Fireside chat with Paul Polman

Okay, welcome to the fireside chat with Paul Polman. This is really the, you know, we have had many highlights today, I hope, but this is really one of the core highlights of our Climate Bootcamp and the last activity of the day before your college dinners tonight. So I'm very pleased to have— to present to you Paul Polman, who has many different hats, and one is more impressive and inspiring than the other. But he's probably most known for being the CEO of Unilever from 2009 to 2019, where he really pioneered a purpose-driven business models and really showed that a sustainable business can drive performance and that these two are not at odds. And I think that has really changed the tone and really set an amazing example. And we've been very fortunate here at Saïd Business School that Paul has been the chair of our board that met earlier today. And so Paul has been in today and— I'm here. Paul has co-authored a book on net positive. I just got the opportunity to get a signed copy, so thank you, Paul. How courageous—

Ignore the value though.

How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take. It's a great book. I love it because you weave in really your role as what it means to be a leader of a big and complicated organization like Unilever with very long supply chains that is truly global and what it really means to create a business that is net positive. And maybe, Paul, we start off with that question. And as many students, many of you are beginning your MBA journey, you know, now, but also maybe a journey into sustainability and leadership. Could you explain to us the concept of net positive? We heard today about net zero and geological net zero, so what means net positive actually? And could you share a concrete example of what that means in practice?

Sure, sure, sure, with pleasure. It's actually officially I'm not anymore the chair of the Saïd Business School because after 2 terms, this morning's board meeting was my last one, so I feel liberated. So I won't claim that title anymore. But, um, so the reason we wrote Net Positive is really to change a frame of mind that is actually haunting us. The essence of the book is, um, how can you leave the world better off than you found it? 2 simple questions. How can you profit from solving the world's problems, not creating the world's problems? And is the world better off because your business is in it Yes or no? And basically think about our current economic model, which actually quite happily consumes a lot of the world's scarce resources. But what if we change our mindsets and move from consuming, or depleting if you want to, the world's resources to merely borrowing them? Or not only borrowing, but perhaps even restoring? The— The situation that we find ourselves in, in the world, is, is, is quite precarious, if I may call it that way, where we have an economic model that 100% depends on nature, but the way we make that economic model come alive actually destroys nature. So we're undermining our own long-term success, our own viability, was the way we do things. That would have been okay when there were 3 billion people in this world consuming about 1/5 of what we're currently consuming. But with this enormous wealth creation, population growth, these numbers simply don't add up anymore. So you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet, and anything you can't do forever, you would agree with me, is by definition not sustainable. So how do we ensure that we have a future for us and for the generations that come after us and enjoy this wonderful planet? Most companies are in the CSR mode. 95% of companies in the world actually write CSR reports, corporate social responsibility. I read a lot of them and sometimes you get tears in your eyes. You know, managed to the tilt by the public relations department, checked by all the lawyers that we have in the world, and it sounds like manna is falling from heaven. But if you read these reports, it really deals with being less bad. Less carbon in the atmosphere, less plastics in the oceans, less deforestation in my value chain. But when we've overshot these planetary boundaries to such an extent, less bad is simply not good enough anymore. I used to kill 10 people, I was an amazing murderer. Now I kill only 5 people, am I better? So it just doesn't work, you see, and yet that's our mindset. So what we argue in the book is that to be successful longer term, I would argue already today, you need to think regenerative, restorative, reparative, and that's what we call net positive. So what does that mean? It means if you are in the food business, Think about regenerative agriculture. Growing your food in a way that restores the land versus depletes the land. That restores the biodiversity versus depletes the biodiversity. That gives a farmer a livelihood versus what currently happens, keeping the farmers in poverty. If you're Pepsi or Coca, not to mention companies, you want to be water positive. What does that mean? What does that mean? That means giving more water back than you use. Very much something we strive for in Unilever. Be sure that the water that leaves your factories is cleaner than the water that comes in. Work the watersheds. Ensure that you create wetlands. You might even go further and be sure that the 1.5 to 2 billion people that don't have access to clean drinking water, that you provide solutions for them. Become water partners. So in any business that we look at, I think the model is there. Climate positive. Net zero, by the way, I don't understand. It's a horrible term and I don't know how you're going to explain it to your professors because it absolutely doesn't mean anything. But so much for your course for the rest of the quarter. But think about carbon positive. You know, you have now houses that are being built in many of the countries where you put solar on your roof, where you use thermal or other forms of green energy to warm your buildings, and where you actually use materials that capture carbon. You can easily see that if we just change our frame of mind, that you can actually build in a carbon-positive way. And by the way, that is much more easy to understand for people than these net-zero things where we do something good here and something bad there. and someone has to calculate that it averages out, it just doesn't work. Especially when you've overshot these planetary boundaries. I brought some charts, but I'm not sure if we want to use them, but it makes it very clear where we are. I'll do it for 2 seconds. In fact, I didn't bring them. One of my assistants sent them, so we just looked at them. Since he did all the work, I'd get in trouble if I don't show them. So I have— So let's see how we advance this.

If not, let me just—

Here, I think I got it. So this chart you've seen a million times. It's actually the— on the left is the socioeconomic trends, the growth of population, the growth of GDP, urbanization, all the things that you know and read about. But as a result of that, also the pressure on the world's scarce resources. On the right side, you see the trends actually on Earth systems that require the, you know, for us to function in a healthy way, you know, like tropical forest loss, domestic land dedications, reductions, biosphere degradation, ocean acidification. And what you see is these trends are 100% the same. As we consume more in this linear production model, consumption model of taking it out of the ground, stuffing it into factories, and then basically ending up in landfills or in oceans or in incineration. 8% of all the packaging that we use in the world is reused, 92% is not. I mean, how long can that go on type thing? So that's really where we are on the pressure that we've put on the planetary boundaries. It's as simple as that. as that. If you look at what happens is, and I'll focus on the middle side, it's only a short period of time, about 10,000 years ago until now, that we were in something called the Holocene, which is a very delicate balance. Now, over the last 100 years with our way of living, in fact, over the last 50 years, we've lost about 73% of the world's species, which is ridiculous. It's basically my generation. What has been built up for 3.5 billion years very delicately has an equal right to live. But because we think we're more intelligent, we have that supremacy over nature, over living— other living creatures. And the result is actually that we're starting to push ourselves out of balance. What took us a long time to get there, what gives us this prosperity that we live off, If you look at this chart here on the bottom, you see this great acceleration of things we use and things we put in the atmosphere or in the oceans that I just talked about, that we're currently on a trajectory of well over 3 degrees global warming. We hit the 1.5 degrees, there's no way that we can stay below that, unfortunately, where we are. At 3 degrees, it's a freaking disaster. You look already where we are now. So I don't need to explain that to you. Here you see actually a report we did on the state of the planet. If I just go to the next chart, the risk that we see is that we have— that we are very close to tipping points. This chart is supposed to turn and show you the different tipping points that we have. But you take the tropical forests that we have, which are basically the Amazon, Congo, and Indonesia. You know, 20% more deforestation results in them being carbon emitters versus carbon absorbers. You don't want to be in that situation. We see the oceans getting into negative tipping points. We see ice sheets melting on both sides of the planet, creating reinforcing cycles that accelerate the effects of what we're suffering from. Very difficult to stop. So we're at a precarious moment. We look at the world's planetary boundaries, look at this here. We have mapped the health of this planet in 9 planetary boundaries. Think about ocean, think about land, think about biosphere. So these are things we need to keep in boundaries. They're all related, obviously. You cut the forest, you affect the water cycles, you affect the air, you affect CO2. All these things are related. You affect food, you affect human health. I don't have to explain that to you. But unfortunately, it used to be 6 out of the 9. As of last week, 7 out of the 9 because we've added oceans to that as well, the acidification of oceans. So we are living well beyond our means now and we're getting close to these negative tipping points that obviously you don't want to deal with. Here you see these tipping points that are the most crucial ones in the world. And you see where we are, which is these white dots, but if you move to the right, obviously, and the more you move to the right as the temperature goes up, you know, you're well beyond the danger zone, and that would be very costly. In fact, we're at the point already now, today, as we talk, that the costs that we are incurring of these temperature rises, I would argue, are significantly higher, actually, than what we need to spend to avoid these issues happening in the first place. So you can turn that then around, and that's a wonderful opportunity for any business or for anybody to become part of a solution instead of part of a problem. There's one thing what climate change doesn't do, is climate change doesn't seem to care who's in the White House. And, you know, so if we don't come to grips with this, then obviously the consequences are severe and we see it every day. I don't need to explain that to you.

Paul, when you look back at your own leadership journey, when was the health of the planet an issue that you became aware of, or when did it become a priority? And then what was your first thing you started to do?

Well, it wasn't an issue. My parents actually met in Boy Scouts, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts. They were not so supposed to meet, but somehow my father and mother met. God knows how. And here I am with 6 of my fellow siblings. So we always appreciated nature, but we didn't see these constraints coming. You know, Rachel Carson was talking about it in her book Silent Spring in the '60s. You had Earth Day already in the '70s. I was at Rio in '92, Rio+20, when we did the Sustainable Development Goals. which I had the honor of helping develop. So these things build up. They actually build up as science becomes more readily available, as people become more aware of it. So it's fair to say that when I grew up, you appreciated all of it, but you didn't see the threats. Despite people like Hansen in the US warning about this, despite the fossil companies being well aware of what they were doing, that data was not made public, obviously. But now it's coming out of our ears. We can measure and monitor everything. And I think in the last— what has— 2 things that have developed in the last decade or 2, if I may say. Climate science is a very delicate science because of the way it all relates to each other. And frankly, the climate scientists are discovering every day new things. And unfortunately, the more they discover, the more worried they are. And the second thing that has changed is, as I said before, We can measure everything and we can monitor now to the square meter. I was with the president of Indonesia the other day and we were working a little bit on the deforestation there in Papua in a district called Merauke. And he said, no, these were degraded forests. I said, no, just switch on the computer and I'll show you with Google Earth. We can see on the square meter what the situation is. We can see the carbon emissions that these forests give. We can look at patterns and, and you can, you know, data or science doesn't lie in that respect. I have a farm in the south of England, but we do all of our biodiversity measures now by satellite and water samples, and it's more accurate than anything else. So we can see what is happening, and obviously that has made people more aware of it.

And How would you recommend if you see, if you have now the data, you have the science, this morning we heard from one of the leading climate scientists in the world, now if you take this into the business as a business leader, how do you take this forward? What kind of, what are the kind of the first steps that you would recommend?

Well, the first thing is you cannot run a business if you're not aware of it.

Yeah,

I think people that are, there are no people People are not anymore climate deniers. There are a few of them, but don't get too excited about that. But broadly, people understand what is happening. And we are actually moving. There's no question about it. Despite what you read again in the papers, we are moving and we're moving in the right direction. And I can explain that if needed more. But the issue is more that we're not moving fast enough, that we're still creating the problems at a faster pace. Okay. Then we're solving them. I work with 70 fashion companies, about a third of the fashion industry, that I've brought together at CEO level to change what is a very destructive industry in better practices. And they all have in their annual reports how much more sustainable cotton they have. You know, 5 years ago I was using this, now I'm using this. And they show wonderful graphs of how much more they use. So we did some studies at the macro level And we said, how much do you think the whole industry has changed to sustainable cotton? Well, it's today, it's 1.8%, but 30 years ago it was actually 2%. So we've gone down, yet all these companies think they're doing more sustainable cotton. The problem is we're having 5 times more clothes at home and more people have access to clothes. And sadly enough, with models like Shein, which are incredibly destructive, We don't even wash them anymore. We wear them for 2 or 3 times and then we ditch them. I always thought that the only thing you could see from space was the Chinese Wall, and that's actually not true, I've been told, although I've never been in space to check it out. But you can actually see a belt of garment in Chile and in Nigeria that we ship to the poorer countries to give them clothes. Which they obviously don't need, and they just end up in the oceans and all the other things. In fact, nearly 50% of the plastic in the oceans, or the microparticles, are the fibers of your clothes. Obviously, you see a bottle and get emotional, and we need to solve that, but actually what fashion does in terms of that is enormous. So we bring these industries together and try to do together what you can't do alone, because that's usually where the answer is. But the first thing you have to do is you cannot run a company if you're not aware of these issues. You cannot run a company if you don't know what your impact is. I would argue you cannot run a company if you don't take responsibility of your total value chain, if you don't set targets in line with science, if you don't make these commitments that are not commitments for not to lose, but commitments really to win these challenges, and there are very few that do. We have— most companies have climate targets, most companies have signed up to SBTI, science-based targets for nature now, but also for climate. We see that really growing, but very few have plans between now and 2030, or very few have plans that are aligned with the Paris Agreement to stay below 1.5 degrees. Then they're actually, I believe, in failure of their fiduciary duties even, and they shouldn't be CEOs anymore because they put their own companies in danger. We see now clearly that the CEOs that understand this, that incorporate it at the core of their business, that they're actually also getting better financial performance in general, that they are also better valued by the financial market, and as a result, it's reflected in their share price. And not surprisingly, especially now that we are quite different than 10, 15, 20 years ago, we have seen enormous changes in cost curves. On the one hand, costs have come down. You take solar and wind, since the '70s they've come down 99%. They're going to go half again in the next 2, 3 years. It's basically, you know, it's now the lowest cost of energy in 95% of the places in the world. That's why it's moving so fast. And such a tragedy of what's happening in the US where they start to become uncompetitive very quickly, and we start to see that already. And the other thing that has happened is that the cost of not acting has gone up too much. But where's the issue? I think the issue is perhaps a little bit— I mean, there are many challenges in these big systems transformations that need to happen, but unfortunately humans have never seen a change of this magnitude. You would have a whole generation, nothing would really change. When I grew up, my first 30 or 40 years, nothing really changed, you know. And now it's what used to take centuries or decades is sometimes days or months. And we are linear thinkers. We are not exponential thinkers. So we tend to discount too much future cash flows from taking action. We tend to discount too much the cost curves coming down on technology, and we tend to equally underestimate the costs that we incur, which are also exponential, if we don't act. So we're always surprised and we're always behind them as a result of that. So it's not a challenge of technology or of money. I mean, this world has more technology than we know what to do with, and frankly, more money, with a few exceptions. It's a question of leadership and willpower.

Yeah, what you said just connected to quite a few themes we're talking about today, this morning, about what is actually the cost of the damage that climate change is causing. And then those of you who were in the session with Alexis McGivern, we talked about the target setting of companies, and the Net Zero Tracker tracks those companies. I think over, I think, 1,200 out of the almost 2,000 companies they track have set targets. which I think is a really positive development. But then we also live in kind of very turbulent times at the moment where we see at the moment where it feels that we made some, you know, some headwind, some kind of positive steps, we see a lot of backlash against sustainability, against taking climate action. So I was just wondering what your recommendation would be for leaders to stay the course on this very kind of important, very long-term issue given all these obstacles that emerge.

Yeah, my first word, my first sentence perhaps listening to you is a word of caution between what you read in the papers and what's happening in real life. And there's a big gap emerging that somehow, you know, the papers and social media, etc., don't pick up on. They like to pick the fights and the extremes, and it looks like we're all moving back But I can take any country now. Last year we spent $2.1 trillion in green energy investments, double fossil fuel. This year, the first 6 months, it's up again 10%. Not as much in the US, but the rest of the world has compensated. Mm-hmm. This quarter alone, China will sell more electric vehicles than the whole of the US has in electric vehicles. In the last 2 years, the capacity expansion in China is the total European expansion. Pakistan, anybody here from Pakistan? In the last 2 years, 25% of your energy has now come from solar. It's going so fast that it's even, you know, a surprise to anybody who has seen that. And the list goes on. We're moving actually very fast. We're not moving fast enough, but we're moving very fast. In the right direction. What has this backlash— this backlash is partly justified, if you want to be diplomatic, because there was greenwashing out there, there were fake targets that frankly the CEOs might not have fully believed in, and what you see now is it's much more a performance-driven culture than a promise-driven culture. It's also not surprising that the noise and the pushback goes up when a transition happens like this because the vested order is not very happy. All that pushback you can directly trace back to the fossil industry. There's no other source of that pushback, and that money is heavily invested in politics in some countries, and that's where you see it. So it should not be rocket science that this happens. It should not be rocket science either that companies that have an old business model and have a very healthy cash don't want the change to happen, you know. It's the same with plastics. We know plastics are bad. There's 30,000 chemicals haven't been tested on people. They are forever chemicals. You find plastics in fetuses and the reproduction organs, in any part of our body now, in your brains. And many of the issues come back to us 10 times in cost of healthcare and all the other things. So we know it. But you know, if you're a fossil fossil-producing country and you see the use of fossil fuel going down, which it is broadly, you need to have alternative use. So then you start to boycott the plastic convention, which is exactly what happens. You know, you trace it back to a few. So we shouldn't be surprised about that. We shouldn't be disappointed about that. We should just develop our strategies around that and obsolete them faster than they themselves would like to. So that's why it's also so important to work with governments to get clarity of direction and consistent policies and all these things. That's why we spent a lot of time on some parts of the world more than others. The US, definitely a little bit of a setback. It's not good news. I'm not advocating here to just forget about it, but it's not as disastrous as some people want to talk. When I was in New York last week in Climate Week, everybody was talking about the elevator Everybody was talking about the teleprompter. I said, why don't we talk about what we can do and what we should be doing to move faster? And I think it's better to have the discussions at that level than become reactive. Too many people are fearful. Too many people have lost hope. Too many people are depressed. And that's all reactive mode. We should muster our courage and become proactive on many of these areas. It's a very good, very informative discussion. And very profitable. We look at the climate leaders, all companies that were moving forward faster and in line with the Paris Agreement, and then within that group, which by the way is $27 trillion of value that these companies represent, so not a small chunk, and then we looked at the leaders within that group that move faster And what we saw that these leaders actually are more profitable and higher valued by the market. So the financial market also, despite what you read and why people stay quiet now and others fill that void with their own stories, but the financial market, by the way, $43 trillion in the financial market still wanting to hold companies accountable on decarbonizing. They value those leaders within a group of more is higher. So all the indicators are there. It doesn't mean that you can solve all the problems today. There are some challenges, so let's not be naive. And sometimes it requires investing now but benefits later. But hey, that's with a lot of things.

I think that is a really positive message to hear, that there's actually a lot more positive change going on than we read about every day. And I think the examples that you mentioned, that actually we see a lot of businesses that by being sustainable are also more profitable, I think that is really when kind of the business case and the sustainability case come together. And I think we see that more and more. But I think sometimes also there might be moments when there are challenges for leaders to kind of believe and kind of the long-term value creation. And you actually open your book with this moment when you as the CEO of Unilever were facing a hostile takeover threat, and you mentioned the role of having built relationships with stakeholders and building that trust in kind of the long-term strategy is kind of what's really, really important to help you fend off that threat. I wonder if you could—

Well, yeah, I would even say if we would not have this strategy so ingrained in the core of what we were doing as a business. In fact, it was our strategy, it was the core of the company, which automatically requires you to work with all parts of society. Our stakeholders included the planet, included future generations, and all these things. And a financial manipulation and a short-term managing of these economies is not serving us well. In the US, 30 years ago, over 8,000 publicly traded companies now they're less than 4,000. Average length of a company when I was born was 67 years, now it's 17 years. Average length of a CEO is around 3 to 4 years maximum. So we just don't know anymore how to run these companies, and that pressure on the short-termism, you know, I was with my friend Peter Bakker from the World Business Council, which I used to chair, last week, and he said, you know, still 75% of the CEOs say it's the short-termism short-term pressure that they get from their shareholders that get in the way. I personally don't get that, but I can see it. I don't think they're telling you a lie. But, um, but, you know, what I don't get is why don't you stand up? Nobody prevents you from that. But, but, um, so that short-termism has crept in for sure. But that a CEO has always been in the job to manage multiple decisions. of which sometimes you don't have all the facts. Am I building a factory now that pays out in 10 years? Am I going into a new country which might take 20 years? Am I putting new training facilities in place for the next CEO which is 25 years? And we're always able to juggle all these priorities. Now that we deal with the future of humanity, we seem to have a problem. So I don't get it. And obviously people don't like that because it's another variable and I comes on top of AI, and it comes on top of geopolitical tension, and it comes on top of new trade barriers. So it is confusing to be a CEO, but heck, we pay them very well, and you either get on with it or you step aside. You know, that's really why it's so important what we're doing here, that we create the leaders that can deal with that. Hmm. When I came to Unilever, it was the financial crisis, it was COVID, it was the Brexit. I mean, every You know, we've had world wars, we've had everything. Any CEO will say it was tough when I was there. But the fact that we have sometimes choices to make is not a new thing for a CEO. And this is actually the easiest choice to make, you'd think, when it gets to the future of humanity. Now, sometimes it's difficult to do. I understand that, because otherwise some people would have done it before you. But for example, at Unilever, We said, I don't want any factory to have any waste anymore. So the guy who was running the product supply for us— we had 582 factories at that time in 190 countries. So he was Italian, so obviously more drama. So he got a heart attack, so I had to do CPR. And Pierluigi was his name. Not to— you know, he's a very good guy and still my friend because I kept him alive. Yeah. And because I needed him. But I just said, just take your time and let me know how much it will cost and how long it will take. You know, so we thought we could do it in 5 years because a lot of it you have to do at the design stage when you design things and think differently about it. But we did it in 3 years. We saved $400 million because waste, someone has to pay for it. So, so we saved that. Some we could upcycle, but most of it was just savings by thinking differently about how we design and, and how we deal with them. You know, nature doesn't have waste. Nature is circular. Nature is regenerative. Nature is very forgiving. But now it has run out of that forgiveness. It just doesn't have the capacity anymore. But let's at least use that moment to learn from nature and build these same principles in our business models. I don't think there's anything rocket science there, but it's hard work. But what we saw when we reduced our factories to zero waste, and we could measure the factories that were leading in that and the factories that were a little bit lagging, or where we had a bigger challenge, obviously it wasn't all the same. We found that it improved customer service, that it improved product quality, that it improved motivation of people in the factory. So that's really what systems change is all about. And if you see that holistically, But too often with governments, with business, etc., we work too much in these silos. Also in terms of working together. Now I work with many industries and too many CEOs still think that these are competitive areas, they should not cooperate. And I think the future is more in cooperation. The future is more in people that understand that some areas you don't compete anymore. You can't solve the issue of plastics in the oceans or deforestation or all the other things by yourself. You have to work that in partnerships, and that takes effort, takes skill to do that. So Kraft Heinz, I know I didn't answer your question, but Kraft Heinz, was it a takeover or not? I don't know. They tried to buy us with our own money, and in the Netherlands, already in elementary school, you know that that doesn't make any sense. So, so, uh, I never understood it. So they left on Sunday. This was the first time that they left an attempt. They had succeeded in all the previous ones, and they were telling me I could earn so much money and play the game. But the game was just to create more billionaires, and our company and our thinking was more for helping the billions of people that still need help. So it was a fundamental difference in how we would run these businesses. The culture was totally different. The portfolio didn't make any sense. And, you know, you see their share price now is less than when they started the company more than 10 years ago or 15 years ago. It's less in absolute today, which is one of the few companies in the world that has achieved that. Now they're splitting up. You know, they're splitting up and separating it again. Warren Buffett Calls it the worst investment he's made in his life. He's written off twice about twenty billion. So is that the success story of capitalism? I don't know, but we somehow don't talk about it. You know, we don't talk about it. We don't talk about the Boeings and the GEs that are myoptically focused on the shareholder and drive these companies down to to the graveyard of dinosaurs. And when we see a sustainable company like Orsted, who's or whoever, doesn't matter, slightly off track because policies change or, you know, the market isn't quite settled yet, then we say, see, sustainability doesn't work. You know, the graveyard of shareholder primacy companies is infinitely bigger than the graveyard of companies that run more sustainable business models. So put it in perspective a little bit, these things.

Yeah, and coming back to the issue of complexity you mentioned, because we could say business leaders used to have like one main objective, which is maximizing shareholder value, which is, you know, very clear. And now to run a sustainable business, you have to face this vast complexity of the different stakeholders, different needs, of course, also being profitable. Are there any leadership habits that you cultivate to manage that complexity?

Well, first I want to say sustainability without profit is no impact. At Unilever, it became probably the biggest driver of profit, our purpose. If you call sustainability and purpose, you might have a separate discussion on this, but people were fighting because they understood that if the performance isn't there, we could not run our business model long-term, or the shareholders would come after us, and they were so determined to fight for a better life for people that couldn't fight for themselves. When we attacked the issues of food waste, it was because people went hungry and we didn't want to be part of that problem. We wanted to be part of the solution. You get more energy out of people than if you fight food waste because you want to give the shareholders more money. That's a— it's like a little hamster ring. You have to run faster and faster for that. Never works. So purpose or sustainability in the sense and profit are needed. So we were very profitable, 10 years top and bottom line growth, 300% shareholder return. I've never compromised on anything there. I'm actually a diehard capitalist there, but a humanist. That is the problem. We've taken humanity out of capitalism. Yeah. Capitalism. So, but likewise, if you have profit without sustainability, then I don't think you have a future as a company. You put your future at risk. So one enhances the other, and they're both very complementary in a sense. And most companies understand that. We can now see that companies that have a stronger purpose, not just one of these fake statements, but really are able to make that come alive, they are more profitable. And it's not surprising. You know, people— you unlock energy in yourself and others if you work on something bigger than yourself. Nobody gets motivated by, we need to make more money, our company wants to be the biggest, the best, the most profitable. And yet most companies still have those purpose statements. That certainly wouldn't motivate me. And I'm sure that I speak for many others. So, but that wasn't your question, I think. I apologize.

The question was, are there any habits as a leader to face this complexity?

Yeah, I think in today's world, it's— forget all the things of leadership. No, I've never been a strong believer, here are the 10 rules of leadership and how to play piano in 5 minutes and how to be become a great leader in 10 minutes. So all those books I've never really had on my shelf. It's hard work to be a leader, but, you know, leadership ultimately is putting yourself to the service of others, knowing that by doing so, you're better off yourself as well. And that's a definition that comes later to life for most people, because in the beginning you have your Maslow hierarchy. You want a job, you need some money, you want a house, you want a family. I understand all of that, but the sooner you realize that leadership really comes from putting yourself to the service of others and a firm belief that you're better off as well. We did a study— I'm on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation— last week we did a study for UNGA Week, and it was Gordon Brown and myself, and we found actually that even in the US, because we broke it down by political party and country, We also looked at the UK— Labour, Conservatives, Reform— and we found out actually that consistently all across the world, about 80% of people felt that we needed to cooperate globally together, even if it would mean in your own country sometimes a compromise. So they understand the prisoner's dilemma in a sense, but if you then listen to the politicians, you wouldn't believe it. So the leadership skills, I think, in this environment today where we are in, are probably, if I simplify it, and I'll try to keep it cute and short, I'd say the ABCs of leadership. Yeah. The A comes from adapting. You have to adapt to this environment and understand what is going on. Why are these sentiments reflected in politics? for example, himself, just to mention his name once, isn't really the problem. He's not the problem. Now, you might be shocked, but he's a symptom of a deeper problem that we also see in other places in the world. So what is going on there? And, you know, if we talk— give a little example— if we talk climate change in parts per million and fear that the whole world disappears, etc., it's less appealing to people to understand. that than if we talk clean air or forests we can walk in or freedom from energy price volatility, geopolitical freedom or security. So the way we talk about things have to be humanized a little bit. So that's the A of being an adaptive leader, understand the current environment. The B would probably be bridging. Being able to work with others even if you might not have the same point of view. I used to be, as a Dutchman, fairly judgmental, but we spent a lot of time with Republicans in the US. We brought them in Italy to Bellagio, which is a Rockefeller training center. We spent a week in Washington, et cetera. And they are very worried about adaptation in this environment, resilience building, grid investment, national security. Republicans actually more concerned about biodiversity, although the president doesn't talk it, but the Republicans more concerned about biodiversity than the Democrats, which seem to be more in social rights and some other things. So you need to find these areas where you can bridge and how you talk about it. We're working now a program on school meals globally. There are 400 million children that depend on school meals for going to school and all the benefits that come from it. In many countries, obviously in the emerging markets, only 15% have school meals. So we're putting programs in place like 82 million people in Indonesia or 50 million in Kenya, and we link that to regenerative agriculture. We link that to smallholder farmer livelihoods. So we try to drive systems change. The people that you think are your opponents actually would be your biggest supporters. We have a program in the US which is called Food as Medicine, where lower-income people who buy unfortunately lower-quality food and get into health problems, we have a program with the government, with insurance companies, to reimburse them healthy food, and we can see the savings in health So there are many areas of bridging. And then the third one is, after you adapt and bridge, I would say you need to learn how to cooperate. You know, it's a cooperative— I talked about that, so I don't need to say much more, but the real leadership skill is to form these alliances, sometimes with civil society, with governments, and that takes courage. It's not easy. I'm not saying that. But that is often where 70%, 80% of the answers lie of things we think are impossible.

So we did get the ABC of leadership after all from you. So last week, we had a debate at the Oxford Union where the motion, this house believes the next great business will not be human, was overwhelmingly defeated, as I can report.

Glad to hear.

So I think that shows that there's some hope in putting humanity into the business. So I wanna ask maybe one last question before we open it up to the floor. And that is now welcoming here for our launch week, this new cohort of our MBA students. What advice would you give to them? to them at the beginning of a— sometimes have already started a great career, but really at the acceleration of making this a great career and becoming leaders in the world? What kind of advice would you share with them?

Yeah, I always hesitate to answer that because it's so general, then it doesn't mean anything, or you really— we're all individual human beings. So I always struggle a little bit. But, you know, first realization, 2 realizations. It's actually the best time to be born. This is a great opportunity actually to attack what might be perceived as overwhelming issues, and we have all the tools to do it. And to be part of that movement, to be able to do it in the next 10, 15, 20 years is incredibly, you know, satisfying, at least to me it is. The second thing is, You're very privileged if you're at Saïd Business School, as one of the top business schools. It doesn't matter what the ranking is, but it's one of the top business schools. You belong to the very small part of the world population that can do that. So that's a privilege. But with a privilege comes a responsibility. You know, Viktor Frankl, who wrote this book, Man's Search for Meaning, he— I remember him writing in there saying that when they built the statue of Liberty on the East Coast of the United States, they forgot to build the Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast. And you have a lot of liberty by studying here and a lot of privileges that is, you know, 0.001% of the world's population. Then you need to put yourself to the service of the others. If this program doesn't make you realize that, I think you've missed some of the moments of— Teachable moments that we could get out of it. My only advice to everybody is it's not an easy world, and so take care of yourself. You know, the last thing we can do is have burnt-out people attacking a burning planet. That doesn't seem good to me. So, you know, we need resilience, we need agility. You know, am I good at it? No. So who am I saying this? But, you know, I— You're a good role model. Spent a little bit more time on that. And I see it around me as well, where people that we need and whatever community you belong to, that, you know, you first have to take care of yourself. In Unilever, the first thing I did was, when I came, obviously correct some basic business issues, but that I call hygiene, but to spend a whole year on having everybody work on their purpose. and their purpose for impact, and then their collective purpose for results. And because I just thought, and I did that with a friend of mine, Bill George, who has written this wonderful book called True North, that's worth reading. But, but, you know, you can't be a purposeful company if you can't figure out what your own purpose is. You can't be a sustainable company if you're not sustainable yourself. You know, I would argue you have a hard time loving someone else if you don't love yourself. So you have to invest in that, and you have to work on that. And in this world, you need more resilience. So it's physical resilience, it's emotional resilience, it's mental resilience, it's spiritual resilience, however you want to define it. But that's sort of— call it the hierarchy of resilience. So that's the most important advice. And then secondly, indeed, as I said, if you're that privileged You know, 99% of the world population is not really focused on working for them. And, you know, for some people greed might be good, but I found, at least myself, that over time generosity always wins. So lead a life of generosity is probably the best thing you can do.

Thank you so much. So with that, I want to open up to the floor. We do have some complexity to manage because you will have to go to the airport, and so we need to make sure that we release you in time. But so let us know when you need to go.

I'm not nervous. Some other people might be.

So we can take some, some questions from the floor. And please let Paul know who, who you are, what your background is. And we start there in the back. Yes, yes, I think you with the white shirt. Yes.

Hi, Paul. Thank you for being here with us today. So I'm just wondering, given the current average GDP for the EU, if you had to So if you are stepping into— Yeah. So if you are stepping into the position of a CEO today, maybe Unilever, how would you structure your agenda to achieve the maximum impact? Because you mentioned that compared to before, you spent about 10 years in Unilever, but if you had just 3 to 4 years today, how would you structure your agenda to ensure that you achieve maximum impact?

Yeah, whoo. So I don't think a 3 to 4 year mindset is a good mindset if you run these big institutions. They're built to last, and you have to run them with a little bit of a longer-term mindset. What you then do short and long-term obviously is different, but Don't run a business with a 2 or 3-year horizon. Run a business with a 100-year, 200-year horizon. That's how I ran Unilever. That doesn't mean kicking the can down the road. That doesn't mean not delivering. These are totally separate things, but often get confused in the same discussion. But do all the things that are right for the business longer term. So we made our business, we wanted to make our business 100% sustainable. We wanted to decouple our growth from environmental impact. We wanted to be sure that everybody had a living wage. The world didn't know what living wage meant, so we created a Living Wage Coalition. You know, we wanted to be sure that there's no deforestation in the value chain, so we put in coalitions around that. Since we are in the business that is water sanitation and hygiene, you know, with our brands, part of our brands, we wanted to be sure that everybody had access to clean drinking water. water. No open defecation in the world. Now, you might say, what does that have to do with your business? I think it's far more motivational if you work on a brand, let's say a toilet bowl cleaner, that dinner discussions are never so pleasant. And you can say it's 99% disinfectancy or 99.5% or whatever marketing gimmick we invent. But if you say, I built 150 million toilets to help women protect their dignity and respect, it's often women, or to prevent spreadable diseases, or to, you know, then life takes on a whole different meaning. And I can tell you, if you do that, the brand will do very well. We had a bar soap brand called Lifebuoy, which is basically a bar soap. You wash your hands, it's a bar soap, it's a bar soap, it's a bar soap. In fact, they wanted to discontinue the brand, but it was called Lifebuoy for a reason. And that was in Victorian Britain. When Lord Lever started it, 1 out of 2 babies didn't make it past year 1 either because of hygiene. So we said we're going to use the brand to do handwashing and give every child an opportunity to live. There are 5 million children dying every year of infectious diseases like pneumonia, diarrhea that you can prevent with handwashing. So the brand reached 1.2 billion people, more than any government could do. In partnerships with Gates Foundation, DFID, USAID, UNICEF, Save the Children, because you couldn't do it alone. But then it takes a whole different meaning. We have people knocking on the door to want to work on a brand like that, and so forth, and so forth. You know, the ultimate example is obviously Ben and Jerry, where ice cream is more of an excuse because someone has to pay the bills, but they are really activists, you know, for any cause. So there the brand is actually activism and ice cream is the excuse. So that's the other end of the spectrum a little bit in a sense. But I would spend my time on ensuring that the purpose is embedded in the business. And I would ensure that the values are being lived because culture at the end of the day is a function of values and behavior. And many companies have wonderful value statements, but the behavior doesn't match at all. So you instill those things to drive lasting cultures. Now, businesses will change. You know, my successors have sold some businesses. Would I have sold them, yes or no? I don't know. I wasn't there anymore. Or, you know, some brands are more important than others. Some programs that we had, they might not think it's priority today. That you have to accept because the world changes and priorities change, but values shouldn't change. Purpose rarely changes. And so that's where you focus on so that you get the right cultures. And it's that resilience of that culture that makes you live for 200 years or longer.

Yeah, I think we collect a few questions, and again, don't forget to tell Paul your name. So we have one question there. I try to get the light blue shirt over there, and then we have one in the back. Yes, and I think your colleague is helping you pointing the— pointing. Okay, so maybe we start with you. Yes, thank you.

Hi, thank you so much for this chat. My name is Sybelle, and I was wondering, since you just attended New York City Climate Week. What were some of the main themes that you spoke about with the other leaders at that event, particularly around where is the most opportunity in the US today, especially given some of the political changes that we're enduring through the US right now?

You're American?

Yes, I am American, but I worked in the climate industry at Watershed, which you might have seen there.

Yeah, from where are you in the US?

California.

California. Yeah, it's a very Republican state.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then who else? Yeah, okay, go ahead.

Hi, Paul. I'm Paulo, funny enough. My background is in financial advisory, working in Deloitte. And what I wanted to ask is that going back to what you mentioned about long versus short-term thinking, what your thoughts are as to what the most relevant long-term challenge is right now that may or may not be overlooked, and what are some companies you can think of that are excelling in terms of solving that issue or working towards that issue.

Okay, and final one.

It's for the recording. So we can

actually throw these. No?

Hello. Um, I'm Matea. I'm also in finance side of things in New York. Um, and I was just wondering, we've talked a lot about, uh, net zero and kind of this climate blindness where people believe that we're just focusing on our net-zero targets and we don't have to consider anything else in the sustainability space. So I was wondering how you address leaders to get them to think on a more global perspective on all of these many major issues.

Yeah. Okay.

So we can go very quickly. So Climate Week was interesting because we had London Climate Week and there were twice as many people and twice as many events and twice as many discussions and everybody thought that's the end of New York Climate Week. Because we can't get into the country anymore, it's not appreciated. And all these stories started to circulate. And I heard plenty of them. The reality was quite different. When I was in New York last week, there were twice as many people as the year before. You know, the movements are starting. The projects are much more tangible for sure. But there is so much going on. There's so much going on. And the enthusiasm is there. Despite the noise that is out there from some. Even in the US, the activities that are really happening are quite striking. In the last 10 years in the US, 95% of the new energy that has been put in place is green energy. Despite drill, baby, drill, there's been no drilling in the US because it doesn't make economic sense. You have to go deeper and deeper. For an energy source that is 1/3 as effective as solar or wind. It's actually a very inefficient energy source. And physics have overtaken the old sources with the new ones. Economics have overtaken it. In fact, I would argue geopolitics have overtaken it. 3/4 of the world has to import fossil fuel for their energy. needs, and they're becoming very dependent. And yet they're sitting on 10 times more energy with green energy. So they're moving very fast. We created a global alliance, the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet. We put $10 billion in with foundations, and then we leveraged it up with blended financing for about $100 billion. And the speed with which we are now rolling out these programs everywhere is truly tremendous. And what we see is that, for example, even in the US where you have states that are behind, that slow it down, and states that don't slow it down, you see now a difference in energy prices emerging. Even a very big Republican state like Texas is now the biggest exporter of wind and solar in the US. And there was a proposition to their to their constituents that for every investment dollar invested in green energy, they had to invest a dollar in fossil fuel. They voted it down because they said it's ridiculous. It just doesn't work anymore. So how long can you go against the grain? And that was very energizing for people to finally understand that, that we are over that hump in that sense. You can slow it down. You can make it more difficult. You can move again to perverse subsidies, and all of that is happening. But you can't stop the law of economics at the end of the day. So I give people a lot of courage. The fast development in emerging markets that is now happening, issues is financing. There's still an enormous premium in the emerging markets where most of the new initiatives are coming in, where most of the future carbon issues emissions are going to be, there is a risk premium that is too high. So it doesn't unlock enough investment, which is unfortunate. So we are working on mechanisms on the global financial institutions— think about the World Bank, IMF, regional development banks— to not finance projects anymore, but to be much more catalytic and use blended financing to leverage in private sector capital, and then we can perhaps accelerate some of these things that need to be accelerated. But I wouldn't say optimism, I'd say hope, you know, in many of the areas. The discussion is also more complete in terms of looking at climate not only from energy but also food systems. You know, the food systems actually cause 30% of climate change right now. are also 30% of the solution. So a 60% swing, actually with much lower investments and faster results. You cannot solve climate change without solving our broken food system. And so that realization is coming. So a lot of the good things I think people are focused on now, much more cooperation. What are we missing out? Nobody wants to talk it publicly and nobody wants to, you know, have their name in a program. Many CEOs say, yeah, I support you, but don't say I'm on the panel. Or I'd rather do— I will do this. And I believe many do, but we don't want to talk about it. And that's unfortunate because if you're silent, that space gets taken by people that are very happy to speak. And it's not always the loudest that we need to listen to. And that's happening a little bit. So we have to watch that. You can follow me on LinkedIn. I put things on LinkedIn from time to time, but I talked about the importance for CEOs of how to, you know, publicly act in an environment like this. So that's sort of a summary of it. But 46 countries have now come in with NDCs. 75% of the GDP globally, if you include US states, that number goes up to about 85%, have targets that are net zero targets. Things are moving. We just need to find this way now to accelerate it. And then Paulo on Deloitte, which is a very good company, short versus long term is an issue. We created an organization called Focusing Capital on the Long Term. Interestingly now, the US president was suggesting to stop quarterly reporting. So I commented on that as well. If it's for the good reasons, I'm fully supportive. But for him, it's more for being less transparent and more opaque. That would be the wrong reasons. So, but if it results in change of behavior, that's good. Most of the problems we have in the world is not because people don't believe in things that need to be solved. But then you might ask yourself, why collectively are we behaving so badly, in a sense? It's because of the boundaries around us that drive our behavior. These are perceived boundaries sometimes, or actual boundaries. If I put in Unilever a salesperson out there and I say, you're going to get rewarded on the number of orders you write, i.e., a boundary, or you're going to be rewarded on how well your relationship is with your customers, you can understand right away you'll get totally different behavior. So if we can remove some of these boundaries that get in the way, short-termism being one of them, there's no question about it. So we created a movement focusing capital on the long term. You can look at that, Sarah Williams leads it from the US. All the big companies are in there. That's how Larry Fink started writing his yearly letter. Now, there's again, people are a little bit quiet there and not part of these coalitions publicly, but the efforts continue to push it in that direction. Did it go fast enough? Because in Unilever, when I came in, I immediately stopped quarterly reporting. I moved compensation to the long term, 5 years. You know, I changed incentive systems. People were a little bit shocked, didn't understand it, and thought we were hiding things. But at the end, it changed the behavior in the company. We were able to do things perhaps better or faster than we otherwise would have done. So, but what you are asking, what I'm worried about, is there a bigger thing I'm worried about? Of course, we should be worried about these planetary boundaries. So I don't want to tell you that, but that's not where my main concern is. My main concern is actually in the decline of democracy, the denial of science, the silencing of institutions. It's very dangerous, and it's not just the US. It's happening in about 70% of the world's countries right now, where the democracy index, as that is being measured, and Human Rights Watch, Transparency International, all these organizations, it's going in the wrong direction. And we tend to see it moving more that direction than in the other direction. So I think for humanity that's a problem and we should fight for that. So I have a lot of efforts that I'm involved in trying to fight for at least human rights. And climate and human rights, climate justice, just transition are very closely related. But we cannot solve it in declining economies as democracies as fast as in more open systems. I'm not advocating one system for another. I'm just advocating, you know, systems where people aren't suppressed. Then you'll have more creativity to solve it without any doubt. And then on the last question of net zero, you know, you need to go through net zero a little bit in a sense to go to net positive. So I'm perhaps more relaxed about it than my opening comments. But what doesn't work is how people have used the carbon market or have used offsets and actually put the credibility at risk of what needs to happen. It's Article 6 in the climate negotiations and it's not very well lived up to. Biodiversity credits are now coming in. Can we get more credibility there? It's probably a little bit more tangible for some people. We've created now a fund, or starting to create a fund, which is called the Tropical Forest Forever Fund. There was no mechanism to reward countries for keeping forests standing. You cut it down and you say replant, you get money for it. But there's a target globally that the countries have set, which is 30 by 2030, protect 30% of the world's land. And like the Treaty of the Oceans that was just signed by more than 60 countries and now is taking into effect, save 30% of the world's land, forests, oceans to regenerate and then restore. So that's 30% by 2030. Behind that, we have to pay countries, especially in the 3 basins, the Congo, Amazon, and Indonesia, Papua. We have to pay them for maintaining the forests. Especially indigenous peoples, which are very important in this effort. So there is now a project going on which is called the Tropical Forest Forever Fund, where we are trying to get countries to donate $25 billion and leverage patient capital for about $100 billion that gets a return of 4%, 5%. We would invest that with a little bit higher risk, 7, 8%, and use that spread to pay the countries to maintain the forest. And if they don't maintain it, they don't get the money. So there's an incentive to not cut down. $4 per acre might not be a lot, but there's about a billion acres to be protected. So a billion hectares— sorry, I say acres, hectares— billion hectares to be protected. So that's $4 billion a year that you could spend And this would be the first mechanism where money is available all the time versus depending on, you know, who's in government and is it aid or is it a grant or is it temporary. So you make a mechanism that probably could be, if that works, could be quite transformative. So increasingly I think the world is becoming more creative to help some of these countries. We cannot ask them to do all these things and not give them the financial means to do it or the technology or the resources. And so you see this happening more and more creatively, which is encouraging. Final question?

Final question. Okay, go ahead. Yes, please.

You touched on governments a few times.

There's a conversation in the Global South that a lot of these rules and a lot of these regulations with regards to green economy sustainability are hindering the growth of the Global South when the Global North already had the opportunity to kind of drill, they could drill and build their economies. So what conversations are you having behind closed doors with a lot of these leaders and how are you swaying them?

Yeah, so for example, read Mo Ibrahim's Africa report. So technology has changed, et cetera. So these notions of, now you keep us poor again, and it's another form of colonialism, and all the things that are being said, just direct here to you, is not anymore true. I will be in Kenya in 3 weeks with President Ruto. He probably understands that best. Kagame understands that. So many of the governments understand that now it's better It's a little bit like the landline and the mobile phone. It's better to invest in the industries of the future and be competitive. Africa is a huge opportunity right now, and I think Africa and Brazil, actually, because they were always sort of the continents or the countries to become, but never became. You understand what I'm saying? Yeah. But now you have your youth dividend, you have your enormous creativity, you have all the transition minerals. that are there. Africa and Indonesia will have 70, 80% of the world's nickel supply and lithium and some other things. So now all of a sudden we have a South-South relationship that is developing. Africa has discovered that there's no more grants, no more money, so, so we need to do it ourselves. So they're looking at different ways of developing instead of external and not getting the money there. Africa is a continent where $70 billion comes in on aid, which is now going down, but $80, $90 billion was leaving the continent. So hopefully we'll have a flow of foreign direct investment coming in. You have your free trading zone now that is starting to emerge. You know, you just need a little bit more dynamic and younger leadership Because you still, you know, have a problem there that many people have a hard time leaving office there, like we see in many other parts of the world. But even that is changing right now. So I think it's actually a great moment for Africa to attack some of these burning challenges. If the rest of the world wouldn't exist, which is not a fair thing to say, Africa is big enough. You know, you soon in Africa will have You double the number of young people, you'll have 3.5 billion people in Africa. That's what we had in the world 50 years ago. And you have all the resources. That's the beauty of it. There are challenges, but you have all the resources. So I think it's a great moment of coming to maturity for continents like this. Of course, we need to help whoever is willing or able to help. I'm a big— one of my big foundations is in Africa. We have 25,000 blind and deaf-blind kids in schools that we support. So I'm totally African in my blood. But this is Africa's moment. I'm absolutely not— Thank you. I think that's it more or less, otherwise I am in trouble.

Paul, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us and giving us this bit of hope and inspiration. I think, you know, as we go away today, I really hope that you will all really think about, you know, what are the kind of key takeaways from today. For me, one of the key takeaways of today is really that this is, that this is a leadership challenge. This is a leadership challenge that really demands new approaches to leadership, of leaders being courageous, ambitious, with— but approaching these issues with humility and with this very strong sense of purpose. So as you go away, as you have some time before now in college, think about what are your core takeaways from this day today, and maybe that's something you can do every day for the MBA, because time will fly very quickly. So think of really kind of what is it that you got out every day that when you come here. And I really love the idea of thinking about your own purpose, right? You have this wonderful year in Oxford which, you know, opens so many opportunities. So think about, you know, what you want to do with this year, what's the purpose that you want to develop, your own purpose. I think this is like really wonderful advice that you're giving all us today, Paul. So thank you so much and welcome you to the exhibition.

Well done. Thank you

so much. Yeah, so I hope you enjoyed today's boot camp. I think we learned— I learned a lot from today's lectures this morning. And I think you really heard from the experts that are really at the forefront of these issues, at the forefront of climate science, the carbon cycle, Miles Allen, Jimmy Jaar, who's trying to reinvent what carbon accounting looks like. Alexis McGivern, who sits in the room of standard setters defining how companies are going to think about net zero for years to come. Mary Johnston-Lewis, who is one of the core leading thinkers in business. Ben Frender, who is at the forefront of climate litigation. So I think you've really been exposed to some really cutting-edge thinking today. And so, you know, it was an incredible pleasure for me to bring all these amazing speakers to you. So I hope you really enjoyed the bootcamp. So I think, you know, I'm between, you know, a little bit of time off and then the dinners tonight, which are gonna be so beautiful. The college dinners are always the highlight of the Launch Week. So I think I just want to, you know, really say welcome again to Oxford. I really hope that you make most of your time here. And if you want to dive deeper in these issues around climate and sustainability, there'll be so many opportunities both here at the business school. I'm sure the MBA team has already talked to you about the business networks. There's one on sustainability in particular where you can bring the most amazing speakers. You can do the most amazing excursions in Oxford, in London, in the UK, maybe abroad to deepen your issues. But we're also happy to bring kind of experts as part of you being in the classroom. But I would also encourage you to really reach out to other parts of the university, be it Oxford Net Zero, be it the Net Zero Institute that are launching the Oxford Climate Ventures, for instance. We are having in a few weeks' time the Oxford Climate Change Challenge for our young high school students, and that has attracted over 1,000 applicants from all over the world that are coming to— and the finalists are coming to Oxford. So there's so much happening at the space, and, you know, it's really for you to become part of that and make most of these opportunities. And so with that, I just want to, you know, thank you for being here and being great participants in the Climate Bootcamp. And I hope you're enjoying the dinners tonight. And yeah, wishing you the best of start that you can have in Oxford. Thank you.