Paul Polman - The Courage to Collaborate - Nordic Business Forum 2026

Good morning,

good morning. Hufa huomenta. Finnish speakers in the audience, I'll continue in English if you don't mind. But thanks for the opportunity and obviously congratulations to the Nordic Business Forum. I was listening to Perpe and Olivia just right now. I don't know how many people at the end were still standing, but I probably would have been sitting down 10 times by now. So fortunate to have the opportunity to at least walk around and move a little bit. As they mentioned, I had the fortune to be 10 years the CEO, a little over 10 years the CEO of Unilever, one of the bigger consumer goods companies in the world, 190 countries, reaching probably 2.5, 3 billion consumers every day with their products and an enormous impact that you can have. What attracted me to the job at that time was not only the enormous business challenge that was there, this was the height of the financial crisis, if you remember, end 2008, but also the enormous opportunity that we had to really change the course of business and by doing so, hopefully positively influence society as well. During these 10 years, one of my highlights definitely was to help implement the Sustainable Development Goals, these famous 17 goals. I know that's a lot for the average business person who has a hard time understanding the business he's in, how much money he earns, or the name of his wife, but the 17 goals are incredibly important. The overall objective of these Sustainable Development Goals is to irreversibly eradicate poverty and do that in a more sustainable and equitable way. In other words, not leave anybody behind. It certainly fit with my mission and how I see the role of business and how we as a company could contribute to that became even clearer to me in that process of doing that. But during my 10 years, as time progressed, I saw these enormous opportunities, but I also increasingly became aware of some of the shortcomings that are inherently embedded in the jobs of CEOs. The main areas where the CEOs struggle today is in fact something that you've probably talked many times before. With the many things going on in the world, the tendency increasingly, regretfully so, is to pull down to the here and now. and make that the urgency of action instead of the more important things. And as a result, we are overreacting to symptoms and never really have a chance to fully address these underlying causes that really drive these things. And this is where I wanted to spend a little bit more time. My principle in life is very simple. It's better to make the dust than eat the dust. But I also think It is very important that on the limited time that we have here on this wonderful planet Earth, that we maximize our impact. And as my time in Unilever progressed, I started feeling more and more I could do different things to really work on these system changes that we need to attack. So I spent my time now mainly on bringing CEOs together across industries In fact, focusing on the 5 biggest industries that you might call have the most devastating effects on the Sustainable Development Goals, but you could also turn that around and say have the biggest opportunity. Think about the fashion industry, think about the food industry, think about the tourism industry, think about the built environment. My premise is very simple. If you get enough CEOs together in a room, you can actually create tipping points. I always thought I needed to convince everybody in the world, but depending on the issues that you work on, with 5% or 10% of the people in the room. Sometimes you might need 15%. You can actually create significant tipping points. And this is where my energy goes right now, bringing these collectives together. Then you need to work on 2 underlying drivers of that. The first one is getting money to be channeled into the right directions. Money follows risks and returns, so you need to change those equations. But there is another thing that actually gets in the way, which is easier to solve but harder to do, to be honest. That is that quite often The investments are made here whilst the benefits are made there. And if there is a different level of trust in a value chain, you never make these investments. Sort of a prisoner's dilemma half the time. I do something and you get the benefit, or if we all don't do it together, we collectively pay a price for that. And then the third area I focus on, which is probably one of the most important drivers in the world right now, is leadership itself. Don't produce enough of the right leaders. If you look in the latest surveys coming out of the US where you can have an aggregate number, you see that about 8% of people that work in companies think that their leaders are moral leaders. We've seen quite some examples of leaders abandoning some principles and values depending on who's in the White House, and that's not a good sign. Not surprisingly, if you look at engagement scores in companies, we've never seen such a big drop. In fact, 4 out of 5 people claim not to be engaged when they go to work. It's a very sad statistic, but also an enormous loss of opportunity and productivity. So here you have it: collective action, financial streams, and leadership. It was Antonio Gramsci who actually was born at the end of the 1800s, who's a politician, Italian. but also a philosopher, and he really put it very well at that time, which is leading up to World War I that he was dealing with, but the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Then people subsequently said that's a time for monsters to appear, and I think we're living in that. We are going through a major change in the way we live and work together on this planet, and we're struggling with that change. No change of this magnitude was ever going to be easy. We have to completely decarbonize our economies. We're carbon junkies. We have to ensure that it's not only benefiting the capital market, but that more people can get out of poverty. We have to change our healthcare systems, our food systems, and many of the other major systems that we've become accustomed to. And that's tough. In fact, it has never been tougher now to be a CEO than any time in history, in my opinion. We see the rotation or turnover of CEOs increasing. It's about 25% We see the per year, we see the tenure of CEOs decreasing, but more importantly, we've also seen the length of a publicly traded company going down. When I was born, the average length of a publicly traded company was about 67 years. The average length of a publicly traded company now is about 17 years. We simply run it into the ground, and we simply, by focusing on the short term myopically, on the shareholder itself, we're actually killing the prosperity that we need. We're also, by the way, doing it in a linear extractive production system that kills the planet that we need for our own survival. So it's kind of bizarre what we're doing, to kill what keeps us alive and to be sure that it only gets to the benefit of few and not many. I've always said, and I hope you agree with me, that any system where too many people feel that they're not included or which is not where they don't have the fair chances, that system will ultimately rebel against itself. And that is what you see happening. Often different stages of that. Now this discontent is often expressed in the polls when you go voting and this increasingly worrying sign of growing populism is a symptom of that. So we have an issue that we need to solve that we cannot solve individually but need to do collectively. Many people have talked about the polycrisis or the Burma crisis. When we had the financial crisis in 2007, 2008, we focused on that entirely. In fact, we spent boatloads of money to fix it. I think many of the problems that we see now really had its origins in the financial crisis. But at the end of the day, at that time, people felt that banks were too big to fail, but people were too small to matter. In fact, nobody went to jail. The risks were shared by society. The benefits were given to a few people. Not a very good story for humanity in the end. And single-mindedly focused on fixing our banking system, none of that money really there to address the real issues of society that I just talked about. Then we got COVID. Again, a moment that we showed we could rally together very quickly. $17 trillion was spent in Europe and the US alone to save lives and livelihoods. We went together to do that. Again, a lack of global solidarity. Some token vaccines were shipped to some of the emerging markets, often a week or two before the deadline of expiration because we couldn't use it anymore whilst we were hoarding 5 or 6 times the quantities that we needed. Countries closing their borders to protect their own citizens and keep the technologies or the tools there. without sharing them or bringing them to the areas of the world where the needs were highest. Again, we only focused on solving the issue, spent that money, but did not spend it in a way to right-size again our global economies. Less than 10% of that spending went to greening these economies. It was much easier once more to spent the money quickly in keeping the support behind the destructive brown fossil-based companies. And that's a clear pattern that you see. Just as a side comment, by the way, the money we spent on COVID, the $17 trillion, is about 3 times more than we need to spend on implementing all the Sustainable Development Goals. So we're willing to spend a lot of money to create— to solve some of these problems that are being created, but we refuse to even spend a penny in many of the cases to really work on these underlying causes. And this is where we are now. I'm happy we are in this situation. I'm sad we're in this situation. I'm sad in this situation that we find ourselves in, this polycrisis or permacrisis, because this will continue for a while, because the people that have nothing to do with it are the ones that suffer. These are the ones that live in the climate-scarce areas, the water-scarce areas. These are the refugees that we have. These are the people that live in the parts of the world where air pollution kills them before it gets to us. These are the people that are in food insecurity, increasingly so. 860 million people now in this world being hungry when they go to bed, not even knowing if they wake up the next day. All these issues, unfortunately, the price is being paid by people that have nothing to do with that. So I'm sad about that because the longer we wait and the less actions we take, literally people are going to die. And this little tip of what we saw this summer again with natural disasters is just another early warning sign that we can ignore or decide finally to act on. I'm also happy about this because if so many things are broken now, if democracy is going down, if climate change is going up, biodiversity destruction that we see, inequality, The disruptions of AI that undoubtedly is being covered extensively. And we have an opportunity once and for all to move out of this silo thinking and mono handling of these issues like the financial crisis and COVID and perhaps build something better. But it's up to us to do that. But the opportunities are there. Leadership used to be to manage complexity in a fairly stable world. But all these basic assumptions that we had of growing markets, of globalization, of abundance of cheap energy, of abundance of resources to feed our businesses, all these have come to an end. The system isn't there anymore. So leadership now is managing complexity in a very turbulent world, and we simply haven't prepared enough people for that. Not surprisingly, it's crept up to us a little bit quicker than we expected. So here is the challenge that we have, and I call it a paradox. It's quite an interesting paradox in my opinion, where we've never had a higher level of awareness of what is going on in the world. I mean, you need to be really daft to not see this or experience this even personally, or read it every day when you open the newspapers of what these challenges are. We have the technology coming out of our ears. Many studies would confirm that, but about 80 to 90% of the challenges that we need to address. We have the capability to do that now with existing technology. Very smartly, people that don't want to change use the 10% to hold the other 80%, 90% hostage. I understand that, but we can do it. We also have the economics working for us. We have more money coming out of our ears than we know what to deal with. This global world has 3 times more money floating around than the real economy actually needs, with the dependence on the financial markets now being more dominant than what seems like the real economy. And at the same time, as we have all these possibilities, we see increasingly the governance structures that we need being eroded, leadership being missing, cooperation being absent or declining, and obviously all of that affects what probably is one of the most important things, things, which is trust itself. So not surprisingly, you see the gap increasing. Now let me ask you a little question before I go on very, very quickly. And if you can just— I think you need to take your phones out. So since you're all sitting, that is now okay. But the first question that comes up is, when it comes to addressing the most burning issues that we collectively face, are we moving actually forwards or backwards? I don't know if this is the poll already or if I need to wait. Here you go. Are we moving forwards or backwards? Or actually, are we standing still? Standing still is not an option in a changing world. You know that. The Finnish are car race drivers, and I remember Mario Andretti, an Italian driver for Formula 1, and then went to the Indies. He was saying, when things around me change faster than I am, I know I'm in trouble. Amen. He was referring to Formula 1, but that's the case with our global economies as well. I'm looking at your polls. 41% feel we're standing still, sort of the cozy state. We can go to bed and sleep and relax. 37% feel we're moving backwards, and only 23% says we're moving forwards. Let's go to the next question. And the next question is, if this is the case, how you've answered that, what explains why we're not moving forwards? Well, I think there's a couple of things. Here again, you have 4 or 5 options. What explains why we're not moving faster? Our short-term focus, we talked about, absolutely. Politics, let's blame the politicians, great sports. Fear of acting. Paralyzed. It's the fight, fear, fight and flight syndrome. The vested interest, obviously many people that are doing very well in this system, some getting paid now salaries of potentially $1 trillion a year. Explain that to me. These people are probably not interested in changing what works for them. And a lack of affordable solutions, I'm happy to see that it's only 3%. Thanks for the input. When you read the newspapers, when you get onto social media, When you talk to people, you really get the impression that we're moving backwards because it sells, it travels. There's something there that isn't functioning. People are excited about that, just like bad news travels much faster than good news. So it's not surprising that the headlines you see everywhere is one of decline more than anything else. People want us to believe, for example, that the energy transition is in reverse. That we're actually buying less electric vehicles, that people are less interested in climate change. The reality is actually not true. If you take climate change itself, in fact, the speed of change that we have seen there, I don't need to tell you that, is exponential. It's faster than we've ever thought and actually always underestimated what experts were projecting. We've always moved faster even than the best minds of this world were saying. In fact, we're spending now $2.4 trillion on green energy investments versus— that's more than double of what we spent on the investments in fossil fuel. And that number is going up year after year. If you look at the exports from China over the first 4 months of this year, they were up 60%, all in green energy, significantly more in export of green energy, by the way, which has a longer-term life to provide us the benefits than what the US was exporting in fossil fuel. We are moving. We're moving. There's absolutely no question about that. And we're moving in most places of the world. Most companies have made commitments to decarbonize their value chains. Some of them might have overcommitted, some might have not been fully committed to actually putting that in place. But broadly, if you look at the science-based targets and people that have signed off and are implementing it, 90% of the CEOs say we have a problem, we need to do more than our predecessors. But despite that, we have passed the 1.5 degrees. There's no question about it. Next year with El Niño, we'll probably be higher. We're definitely in for a little bit more turbulence in the years ahead. We're projecting to 2.8 degrees based on the plans and commitments that are now in place. These are exponential curves. Some people think the difference between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees is only a half degree. I mean, I have to disappoint you. The effects that we will have on the planet are significantly worse than what we see now by many factors. Right now already in the food prices itself, 5 to 10% inflation is there already because of climate change. Our healthcare bills are rising. Refugees could go up to 1 billion people by the end of the century. if this will happen. I mean, this is a system out of control, by the way. The good news was when we started the Paris Agreement in 2015, we were actually projecting to 4 degrees. So we have bent the curve with Paris by setting a clear signal that we need to decarbonize these global economies. We also bent the curve further in Glasgow when everybody came together and became a little bit more aggressive, but we're still removed from where we need to be. So we are moving forward. Without going through all these statistics, we're just not going fast enough. You look at biodiversity and you see the same thing. I mean, we have wonderful agreements on biodiversity. We have the 30 by 2030 plan. Many countries have signed up for that. We have agreements on the oceans. We are protecting increasingly the forests. In fact, the good news is that conservation areas have more than doubled on the planet. That's good. On land and significantly more on sea. We are increasingly aware that having killed about 80% of the world's species in the last 50 years is not a good strategy because eventually it gets to us, and that many of the things that we've killed, we depend on. You wouldn't have food if we don't take care of healthy soil, if we don't take care of the pollination, if we don't protect the forests of this world. and the list goes on. So we're working on it in the right direction. But unfortunately, once more, if you look at the Stockholm Resilience Institute, these famous 9 planetary boundaries that define the health of the planet, and in fact our health, the human health itself, we are off target. In fact, 7 of them are out of what we would call maximum acceptable levels, and increasingly we're getting to negative tipping points. It could be the Amazon forest. Carlos Nobre, who is a scientist, well-known and probably the most famous scientist on the Amazons, is telling us that many parts of the Amazons are already carbon emitters. You see it actually happening with the forest fires in Canada, now in Indonesia. Forest fires in Indonesia, it makes it actually the biggest carbon-emitting country that we now have in the world just because of that. So be it the AMOC, be it the melting of the glaciers, be it the Arctic or be it the Amazon, we are very close to tipping points and people actually don't know what the consequences are or if we can recuperate from that. This is not a scare story, this is a science story. When you talk to climate scientists, which is an evolving profession, anytime they discover more, they tend to be more worried. That's not a good thing, especially since we've had these warning signs for a long time. Now, it happens to be also that the green economy is actually not a bad-performing economy. And that makes sense. The financial market is basically saying, if you position your companies or your industries, if you position them for a future we need to have, I am more likely to bet on you than if you are positioned for a past that we cannot afford. So not surprisingly, if you look over a longer period of time and you look at this green line, which is an index basically of of green economy businesses, you actually see that they're outperforming the market except the tech, which is a little bit inflated right now. Except the tech, the outperformance has been consistent. So this is actually a financially attractive proposition. More jobs are being created in the green economy than in the brown economy. More of the growth is there— of China's growth, about half of it is coming from this green economy. Very well positioned. 80% of their technologies come from there. They've made a long-term strategy there that is clearly starting to pay off for them. By necessity, not only to green the world or to save ourselves, but also to manage increasingly the aspects of geopolitical independence, etc. This makes very good sense. In fact, the technology index might be temporary and we'll need to see how that plays out. But my son pointed out to me, hey, you know, he calls me Papa. Hey Papa, there's really one index that has done better than the overall market that we should watch. And this was a joke that he told me, but the index is actually real. So I don't want to ask you to guess now what the index is, but it's actually a very sad story. That's the index of all the companies that have financed the ballroom of the White House. Which makes my point what the problem is in society we need to address. Anyway, what you see also at an individual company level, it also makes sense. We increasingly say, of course there are exceptions. You still have to run your companies with a high level of discipline. You still have to make the right M&A and business strategies of where you want to be in, in growing sectors versus declining sectors. You still have to hire the right people. And, and be sure that they get trained and developed. All these things don't change. But then if you are a more purpose-driven company, if you're a more longer-term focused company, if you take care of all of your stakeholders, you increasingly have a better chance of a higher return. Study after study after study now shows that if you run these companies in a more responsible way, it actually gets back for returns for the shareholders as well, not as an objective, but as a result. So it makes sense. So if it makes all that sense, why is that? Well, the main thing actually is, in the end of the day, it's the economics. If you look at the US over the last 10 years, despite the rhetoric that comes out of the White House— by the way, climate change doesn't care who's in the White House, just a small detail. But if you look at all the investments that have happened in the US over the last 10 years, about 95% of these investments have been in green energy. States like Wyoming or Texas that are Republican states are actually leading. We can also see in the US that the states that are more advanced in converting to green energy also have the lowest costs of energy. It benefits people. Also have the energy independence that is now increasingly more important. And this is, by the way, despite the pressure that has been injected in the system with these data centers and other things that need to feed the electrification of society. So costs are now the tipping point. In fact, the cost of acting is lower now than the cost of not acting. Especially that we're able to measure everything, it actually becomes the biggest business opportunity of the century, which has always been my argument. Many people say you come from the Netherlands, you know, the country has a certain type of image, you must be smoking pot and your stories must be like a little bit a dream. But, you know, I do believe that to change our system, we need to make the system work for us. But the capitalist system, however you define it, is still the best way to do that. To change the system from within is going to be far faster and more effective than to try to design something new from the outside that doesn't get the traction. So we see the cost coming down. We always underestimate that, by the way. Humans are linear thinkers. The world has moved to exponential, and we've sort of missed that point. We saw a little bit of that during, but we've missed that point. Exponential costs coming down. Sorry, on the other side, the cost of not acting exponentially going up. You look at all the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, if you're familiar with them, I would argue that on every goal now we incur more costs than it would cost us to implement all of the goals. I'll repeat, for every goal we have now more cost than it would cost us to implement all of the goals. In food and land use systems, we have a $12 trillion cost to society in negative externalities. It would cost several hundred billions a year to move to regenerative agriculture. Goal number 17— 16, which is called Peace and Justice, we spend 10 to 12% of our global GDP on conflict prevention and wars, often the result of not addressing these issues. 10 to 12% of our global GDP is 3 times more than we need to implement all of the Sustainable Development Goals. So then we call ourselves the most intelligent species. I'll leave that up to you to see if we deserve that title or not. But at the end of the day, if you turn this around and say if the cost of not acting is now significantly higher than the cost of acting, then smart business people will say, I have the biggest business opportunity to go after that I've ever had. Now it happens to be also our last opportunity because we mess this up, there is There's no other chance. There honestly is no other chance. So let's seize it. Let's seize it together. And what we can't do alone, let's do it together. Tremendous opportunity. That was the driver of the 300% shareholder return for Unilever that we had over that decade, which wasn't an easy decade by itself. Outperforming all of our competitive set, outperforming the market, but more importantly, delivering that year after year. Every year, top line grows, bottom line grows. I don't feel it's a debate between short and long term. If you're a good leader, you manage your business obviously for the long term, but you also have to deliver. Has always been the case, by the way. And business has always been challenged to deliver on multiple variables. When I was running the company, I had to make a decision. Are we going into China? Are we building a new factory? Are we setting up a new training system? Do I invest in IT systems? Now, when it comes to sustainability, we tend to be paralyzed. We can't afford it. It costs too much. We see it as a cost instead of an investment. We see it as a risk mitigation instead of an opportunity. Probably the most important decision, the future of humanity, we somehow put it in a different bucket and see it as separate from all these other investment decisions we continue to make. We need a mindset change to change this. If it is true and you buy into the fact that we have the technologies, we have the money, we have the awareness of it to do something about it, then what is missing is truly human willpower. Are we willing to do this? Because it does come at sacrifices. It does come at short-term sacrifices. It might even come as personal sacrifices. You're exposing yourselves when the forces And it's not going to be easy, otherwise someone else would have done it before you. Most companies now write CSR reports. Most companies have CSR programs. I read some of them. Sometimes you get tears in your eyes. It's like poetry. How much is really implemented or not, I leave that to every individual company to explain. But increasingly we can see it, we can measure it. Transparency is now a requirement. Thank you. But if you read those CSR reports, you see something very simple. You see, it talks about less carbon emission in the atmosphere. It talks about less deforestation in my value chain. It talks about less plastics in the oceans. But the problem is exactly there. All of the CEOs feel that they're doing significantly more than their predecessors, and it's true. I mean, I'm a CEO. They do significantly more, and we should thank them for that. But if you're collectively less bad, then if you add it up, you make the situation worse. I used to kill 10 people. I was a great murderer. Now I only kill 5 people. I'm still a great murderer. This is exactly what we're doing. We're fooling ourselves. So the only way that we can solve that, if we snap out of that CSR mindset of being less bad and start to think regenerative, restorative, reparative. What I call moving from corporate social responsibility to truly becoming a responsible social corporation. We wrote a little book about that called Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take. A very bizarre concept for many people. How can we make more profits and be more successful if we give more than we take. Some people might think greed is good, but I've learned over time that generosity ultimately wins. We're asking ourselves 2 very simple questions: are we profiting from solving the world's problems, or are we creating them? And is the world better off because my company is in it, yes or no? I see hundreds of CEOs over the course of a year, and I pose these questions to them. And it's sometimes surprising how you see them stutter, not even having thought about it, what their roles are. They have purpose statements, they have value statements, but how much that actually comes alive when there is pressure and real choices need to be made is a question. It's a question for each CEO to answer. The net positive principle is what we try to do in Unilever. We try to decouple our growth from environmental impact. Of course, we try to grow the company, but I don't wanna grow the company in a way that puts lives of other people at risk. That's just not a way to live. If that's what a CEO deliberately does, he doesn't— or she, it's mainly he, unfortunately, still— doesn't deserve the job. There's a responsibility that comes with that. Viktor Frankl, in his book Search for Meaning, said it very well. I think one phrase that stayed with me was when he said, when they built the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast of the United States, which is the enormous liberty that we have as CEOs to do what we do with the powers given to us. But there should have also been built a statue of responsibility on the other side. I don't want to do business by having people in my value chain that are in slave trade or child labor. I don't know if it happens or not, but I'll do everything to try to prevent it. I don't want to be in business if people cannot send their children to school. There's something about the golden rule, do unto others as you want to have done unto yourselves, that by the way is in every religion in the world that also should be at the core of how we run these organizations. So we set strange goals. We talked about reaching another billion people, incremental billion people with improving their health and well-being. That's a billion more people that we can touch with our other products as well, which is exactly what we did. We talked about decoupling our growth from environmental impact. We needed that. We talked about creating jobs and enhancing livelihoods for people. These are goals that were a little bit unusual in those days. Our brands all had a social mission at the core of their brands. We weren't selling bar soap and telling you that we were a little better than our competitors. We were helping a child reach the age of 5 in a world where 5 million children still die of infectious diseases before the age of 5. Pneumonia, diarrhea could be easily prevented. We weren't selling just a toilet bowl cleaner and saying 99% disinfectant versus our competitor 98.5%, we are better. No, we were trying to solve the issues of open defecation where you still have 1.2 billion people not having access to a toilet. Contamination, food poisoning, women expose themselves and the issue itself. We were talking about solving the issues of society. We're not there for ourselves. We're there to solve the issues. That's a fundamentally different starting point than if you start with the shareholder. I hope you understand that. You hire the right people, you do that with discipline, there's no reason not to be more successful. In fact, it's the opposite. You will be more successful because you're approaching it a little bit more holistically with more people that are willing to help you. You know, we saw that actually. Let me talk about the 5 principles very, very quickly for the interest of time. The first thing you have to do is to take responsibility for your total business. Many people think that they can outsource their value chain and they can also outsource their responsibility. That doesn't work anymore. If you're in the food business, you're responsible for deforestation, you're responsible for keeping smallholder farmers poor, you're responsible for stunting, you're responsible for 30-40% food waste, you're responsible for malnutrition, and you're responsible for obesity. On top of that, take the other good things that come with it. But if you don't take that responsibility, you're not worth being there. So be aware of your total impact and own it. When I grew up in the Netherlands, my parents taught me when you break it, you own it, you fix it. It's the same for business. The second principle is be science-based. Most businesses put targets out there not to lose versus targets to win. They look at what they did the last few years. They look at what they can get away with. That's the problem with ambition. If you don't feel uncomfortable or if you already think you have all the answers, you're just not ambitious enough. When we set these goals, we had no idea how to get it. We were very uncomfortable with that. We said we don't have the answers, and we said we can't do it alone. We became a little bit more human. A thing we are starting to miss in business. Became a little bit more human, and that builds trust. You don't have to be perfect. Nobody is. The world is changing in its expectations. This is a continuous journey, but you actually have to be part of it versus denying it or boycotting it. The 3rd principle is very important, obviously. It's embedded into your strategies. It is a multi-stakeholder strategy. It is a long-term strategy. It is your strategy. It is the core of how you drive your businesses in whatever business you're in. Why did some companies easily abandon some of their goals and objectives when pressure came from political circles in different parts of the world? Because it was never embedded. It was a separate sustainability department somewhere in the basement with someone in his 50s that they didn't know what to deal with, to do with. Run often by a communications department or public relations versus really having it ingrained in all of the business units. You need to be consistent with this. Everybody knows that trust comes on foot and leaves on horseback. People will watch what you do, especially when the going gets tough, how you will behave, what choices will you make, where is your capital allocation, where do you spend your money? The fossil fuel companies had a big story that, yeah, they will look at green energy and want to be part of that. Well, most of them were spending less than 5 or 10% of their capital on green and then 90% on the others. That's just not serious. Look what people do. Be consistent, but be consistent in many other areas that undermine trust. Is your company financing politics? It costs now $2.5 billion to elect a president in the United States. In fact, the total spending is $5 billion. Where does that money come from? Africa, $50 billion, over $50 billion is leaving Africa every year instead of the money coming in. Where did that money come from originally? What about CEO salaries? What about trade associations actively advocating for something that is contrary to what you publicly say as a company? Many trade associations undermining legislation or climate targets, whilst the companies that belong to them are so happy that they are leaders in climate change. It doesn't work. So these salient points, where are you paying tax? A quarter of the major companies in the Fortune 500 have not paid tax in the last 5 years. In fact, companies not to be named because then they get a little bit irritated, but there are companies that had more tax experts on the payroll than people that were building their business. What sports are we playing? You want to be net positive? It's hard work, but you have to understand that you cannot succeed in societies that fail. You also have to understand that you cannot be a bystander in a system that gives you life in the first place. And the last part is about collaboration. We cannot do this alone anymore. That's right. Unfortunately, we've waited too long. Unfortunately, we have a global governance system that isn't quite functioning the way it was designed for. We have politics in countries that have become more polarized. We have social media that amplifies. We know all those things, but it doesn't mean for us to abandon it. It means for us to step up individually and collectively. And increasingly we see these answers, companies going together, fashion companies to move to regenerative cotton, to jointly buy green energy, Because too complex for each individual company to move that fast. I saw our major competitors now, P&G and Unilever, going together with the Marses and the Danones and many others to get out of plastic and find an alternative that is now truly biodegradable, etc. Have that courage to go for collective action. I always say to the CEOs, when it gets to the future of humanity, we should not compete. We should cooperate. We tried to get out of deforestation and did that collectively. Made palm oil sustainably, did that collectively. Created the Global Living Wages Alliance and made that collectively. Even on handwashing, we created the Wash Alliance that we invited all of our competitors in. For toilets, building toilets for defecation, I created the World Toilet Organization. I put it in Geneva because I wanted one WTO in Geneva that actually worked. But we invited all of our competitors in. It's in that collective action that we now can solve it. The test for me was with mayo and ketchup, which is the Kraft Heinz takeover battle in 2017. I was glad to be a little bit established in my job. Also a share price performance that actually was better than Warren Buffett, which was one of the guys behind this. And we took us 2 or 3 days for this company to, for the first time in their history, to abandon this takeover attempt. But it was a clash of 2 systems that we have in society. One made for a few billionaires, highly leveraged, avoiding tax where you can, cutting all the costs and its people, including R&D. And the other one not working for a few billionaires but for the billions of people with a longer-term value creation model. And of course you can squeeze the lemon a little bit more. It's easy to do financial manipulation, but that's not what I was hired for as a CEO. Boeing got in trouble when their share buybacks and special dividends exceeded the investments they did in R&D by a factor of 3. No wonder the screws fell off of a 737. What vocation do we have as CEOs? What responsibility do we have as CEOs? So to move to my last slide, not surprisingly, you look at the share price, Kraft Heinz in trouble below their offering price, down 70% still since then. Unilever continuing to grow. Let me end with what gives me hope very quickly. We have the knowledge, we have the tools, we have the awareness, and that's a very important thing. And we have the economics going for us in most of the cases, and that's a very active catalyzer. We also have the resilience of nature, as we've seen in COVID. If we let nature rest or if we give nature the chance to come back, It actually has surprised us how fast that is happening. We have the next generation, and last but— which is an incredible innovative generation. They don't see this as problems. They see this as opportunities they wanna be part of. They don't want to have a seat at the table. In many cases, they want to have the table itself. And then I don't have to talk to you about the human spirit. So it's in our own hands what we wanna do, what leaders we wanna be, and You know, if a changing world by any chance is never easy, but if we accept the unacceptable, I believe we lose a part of ourselves. I was very fortunate, and I'll stop here, to be born in the Netherlands. My father didn't have education because it was taken away from— because of World War II. He ended up working in a factory. He had 2 jobs, literally worked himself to death to be sure that his 6 children got education. Had food on the plate and, and had a better life than, than they did. They put themselves to the service of us. An ultimate example of leadership— putting yourself to the service of others, knowing that by doing so you're better off yourself as well. But the older I got, I realized that I won the lottery ticket of life. I had food, I had a toilet, I had free education from the Dutch government— otherwise I wouldn't be standing here. I literally won the lottery ticket of life. So if— which is probably the case for all of this audience— you won the lottery ticket of life, you actually belong to the 5% of the world's population. You might not know the other 95%, but they're out there. They might not shout as much, but they're in pain. If we as 5% don't see it as our duty or our obligation to help the other 95%, we are To put ourselves to the service of the other 95%, we're simply not worth being here. So be the leaders that you can be and have that courage to change the organizations that we need. Thank you very much.