economics component. Was it when you shifted to the private sector or when you were still working in the public sector or somewhere in between?

Katie McGinty:

Really I would say early days and interesting different roles of the different branches of government. Starting my public service in the legislative branch of government, working again with Senator Gore in a different role. Especially for thought leaders in the United States Senate like Senator Gore, the mission was to be a provocateur. To be able to inject new ideas into the conversation. To be a spotlight on new issues or trends that might be emerging. However quickly then moving to the executive branch of government execution, making things work is different than just proposing an idea. Plus at the time, this was 1993, the country was in a mild old recession, but a recession nonetheless, which also then underscored the importance that federal government policy, the policies of the newly elected President Clinton had to be stimulative of economic opportunity and growth. And so an example, one of the big initial efforts that we undertook in the President’s first budget was all about clean water. While there’s a lot that we could have done in that regard, what we chose to do was to stand up some of the first investment funds in driving the infrastructure piece that enables clean water and therein had a double shot cleaning up our water resources while stimulating expansive job creation in the building trades as the infrastructure was laid to enable us, in fact to protect and preserve those water resources.

Geoff Tuff:

So it sounds like a lot of the lessons that you then took into the private sector really were learned when you were deep doing this work in government.

Katie McGinty:

I think the key roots, yes. In moving then from Washington to Pennsylvania and serving as a secretary there again, a really important need in a state like Pennsylvania to be able to show that proper stewardship of our natural resources would also drive new economic opportunity was critical in terms of people’s buy-in, the willingness to lean in. And so for example, at that time it was still early days of renewable energy taking off in this country, so 2003, 2004. Pennsylvania has deep rootedness in the energy space. The world’s first commercial oil well not in the Middle East, not in Texas, but Titusville, Pennsylvania, some of the early and expansive natural gas development in Pennsylvania. So it felt to me that there was an opportunity to tap in to the pride, the culture, the spirit of the people of Pennsylvania to say, hey, the next generation of things energy is upon us and what other state should lead, but Pennsylvania.

And so our approach to renewable energy was not in the first instance to just mandate it, although the state rallied. And we did put a portfolio standard in place in just two years of being in office. But it was to attract and recruit some of the biggest renewable energy companies in the world so that Pennsylvanians would build the big wind machinery and solar machinery. And in a couple of years, we became one of the leading states in terms of jobs related to and factories built around the hardware that enables renewable energy to be an actual thing.

Stuart Crainer:

I also saw in 1999, Katie, you were involved with the Tata Energy research initiative in India. That must have offered a very different perspective from what you received previously.

Katie McGinty:

Well, it was a dynamic time, as is today, but in a slightly different way where it became clear that there were new and emerging powers and voices and forces that were going to be heard on the world stage. So my move to India was preceded in 1997 by our having negotiated the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty. From a decade earlier than that when I first became involved, I saw the transition from a time in the late 1980s, early 1990s when global environmental treaties were essentially negotiated between the United States and Europe. And then Russia and Japan would be invited to the table and they maybe were able to make some modest tweaks to the deal. It was only after that the Chinas and the Indias and the Brazils would be brought into the room to be told the deal. However, by the mid-1990s we sold in the World Trade Organization negotiations.

India, for example, had emerged as a very strong voice in the Doha round of negotiations. And it was clear that the geopolitical scales were tilting and changing in profound ways. So in the course of the negotiation of the Kyoto Treaty, I, at any rate, had a burning desire to not just fly into countries on Air Force One or come in with diplomatic contingents, but to go and spend some time in a part of the world that clearly was going to be absolutely impactful to the future trajectory of the world in many different dimensions, geopolitically, economically, environmentally. And so I did have the privilege to leave the White House and then go and work at a really renowned institution in India now called TERI, then called the Todd Energy Research Institute. By the way, the former head of which was the co-Nobel Peace Prize winner with Al Gore for action and leadership around climate, then also leading the IPCC. So it was a privilege to be there, and the idea again was to work with government leaders, business leaders, and civil society in India to say, look, the path to faster growth for this incredible country is to be one of the pioneers in putting climate smart energy and technology to work.

The trifecta solution of efficiency, electrification, and digitalization

Geoff Tuff:

Which clearly you continue to do today. So let’s actually fast-forward to the present and talk a little bit about the work that you do at Johnson Controls. I’m sure many of our listeners know Johnson Controls and some of the markets you play in. But can you talk just a little bit about the company and the markets you operate in and some of just examples of how scaled and high impact the organization is?

Katie McGinty:

Yeah. You bet. So this year actually is the 140th anniversary of Johnson Controls, which originated in 1883 with the invention by Warren Johnson of the first electric thermostat for buildings. Some say before Edison invented the light bulb. Not that it’s a competition.

Geoff Tuff:

Great anticipation though.

Katie McGinty:

And the company was founded in 1885 and ever since then it has been a journey of innovation to make buildings smarter, healthier, and more sustainable. And that’s the mission we’re still on. And if anything, I think we’re even just more intensified in that mission to look at one piece of that equation of smart, healthy, and sustainable. Part of the reason for our drive to continue to innovate is a challenging statistic. And that statistic is that some 40% of all global greenhouse gas emissions are about and from buildings. Coming even closer to Johnson Controls in terms of our scale and scope, by the way, we are a hundred thousand people strong in about 150 countries. So that gives us the privilege of bringing some creativity and solution sets to every part of the globe.

Within that 40% of emissions, 75% of the 40% is exactly where we live because it is about the lifetime operation of the building. And so that’s the big challenge. Question is apropos to the theme we’ve had here, well, heck, that’s a daunting set of numbers. Where could there possibly be an opportunity in that? And the opportunity really is the flip side of that challenging number. Because if you’re 40% of the problem, you have to have a whole heck of a lot of inefficiency going on, which means you have to have a whole heck of a lot of dollars and cents you’re just burning and not dropping to your bottom line and not putting to work for your growth. And it turns out in fact, exactly that. And so the good news, the trifecta technology solution is about efficiency, electrification, and digitalization. And when we put those technologies to work, the building goes from one of the biggest parts of the climate problem to net-zero, net energy positive, a revenue raiser for the building owner, even as it is a climate calmer for the planet.

Stuart Crainer:

Is it an easy message to communicate? Because basically you are saying that we need to reinvent how we perceive buildings and our relationship with buildings.

Katie McGinty:

Stuart, it’s such a good question because when people say to me, well, what’s your biggest challenge when I tell them stories like for example, Hey, let’s start right at home. So we’re pleased and proud to be well along our journey with our science-based targets and our own very substantial emission reduction. So we’ve already met our scope three science-based target, for example. Scopes one and two, our own operations, Stuart, to just tee up one example. So a factory of ours in Oklahoma absolutely must run factory, huge backlog. And the second-biggest energy consumer in our 80 plus factory fleet. You might think, holy mackerel, how can we turn a big beast like that around to be a green machine? And the first looks at what our course and path might be not dissimilar to many other big manufacturing companies. You walk in and you find a lot of deferred maintenance.

So now you’re thinking, well, this looks like it’s going to be a big cost to achieve the climate objective. Except for when you put that trifecta of efficiency, electrification, and digitalization to work, our result, 43% reduction in carbon, but we’re saving $960,000 a year in operating expenses. So for this critical must run factory by leaning into decarbonizing it, we liberated the cash and capital that enabled us to upgrade that factory significantly to support its throughput even as we took a huge dent in the emissions. Back to your question, Stuart. So how challenging is it? The challenge is about mind share. It’s not often that the C suite is inspired to be really thinking about their bricks and mortar and they’re not so much thinking about when they get on the elevator, the B, they’re thinking a boardroom, they’re not thinking of the basement. And so for us, it is breaking through that and establishing the critical business strategy significance of giving some mind share to a sustainability play around your physical assets.

The economic case for sustainability

Geoff Tuff:

And I would assume that part of the … And Stuart, you look like you may have a follow-up question. But I think part of the way you do that is exactly what you just described. Not talk about it necessarily as a sustainability play, but as an economic play because those are pretty compelling economics in the example you just gave.

Katie McGinty:

Exactly. And when we look at a variety of different sectors, key pieces of the economy, key players in the market, these days every single sector is very capital conscious, very much in a capital conservation mode.

To share just one example … In Denmark, they took time to understand what their thermal energy was looking like, and they realized the great expense that was involved in meeting the space heating, the hot water, the sterilization needs in a hospital. What they didn’t realize was that they had the lottery sitting right next to them in terms of thermal energy and it was a big quarry. And so as we got to work with them putting heat pumps to work to extract that free thermal energy in the quarry, we wound up now with an end result that they have cut their natural gas and heating bills by 80%, even as they have cut their carbon emission between 80 and 90%. But you can’t achieve that kind of result unless, back to Stuart’s question, you can break through the typical break-fix mindset. Where this kind of equipment, you just run it till it breaks and you’re not then liberating the business opportunity in optimizing that equipment and machinery.

Stuart Crainer:

Isn’t one of the issues around this, the word sustainability. In fact, we should be talking about efficiency because efficiency is a much easier sell than sustainability. In fact, sustainability is efficiency. If you pursue efficiency, you’ll get to the sustainable solution.

Katie McGinty:

Language communication I think is often our big challenge. And maybe the Yogi Berra. Among the wise sayings of Yogi Berra, what gets me into trouble isn’t what I don’t know, but it’s what I know for sure that just ain’t so. I think we know for sure that sustainability is nice and it might be the right thing to do, but we don’t necessarily think it’s business critical, business essential and smart.

Geoff Tuff:

So as we think about how you’re looking at the opportunity to have impact as Johnson Controls today, Katie, I could imagine there’s a lot of the existing infrastructure, existing building base that needs to be somehow be made more efficient, decarbonize, whatever you want to call it. There’s also a whole lot of new infrastructure coming online and especially you made reference before the importance of digitalization. And I’m sure many of our listeners then go to thinking about AI and all of the power needs that are required by AI. How do you think about the job of Johnson Controls as relates to either making the existing building base more efficient versus building more efficiently into the future? And is there any trade-off there as we try to digitize and think about the power needs that are required for AI?

Katie McGinty:

There’s huge opportunity in both arenas. As you can imagine, some of this operating equipment, it’s built to last and so it’s 30 years old, it’s 40 years old, it’s 50 years old. And so the opportunity in the installed base, as we call it, to dramatically improve efficiency is just vast. And this is important from a climate point of view because some 70% of the buildings that are standing today in the US, in Europe, for example, are going to be standing in that critical year of 2050. So what can we do to get to work in those buildings? And it’s almost without exception that again, this trifecta of efficiency, electrification, digitalization can drive home 30, 40% reductions in energy use. In new buildings it’s equally the case.

Now, taking a page out of the book of renewable portfolio standards, there are some interesting new policies that get referred to sometimes as building performance standards that are driving in the same direction. Every X number of years let’s compare the operation of your building with like buildings, let’s set a baseline and let’s achieve a 5% reduction in energy intensity per square foot, in carbon intensity per square foot. So there’s some new policy frameworks that are helping to drive that attention and action.

Where does a digital platform come in? We had an experience just recently with one of our longstanding customers in Canada where we had the opportunity in a new build, a relatively new build, a building that had the highest level of green certification. It is among the best of the best buildings. And we at Johnson Controls know that because we not only have our operating equipment in the building, but one of the ways we are unique as a company is we don’t just sell it and say, “Call us if anything goes wrong.” We are also the install and the service partner, whereas many companies just make the hardware. And so we were operating this building as well. But we put ourselves to the test. We said we know that this is one of the greenest buildings. It was exceeding any of the performance standards that were required. We believe if we put our digital platform to work, if we put our AI capability to work, this building can still perform better. And almost immediately, even in the best of the best, we achieved an additional 25% improvement efficiency reduction in operating costs.

And you might say, well, my goodness, how can that be? And the reason is … Well, among the reasons, is the opportunity for what we call continuous commissioning. And so instead of operating against a set point that made sense last year when the switch was flipped, turning the building on, or a set point that made sense 25 years ago when the building was up and running. That digital platform is optimizing every minute of every day against real world conditions.

And so the kind of outcomes, for example … a different building in New York. This was a life sciences company, incredibly important to them that they ensured the health and well-being as a health sciences company of their colleagues and employees. This is core brand, core value. Well that building, again in New York City … You remember the Canadian wildfires. What does a digital platform have to do with that? Well, our digital platform literally was processing a million data points a minute and knew that massive wildfires had broken out in Canada, knew wind speed, knew wind direction, knew all of the parameters, temperature, humidity, et cetera, that were going to determine when that cloud of pollution arrived in New York and immediately switched the building from ventilation to filtration, ensuring that the occupants of that building were safe, happy, and healthy. This is the kind of dynamic capability of buildings now where they become part of the intelligence of your business itself.

Geoff Tuff:

That’s a great story, and I’ll tell you, I was visiting Manhattan the day that cloud descended on the place and it was eerie. But over to you, Stuart.

Sustainability is “strategy essential”

Stuart Crainer:

Like earthquake warnings in Japanese buildings. They can tell you when the earthquake’s coming, 20 seconds ahead of it actually arriving, which gives some help. You’re a chief sustainability officer Katie. Will that job hopefully be redundant in five years, 10 years, 15 years? Where does that role go do you think in organizations now in the next few years?

Katie McGinty:

Two different thoughts about that. So one, there’s some brass tacks, which I have to say I welcome thoroughly, although some of my fellow CSOs find it a less exhilarating part of their job. And that is that things sustainability has finally made it to the big table of the chief financial officer, of an expectation that the data is of investment grade and the realization that this is investor critical information. And so there’s one piece of the job that will provide the stewardship of the QA, the QC, the controls, the proper management of sustainability related data so that there is proper reporting of that data. And again, while some of that is difficult to slog through, it represents such a great maturation of the space that we now definitively understand climate sustainability as investor essential information. So that’s a piece of it. But I think the other piece of it is that sustainability is strategy centric and strategy essential.

And so I think whenever you can bring that edge of I can do it leaner, I can do it meaner, I can be more productive with less, I can drive innovation that enables us to drive a business forward faster. That’s a critical skillset. That skillset also in the broader understanding of sustainability, that puts value … Coming back to one of our original themes. Puts value on inclusiveness. Breaking down the silos in an organization and enabling that inclusiveness, that cross functionality in an organization, that’s where the action is. That’s what unlocks the creativity of an organization. And we all know that our people are our greatest asset. And when those people are inspired and on fire and feel themselves connected to something larger than themselves every day, that’s a team that’s going to be very hard to beat.

Geoff Tuff:

Well, that is about as effective a last word as I think we could have possibly hoped for on this Katie. And I recognize that we’re coming up against our target time here. I would like to first of all thank you, but also applaud the work that you’re doing. I think it’s a fantastic mission that you’ve been on over all these years. And I love the orientation that you’re bringing to the space because I couldn’t agree with you more around the power of economics and just good old-fashioned strategy. A lot of what you just talked about is good strategy for most organizations and it happens to intersect very nicely with sustainability. So thank you for your time, Katie. We have been provocateurs, Stuart Crainer and Geoff Tuff, and we look forward to the next time we can all get back together.

Katie McGinty:

Thanks for the opportunity and thanks for what you’re doing, putting a spotlight on interesting ideas.

Stuart Crainer:

Thanks very much Katie.

Regenerative Business & Sustainability – Thinkers50

Driving Regenerative Growth: why we need a mindset shift

Why do we want growth?

What’s the problem with growth?

How is regenerative growth different to conventional growth?

So how do we drive regenerative growth? What do we need to do more of? What do we need to stop doing?

What do business leaders need to do to drive regenerative growth?

The call for a new growth paradigm

London’s Circular Paradox: Why Startups Can’t Plug In

London’s Circular Paradox: Why Startups Can’t Plug In

The Disconnect

The Case Studies

Blockages in the circular flow

What Needs to Happen

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The Provocateurs Episode 37 | Anke Hampel: Recorded Live at Climate Week New York

The Provocateurs:

podcast series

EPISODE 37

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Anke Hampel: Recorded Live at Climate Week New York

Anke Hampel

Hosts:

Des Dearlove

Geoff Tuff

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The Provocateurs Episode 36 | Selassie Atadika: Leading Through Deliciousness

The Provocateurs:

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EPISODE 36

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Selassie Atadika: Leading Through Deliciousness

Selassie Atadika

Hosts:

Stuart Crainer

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The Provocateurs Episode 45 | Spencer Glendon: What’s Not in the Model

The Provocateurs Episode 44 | Samuel Monnie: The Case for Values-Driven Growth

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EPISODE 36

Podcast Transcript

Leading Through Deliciousness

London’s Circular Paradox:
Why Startups Can’t Plug In