The Provocateurs:

Steve Goldbach:

Hello, I’m Steve Goldbach, head of Deloitte Sustainability Practice in the US, and I’d like to welcome you to this very special edition of the Provocateurs Podcast. Provocateurs is a podcast where we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. Our aim is to provoke you and think, to think and act differently through conversations with insightful leaders who offer new perspectives on traditional business thinking. And today we’re coming to you live on stage at Climate Week in New York City.

This is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte. And so my co-host today is Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. And for those of you who aren’t familiar with Thinkers50, it’s the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking and sharing the leading management and business ideas of our age, ideas that can make a positive impact on the world. Des, it’s great to see you as always.

Des Dearlove:

Steve, great to see you too. And I’m really, really excited about this episode. I think it’s going to be fantastic and of all the places to be doing it, obviously Climate Week is the perfect place.

So let me without any further ado, introduce our very special guest. Probably for most of the people in the room, he doesn’t need an introduction, but the way the podcast works means I’m going to give him an introduction just to make sure we know.

So Paul Polman is a business leader, campaigner, co-author of Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take, which was the Financial Times Business Book of the Year. Paul works to accelerate action by business to tackle climate change and inequality. As CEO of Unilever, from 2009 to 2019, he demonstrated that business can profit through purpose, delivering shareholder returns of 290% while the company consistently ranked first in the world for sustainability.

Today, he works across a range of organisations to deliver the UN sustainable development goals, which he also helped to develop. And I should add that Paul and his co-author, Andrew Winston, are currently number three in the Thinkers 50 global ranking of the most influential management thinkers in the world. Paul, welcome.

Paul Polamn:
Thank you.

Des Dearlove:

Huge thank you for making… We know how busy you are and we are eternally grateful for you making the time to do this. Business is a force for good is a passion of yours, leadership, the next generation of leaders you’re also passionate about. Both of those topics are very close to our heart at Provocateurs podcast, so we want to make enough time to talk about both, but obviously they’re very, very linked.

But let me start with a personal question. Was there a moment for you, a personal epiphany, if you like, when you realised that business is a force for good and addressing climate change was a business and moral imperative, or did it come on to you gradually?

Paul Polman:

Well, if it’s a moral imperative, I think that you get that very early from your parents in the environment that you grew up in. I grew up in the Netherlands a little bit after World War II. I always thought it was a long time after World War II, but the older I get the more I realize how close it was.

And my parents, my father was deprived of education because he was 15 when the war started. Had to go into hiding, missed high school, ended up working in a factory. My mother was a teacher, but he literally had two jobs to ensure that the six children could prosper, and they were fighting for peace in Europe. They wanted us to have education that they didn’t have and I wouldn’t be sitting here.
We hated my mother many times when she would never let us go out of the house to play with the neighborhood kids unless she checked us on our homework. And obviously that was embarrassing for us, but I wouldn’t be sitting here if she wouldn’t have done that.

So I was lucky. We were lucky that we had a piece of bar soap at home, that we had some food so we weren’t stunted, that the Dutch government pays for education and that’s progress, and that is what they embodied. They met in Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts fell in love and got married.

So nature and these types of things were very high on our agenda, but I think it evolves… There is not a road of Damascus moment – despite my name being Paul – but there are things happening in your life that just form you. I was in 1992 at Rio and there were very few business people. Then I started working for P&G at that time, Procter & Gamble in Newcastle, I was running the UK and Ireland. And for the first time I was exposed to second-generation unemployment: shipbuilding, steel and coal had gone belly-up, and we were the biggest employer, so you really automatically get involved in communities.

When I left Nestlé after I was at Nestlé, which is a very great company for community relationships with farmers and all the other things, but we had our Unilever welcome due, and I happened to be in the Taj Mahal when it got stormed by terrorists. So we were locked up and the people around us, many lost their lives and it’s still a miracle that we came out the way we did, but you see the goodness of people and you see the pressures often driven by poverty and that makes you think when you go through an experience like that.

I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with a blind friend of mine, and then we said, “Let’s take blind people from all parts of the world.” So we took eight of them up and that was a great experience and started the foundation that I now have 20,000 blind people in East Africa.

So all these moments, just like passing on of your parents and celebrating their lives and the gifts that they shared with you, all these moments form you I think.

My bigger moment on sustainability, perhaps, was when the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at that time asked me to be part of the high-level panel of what he called 27 eminent people; it was actually 26 plus myself, the rest were heads of state and all the other things. But I remember the first meeting in New York here at the UN headquarters, and I came in and literally the other 26 heads turned and David Cameron, at that time he was the prime minister of the UK, he said, “This is the problem walking into the room.” So it was like the private sector is the problem for all of this, but working two and a half years very intensely together, and then we got the Paris Agreement. I was very heavily involved in the COP21 and many of these things, so these are moments.

Working with John Ruggie, the late John Ruggie, helping develop the principles of business and human rights, which is a very important thing. Climate change and human rights are closely related as you all know. So all these things help form you, but at the end of the day, I’ve always believed that business should be a force for good. And the question we ask in our book is how can business profit from solving the world’s problems, not creating them?

And it is mind-boggling to me that so many people that run these great institutions are well aware of the damage they do yet find it normal not to do anything about it. That to me takes courage. People say, “Why are you so courageous doing that or that?” I think it takes courage to deliberately do something that you know is wrong and feel good about it. It’s a different type of courage that we don’t often talk about, but it is actually. It’s much easier to do the right thing. So I always felt that if you want to make money, there’s nothing wrong with that. Don’t do that at the expense of other people. Don’t do that at the expense of the planet. Don’t do that at the expense of future generations. It seems to me it’s a fairly simple concept – and embodied in every religion, by the way. If you look at every religion, be it Islam or Muslims or Jews or Christians, they all have the golden rule. Do unto others as you like to have done unto yourselves. And I just put the planet in there, do unto others and the planet, and if you just stick to that rule, life would be significantly better for many people.

Steve Goldbach:

So Paul, we’re here at the end of Climate Week. I know it’s been an exhausting schedule for you and this is your last event. This is our last event here. So you haven’t had a moment to reflect. And just for our audience here, the original plan was actually to do this podcast following Climate Week, because you’ve said that you get inspired by coming to Climate Week and then you would have lots of things to think about for the podcast.

So without the benefit of the reflection time that you would normally get, as you sit here, what have you reflected upon? What has stuck with you? What have been the moments? How are you thinking about this week?

Paul Polman:

It’s been very energizing, even a little bit more. Jeff and I, Jeff was the Chief Sustainability Officer of Unilever and now we work together on many of the things we do, including with the UN, but there are some people here from One Young World. I was in Montreal at One Young World last week and then we were in Singapore where tremendous amounts of things are happening and a very dynamic part of the world. Then I came back here on Tuesday morning and flying out tonight… So that’s my only condition that we hit the deadline, but-

Steve Goldbach:

Don’t worry. We’ve got a staff that’s ready to walk you right from here to the E-Train!

Paul Polman:

I’d appreciate that. But the big thing was what was signed on Sunday with 193 countries, which are the ones represented in the UN. The same countries, by the way, that signed the Sustainable Development Goals in September 2015. And this is the pact for the future. The Secretary General has made a very bold and difficult move in terms of what can we do to not just optimize the things within a system that we know doesn’t work anymore, but what can we really do to change the system given the challenges that we have for biodiversity destruction, climate change, inequality probably being the biggest ones.

And the pact of the future talks a new financing mechanism for our multilateral institutions. Can the World Bank, the IMF play different roles? Catalytic financing would be an example of that. It deals with climate change, it deals with the reform of the UN itself, the Security Council.

There’s an implicit understanding that future generations need to get a bigger voice and obviously climate change is very high on the agenda because that’s probably the most burning issue with the world on fire, very clearly, and being very close to negative feedback loops, which is a very dangerous moment. And as Johan Rockstrom, the Resilience Institute, talks about these nine planetary boundaries, and six of them are already past what we would call the acceptable limit. So we need to get that back by all means possible still.

So what is exciting is that this is signed by all the countries. I know some countries will pay lip service to it, but others will aggressively try to achieve their commitments. I was very pleased to see President Lula, we had some meetings yesterday with the Brazilians and the day before, and he committed Brazil to one and a half degrees. And so a tremendous amount of things are happening on the climate front. You see an enormous presence of the private sector here; young people, entrepreneurs. It only ought to give you hope if you’re a week here, but what we have to do is translate all these ambitions that are clearly there into clear actions and that’s where we will be focused on.

Steve Goldbach:

And maybe just a follow-up on that for a sec. So a lot of times in the sustainability space, we hear the word ‘system change’, and then we hear this desire for action. So what in your mind would be, as we think about systems change, we often think about what are the ways you’re going to reframe the way people behave? So what are the kinds of actions that would set the systems change in motion from your standpoint?

Paul Polman:

So the way that people behave is exactly right, and I’m glad you mentioned that. You have to believe in the goodness of people. Rutger Bregman, a fellow Dutchman, wrote this book called Humankind, which is worth reading. And I have never met a CEO who wants more, or she wants more, unemployment or air pollution or people going to bed hungry. It doesn’t exist. And yet collectively, we’re behaving pretty badly or irresponsibly, if I may call it that way, mildly. And it is really more so because of the boundaries around us that start to drive our behavior, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. And it’s these boundaries that you need to change.

And I always say leadership is about working on the forest, not in the forest. When I became CEO of Unilever, on the first day, basically, I abolished quarterly reporting. I moved compensation systems to the long term. People say, “Oh, that’s very heroic.” No, it was not. It was moving the boundaries so that people could start to behave properly. In many companies, that’s not the case.

Out of that, we created an organization called Focusing Capital on the Long Term. Sarah Williamson is very capably leading that. We have all the great financial institutions and their organizations like ourselves, to show the financial market and we’ve made some success at a longer term strategy, taking all the stakeholders into account, versus a myopic focus on the quarter and the shareholder, is actually a better way to build long-term shareholder value.

Steve Goldbach:

Absolutely.

Paul Polman:

And I think there are overwhelming data coming out of our ears, but the behavior still wouldn’t mirror that unfortunately, so we have to work on that. So that would be one of the changes.

The other chance is to put a price on negative externalities. The price on carbon, 25% of the world is doing that now, 26% cap and trade systems, carbon pricing systems. But we need to value these negative externalities.

Now Europe is making the CBAM, which is the carbon border adjustment mechanism. It probably will trigger, depending on the elections here, a mechanism coming in place in the US in some form or another. China has put it in place. So we might see momentum around that.

So we struggle with biodiversity. We still value a tree that’s dead more than a tree that’s alive, not a good thing. So I’m on the task force for the TNFN, the task force for Nature-Based Financial Solutions, a mirror copy of the TCFD as you’re well familiar with, and we’re trying to see how we can move that forward.

We launched an initiative this week very excitingly. You had Jane Goodall here yesterday. She’s a planetary guardian. I co-chaired an organization with Hindou [Oumarou Ibrahim], who’s an indigenous leader, and President Santos from Colombia, so we’re trying to move that higher on the agenda.

So these are the systems changes that are needed, but they require a mindset change. They require us to first and foremost understand that we are interconnected. That the success of any or the failures of some, or many still, affect all of us, and that we’re first and foremost citizens of planet Earth.

And then the second thing is that we need to work together, that cooperative leadership, especially when it concerns the future of humanity, cooperative leadership is more important than competitive leadership. So it’s a human issue that we need to address.

Rumi, who is a poet from the 13th century in Iran said it very well when he said, “Yesterday I was clever, I tried to change the world. Today I’m smart, I’m trying to change myself.” And that’s probably the biggest thing that we need to work on in this world, is a systems change to be honest.

Des Dearlove:

Talking leadership. Let’s talk about leadership because you’ve said recently that there’s a crisis of leadership.

Paul Polman:

Yes.

Des Dearlove:

By all accounts, it’s a tough time to be a CEO at the moment. What advice would you give? I mean, you say it’s easier to do the right thing than it is to do the wrong thing.

Paul Polman:

Yes, I believe.

Des Dearlove:

But a lot of CEOs don’t seem to understand that. And what advice would you give them?

Paul Polman:

So there is a crisis of leadership. You see that very clearly here when elections again are not very clear, how people shrink to obscurity, not willing to make commitments, not going into these cooperative partnerships that you now need to tackle the tougher challenges.

Des Dearlove:

Do you think they’re ducking now? Do you think people-

Paul Polman:

For sure. For sure. For sure. For sure. Not think, it’s not even thinking anymore.

Des Dearlove:

Okay.

Paul Polman:

It’s a fact. So we just need to talk the way it is, otherwise we never solve it if we don’t see reality in the eye. So it’s difficult. And it’s difficult at a political level. We don’t really have many.. If you ask who is a politician you admire, people start stuttering. If you say name five companies that really set the example for the world, people stutter. Trust levels are low. The turnover of CEOs is less than four and a half years tenure now. The life of a publicly traded company was 67 years when I was born, it’s 17 years now. 40 years ago, we had 8,000 publicly traded companies in the US so people could benefit from that wealth’s creation. They could become shareholders. Now we have 4,000 companies.

So there are many signals or signs that show what we’re doing is not very good and that we have leaders there that are not able to function in this world, which is a VUCA [Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity]  world, which is a world where too many things come together, but they all come together because they’re actually related to the same thing. It’s not attacking the burning issue in the first place. So when we had the financial crisis, we tried to put bandages on that and treated it like “Let’s throw money at it,” but we never really fixed the basic issue. Banks were too big to fail and people were too small to matter. So you got a lot of discontent building up.

Then we had COVID and there we do the same thing again. We give a few vaccines to the ones that have the money, and the 80% of the world that suffers increasingly from our inability to act, we have the courage not to give them anything, just like we have the courage not to give them 100 million climate fund, just like we have the courage not to give them any technologies to make their economies competitive and green. So there’s a real vacuum here of morality, if you want to, and that needs to be solved.

Judy Samuelson from the Aspen Institute, I was talking to her and she said, “Paul, you have to read this study.” I chaired the Saïd Business School at Oxford and on the board of NCRTSA and some other things because we need to create different types of leaders. But she confirmed it. She said, “We did a study of all the MBAs.” The business programs in the world have 70 million people a year that go into business schools. It might also be engineering or biology that want to start their businesses, but 70 million people take business courses, more than any other study.

So they were interviewing the people, “Why do you go to business school?” “I want to make a difference. I want to change the world. I want to make it a better place,” et cetera. Then one or two years later, depending on the program, re-interview the same people. “I want to work for Goldman Sachs. I want to make a lot of money, and I want to screw the world.” And that’s basically still what is out there running the companies. And all of a sudden you’re in an environment that you need to be, where is purpose. We don’t like to talk to that. Very few CEOs want to talk love or empathy or compassion or are able to explain it. You need to work in cooperative partnerships and they’ve been taught to compete the heck out of everything. We have to be taught to think about future generations or the planet itself.

No, the shareholder, the shareholder. So the skill sets that we need in these leaders to be these societal leaders is not there.

The reason I took the site chairmanship of the Saïd Business School is because right next door is the Blavatnik School of Public Policy. You have wonderful social sciences there, philosophy, arts, et cetera, so that we can create programs with really full societal leaders.

Steve Goldbach:

So your old friend and my former colleague, Roger Martin, used to complain about the same thing when he became the dean-

Paul Polman:

But he did a great job at the Rotman School.

Steve Goldbach:

… at the Rotman School.

Paul Polman:

Yeah.

Steve Goldbach:

Right? And so if you were designing the MBA program of the future and thinking about teaching purposeful leadership, so you’ve talked about philosophy. How would you think about changing the curriculum? How would you think about creating the leaders that we need for the future?

Paul Polman:

Well, we actually are doing it. So we’ve created a group of about 30 universities that we’ve put together based on the principles of what we talk about in Net Positive and try to change with them and be leading.

Andy Hoffman at the URP Institute in Michigan would be one, University of Vermont would be the other one. We have alliances with universities on what we call climate leadership for universities. So we’re using them as pilots and test markets.

And then we’re part of an organization, which is, I chaired the UN Global Compact for the Secretary General. And out of that, we created an organization called PRME, which stands for Principles for Responsible Management Education, that’s about 865 universities. And together with some funding that we got from the Lego Foundation and others, we’re actually trying to change the curriculum.

So what’s the direction we take? Obviously everybody is looking at technology, everybody’s looking at lifelong learning, everybody’s looking at making education actually less elite so that we can get a broader representation of people that often are underrepresented, more in touch with realities of this wealth, but then also broaden the type of education that we give just around the lines that I was mentioning to you.

And at the Saïd Business School, not to advertise for that, we make sure that about 20% of the people are from Africa, half of the people that are in the school are on scholarships. We have a system of a degree plus one.

So we have sister programs with the Smith, the Martin, or the Blavatnik School to just broaden that education. And then you want the universities to be much more focused on impact. This notion that you have to research is important, but this notion that you do research for 10 years and nobody actually reads it or that it’s not applicable. If you run a business school, I think you have to be held accountable also in today’s world that we live in for the impact that you can create, the positive impact obviously I’m after. And that has to be quite tangible nowadays.

Des Dearlove:

Coming back to… talking of all things kind of climate and sustainability and things. The other language we are hearing now is the language of regeneration. So sustainability was about doing less harm to the environment, regeneration goes further. It’s about doing more good.

Paul Polman:

Right.

Des Dearlove:

And actually, it’s very aligned with Net Positive. It’s very similar.

Paul Polman:

Yes.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. It’s the same thing. How important is the language that we use? How important is this shift onto the front foot?

Paul Polman:

Totally. Because language, context and content are incredibly important and language often drives behavior. I can make you feel very happy. I can make you feel miserable. We’re still the same person, but it’s the language that probably will do that first before anything else and perhaps some physical expressions, but they go together.

This year, World Overshoot Day is August the first. That’s the day that we use up more resources than the world can replenish. I would argue that every day after that we’re actually stealing from future generations.

In the last 50 years, we’ve lost about 68% of the world’s species, mammals, vertebrates. So when is it our turn? Hubert Reeves, who is a philosopher in Canada just across the border, said it very well when he said, “Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible nature, not realizing that the visible nature he destroys is the invisible God he worships in the first place.” And this is exactly what we are doing.

So then you look at sustainability reports of any company in the world, including the company I represented. And it talks about less plastics in the oceans. It talks about less carbon in the atmosphere. It talks about less deforestation in my value chain. You get tears in your eyes if you read some of these sustainability reports, but when you’ve overshot these planetary boundaries to such an extent, less bad is still bad. I used to kill 10 people. I was a terrible murderer, now I only kill five people. I’m not a good murderer. It just doesn’t work that way. And somehow in the corporate world, we need to change that mindset. My plane goes down less fast than your plane is not a good story. And yet we sort of collectively, and I’m deliberately saying it in a provocative way, but collectively we behave like that.

So what we were trying to do was this book, when we were writing this book was really… We thought we’d do a practical book about how to change your companies and become more responsible, et cetera. But the more I was writing it with Andrew, the more we thought about it as a mindset change, that the only thing that is acceptable is to think restorative, reparative, regenerative, and that’s what we call Net Positive.

In essence, to keep it short, but what does that mean? That means that the leaders, so how do you become a net positive leader? That we first and foremost need to take responsibility of our total impact in this world. There are many companies still that think they can outsource their value chain, also outsource their responsibility.

It dawned on me when the Rana Plaza factory collapsed, 1,030 women lost their lives. They knew they were going in there on suicide missions. The cracks were on the wall. By the way, they got paid 11 cents an hour. That’s as close as you can get to modern day slavery. I was the first one – using Unilever money admittedly – I was the first one to send money to them. I have nothing to do with fashion. But by that time I had developed the sustainable development goals. If we don’t have the courage or the audacity to take responsibility for these things in our value chain, then you’re not worth running these companies, in my opinion.

So Net Positive is take responsibility of your total impact. If you break it, you own it. The second thing is, run your businesses for the longer term, which automatically brings you to all of the stakeholders. You cannot run the business for the long term if you don’t take care of all your stakeholders, by definition, impossible. And then you need to really run your business by firmly believing that the shareholders need a return, but that return is a result of what you do. That’s not the reason for doing it. It’s a little bit like white blood cells. We all need white blood cells to live, but we don’t live for white blood cells. And then, net positive companies work on these transformative partnerships and ultimately go into what I call positive advocacy. If we really want to drive the big systems changes that Steve was referring to, we really need to work together with civil society and governments to get the right frameworks and the right policies in place, otherwise it doesn’t happen at the speed and skill that we need it.

So right now in Washington, there’s about $6 billion spent for lobbying by companies, by trade associations. Many CEOs saying this thing to sound right, doing this thing, or having the trade associations advocate other things. We’ve published extensively about it. It just doesn’t work anymore. And that’s probably one of the reasons you lose employees. That’s one of the reasons business doesn’t have the trust it should be having. So that’s Net Positive leadership in a nutshell, and that’s what we should all train the people for, to do that. Now it takes courage. It’s not easy. I understand that.

Steve Goldbach:

So Paul, let me come back to the idea of running your business for all your stakeholders and running it for the long term. You and I talked before about using simple language. So the last time I looked at how companies were valued and you were a CFO, you forecast your cash flows for a handful of years and then you do this thing at the end, called the terminal value, where you assume that my company lasts forever and continues to grow unabated forever. And that’s usually somewhere between 50-75% of the value is in that shorthand number, in the way that valuations are typically calculated in the world. Why is it, do you think, that given all the value is predicated on this assumption that businesses last forever, that we can’t get our heads around focusing on: We need to make sure that our companies can last forever? And one of the things that must be true for them to last forever is that we need to have a functioning society, a functioning planet, because we all benefit from that.

Paul Polman:

That’s right. No. Absolutely. And I think you’re answering your question to be honest.

Steve Goldbach:

Yeah. Well, I’m looking for validation from you really.

Paul Polman:

You don’t have to ask me to agree on that one. But you see, you need to look at what causes it. Because most of the value creation in any company is anywhere between five and 15 years before you create value. If Unilever builds a new factory, it takes us five years before you get your return, and because it doesn’t fill up at day one, you have to build these things and work it. If you go into a new country, it might take you 10-15 years before you have a return. If you invest in your people, it might take you 25 years before you have your successor. So we do a lot of things for the longer term, yet when it comes to business decisions and too many companies, CSR is being celebrated, but when the pressure is there, it’s the shareholder and CSR is the first thing that is being dropped.

These are tragedies in history that often cost the shareholder infinitely more. And so there’s enough evidence now, I think also with hard data, that companies that are run for this longer term, for taking these multiple stakeholders into account also have a better return over time for the shareholders.

It certainly, it’s not only a Unilever story, I think you can see that broadly. As ESG funds are starting to perform better over a three, five, 10 year period. Obviously when you have a short term crisis, you might all of a sudden see a deviation, but broadly they are having a better return.

So what is getting away from it? I think you have to start with boards. Boards are still populated by people that grew up in a different era, often a certain age, often more interested in protecting their reputation and terribly short on basic skills. We need some boards with knowledge about sustainability or climate change or actually AI or very under-representative in-

Steve Goldbach:

And lots of diverse…

Paul Polman:

… terms of gender, in terms of racial dimensions, et cetera. Not only in this country, to a lesser extent, but also in the part of the world that I live in. So you need to start with boards. And then often the CEO will say that the short-term pressure comes from the boards, actually not from the financial markets, I tend to believe that. There are more people in the financial market, if you look at the proxy season and the questions, et cetera, that are seeking a little bit longer term behavior.

Then you need to drive some behavioral change. If you have a system where you have not one person, one vote, but $1, one vote, it really leads to erosion of democracy. And you see it happening right in front of us in this country, but also in other places.

Des Dearlove:

So how do we-

Paul Polman:

So it drives behavior that goes in the wrong direction and these are the systems changes you need to fight for.

Des Dearlove:

Sorry to interrupt you, but how do we persuade people who have a different opinion? I mean, we had a great session yesterday with Jane Goodall and she was sort of saying, “You can’t just confront people. If you can engage the heart, the head will follow.” I’ve heard you say something not dissimilar to that. The way you have to persuade and influence people is more of a subtle art.

Paul Polman:

You’d think the word conservation and conservatives have something in common. So that’s not a problem. In fact, now that we work biodiversity and work closely with Jane, you actually see less of a tension than the whole area of climate change has become unfortunately contentious.

So the way you work on it is two things. Obviously a lot of bridging and listening and understanding and not getting hung up on the words, which sometimes create irritation, but just on what we’re trying to achieve. Are we trying to achieve clean air that people can breathe? Are we trying to implement technologies that make our economies more competitive versus obsolete economies? Are we trying to create an environment of more inclusion or less inclusion?

Steve Goldbach:

Things that are inarguable.

Paul Polman:

Well, they might be arguable for some people. But start with the things where you align on values, what you want to achieve, and very quickly, I would believe, you can find more common ground. So the other thing that we have mastered ourselves in is that we, and the newspapers form and social media obviously drives that further, is that we just thrive in celebrating differences between us, even when we go up in companies in careers, when you had performance reviews, there seems to be an awful lot of pleasure in just explaining to you all the things you don’t do well that you need to correct before you get promoted. I’ve always taken a different view. It’s celebrate the things that you do well and find other people that do other things better and compliment. So start with commonalities. Why don’t you build on each other’s strengths? We cannot solve the climate crisis if the US and China are not together, have at least a common strategy.

And that’s the same for vaccines. Are we waiting for the next pandemic to treat it the same way as the one that we had before where we had to put in over $20 trillion? Far more, by the way, than it would cost us to solve the issues. So all these things require cooperation and it takes courage. I understand that. And that is a role that the private sector has to play better. When the political sector is broken, when institutions don’t quite function the way they were designed, then I think responsible business needs to fill that void to help move it forward. It’s in their interest. There’s no business in conflict zones or in wars or on a dead planet.

Steve Goldbach:

So Paul, you’re clearly an incredibly thoughtful and serious person and as we-

Paul Polman:

It depends on the time of the day.

Steve Goldbach:

… give our audience a moment to think about some questions, what do you do for fun?

Paul Polman:

So first of all, I think it’s very privileged to be able to work on things and have impact. And I don’t think that has to be separate from fun. In our lives we can make the choices of what we do, which is not the case for 85 or 90% of the people out there. So I’ve made a choice that gives me enormous satisfaction, to try to work for the ones that are left behind, which is the essence of the Sustainable Development Goals. So I get energy going to our foundations. I get energy talking to smallholder farmers and seeing how we can create livelihoods, I get energy in trying to see if we can attack the issues of climate change.

Honestly, that doesn’t stress me out. But at the same time you need to do some other things too. So you read your books. I actually like classic cars, so I drive them and we race these things to get your mind on other things.

My wife is a musician, so I spend a lot of time on the arts and supporting that, but also listening to it. Unfortunately, I never learned to play an instrument, but my line is every good musician needs an audience. So I’m trying to play that role so-

Steve Goldbach:

What does she play?

Paul Polman:

… sort of indirect musician. But you need to do other things but for different reasons, you need to get oxygen, because if you don’t get that oxygen, where do new ideas come from? Where do new partnerships form? So that’s the oxygen, and I’ve been very fortunate in the jobs I’ve been doing to continue to have enough oxygen in that sense.

Steve Goldbach:

Any questions from our audience? We got a mic runner. We’re going to need that for the podcast. Just wait.

John O’Brien:

Thank you. Hi, Paul. Great talk so far. Thank you. John O’Brien.

Paul Polman:

So far.

John O’Brien:

So far and I’m-

Paul Polman:

About to ruin it.

John O’Brien:

John O’Brien. You mentioned it, change starts with the board, and yesterday we had Craig Foster in here and his latest project is how to bring mother nature into the boardroom-

Paul Polman:

Yeah.

John O’Brien:

… with Steve and others, we work with the World Economic Forum and boards on climate governance. How do we make this work better in boardrooms?

Paul Polman:

So that’s an organization that we sponsor which is called Board 2030, where you have a shadow board. There are some people in the building here of One Young World. So I’m the chair of One Young World, so we always sent the maximum like Deloitte does, which is 50 people. So I had a cohort of 250-300 people at the end, some attrition, but that’s what it was. I would throw questions at them all the time, not that I always took their advice into account, but I would include them in things. They don’t need to be in the board, as you understand it, physically, there are some things that make sense and don’t make sense, but you need to give them voices and agency. And I’ll come back to that. I do regret looking back. In Unilever, I did have an empty chair but that was the consumer or the citizen because we were just so obsessed with ourselves that we forgot what that was about. But what I regret was that I didn’t put two other chairs there. Obviously mother nature is a clear one, and that’s very transparent now to most of us. But actually, future generations is more important because if you put the future generations there, you cover everything, including modern nature, otherwise it just doesn’t work. So that’s symbolically doing that.

So, how do you bring that to life is actually more important. So we ran a study, it was one of my foundations, with 4,000 people in the US and in the UK and we found that as you get from the baby boomers to the millennials to the Gen Zs, the Gen Ys, there is a higher need to find purpose in work. Without any doubt, people want to do more than just get a good salary or be paid fairly. They want to make a difference that’s bigger than they can do by themselves. And they look for companies where their purpose is aligned with that. That’s one of the reasons why you have so much pressure in society or angst, because people have values in their own lives that they don’t find back in companies. And then either you are a very good actor or you have to put on a mask, and that eats you up in the end. So that’s very important. And what we found was that 30% of these people, and it was actually fairly consistent, but it goes higher on the younger generations, have deliberately quit a company because the values were not aligned with theirs. But here is this stunning statistic. 60% is considering doing that. They’re considering doing that because the company’s CEOs talk the talk but not walk the walk, because they’re not being involved or given agency, because the plans of what the company does are not understood or not present, if you want to.

So these are things that I think CEOs need to be terribly concerned about, especially at a time where talent is probably 10 times more important than ever. And that’s probably not fully internalized in people. That survey was the most read on LinkedIn and got quite a lot of comments on that. So I hope we created a little bit of a ripple on what we called conscious quitting, but you have to sensitize people to that much more than what we’ve done so far.

And boards have a role to play, I think. Boards have a hard time getting their hands around culture or the “softer things,” which are actually very hard things. I’ve been on many boards, but it rarely is a discussion and that’s probably the most important thing. It’s also difficult to talk to the analysts. I mean, I’ve been in front of millions of analysts in my career. How do you talk about culture? You see them sort of staring to the ceiling and wondering what you drank, or if you’re sober, or if you smoked something. Which, as Dutchmen, we do. So that makes it easy to explain, but we need to talk to that more in my opinion.

Steve Goldbach:

I think… Whoa. We’ve got lots of questions. All right. We’ve got the mic here and then we’re going to go to Sarah in front.

Audience Member:

To be efficient, I’ll just do a follow-up. Thank you, Paul.

Paul Polman:

Oh, there you are.

Audience Member:

Right here in front.

Paul Polman:

We have the lights.

Audience Member:

Thank you. You’ve led many big companies. You talked about lack of leadership at very large companies, but you also mentioned that you met some entrepreneurs this week as part of your visits. We had some high impact social ecopreneurs here in our space. What is the role that you think that the movement of ecopreneurs can play in helping solve some of the problems?

Paul Polman:

Well, it’s absolutely key.

But we all have a role to play. I don’t think it’s like government, civil society, academics, business. I like to put people together because of the Sustainable Development Goals, but naturally I’m inclined on that platform. I didn’t want to be a CEO to be honest. I’m an accidental CEO. But I also thought that in my career I always look at what’s the maximum impact I can have, and I do the same now.

So for me, it’s more about impact than where you are, but you need to include everybody. So in Unilever, we created a social entrepreneur program where we asked the then Prince of Wales now the King himself to be the patron of that. But actually he became much more than a patron. He was all the time in the office actively championing it, we would give prizes. But what these people most appreciated was not the money or that they could go to the Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Leadership, but what they appreciated was that they could get connected to these bigger companies. So it’s very difficult for these ecopreneurs or social entrepreneurs to get into companies.

So one of the things, we created an enormous network and anywhere we went, we would throw these challenges to them and it made our company more human. But also the creativity then came in. We were able to work with millions of smallholder farmers in Africa and other places or build women entrepreneurs throughout our value chain when it got to diversity or whatever, because actually of them, not because of us, but by giving them agency and they were able to do that.

Now we were good in some other things, so that doesn’t matter to me, we don’t have to compete with each other, we have to complement each other. So you bring these people together and celebrate that on common purpose. But it’s hard to do these partnerships.

We had some of the biggest partnerships with the UN, and I’ve always worked with the UN, the world, thank God we have the UN, despite its shortcomings, but we reached, in my tenure, 1.2 billion people with handwashing, which is, four to five million children die every year of infectious diseases like pneumonia or diarrhea, that you can basically simply solve with the act of handwashing, a few times a day at these important locations. But if I would have to finance that as a company, I’d be bankrupt. It’s impossible. So we worked with USAID, with the Gates Foundation, with [inaudible], with UNICEF, and others, and we put these programs out there in all of these countries. We worked with, often the wives of heads of state, very powerful spokespeople. And at the end of the day, we reached about 1.2 billion children and saved millions of lives, in my opinion as a result of that.

Now there’s nothing wrong, and by the way, when I was developing the Sustainable Development Goals, there’s a goal of sanitization, and we put handwashing in there as one of the sub-goals, so that everybody would focus on it. We happened to have 50% of the handwash market as a company, but I can tell you it was growing double-digit during my 10 years.

So there’s nothing wrong with that. To combine sustainability and also ensure that your business is run sustainably, so you can do more of it. It’s bringing purpose to life. But it’s very good for the shareholders if you do it responsibly. So you source your things sustainably, you ensure that your packaging doesn’t mess up the environment. You pay people correctly and you don’t hold them on a string, and you make your brands be a force for good.

When we have a toilet cleaner, we have the leading toilet cleaner in the world. I told them, “Your goal is not to sell toilet cleaning products or to tell me it’s 99% disinfectancy or your competitor 99.9, and then we say 99.95. I don’t want to be part of that game. It’s useless. Your goal is to build 150 million toilets because there’s one and a half billion people who’s open to application. And if you build 150 million toilets, you’ll be the best in knowing what the needs are for building toilets.

When we sell Dove, we don’t sell Dove, we sell women’s self-esteem. And then we happen to have products.

Ice cream, Ben & Jerry’s is the ultimate example. They sell ice cream but they’re really are a social activist brand, but they need to pay for it. So they need to sell ice cream to pay for it. So ice cream is an excuse to sell, but so every brand should have that purpose, in my opinion, otherwise why would we keep them around?

Steve Goldbach:

So Paul, can I just check on something with you? You’re the one with a flight, I saw a lot of hands.

Paul Polman:

Okay. We can take a few more.

Steve Goldbach:

You got time. So we got Sarah.

Paul Polman:

You’re a good driver.

Steve Goldbach:

And, Des, you’re going to be the governor, so you tell me.

Paul Polman:

I’d say tip him well. It’s my only advice to you guys.

Steve Goldbach:

Okay.

Sarah Woodcock:

Hi, my name’s Sarah Woodcock. I wanted to know what single achievement in your career has given you the most sense of accomplishment? And equally, what failure have you learned the most from?

Paul Polman:

So I don’t want to reflect it on me because I’ve always been fortunate to have enormously capable people around me that did enormously capable things that I was able to explain. But the secret is just to invest in others. The more you invest in others, the more they invest in you. So leadership ultimately is about putting yourself to the service of others, knowing that by doing so, you’re better off yourselves as well. And many people are not willing to take that act of faith, but it works, it honestly works.

So when I was CEO, I told people, and people started laughing, I said, “I’m the one in the company that knows the least.” People laugh. “No. You’re a CEO, you should know everything.” No. My finance person knew more about finance than I would or ever will. The person who ran North America would know more. The brand manager on Dove, the person who runs the factories will know more about that. So at the end of the day, I’m nobody, to be honest.

So what you can only do is to give all your energy, in terms of ensuring that the environment is right for them to prosper, that the values are coherent so that we have a glue that makes the metric of one plus one is 11. And to invest in them, to make them succeed, to create an organization where each and everybody can rise to their highest desires or abilities.

And then things automatically will happen, based on a very strong purpose. You can align people on these purposes. When I came to Unilever, I called Bill George. I said, “I’ve never been a CEO. I’m scared stiff. I don’t even know why I accepted the job, but I’m in it now, but I need help.” I just didn’t know how to do it. Bill had written this book, True North, which I like and it’s very powerful. I said, “The first year, we’re just going to work on purpose.” If we all work on our own purpose and then how we influence others and then how we get results. Of course, we ran a little bit the business the first year because there were some left brain things that needed to be corrected but we all worked on it.

We could never have gotten our Unilever sustainable living plan, where we set goals to double our business, decouple it totally, social targets. We were the first ones that did the full monty of ESG, if you want to, but also made commitments to decarbonize. We immediately set targets in line with science. We had no idea how to do it, but we had the courage to say, “We take responsibility of our total impact.” We set targets that we need, not what we can get away with, like so many companies, play to win versus not lose. And we said, “We don’t know how to do it.” We became human and said, “Let’s have partnerships.” And that’s why it attracted a lot of people. We never got attacked, although we had many issues, and we would let people publish these issues. The only company, regretfully, which is a failure. We were the only company that issued the human rights reports – I issued two or three of them when I was there – with some very strong, salient points in there that need to be addressed, where we asked Oxfam or others to publish. People said, “Don’t publish because you’ll lose your job. All the newspapers will take you to bits.” I said, “No. We asked them to do the studies. Everybody should know how tough it is.” So then we published it. People said, “Well, if Unilever even has those problems, can you imagine other companies? But they at least have the courage to publish it.” We never got attacked. More people wanted to join us and help us.

So bring humanity back to business is all I say. And each time we don’t do that, we pay a price for that. Each time we do, we make the connections that we need to solve some of these bigger problems.

My biggest failure, probably. I have more failures than success, otherwise I wouldn’t have been a CEO, to be honest. You see what the IRA does now and other things, but we have so much more to do, so that was a failure. A failure to not be able to get as many companies to follow us and be as courageous, I still see that. We created the World Business Council. I chaired the ICC, the International Chamber of Commerce globally, the B team, the UN Global Compact. We now have a reasonable group of companies that are marching in the same direction in a more coordinated way, and that was my intent. But if you really look at where we are, I cannot sit here and look at my seven grandchildren or even my own children and say, “I’ve done a great job.” Honestly, I can’t. I wish I could. But poverty is going up, climate change is going up, inequality is going up, and we’re all sitting here saying to each other how great we are. I have a hard time doing that. I’m hopeful. I think we can challenge ourselves to that higher level of morality or consciousness that we need, but we’re not doing it right now. So there’s nothing to celebrate.

Anytime we get a prize. We just got a prize from the UN, we went there. I don’t really want that. I don’t think we deserve any prize. Certainly not people like us. The ones that deserve the prize, it’s the ones for which we need to fight.

I have people working in our foundations that work for less than $10,000 a year, working with a blind or deaf/blind child, 100% dedicated day and night to give them a chance and we step on them. These are the heroes that we should celebrate. These are the ones that we should give prizes. These are the ones we should congratulate, but we are not yet at that point that we can feel good about ourselves. Honestly, we can’t, and so I’ll go on. I’ll wear the pin. I’ll go on until we get to that point that is in the sustainable development goals, which is to irreversibly eradicate poverty in a more sustainable and equitable way, or as we call it, to not leave anybody behind. So that’s a big failure; that we should take our own responsibilities.

Steve Goldbach:

Paul, there’s really no way-

Paul Polman:

I’ll take one more question, then I’m flying off.

Steve Goldbach:

All right. Okay. All right.

Lena Taylor:

Quick question.

Steve Goldbach:

I checked Waze, you’re okay.

Paul Polman:

I’m okay?

Steve Goldbach:

It’s 1 hour 34 right now to JFK.

Paul Polman:

I’m okay.

Steve Goldbach:

So I’m just-

Paul Polman:

No. No.

Paul Polman:

We have five more minutes.

Lena Taylor:

Okay. Great. My name is Lena Taylor and I run an organization called Heart Quarters. So we do executive coaching and leadership development. And let’s say you talked about the courage that it takes to do the wrong thing. Let’s say one or some of those people that you’re talking about have a come-to-Paul moment. What would you tell them in terms of the courage that it requires to pull a product that’s harmful for the environment or stop a line that’s profitable but harmful?

Paul Polman:

Yeah. So I think we are at a point now, the human beings have a little bit of a shortcoming. We are evolution, but evolution is relatively slow, whilst we’re now living in an environment where change is really fast. So we actually have a problem, it’s that our minds are not wired to deal with that. So we are linear thinkers and we have exponential problems. So we are pretty bad at forecasting what is going to happen. We tend to overestimate the time we have to solve problems. We also underestimate how quickly technology is available and what the economics are as a result of that. I’m always amazed at talking to CEOs that, when they say, “I can’t do this,” you ask three times or four times the ‘why’-question, how quickly you can find the answer, even at a simple bilateral. But certainly if you go into more broader partnerships, you can solve 80% of today’s problems, to be honest, and you’re more profitable.

Deloitte did a study last year that I quote quite often. If we don’t do anything and stay on the current trajectory, everything you know, business as usual, but everything you know today, it sounds like a lot, we will have a cost in 2030 over $178 trillion, extra $178 trillion. Climate change would be obviously one of the bigger drivers, but there’s more.

If we would work hard to stay around 1.5 degrees, which is still possible by the way, then it’s $43 trillion benefit. In every sector we now work where I bring people together. I work in fashion, I work in food and tourism and travel, in the built environment, in the financial markets where we are creating impact funds. And these are the biggest sectors on devastating effects on the SDG, so turn that around, these are the biggest opportunities. We see, in every sector, that the cost of not acting is now higher than the cost of acting. We need to spend $3 to $5 trillion more on the SDGs every year now to make it come alive, because we’ve waited so long, wouldn’t have been necessary, but that’s where we are right now. $3 to $5 trillion. As I said, we spent $20 trillion on COVID, only in Europe and the US, which is a zoonotic disease, the destruction of biodiversity. It only takes a few hundred billion a year to protect and restore our biodiversity. For every dollar we invest there, we get $16 return and fast results.

Goal number 16 is about peace and justice, right? And so functioning institutions, absence of corruption, et cetera. This world right now is spending 10 to 12% of its GDP on conflict prevention and wars and the numbers are going up. Just the weapons we buy every year is just past the 2.5 trillion dollars level. It’s absurd.

So we’re willing to spend the money to deal with conflict prevention and wars, which has as the roots poverty and inequality and increasing climate change, but we’re not willing to spend the money to… And our food system is probably… If you come from Mars, you’d think we’re crazy. We keep 850-

Steve Goldbach:

Let’s just be clear. That’s Mars the planet?

Paul Polman:

Yeah. The Mars. Yeah. Yeah. No. I was with yesterday with Stephen Batcher, they’re a very good company, but thanks for correcting me on the record. Man, that was a close call. We keep 850 million people in absolute starvation, they don’t even know if they wake up the next day. We keep the smallholder farmers in poverty. That’s where most of the people you find that live in poverty. We have 30% of the food we waste in the value chain. We destroy biodiversity because the only way we do food is to degrade land or to cut down forests.

And then we have half the world population overweight or obese on the other side creating one of the biggest epidemics, which is Diabetes 2. 70% of our healthcare costs, which we know we can’t afford the way we do it, is going to that. So this whole system is broken, and yet, if we would go to regenerative agriculture, pay farmers for nature-based services, for restoring the soil health, which we know how to do, many farmers do, but do it at scale, we create an economy that’s worth, from a $12 trillion negative, that our food system currently gives us, we turn that into a $4 trillion positive.

Every-every issue we look at, the cost of not acting has become higher than the cost of acting. So what I would say to these people, you’re sitting on the biggest opportunity that is ever given to us. I just came from Indonesia this morning, I’m about to fly to Brazil. We look at the country plans, ecological transformation plans for these countries, and we find, let’s take Brazil as an example, $150 billion investment a year will unlock, already in year one, $450 billion.

In fact, these countries are very well-placed. They have natural capital, they have clean energy, hydro in that case, they have transition minerals. So they have everything actually to be ready for that green economy and unlock from what is a middle income country to actually becoming a high income country, because that’s where the game is going to be played.

So you need to have, the moral story or the arc of morality, as Martin Luther King, and others, was talking about, will ultimately bend but we unfortunately can’t afford to wait that long anymore. So we have to accelerate it. And the only thing that accelerates it really is economic forces, which could be incentives, but it could be absence of powerful subsidies, which would be the easiest ones to do, which could be frameworks like carbon pricing, European carbon border adjustments or the corporate sustainable reporting directives really are big changes that will happen here.

And ultimately, it’s the economic forces. Technology, the last one being there that makes the system change. I wish it was different, honestly, I wish, but it’s the reality. But we’re close to that, 80% of the things we really can do now and do it profitably. And the other 20, we have a little bit of time.

We’re working now with a big coalition on sustainable airline fuel. It’s a little bit more challenging, but we have ways to wait, but for the other things we really need to move. It’s urgent.

So I want to leave you with an optimistic message, because I don’t want to leave you feeling ‘blah,’ you know? Because, exactly of this cost of action-not action, we see things moving and moving faster. Last year, $1.8 trillion in green energy, 50% up the year before, twice than what is going into fossil fuel. This year, it’s up again 30%. Electric vehicles, batteries, solar, wind, they’re all close to tipping points if not past tipping points.

There are seven countries that are already totally decarbonized, 47 countries ahead of the Paris Agreement. These countries that are ahead of the Paris Agreement, you find them everywhere, Latin America, Africa, and they’re doing economically well. So there is momentum in the world, but the problem is we’re in second gear, we need to go to fourth gear. So coming back to my car racing, before we only drive electric cars and don’t have gears anymore, you don’t know what I’m talking about. It is much easier to go from second gear to fourth gear to accelerate, than it is to accelerate when you’re in reverse. In fact, you would blow up the engine. I wouldn’t recommend that.

So the use is an incredible force now that we’re giving agency, and that is something to be very positive about. So the forces are there, I think, to make this happen and to say, “We did it. We were the ones that didn’t give you the problems anymore. We gave you the solutions.” And we can do that in the next 15-20 years. No problem.

Steve Goldbach:

So sadly, Paul, we’re out of time and I really, really appreciate you spending the extra time. We are going to say thank you and let’s give him a nice round of applause.

Thank you.

So, I’m just going to read the outro. This is the Provocateurs Podcast coming to you from Climate Week in New York City. We’ve been Des Dearlove and Steve Goldbach. If you like our chat, then please check out our other episodes and we hope to see you on the next one.

We are going to let Mr. Polman walk right out to his train, at the E-Train. No. I’m kidding. We’ve got a car waiting for you. But we are deeply appreciative for all your wisdom and thank you for all you’re doing for society, for the world, and it has been an absolutely humbling experience to get to know you the last couple days, and you got to go make your flight because we want to do this again with you sometime, and you’re not going to like us if we don’t let you do that.

Paul Polman:

Thank you.

Steve Goldbach:

Thank you so much.

Paul Polman:

You’re welcome.

Steve Goldbach:

Thank you. Thank you.