Fireside Chat with Paul Polman, Business Leader, Influencer & Co-Author of Net Positive.

In a world that has overshot, the only thing you can do is to think regenerative, restorative, reparative. And that is what we call net positive. People are looking for purpose. They want to do something bigger in life than they can get to themselves. They want to leave this world in a better place than they found it. Profits in the business are important, but I always compare profits to white blood cells. You need white blood cells to live. But I've never met a human being that lives for white blood cells. Things like climate change or the pandemic or now the war unfolding, we cannot sit still and say we've done our bit. This is a collective effort for all of us as citizens of planet Earth.

A big welcome to everyone who's made time from their busy schedules. this morning to join us for this fireside chat. A very big welcome to you, Paul. He's someone who doesn't need an introduction, but I'll say a few words about him. He's been the CEO of Unilever for about a decade. He's also played a key role in shaping the Sustainable Development Goals that are set out by the United Nations. A big focus of the conversation today is also going to be his latest book, which is Net Positive, and that might just be the small sort of ray of hope that makes our days brighter given everything that's going on around the world. Moderating this conversation would be John Ratcliffe. John Ratcliffe has been almost a part of the LBS Marketing and Strategy Club for longer than any of us on the ExCo have. Through this time, he's had help leadership roles at Google, at YouTube, and he currently is the CEO of Engage Video Group, which is based out of South Africa but has presence all over the globe. It's going to be a very, very interesting conversation. And with that, I'll hand it over to you, John.

Anish, thanks so much. Much appreciated. What a great introduction there. Paul, I feel so honored to be speaking to you today. Uh, I first heard you speak 10 years ago at the One Young World Summit in Pittsburgh in 2012, and I remember when David Jones introduced you in that session. He introduced you as the one leader having the most impact in the world of sustainable business future, and I was incredibly inspired by your speech. I then got to hear you speak again in Johannesburg in 2013 And certainly, as I lead a business into the future, a lot of what you spoke about there is very clear and present in my mind. I think as I sort of reflect on your presentation, you had such a unique point of view on the world, such a unique point of view on the way to run businesses. And I think specifically when you joined Unilever, that was such a unique point of view in the world, especially within the biggest companies in the world. I was wondering if you could start just talking a bit about your vision for how you believe businesses should be run or could be run in the future. to make a better world for all of us.

No, thanks, John, and thanks, Manish, for the introductions, and obviously a great opportunity to talk to you all. I'm even more interested actually because if you have the combined LBS and INSEAD communities there, and hopefully others are listening in, you are an enormous force, you know, just LBS alone, 12,000 students, You have nearly 50,000 alumni. And what— as we unfold this story today and have our discussions, you will probably see a recurring theme of lack of leadership that we have in this world, or lack of courage. So the more we can invest in you and make you part of the changes that need to happen, the more important it is. One of the reasons why I, amongst many of my other activities, assumed the chair of the Said Business School and are on the advisory boards of ESA and INSEAD and work with PRIME, the Principles for Responsible Management Education, to really see if we can get out of this narrow definition of what an MBA should look like, which is a slight mirroring of what I call little Milton Friedmans on steroids. And create better human beings to help address these broader issues that we have in society. As anything, a lot of it is formed where you're born, obviously. And I was born in the Netherlands in 1956, which was ten years 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 that was. And all my parents wanted was peace. They were ardent fighters for a united Europe. In fact, they would be very sad. If they saw what is currently happening, and obviously our our sympathy and feelings go out to the the people in the Ukraine right now more than anything. They wanted to ensure that we got education. It was deprived from them as a result of the war. They wanted their communities to thrive and rebuild it. So you know, in other words, they put themselves to the service of others, basically living these. Very important human values of dignity and respect, equity, compassion. That was extremely important to them, and fortunately their 6 children have gotten a fair dose of that. And then we grew up in the '60s, at least I did, and that was the Vietnam War, flower power, Biafra in eastern Nigeria that some of you might still know. But it was also the first Earth Day in April 1970, followed by the Rio Conference in 1992, which I participated in. And, you know, we grew up being as much activists wanting a better world than anybody now. It might be that some of these issues have changed. But I was very fortunate to be in Rio+20 when we were celebrating that and decided to move to the Sustainable Development Goals as a sequel of the Millennial Development Goals. And fully try to work on eradicating poverty and making this a more sustainable and inclusive world. And that work as the representative from the business community on the Sustainable Development Goals, where we work 2 and a half years and listening to every walk of life—women, children, people with disabilities, indigenous people, farmers—and the list goes on—and try to. Make a moral framework for the world, that probably was one of my biggest and most satisfying learnings I've participated in in life. And like anybody, your values, your leadership, who you are is a continuous development that never stops, you know, till the end. And when I move on from this wonderful place to hopefully even a better place, you will be continuing continuously developing yourselves. When I was, um, in Newcastle running the UK and Irish business for a company at that time called Procter& Gamble, I saw for the first time second-generation unemployment. Steel, coal, shipbuilding had all gone belly up. So I spent a lot of time on the community activities as, as one of the biggest employers there, and it, it taught me the importance of multiple stakeholders and And how your business depends as much on the communities that you're in as on any of the other stakeholders. One of my blind friends called me and said, let's climb Mount Kilimanjaro, and we decided to climb with 8 people Mount Kilimanjaro, and 6 of us reached the top, and that was a different experience. I understood that disability is in our own minds on how we treat the people or what we expect from people. Helen Keller, who taught at the Boston School for the Blind that I work with called Perkins, she was often asked— because she was blind and deaf but spoke 7 languages— and she was often asked, it must be horrible to be blind. And she said, no, the worst thing actually is not being blind. The worst thing is having eyes and not being able to see. Then I was stuck in Mumbai in the terrorist attack, the terrible attack that lots of people around us lost their lives. And for some miracle reason I still don't understand, we came out alive. But it showed what poverty does and how it creates hate and violence. But it also showed the goodness of people all around us. So all these things to say, and I could go on, these are all things that help you. And the more I accidentally got into business, by the way, it wasn't my choice. It was really, uh, I couldn't do what I wanted to do, and I needed at one point in time to make my own living. So I did business as a sort of an escape, but I wasn't very motivated. But the more I started working in business, I understood the importance of the private sector in, in making this world function, and, and the role of business, how business was invented, um, to address the worldly problems. And Um, you know, the word company comes from— the Spanish speakers around you will know, uh, compañero or companion and all the other things, which really makes— means breaking bread together. And unfortunately, in the last 4 or 5 decades, with our myopic focus on shareholder primacy, we might have lost some of that. But I've always believed that business is there to solve the world's problems, not to create the world's problems, and And that frankly many of these things like the Sustainable Development Goals cannot be addressed without business. And business is 65% of the global economy, 80% of the job creation, 95% of the financial flow. It's impossible to address these issues that we now deal with. And as business cannot live without the Sustainable Development Goals, I also think for that reason, the Sustainable Development Goals need as much business. And that's really what I'm focused on right now, how to drive the private sector to this higher level of consciousness, to do that at an individual level, but also at a collective level to address some of these most burning issues that we are still facing.

Fascinating, Paul. And listening to your journey there, it now makes so much sense why within Unilever you chose to lead the business like you did. I can only imagine arriving at Unilever, you know, not everyone was thinking the same way you were. And I can only imagine at that time that there would have been a lot of people thinking, you know, completely the opposite, Wall Street thinking the opposite. It must have been a very hard time to try and turn the psychology of the business around. And I just wondered if you could take us through how you managed to do that. Were there some strong leaders around you who bought into the same sort of point of view on the world? What was that like?

Well, it's in your country that Nelson Mandela said, it never seems possible until it's done. I mean, I think that's the same with any big challenge. I inherited a company that wasn't quite performing for the previous 10 years, had seen its business go down by one-third, share price obviously flat or no movement really of significance. And people were worried there. We were shrinking our way to glory. had become more shorter-term and frankly chasing our own tail and had become victim of the same short-termism in the financial market. Lost a lot of good people in the process. So I was brought in for the first time from the outside for a CEO. The company had always created its own CEOs internally. And, you know, the added complexity, if you want to, or luck, whatever, it was the financial crisis, the height of the financial crisis, and we had to do something else. Instead of thinking to glory, I don't believe you can save your way to prosperity. We had to find a way to bring this company back. I believed in its brands, in its people, actually in its history and in its values. And that is where we started to focus on. I knew that I could not demand respect, even being a CEO. You cannot demand respect, you have to earn respect. And that it really depended on me to gain that. I read more about the company perhaps than many of the other people that had worked there for a long time were aware of it. And there was something in Jim Collins' book, From Good to Great, when he talks about nurturing the core before you stimulate progress. So I went back to what really made this company great at the time of Lord Lever when he created this company. At that time was Victorian Britain, end of the 19th century. One out of 2 babies didn't make it either past year one because of the horrendous problems of hygiene. So he invented the bar soap, made the mission of the company already then making hygiene commonplace. He believed very strongly in a concept called shared prosperity. Even in religion, he was a Unitarian, but he built the houses for his workers before the factory was fully up and running. He introduced pensions, guaranteed pay when people volunteered for World War I, and many of these other amazing things. In fact, I always point out that the most amazing thing he did was when he went into the House of Lords, he took the name of his wife. Today is International Women's Day, and congratulations to all the women that are online and the 51% that are enrolled in London Business School, which is a a great pleasure to read. But this guy was far ahead of its time. So we went back to the roots of the company and out of that came our conviction that we should build on that purpose of making hygiene commonplace. And this is how we invented the purpose of making sustainable living commonplace. And that became the basis for what is known as the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which at that time probably was the most revolutionary plan out there. Decoupling growth from environmental impact, absolutely needed, increasing overall social impact. And then with some very, very challenging targets, targets that the world needs, not targets that we could get away from, get away with. So how do you do that? Very simple. You have to just be sure that the purpose is strong to withstand the attacks that come, to make people go out of their comfort zone. Yeah. And we spend a lot of time on discovering our individual purposes and then working that on collective purpose. You cannot be a sustainable company if you're not sustainable yourself, or a healthy company if you're not healthy yourself. And likewise, you cannot be a purpose-driven company if you're not purposeful yourself. So it was people like Bill George, and drawing from this wonderful book he wrote called True North, we spent a lot of time in the first year developing our own courage and then putting that into practice. And that made the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan a multi-stakeholder plan, taking responsibility of our total handprint in the world, not just what is in our own control. For Unilever, that meant looking at poverty, deforestation, food waste, and many of the other things that come with it. And that, you know, worked well for us at the end of the day. It motivated our employees, it attracted the right people, It made our business more robust, our innovation stronger, and ultimately got translated also for the shareholders in a 300% return over the 10-year period that I had the pleasure to lead that wonderful company.

Fascinating, Paul. So I guess as I'm listening to you articulating the leaders' purposes in their own right, then the business's purpose as a whole, and then from there working on the brands individually after that. I was intrigued just to hear your purpose. I don't know if you have it sort of articulated neatly, which you could share with us.

Yeah, my own purpose is actually very simple right now, and it really relates to the Sustainable Development Goals, is to work very hard to make the Sustainable Development Goals come alive. And then the main things I do is really on poverty and inequality. The Sustainable Development Goals really has as objective to irreversibly eradicate poverty and do that in a more sustainable in equitable way. As I mentioned before, it follows the Millennial Development Goals, which were started by Kofi Annan, and halved the number of people living in poverty. They were very much goals for the developing market. Now the goals are very much universal. They recognize that issues are broader, like climate change or the protection of our lands, our forests, our oceans. They are also more inclusive, recognizing the broader notion of partnership. So I focus on that and I use my convening powers with the private sector to bring them together at critical mass, work with civil society and governments to drive the true systems changes. The problem we have currently is that we're trying to do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It doesn't work. Optimizing within a current system brings you only so far. So we need to move the boundaries. We need to change the system. Just like in Unilever, I stopped quarterly reporting or giving guidance to give people space to address some of these main issues and focus on the longer term. We now need to do the same in society. We need to give companies and businesses and governments the space. It has all become so short-term that we focus on the symptoms and never take the time to correct the underlying causes. So this is really what I look at and try to drive systems change, be it Implementing broader accounting systems, moving the financial market to the longer term, trying to develop more inclusive economic systems, developing new leadership. These are all elements that need to be put in place to create this better world. You know, I've long ago realized that I won the lottery ticket of life by being born in the Netherlands. My father worked in the factory, but I got free education. I always had food at home so I wasn't stunted. I had a piece of bar soap at home so I didn't die from an infectious disease like still 4 to 5 million children do every year before the age of 5. I had a toilet at home so I didn't need to deal with the issues of open defecation like 1.5 billion people still with all the issues related to that. So I won the lottery ticket of life, otherwise I wouldn't be talking to you. But what— What did I do for it? Nothing. I was born in the Netherlands. That wasn't my fault. So if you belong to that 5% of the population right now that has won that lottery ticket of life, then it's your duty, I find. It's your obligation to put yourself to the service of the other 95%. The world simply wouldn't focus, wouldn't function if we continued to build these smaller and smaller islands of prosperity and build high walls around them. in an ocean of poverty. And by the way, the ocean is rising and it affects us all, literally, by the way. So that's what we need to do. That's my purpose. And I will do that till I move on, as I said, to better places.

Fascinating, Paul. I guess as you sort of built this out, a lot of the brands within Unilever started to take their own purposes and sort of start to stand for things which they didn't necessarily stand for or communicate that they stood for before. I was just wondering if you could talk through some of these consumer-facing brands which stand for things which really matter to you as an individual and which you saw in your time at Unilever and maybe since Unilever, where you think they've got this really right and it's managed to change consumer perception and have positive impact on the business as a result.

Yeah, as we talked about this change process of developing your purpose, putting that into a bold vision, the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, starting to measure your impact, setting clear targets, Communicating these targets, holding yourself accountable, working on transparently developing broader partnerships to reach these things. One of the most important tools is that always you implement in your own company first to earn your seat at the table. So we set some bold goals like well before others to be zero carbon emission in our own value chain. We've achieved that. Achieving gender parity in our total value chain, not only in our offices and all that. We've achieved that, making all of our sourcing sustainable. So getting your own house in order at a corporate level is very important. All of our factories, zero waste to landfill, that type of thing. But ultimately, the main connection that we have is with our brands, with consumers. And these brands are very powerful in that they can address societal needs. But they can also drive the needed societal changes that you want. And what we found was that brands with a purpose, with a stronger purpose, were actually growing faster and also being more profitable. And when that happened, the penny started to drop for most of the people that were still sitting on the fence. Purpose by Colin Meyer in his book Prosperity is defined as to profitably address the issues of people and planet. You know, profits in the business are important, but I always compare profits to white blood cells. You need white blood cells to live, but I've never met a human being that lives for white blood cells. Hello, I'm Paul Polman. I have more white blood cells today. I feel really good about that. That's not how we live. So profit is the same. We need profit. But we want to live for something more, something bigger that we can establish, a real reason for being, and that is really purpose. And for a consumer goods company, embedding that in the brands is probably the most important thing. We made a commitment to reach 1 billion people and improve their health and well-being. Not easy, bigger than China or India can do by themselves. After the 10 years, we actually reached 1.3 billion people. By embedding it into our brands. Lifebuoy reached a billion people with handwashing, helping a child reach the age of 5. We worked with the DFID, the USAID, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and many others to put these coalitions together to ensure that every child in every school— and you're familiar with South Africa and the Lifebuoy efforts there— every, every girl and boy in school was doing handwashing and bringing these habits home. A brand like Domestos, a toilet bowl cleaner, we set it as a goal that we wanted to build 100 million toilets to stop the issues of open defecation. It made the brand so much more aware of what was happening out there, our innovation so much stronger, our motivation going up. Dove, yes, you know, it's a shampoo, it's a body cream, whatever you want to call it, but at the end of the day, We positioned Dove to stand for women's self-esteem in a world where only 4% of women feel happy in the bodies they're in because of all the nonsense that is bombarded at them in the magazines and televisions, etc. Or absence in school is driven by oral care. So we wanted to reach 100 million children with our toothbrushing campaigns. And sure, all of that was related to our brands. Not surprisingly, the brands that were doing that were growing faster. Our relationships with these communities were stronger, with these governments, because we were addressing really the main issues that you find in the Sustainable Development Goals. And at the end of the day, as a result, these brands, as I said, grew faster, twice as fast really as other brands in our company, and were more profitable as well. So that's purpose in action if you want to. And I think what we now know is if you look at broadly the macro numbers, now that we have more data 10, 12 years on, on a global level, when we started, frankly, there wasn't any data. But now we can show that purpose-driven companies that operate for the longer term, multi-stakeholder, have a significantly higher return than their peer groups, that the ESG funds that are genuinely ESG have a higher return than their peer group. So increasingly the data is available to point companies in the right direction and say this really is the right way of running a business. Recruiting from 100% of the population and having a representation in your company is better than only recruiting white males. Taking active action to reduce your carbon exposure makes you less subject. Look now even at the cost of energy that is coming in. If you have green energy, you're really at a competitive advantage now. Working your human rights in the value chain, call it the Ruggie Frameworks, named after John Ruggie, a wonderful man who recently passed on, makes your company so much more resilient. So increasingly we can show that running your businesses that way and moving out of this myopic shareholder primacy focus is not only the right thing for long-term value creation for your shareholders, But obviously, as a starting point, it's the right way for gaining validity to operate in this world in the first place.

I'd love to hear about what it felt like within the business as you started to build momentum around these things. I can imagine at the start, really hard, but as you start to see the impact that you can have as a brand and you start to look around at the leaders getting energized by it, I'd be fascinated to hear what that felt like. I've always been a big fan of the Muhammad Ali quote that service to others is the is the price you pay for your ticket on Earth. And I think when you get these things right, it really starts to feel good. I'd just be interested to hear what that momentum felt like as a leadership team and throughout the business as you started to feel that you were having real impact on the world.

Well, it's not the price to pay. It's actually a tremendous satisfaction. True leadership only starts if you realize that putting yourself to the service of others will also put yourself in a better situation. So that's the ultimate goal 17 of the Sustainable Development Goals, what we call simply partnership, but it's actually partnership for the common good. And, you know, for many people, greed is good, but generosity always wins. And I've seen that in my private life. I've seen that in my business life. So that's not different, I think. But, you know, seeing the momentum being built and the impact you can have is satisfying for anybody that works very hard on it. And it takes millions of people in the case of a company like Unilever. But, but, you know, increasingly showing that this is the better way of doing business and getting other companies to move in that direction and hopefully creating critical mass is where the satisfaction comes from. Ultimately, it's about lifting people out of poverty. And so I've always said it's better to be a billionaire under the definition of touching a billion people than being a billionaire with a billion dollars in your bank account. It really isn't very healthy in my opinion. So the true billionaires need to be celebrated, and frankly, in society we still do that too few and far in between, regretfully. But that's what we need to focus on. But you know, if I may be honest, I've always said that if Unilever does all these things and scoops up all these prizes, but the world doesn't move at the speed and scale that is needed to address these issues, there's no reason to celebrate. Regretfully, I have to say that, you know, we cannot sit still and say we've done our bit. This is a collective effort for all of us as citizens of planet Earth. You know, things like climate change or the pandemic or now the war unfolding in Ukraine, it actually doesn't know any boundaries or borders. It affects us all. So, you know, if Unilever would have solved— they didn't— but if it would have solved the issues of plastics in the oceans or deforestation, Or would have said, I'm not part of that problem, but the world still has that problem. What is there to celebrate? So we can't stop. Desmond Tutu, again from your country, a remarkable man which I had the pleasure to get to know at various occasions. And he was just always optimistic and he always used his sentence when people were asking him, are you an optimist or pessimist? He would always say, I'm a prisoner of hope. So I stay a prisoner of hope knowing that fear doesn't drive change. Going back to Muhammad Ali, I mean, fear makes you freeze or fight or flight. It's hope well presented that gives people the energy to work on something and move forward. in a way that unlocks this latent energy that we need to get there. But we are at a very crucial moment for mankind. And now this war again, you know, if it depriorizes our conversion to a greener economy, to a more inclusive economy, just like COVID did, by the way, if that is the trajectory that we're now being put on, that would be very— that would be a very deep crisis beyond proportions that that humanity has dealt with. So how can we stay on that course is very much now what we're trying to focus on and actually accelerate the changes that we need. To some extent, if we can accelerate our independence on fossil fuel coming from Russia instead of going back and drilling more holes, that would be a good thing. So how do we keep in all of this the direction clear of where we need to go is very much what's on my mind right now. what I will continue to work on. So no reason to celebrate yet, to be honest, John.

Sure. I'd love to come back to one or two things within the Unilever journey, but before we get there, just talking about the Ukraine, what's happening in the Ukraine, I guess a question I'd love to get your point of view on is the role that the private sector can have in a crisis like this. Is there a role for the private sector? You know, traditionally, go back 50 years ago, it was all about, you know, governments hopefully solving these kinds of problems and potentially not doing it well. I'd be fascinated to hear how that shifted in 2022 and what you think the role could be.

Well, this is a tremendous tragedy unfolding that absolutely should be condemned by all means, acts, and words. This is an invasion of a sovereign country. This is a toppling of— an intended toppling of a government that was democratically elected. This is crimes against humanity being committed as we talk now. The death toll is rapidly rising. The numbers of schools and hospitals that are being bombed now is beyond proportion. Then having the courage in your own country as an autocrat to say if you use the word war, you go 15 years into jail. This cannot happen. What we're talking here about is an attack on all of us, an attack on the basic human values. That underpin humanity. And, uh, and it's indeed not far from where I am right now, which brings it even further and faster home. When I was the chairman of the International Chambers of Commerce all across the world— the International Chambers of Commerce were started in 1918, 1919 after World War I, and they were called the Merchants of Peace. There was a firm belief from some of the leaders then in Europe that if we could create interdependence between the countries from a trade point of view and from a goods and services point of view, then the chances of wars would be less. We were proven wrong in World War II, but it very much held for the subsequent 60, 70 years. But now it's on the verge of being violated again. But what I'm very pleased about is, is not only to see how governments have rallied together more or less, you know, it's always been difficult to get unity in Europe and this might be the trigger to get unity in Europe and move the European agenda forward faster and so we must. But it also has brought a different impetus to the United States. We've seen some dysfunctional voices coming there from former presidents who praise Mr. Putin and all that, which is outright disgusting. But at least we've seen Republicans and Democrats now aligned for once on a common agenda. Can we use this as a bridge for the world and unite, you know, together? We still had 25% of the countries in this world abstaining in the UN when the Security Council vote was made, which is 25% too much. Can we use this opportunity to bridge? We lost the opportunity to bridge with the developing world when we refused to give them COVID vaccines, which was an outright scandal. We refused to bridge with the developing world when in Glasgow we didn't even have the courage to put $100 billion on the table for climate financing, which was an outright scandal. Let's pay for our sins in a sense by now bridging, being sure that we make the vaccines available. We ensure that we provide the help on loss and damages and building resilience and adaptation on climate finance for parts of the world that haven't caused it. But let's also use this opportunity to unite together against the common enemy that is undermining the future of humanity. And this is the moment, and business has understood that. The amounts of businesses that are boycotting or that are not involved anymore. Some of it driven by government action like the no-fly zones or, or the swift cutoff of the monetary transfers, but most of it driven by voluntary action, which undoubtedly will have a significant effect, as we're already seeing, on the Russian economy. And the main thing to do is, is to make the people of Russia realize, even despite the false information being thrown at them, That this is a person that deserves no place in the history of mankind anymore, and that pain needs to be done for the benefit of the millions of people that have paid their lives or are suffering as a result of this invasion. So business understands that, and I think broadly, you know, the the business community is moving. And again, I'll be actively working this morning. I had a meeting here in Geneva with the. Humanitarian organizations, and we will continue tonight. We have meetings on the food security issues, which are not simple. 25% of the European food is coming from the Ukraine and Russia directly or indirectly. If you look at fertilizers, or if you look at wheat, or if you look at the feedstock for animal feed, and there is no planting for the harvest that should happen now either. So a looming food crisis could affect 200 million people. So how do you balance these tensions of boycotts and, and trying to undermine and fight and certainly ensure that companies don't profit from this terrible war, but also that you don't get into broader humanitarian crises beyond what we're currently seeing already? But I have to give business— again, the, the bigger, the, the bigger, bigger businesses are getting the, the share of the newspapers, but I have to give them credit on how some of these CEOs are actually taking the longer-term right view versus the shorter-term wrong view. And this is a good test of leadership. Ultimately, leadership is always between the harder rights and the easier wrongs. And it's so easy to take the easier wrong right now. You should avoid that.

Thanks, Paul. As I reflect, I think we as all— as individuals, I suppose, have an opportunity and maybe a responsibility to do our own bit in this environment as well. I know that you have been for a long time the chairman of the One Young World, and yeah, thank you for chairing that organization. I've certainly personally been an incredible beneficiary of the positive energy which comes from the One Young World. The question I wanted to ask is both thinking about the One Young World and the youth in terms of what they can do in an environment like this, and also as individuals, what role you think we we as individuals around the world can do? Is it— should we be signing petitions? Should we be protesting in our region? Do we feel like that has any impact? When I say protesting, I guess sort of supporting the end of the war. I'd be interested to hear your point of view on individuals and potentially the youth specifically as our role in this whole thing.

You cannot do enough, to be honest, and it's all of the above. For evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing, and that is so easy. We've seen that in the US where basic democratic values were being challenged. Many of the CEOs stood silent. And each time that line of demarcation is moved, moved, moved. And where we are now, there are norms in society that we find now normal that were outright unacceptable 5 or 10 years ago. You know, fake news or politicians lying to you. That didn't happen when I was young. So if we don't speak up to some of these things, or the way that certain groups of society are being persecuted, and if we stay silent, we have to speak up. And certainly when you get the Ukraine situation, it's our duty, it's our obligation to do that. The young are— 50% of the world population is below 30 years old right now, and they're going to be 100% tomorrow. They're more technology-savvy, more purpose-driven, Gen Z or millennials. They think more multi-generational. They understand that we have to live in harmony with planet Earth, where we are really close to negative tipping points beyond proportion that I think people are not fully grasping yet. This linear thinking versus exponential issue on climate change is getting very close to points of no return. So the young understand that. They want to be part of these solutions, and with their creativity, They certainly should be. I've always advocated that they shouldn't be just having a seat at the table. In many cases, they should actually have the table. So how do you personally get involved? First and foremost, I cannot stress the voting rights. I still believe myself that Brexit was a tragedy of populists and frankly timed wrongly when most of the young people were on holidays and other things. There was a low participation of the youth, and yet it was their interest that was being voted on. This Brexit vote was carried by a few old farts that think that Britain can go back to the old empire, and I know I'm insulting some people on the line, but I'm happy to do that. This has been really disgraceful, but if the young would have voted, then it would not have happened that way. So the same here with we have to get involved. and get the right politicians to be out there. We have to see with our spending power where we put our money so that we reward the companies that act responsibly and don't buy from companies that don't. But that's not only related to the Ukraine. You know, it's just not cool to buy a $1 t-shirt when human rights are violated in the value chain. How many have asked, where is the t-shirt made? How much are the people paid? We can do it in our own behavior by adapting the way we live, the way we use resources, the way we recycle, fly, eat meat or not. The biggest carbon reduction that we can do immediately is eat one day a week less meat than we do currently. That will be the biggest impact on the short term on carbon emissions, that I can tell you. So many of these things, I think, if we show a little bit of sensitivity to the challenges out there, can have an enormous impact from each of us individually. that then adds up to critical mass collectively. And that's the responsibility that we all have.

Thanks, Paul. It feels like a call to action, and I for one will be looking to do my part following our conversation today. One thing I wanted to touch on, just because it's such an interesting story, and when I read about it, it just sounded absolutely fascinating, was the Kraft Heinz 3G Warren Buffett hostile takeover attempt on Unilever while you were there. And, um, yeah, I guess it must have felt so interesting, uh, on your side while executing a very specific vision for Unilever to have almost the opposite vision brought in front of you as, as their desire to take over the business and run it in a different way. I just wanted to get a very brief sense from you being on the inside of this, like what it felt like to hear that this was, this was, uh, potentially on the cards. And then to feel like there were so many worthy adversaries up against your incredible vision for the company which you had built?

Well, I'd forgotten about it, John. I'm kidding. But the brand is not in my household nor in my children's household, if that's what you're asking. The, you know, it's an example of the different business models that we have in this world. And to some extent, I was happy that I had to deal with that. after 7 years of being a CEO, was a little bit more comfortable in my seat and not having to worry about too many things, but, but to focus on what we really stand for. And these are really 2 different models of business. Both of them are legal. One is very much focused on the multiple stakeholders. The other one is focused on the shareholder. And I could not have thought about 2, uh, more extreme examples, if I may. The Kraft Heinz short-term profit maximization model frankly serves a handful of owners of capital and funnels all the gains to them. You know, J.P. Lehman, Warren Buffett, already then they had a combined wealth of $130 billion, and they certainly used that to manipulate the financial market. There's enough evidence of that. And part of that was driving the Unilever share price down before the bid was short selling. And their whole game is maximizing shareholder return. They're obsessed by cutting costs and raising profits and frankly limit the responsibility of externalities or spillovers of their impact on others. You know, they're the typical example of let society pay for that. We will just take all the benefits. You'll find them on the bottom of human rights indexes, on the bottom of conversion to sustainable sourcing or getting out of unsustainable palm oil and all these things. By the way, also on the bottom of Glassdoor if you think what their employees think of them. And then you have Unilever, not to put Unilever on a pedestal, but it's more of a net positive model. It takes responsibility of its total impact in the world, wants to attack these negative externalities even if it's tough. If it can't do it alone, it tries to form the broader partnerships. It sincerely wants to work with the multiple stakeholders. And the main driver of the business is to attack the world's challenges like climate change, inequality or poverty, biodiversity loss, racial divide, and trying to do that, obviously juggling the different stakeholders. The outcomes of these models have been clear. Unilever saw a shareholder return of 300% even after Kraft Heinz. The share price went up. Kraft Heinz share price collapsed, was worth less than our Indian subsidiary, just put it in perspective. Then the crisis came, the COVID crisis. Unilever had the leeway to guarantee jobs for all the people, direct and indirect, allocated $500 million to support its partners. When frankly the banks weren't coming through very quickly, extended credit to everybody and kept the company going. Kraft Heinz had a write-down of $15 billion, cut its dividends, its debt was reduced to junk rating. It was on its 3rd CEO since then and still is on the bottom of the Human Rights Index. So what are some of the lessons perhaps from this? I don't know. I know what model I prefer, the one that deals with the billions of people versus the few billionaires. I know what it takes. You know, when, when you stand with the world, the world stands with you. And during this Kraft Heinz attack, which was pure financial manipulation, the trust that I got from the other stakeholders and the partners, including civil society and NGOs, and, and the way they, they fought for saving this company was instrumental in turning them away after 2 days. And that included Greenpeace working with us, the International Union of Food Workers, and I could mention too many of them, but they lost that support very quickly. Of course, there were some people that were interested in short-term financial gains, also in the financial market moving and making noises. There were some short-term banks that were happy to lend the money. There were some PR agencies that got paid to spread false rumors. But we basically kept them away. And one of the other lessons is, is you have to work on the right shareholder base. Too many CEOs have such a short horizon, they cater to the current shareholder base. And we really, from the beginning, said we need the right shareholders. And if you don't like it, what we are doing, put your money somewhere else. We want the shareholders that were aligned with our purpose, aligned with our Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. Obviously we had to perform, but as we had put in 300% shareholder return, we're performing better than actually Warren Buffett's share price, Hathaway, that they were fairly happy. And these shareholders actually broadly stuck to us. So it's a lesson in different business models, but it's also a lesson in what choice do we want in society. And unfortunately, we've seen little movement from business, from politicians, to really step up the actions to guarantee the right governance frameworks, the right corporate laws that we need to have, and the right way that we can channel our actions in a direction that benefits society, not a few people. So, you know, some work to do coming out of this still that I had expected would go a little bit faster perhaps than what we have seen in real life. And now Again, a risk of being sidetracked by very burning issues, but we cannot afford to do that.

I wonder, Paul, in this journey whether these sort of attacks— and it's almost like attack on purpose, it's attack on what your business stands for in terms of what they were hoping to do with the business— I have to imagine this moving through, it crystallized your beliefs and sort of cemented those beliefs within the business and allowed the business to rally around it. And maybe this can lead on to the next question, which is just sort of what led you to write the book Net Positive. I have to— I mean, it feels like everything we've spoken about today is a really great answer to that question. But perhaps you could just talk about your vision for the book and what you hope it could achieve in the world.

Well, we need Net Positive, that's very clear. We're not addressing the issues of climate change inequality now the global insecurity at the right speed and scale that we need to save humanity. The world is 4.6 billion years old. Just for the simplicity of the discussion here, not to insult any of the intelligence of the wonderful students, but let's put it at 46 years. In the 46 years, human beings have only been around for 4 hours. The Industrial Revolution only started 1 minute ago. In that one minute, we've cut down half the world's forests. In the last five decades, we have lost about 70% of the world species mammals and vertebrates. When is it our turn? Hubert Reeves, who is a philosopher from Canada, said it very well. 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. If we don't learn how to live in harmony with planet Earth, we won't live. Planet Earth will be there. We 100% depend on that, yet we don't give it any value. World Overshoot Day last year was July 29th, which is the day that we use up more resources than the world can replenish. In other words, after that day, we are literally stealing from future generations day after day. That's just outright unacceptable. I I don't want to be part of that. So most companies are in the CSR mode, corporate social responsibility. What this book is trying to do, get the companies to think in becoming RSC, responsible social corporations, and moving from a less bad mentality to a positive mentality. You know, CSR is about less bad. You saw it in Glasgow at the COP26 where I was for the 10 days as advisor to the UK government. But it was less carbon emission, less plastics in the ocean, less deforestation. But you know, I hate to use the comparison, but I used to murder 10 people, now I murder only 5 people. Am I a better murderer? But that's what we're doing. We're murdering planet Earth. We're actually murdering our fellow citizens in doing so. 8 million people die prematurely every year just because of air pollution alone. And that's just a small statistic I can quote out of many. So that's bad. CSR is simply not good enough anymore. Then people say, okay, okay, I get it. I want to be sustainable. What is sustainable? Sustainable for most people is neither good nor bad. So they call it net zero. You know, the oil companies are very good at it. I don't need to do anything now because we'll get carbon capture in the future. They're basically kicking the can down the road, making targets for 2050. Because it's popular to do so your daughter still loves you as a father, but not doing anything for 2030. Net zero would say, okay, it's okay to build a coal factory here because I'm going to plant some trees there, you know, but the people around the coal factory are living 12 years shorter than the rest of the world. Doesn't seem to matter. Doesn't work anymore. In a world that has overshot, the only thing you can do is to think regenerative, restorative, reparative. And that is what we call net positive. And increasingly we see signs of that, how to move to regenerative agriculture, Microsoft taking carbon out of the air since 1975, Walmart protecting 1 million square miles of ocean, Mastercard putting $500 million into the US economy to get Black ownership of businesses or to drive financial inclusion for people that are still excluded. That's what is net positive thinking. And that is what companies need to get to. Companies that do that well will position themselves well for the future. Companies that continue to refuse, I think, are already heading as we talk to the graveyard of dinosaurs. So what is a net positive company? That's a company that first and foremost takes responsibility of its total impact in the world, all consequences intended or not. Many think they can outsource the value chain, still outsource their responsibility. Doesn't work anymore. Take Facebook. Okay, we like people like us, otherwise they wouldn't use Facebook. But if you don't take responsibility for the hate crime that's on your platform, for the child addiction, for undermining democracy, we don't want Zuckerberg around. And people are telling that now loud and clearly. Point number 2, I've talked about that: operate over the longer term. It is impossible. To address these issues of climate change or inequality with my optic focus on the quarters. The third thing is to work with all of the stakeholders. If you're automatically thinking longer term to address these issues that we have of people and planet, then automatically you're talking multiple stakeholders. Then it gets to principle number 4 that basically says the shareholder return is the result of what you do. It's not the objective of doing. We've talked enough about that. And that required quite a mindset change even in Unilever. And by the way, the longer-term shareholders increasingly understand that. They know they need to have a return. Often it's pension funds, but they also increasingly understand that the people need to retire in a world they can live in. Hence the letters from Larry Fink and all the other things. And the 5th and final point for net-positive companies are companies that really work on the broader systems transformation that is needed. So they go beyond Their own. Just like in Unilever, let's say we work to get plastics out of the ocean or stop the deforestation or address the issues of human rights in the value chain. They go beyond their own company. The book is a very practical how company because we said we're not going to spend any time anymore on the what. There are always 5 or 10% of people that don't want to move because they have an enlightened self-interest. We know who they are. They deny the science. We know where they are. But at the end of the day, this book is written for the 60% that sits on the fence to create a critical mass to start moving. And, uh, it's, it's for the first time written by someone who's run a major publicly traded company, uh, and not by a consultant or an academic, in due respect. So it's a very practical thing and, and doesn't shy away from the tough, tougher things. It talks about your leadership transformation. Your company transformation, your own industry transformations, the broader systems transformations, but then also what we call the elephants in the room, how to deal with CEO salaries, money in politics, trade associations, lobbying, other things, corruption, tax, all these salient issues that frankly too many CEOs shy away from still that need to be addressed and need to be addressed urgently to rebuild that trust. Ultimately, it's a story, I think of, now that I think about it, of putting humanity back in business. And that's why we call it courageous leaders, courageous companies thrive by giving more than they take. But courage comes from the French word cœur, which is heart. And it's really leadership that is both the heart and the head. And what we've seen in COVID once more is that these leaders that operate with a higher level of humanity, humility, show empathy, compassion, have a higher level of purpose, the power of partnership, thinking multi-generational. They are the leaders that have instilled trust in their organizations, and their organizations in these very uncertain times have done better. That's the type of leadership that we need. Ultimately, it boils down to that. It was Rumi, a poet in Iran in the 13th century, He said, yesterday I was smart. I tried to change the world. Today I'm wise. I'm trying to change myself. And that's really— this book is as much of a personal transformation that is needed here than a systems transformation. I've said many times, John, that— and you know, I'm direct as a Dutchman. That's the benefit of having been born in the Netherlands. But this is not a crisis of climate change or inequality or poverty. It's not. This is a crisis of greed, of apathy, of selfishness. And if we don't get that through to people, if we don't get these leaders, then I fear for the future of humanity. But perhaps then it's not worth having humanity around.

So fascinating listening to you there, and just so much passion and so inspiring. One last question, just to be respectful of your time. We, as you know, the bulk of the audience today is from the London Business School and INSEAD. We also have 30 other universities represented today and 50 different countries, a number of people from Ukraine. And I guess as I reflect on on the power we each have as individuals. You know, I think the one amazing thing about the MBA ecosystem is it sends people out into all different companies, and a lot of them will end up in the biggest companies in the world. If you were leaving this conversation and you were trying to work out how you could have impact in these companies off the back of this net positive frame of thinking, what would you suggest? How could you go about being a sort of mini activist in your company? Do you have any ideas or thoughts? you've seen in the past which have worked, which have had impact?

The first thing is I think you are best off if you can marry what you like, what the world needs, and what you're good at. If you can operate under that intersection. We've seen the Great Resignation in the US. I mean, people, and I think it's the same happening here in Europe, people are trying to now select companies. I've always said it's an honor to get people to work for us. When we started the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, we became the preferred employer in most countries we operated, and we got about 2 million people applying to us every year. We were the 3rd most looked up company on LinkedIn after Google and Apple. We didn't understand that, but people are looking for purpose. They want to do something bigger in life than they can get to themselves. They want to leave this world in a better place than they found it. So find these companies that, that have your values and and purpose. And also, I stress the values. If you're not aligned with your values— I've been lucky to work for 3 great companies that had values that I felt associated with, so I could be myself. I could develop myself to my fullest potential. And, uh, and I, I could always say what I wanted to say or, or share my thinking with anybody without feeling threatened in my career or, or in my personal being. And, uh, You know, so find, find that intersection is the point. And, and secondly, being an activist, companies are not bad companies in the sense that there are not many CEOs who want more unemployment, more climate change, more inequality. They are not there, at least fortunately I haven't met them. So, but often they just don't know. They don't know what can be done, that 70, 80% of the solutions are available today already with technology that is there. They don't know how to do partnerships. They don't see that it could actually benefit their company immediately in all the areas. I always say not everybody can invent the internet. So come into a company with a constructive mindset where you understand these challenges, where you have your sphere of influence, where you come in with the solutions because you're solutions providers that, and certainly and surely and slowly, your circle of influence would grow. And yes, speak up if you see things that you don't agree with. I think the bigger change now is coming in society, frankly, from employees speaking up. And every company now inside of them have a Greta Thunberg in the company. When a CEO gets 1,000 letters from employees that say you need to do something about climate change, I can tell you that's more important than getting 10 million postcards from consumers. You know, when employees walk out because you are providing face recognition to the government that is then used for other purposes, or you're providing mattresses to the border where children are being separated from their parents, it sends a message to the CEOs. I mean, Jeff Bezos got involved because 8,000 employees threatened to walk out on climate change. Now he's making some of his money available for that. Good for him. But, you know, but it's the employees that drive that change. There's no question about that. So we are all activists within a company. We have significantly more influence and certainly creating the networks, even in Unilever, which, you know, where we had quite a lot of people going to One Young World. That was one of my strategies to create critical mass. So I've been involved for the last 12, 13 years, but So we had a network of 400 or 500 people, 50 every year because you had to limit it, otherwise it became a Unilever show. But we got 400 or 500 people in the company that had One Young World, but they were drivers of change. We brought in social enterprises and linked them into our value chains deliberately. They were drivers for change. They brought in reality checks. You know that I think management sometimes in their comfort zones would forget. So you are the change that that world wants to see at a much bigger level than you individually. In most companies now, half the people will be millennials or Gen Zs. Honestly, and my biggest fear was always that we would lose them as as as purchasers of our products as well. I always looked at an in the. I always looked at are we the preferred employer? What happens with diversity? Because these were important to me. But I also looked at what is the penetration of our brands amongst millennials. And that was a good sign if we were purposeful or if we were addressing issues. And so companies would be wise to take notice here. You have in that sense more influence than you think you have. So anyway, enough said on that.

Paul, thank you so much for your time. And thank you so much for your journey. It's just so inspiring to have people like you in the world fighting for a better future. and certainly personally super inspired. In my research for today's conversation, I found lots of podcast conversations which covered a lot of stuff we haven't got to speak about. And it feels like we could have let the session run for hours if you had the time. But if you, if you search on the podcast environments, I'm sure you'll find more about Paul. Once again, thanks so much for all your energy you've invested in this space. And yeah, super excited to to learn more about the impact you're having in the years to come.

Thank you, and thank you all for what you're doing. And above all, be safe. Hope to see you soon in person. You too.