Scottish Leadership Institute Net Positive with Paul Polman and Andrew Winston

Okay, okay. I think most of us are back from lunch now. It looks like we've got a reasonably complete crowd here. I am very excited to have with us now Paul Polman and Andrew Winston. Paul has been quite ubiquitous in the last week or 10 days in the first week of COP, and we're very, very privileged to get both him and Andrew, both the authors of this book Net Positive, their book Net Positive, to be with us for this session now. So thank you both very much indeed. But I'm sure you all know, but I will introduce them in any case. Paul was the radically transforming CEO of Unilever for 10 years until 2019 and really transformed its mindset and its culture to being one around stakeholder capitalism and building the business so that it works for good as well as profit. And those 2 themes come through very strongly in this book. It's not either/or, it's both. And that's a theme that Andrew Winston has been writing about for many years. His bestselling New York Times bestselling book From Green to Gold says it in its title, and Andrew is is a real expert in the in the research and the facts and the figures behind it, and Paul absolutely in the implementation of it. So as with the rest of today, you're not here to speak to me or listen to me. Let's hand over to Paul and Andrew, and they're going to speak for about 10 to 15 minutes, and then we'll have a bit of a conversation and then open it up for questions from yourselves directly to them. So with that, Paul, Andrew, you're most welcome. Do you want to just give us— I've gone off screen on there— do you want to give us a sense of What drove you to write this book? I mean, I know you've had extraordinary experience, Paul, in leading Unilever, but you had said at one stage, I think, that you weren't going to write a book, and here is a book. So, um, that is true.

No, that's a good memory, Roddy, and it shows you you should never say never. But I still didn't want to write a book because many of the CEOs write a book either because they want to rewrite history, which I don't think is very useful, Or they want to write about themselves, which I don't think is very useful either. I've always admired Andrew with his books, From Green to Gold and The Big Pivot, and he's been a big influence on a lot of things I've done in Unilever. So when the opportunity came and Adi Ignatius from Harvard says, you really have to reach more people because they want to hear the story, they're struggling with the how, why don't you put it on paper? And really to get this multiplier effect and under the condition that Andrew would be willing to write it together, I finally positively gave in. It's been a tremendous journey and we've both enjoyed it and became better friends. I think actually the book is very timely because of COVID We came out a little bit later, but as we both were in Glasgow last week and the momentum that is being built, there are many of the CEOs that really want to move to this better, more inclusive, more sustainable world, but struggle with the how. And that's what really the book is all about. It's what you call in your leadership, and I really applaud you for having started the Scotty's Leadership Institute, this mindset shift that is needed. So I hope this book contributes. It's called Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take. And it's a very simple premise here that says, how can companies profit from actually solving the world's problems, not from creating them? And the ultimate question that Andrew will go in deeper undoubtedly is, is the world better off because your business is in it, yes or no? And I'm not so sure many of the companies currently can answer that in the affirmative yet. So it's clear, as you've seen also with COP, that we're moving in the right direction, that people understand these burning existential issues of climate change and inequality, biodiversity destruction, etc. But we're simply not moving at the speed and scale that we should. COVID has put a spotlight on it. When COVID came, everybody said ESG is dead, climate change is dead, governments have to focus on other things. The opposite is true. We've seen a seismic change actually in the last 18 months, which I believe is bigger than what we've seen since Paris. And people have realized that you can't have healthy people on an unhealthy planet. They've also realized the enormous costs associated with our failures. that far exceed the investments that we need to make to prevent them in the first place. Just a very simple thing is that the World Overshoot Day this year was July 29th, which is the day that we use up more resources than the planet can replenish. I would argue that after that day, Roddy, we're actually stealing from future generations. So many companies are, and you saw that also in Glasgow, in the less bad or in the CSR space, but less bad is simply not good enough. I used to kill 10 people. Now I kill only 5 people. Am I a better murderer? And that is really a question to ask for us. So people say, I understand that I want to go to sustainable or net zero, which is neither good nor bad, where we say, okay, let me continue to build the coal plant, but I'll plant a few trees in Australia. That doesn't help. It doesn't help the people living next to the coal plant. It doesn't help in climate mitigation. So neither good nor bad is a desirable position to be in as an intermediate step, but we have to start to think restorative, reparative, regenerative. And this is what we call net positive, actually leaving the world in a better state than you find it. You know, nature itself regenerates. It's a wonderful thing what we have invented. And this book probably could be summarized that it's trying to regenerate, trying to create that system for all of us that regenerates. So it's a very simple and powerful concept. I think what makes the book even more relevant, uh, today is that it's written not by consultants or by academics. It's actually written by Andrew and myself with real experience from Unilever and other leading companies. And I think we have shown that, uh, transforming a publicly traded major global multinational like that is actually good ultimately for your shareholders as well. And we're sharing that knowledge in the book. We say it reverses really this 50 years of corporate dogmatism that encourages short-termism and shareholders' supremacy, if you want to. And, and we bury it with the book. So it talks about, uh, the how in terms of the incredibly complex transformation that we need to do. It talks about leadership transformation, corporate transformation, ultimately systems transformation. And that transformation happening at the 3 levels and in that sequence is absolutely important to do it. And that's why leadership is so important. We're talking today to you, talking, uh, with, with people from the Leadership Institute. And above anything else, the book recognizes that it starts with, uh, personal leadership in our first chapter, Do You Care? And a company can only head in this net positive direction actually with courageous leaders, leaders that start to first and foremost be in touch with society, aware of the issues, listening to people out there, all of their stakeholders. And then they have to assume the responsibility, owning the problem as we call it. Undoubtedly, Andrew will go into that. And then Once they are at that stage, start to work the roadblocks first in their own company, then working it across organizations, and finally in these more transformative things. So getting out of your silos. That's the book. We like it because it also goes into tough calls. We call it the elephants in the room, which is a chapter that is proving to get quite a lot of attention. But how to do this consistently, how to deal with tax, corruption, human rights, CEO salaries, trade associations lobbying different things. And it's in that consistency of implementation, I think, that we create these net-positive companies. I'll hand it over to Andrew.

Great. Well, thank you, Paul. Thank you, Roddy, for having me. It's great to be here. It's actually great for Paul and I to speak together. We've been kind of dividing and conquering and going to multiple events a day. And so we rarely get a chance to speak to people together and kind of hit it from both angles. So, I mean, Paul set up the book exactly as I would. And the goal of a net-positive company is to thrive and profit, but to do it from solving the world's problems, as he said, not contributing to them. And let me give you the kind of detailed definition we have in the book, which is a company that thrives by improving the well-being of everyone that it touches. And that, for especially a multinational, is pretty broad. So it's employees and customers and consumers, suppliers, communities, really every stakeholder group and at every scale. So the goal is that every product and service, every operation, factory, every country you operate in, that you're leaving it better, that you're improving their well-being. This is a North Star. It's not something a company has done yet. We're not claiming in the book that Unilever is there, but there are great pieces of it being done. There are stories of parts of the agenda getting done. And I'll come back to that in a second. The core principles, there's kind of 5 that we say really separate companies doing just well in general from moving towards net positive, starts really with ownership and responsibility, taking that ownership of your extended views. As you all know, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol has these 3 levels of carbon emissions and your responsibility for them that extends to the value chain. But there's other levels beyond that. There's the way your entire sector moves through the world, which is what gets you to kind of circular and regenerative models where you need everybody at the table. There's your policy and influence as another level, which is, you know, why so many companies I think are at COP, hopefully having a positive influence. And then at the largest scale, your influence and ownership over how you affect the world and its consumption focus or its focus on fossil fuels or however your sector and your business influences really the largest issues, even up to democracy and our society. So that ownership is at the core. The other 4 key principles really focus on being long-term, which is fighting the short-term pressure. And I think that's one of the things Paul did so well at Unilever and was very hard to do. And it's still very hard to fight that short-term quarterly pressure. It's a focus on all stakeholders, as I said. And then we kind of lay out as a separate principle that after focusing on stakeholders, the shareholders do well. So it's not saying that the shareholders sacrifice, it's that they do well in the long term and they need to believe in value creation over the long term. And then finally, there's this principle of partnership and collaboration that it really all comes together when you embrace that partnership and see the systems that you need to influence. So Paul mentioned the leadership attributes. I think we're totally in line with SLI's approach, kind of a people-centered leadership. I've heard from some of the early readers, from people who are not sustainability folks, saying that they were just struck by the kind of humanity of the story or how much we're trying to bring being humane and being human into business. So there's a humility to it, an empathy, and as Paul said, real consistency. So a couple examples of, I think, the kind of work you're seeing On carbon, you have some of the tech leaders like Microsoft and Google with very aggressive goals. Microsoft set a goal to sequester all the carbon that they emitted since they were founded. So that's really a retroactive neutrality. It is positive. And Google in a way goes further by saying by 2030, they want all of their facilities to be powered by green electrons only 24/7. Which nobody knows how to do yet. And what that means is having on-site renewables storage. And then if you're still plugged into any grid, that grid has to change. And they talk about this in their goals that you have to go change the grid as a system. So that is a perfect example of that kind of partnership that's needed and how you create a net positive effect by changing not just your own emissions, but trying to change the grid so everybody on it is at zero. Walmart, for example, has put out goals around protecting 50 million acres and a million square miles of ocean. They want to be a regenerative company, and sectors have come together in part at times with Paul's help and his work with his group Imagine. The Fashion Pact is one example of 70 CEOs in the apparel industry, 250 brands, and they've come together to set their goals to stay within 1.5 degrees. To eliminate single-use plastics, to move to regenerative cotton. These are the kinds of things that we need to see where sectors come together and say, let's improve the whole system. So those are the kind of main frameworks behind it and the ideas. The details to make that kind of company a reality are complicated. There's nothing that we say in here is easy. If it were, we would be much further along, and I've been working with companies and watching this space for 20 years, and the progress is both amazing and woefully inadequate. It's a strange existence in our field to see both extremes, that we're both winning and losing right now. And I think you see that dichotomy at COP. I just heard Christiana Figueres and Tom Karnak on their podcast talking about the 2 COPs going on, the inside one with increasing goals and the outside one of the kids being pretty upset that it's not enough, that it could be hot air. Both of those realities are true. And I think a net-positive company starts to navigate those and maybe close the gap between the two. So let me leave it there. And I think we want to do some Q&A and take your questions. And I kind of love to hear your perspective about what this all means for leadership. And thanks for having me.

Well said.

Can you hear me? There we go. Excellent. Sorry, we've got to switch the microphone around a lot these days. But thank you both very much. I mean, I think you encapsulate it there, the real challenge, which is an inspirational one, that we know what needs to be done, and you set out very clearly in the book what how we can start going about that. But so on the one side, it's uplifting, but there is this, you know, ticking clock going on all the way. But before— I've got a couple of questions around leadership from the book, but just some personal reflections on COP. As we know, we're only 45 miles from the SEC at the moment. Paul, you were there all last week and, you know, you were behind the scenes. What's your assessment of the progress? Is it— has it been better than you expected? And, you know, without some of the spin that inevitably goes around that, do you think it's— is it a net positive experience? Let's put it that way.

Well, I was there, Rodney, in the function of advisor to the UK government. We've worked on this for the last few years. This is a very important COP. We obviously had one-year postponement, which gave us more time to work on it, but the urgency is there. If you— and I spent the last 8 days there and now doing it remotely. But if you look at when COVID came about a year and a half ago, a lot of people were skeptical. They were saying climate change is going on to the second rank of priorities for governments. ESG is dead. Companies will make the same mistake as during the financial crisis and shrink back to— to their shareholders if you want to only focus on the short term. It could not have been farther from the truth. Fast forward a year and a half, we've moved from 20% of the countries in the world making net-zero commitments to stay below 1.5 degrees. Now we have about 85% of the countries making these commitments. We have half of the world's capital, $130 trillion, of money under management signing up to the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero that Mark Carney so capably leads. We have over 5,000 companies in what is called the Race to Zero, Race to Zero Breakthrough, and Race to Resilience. So we see a movement at scale happening that we haven't seen before. People were skeptical that the countries could agree on the 1.5 degrees. That's now an established currency that we have to go for. People were skeptical that we would not have the $100 billion climate financing for the emerging markets. It now seems that we are very, very close, and certainly by 2023 we would have that. And what I'm very pleased about is people are now understanding that it's not only the energy transition, we also need to transition other systems, like for example the food system. So Biodiversity restoration, stopping deforestation, protecting our oceans. They're very much on the agenda. And we find out increasingly as we look at these systems that they're not only 25 to 30% of the problem that we need to solve, but they're also 30% of the solution. So a lot of positive things, I would say, coming out of Glasgow. Besides that, there are 40,000 people, by the way. This is a People's Conference. They were worried that the UK government wouldn't give enough permits, that COVID wouldn't allow you to travel. But I have to say, I've been to all the COPs in the last 10, 15 years. I have to say, the number of Indigenous people that were there, the farmers, the, the youth, I think the UK government— and I'm not saying that to be polite— has gone out of the way to actually make it happen. However, however, and this is the big however, We're not at 1.5 degrees yet. If you add up all the commitments, and these are just commitments, they need to happen, it looks like we're somewhere around 2 degrees, and 2 degrees is an absolute disaster. We need to take about the 25 gigatons out, and with a little bit of luck, the commitments add up to 8, 9 gigatons. So the pledges don't add up yet. We're light on loss and damage, resilience and adaptation, which is becoming increasingly important. Because we've waited so long. And then there is still a lot of work to do in order to establish that trust and that confidence that is needed to first and foremost get these discontinuous partnerships that we're looking for to solve issues, but also to reconnect with the people out there. The youth were on the street in Glasgow. I was part of that, about 100,000 people protesting. You know, 56% of the youth is desperate. They don't see a hope for the future, which is not what you want. Uh, you know, nearly 25% says they don't want to have children anymore. So we have a job to do to reconnect, if you want to, and to regain that trust. And this is why all the attention now needs to go as we move forward, not only to continuing to increase our ambition, because, uh, uh, the closing the gap, we must. Uh, secondly, We need to see more action. So the establishment of the Sustainable Standards Board, the requests from the developing countries to do annual reviews, or certainly if we go 2 years from now in the COP28 and hold people accountable. And then obviously accountability. We have to hold the countries as well as the businesses to a higher level of accountability than what it's currently doing. And not just, you know, make these pledges without substance, but really translate them into holding companies to the fire. And I think if we focus on that, it could be one of the best COPs that really change the curve for humanity. There are a lot of cynics still, greenwashers, skeptics, laggards, but I think increasingly I get the feeling that they are being pushed out of the way and that the that we're close in many cases to a tipping point. And frankly, we don't have another choice. We must now push forward at the speed and scale that is needed.

So there's a couple of questions.

There's a tipping point on the climate side, but do you think there's a tipping point on the organization side where the momentum shifts to businesses behaving better?

I think the main point is coming from the 3 factors that you clearly saw at play in the COP. The first one is the financial market is really starting to move and starting to put pressure on businesses. They're actually valuing companies that actively attack these negative externalities increasingly better, even without the accounting standards in place. The pressure is coming from the youth, and with the youth I also include the employees and companies. It's amazing how many CEOs say, I wouldn't be able to hire anymore. I wouldn't be able to get an engaged workforce. And we very much saw that at Unilever. And then the third reason is technology, actually. We always underestimate the speed of technology. But what we have seen now is that, you know, 70-80% of what we need between now and 2030, we can do with technology that's currently available. And it wouldn't affect the profits of the companies either if we would work together. So having come to a point, Roddy, where the cost of inaction is now clearly higher than the cost of action, we've rapidly moved from a risk mitigation or a greenwashing or popular trend into a must for business in order to position themselves very well for the future.

Thank you. Andrew, do you want to add to that?

No, I was just going to say that there's some questions popping up online, and Andy in the chat was suggesting we take some, but I wanted to know where you were.

Well, I've got one more question, which was focusing very much on leadership, and it comes from the book, in fact. Paul, you say no company has the luxury to spend time trying to convert people, And that's clearly what we've got to do. So is there a need for some degree of brutality? I mean, we've been talking here about collaboration and empathy and nurturing, but is the situation we're in now demanding that we've got to be a little bit more brutal about people who aren't on this journey?

Yeah, Andrew, you want to take that first?

Well, it's interesting because there's so many parallels, right? I mean, especially in my country, there's debates over things like vaccines that you didn't expect there to be debates about, and there's so many questions about, do you try to bring everyone along, you know, who do you bring in? I think the distinction that we made in the book that I think can be helpful is thinking about the level of kind of critics or part, you know, kind of a range of partnerships from people that are critical but supportive or can help to cynics, and I think there's a category of the pure cynics who really are just tearing down and just stand there and say, everything about that business does is wrong and they can't be salvaged. That's not particularly helpful. And I think on many topics, but on climate in particular, we do have to figure out which people I think are just not movable, right? And that you change the system around them and they'll do things like buy renewables or buy an EV because it's the best, cheapest option and they don't believe in climate change. But I think within a company, there's a little more control. And Paul can talk about that transition in his early years as CEO. There's a little more control in getting the cynics out of the way. But it is true that we can't just write off everybody who's skeptical about climate change. I think we have to take on some of the skepticism. In particular, I'd say the story that you keep hearing, especially from kind of one party more than another in the US, which is that tackling climate will just, quote, destroy the economy. That's become ludicrous. And as Paul said, the cost of inaction is so much higher than the cost of action. And I do think we have to take that kind of story on directly and convince people of the business case, which we've been doing for 20 years, 30 years, and convince them of kind of the improved economics of going down this path.

You say you've got some questions in the panel, in the chat, but I can't actually see them, so I don't know if you want to select one, and we'll also get some questions from the audience here. So

I'll just read— I'll read the first one that came in, said, what do business leaders need in order to create changes toward net positive? Is leadership style sufficient, or is there more to it? For example, does the company culture have to support it? I'll say something kind of quick, and then Paul can speak more knowledgeably, that the flow of the book that we kind of went with on the how starts with the self, as we've talked about, kind of your own purpose. It then goes to corporate purpose and finding the meaning for employees and executives for themselves and for the organization, to setting these big, bold goals, to building trust and transparency so that you then have everything in place to build these partnerships. We then at the end actually get to culture. And we kind of talk about it as, in some ways, the result of living your values and the result of getting all these things in place, that you can't just declare culture to be different. You have to do it through consistency. And I'll let Paul kind of elaborate on that.

Yeah, I think just to build on that briefly is culture is actually the combination of the values that you put out there and the behavior. We've seen many companies like the Enrons and the Parmelots, but also the Boeings and the GEs, et cetera, which or the Wells Fargos, they have enormous values, but they don't have the behavior matched to it. Often you can see the true company when a tough choice is being made, you know, and the same on climate change. We still have many leaders that put targets out there that they know they can achieve, but they also know it's grossly insufficient to what the world needs. So when we talk about courage and courageous leaders, we deliberately like the word courage because it's leadership with the heart and the head. And what we've clearly seen during COVID as well is that the leaders, and as a result, the companies that were doing better than others in general, were the leaders that were operating with a higher degree of empathy, with compassion, as Andrew said, humanity, humility. Leaders that were more purpose-driven, understood the power of partnership, thought really in terms of multiple stakeholders, including the planet or future generations. And what we talk about in the book then is really where you hopefully need to get a critical mass of leaders that set targets that they know are needed versus the ones that they can get away with. In Unilever, We set absolute targets to decouple our growth from environmental impact. We didn't have all the answers and we said so, and that resulted in an increased level of trust that we then needed to create these broader partnerships to get to the answers. So it really helped us. Many companies only go into Scope 1 and Scope 2 commitments on climate change, for example, when they know that the major emissions are in Scope 3 or beyond, as the book is talking about. Many companies in many industries outsource their value chain and also think they can also outsource all their responsibilities, all their consequences from being there, intended or not. So courage is taking that overall responsibility. Courage is setting the targets that you know are needed, not that you can get away with. Courage is really getting into these more complex, broader partnerships. Where you might hear inconvenient truths, where you're not totally in charge. And ultimately, courage is speaking up and working the more complex systems changes like we now need to do with governments, with broader civil society, and the private sector. And some of that you saw in Glasgow on display. It's not easy. And I think the main thing that the book talks about is how do you get that inner core Like you cannot get a sustainable company without being sustainable yourself, I don't think you can get a purpose-driven company if you're not purposeful yourself. In fact, that's what we worked the first 18 months in Unilever to be sure that everybody understood his or her purpose and then collectively developing the Unilever purpose. That was an incredibly important step in this transformation. So it's that type of leadership that we're looking for. And it's ultimately leadership that is embodied in Goal 17 of the SDGs, leaders who put the interests of others ahead of their own, knowing that by doing so, they're better off themselves as well. So this book, although it talks about the company transformations leading to broader systems transformations, at the root of that, which makes it so powerful, is the individual or leadership transformation that is needed.

I think we've got a question here from in the audience here. So, yep.

Craig Fleming. Thanks, Paul and Andrew, very fascinating. Just building on that last point, I wonder if you can say what you think might be possible to build resilience, and if good things are coming out of COP26, how do we mitigate against the political cycles that exist in democracies around the world where suddenly the winds of change can mean a whole change in direction, as we saw after Paris, for example.

It's a great setup, Raphaël. Andrew and I just worked on an article that is being published as we talk on resilience. Andrew, you want to take that? Because it's a perfect question.

Yeah, it's a really interesting question, and it is about building capacity. We talk about kind of traditional forms of resilience that are more obvious— financial resilience, having your house in order, having some leeway financially. And Unilever was in a strong position when the pandemic started and was able to extend credit to customers and to suppliers. Having people resilience, having the right people in the right place, portfolio resilience, those are kinds of the regular things. But then there's this more extended way that comes from finding that purpose, right? This gives you real resilience in the face of deep change. Because your people are on board. They're more engaged. I think they ride through the hard times better. They stay more, which is a huge issue right now, right? We're calling this the Great Resignation. But having your people on board, I think, through purpose allows the company to have more staying power and I think move more quickly when things happen. So I think the purpose is really the big one that we'd focus on as kind of the difference. But I think having an organization that is heading towards net positive just creates a different sense, a different feel in the organization that brings people along. Because there's some questions here I see in addition about employees and how do you bring— how do you engage them or how can they help the organization engage? I think that's the critical one for me. I think as all stakeholders, there's pressure points. Investors are building more pressure, certainly. And customers are asking more questions B2B. But for me, employees is where I think the real change is going to happen. You see it recently with an open letter from 1,000 McKinsey consultants to their management saying, we should look at our oil and gas portfolio. What's the footprint of it? We should, you know, we should have transparency around it. I think the only thing that will change, say, Facebook, and I think give them more flexibility and be a better agent in the world, is their people. is whether they can attract and retain the best people. So it's that purpose and people together that I think create the resilience that companies need. I think it's probably a different agenda if you're asking about kind of physical city, country resilience. There's kind of a different set of policies that need to be in place with consistent investment. And those political cycles are problematic, right? You can see how hard it is to pass a pretty important budget bill in the US. So, you know, I think with all these political cycles, the more you can put in place that's hard to take away, the better. You know, for me, that would be things like a price on carbon, you know, long-term investment in the grid and in resilience and adaptation, those kinds of things that are really hard to take away once you've started putting them in place.

Yeah, just to add to that, because the good thing is now you can also measure many more things than we could before. When we started the journey in Unilever, a lot of that was still built on beliefs and and, uh, and anticipation of what was going to happen. But now you can clearly see, um, that purpose-driven companies that operate under these multi-stakeholder longer-term models, um, actually are performing better versus their peer groups. Just Capital just did a study and had them outperform by about 40% over the last 3 years alone. And you've very much seen that bifurcation happening during COVID as well. We know that companies that are more gender diverse or have a more diverse board in all senses perform better. We know that companies now that more actively attack their carbon exposure in their whole value chain have a better chance of putting in a higher performance and so forth. So this notion of what was intangible to many people has become very tangible. And I think the responsible part of the business community is waking up to that.

More questions? Over. We have the red mic. Go ahead.

Hello. My name's Jenny Ingalls. I'm an entrepreneur. I'd be very interested to hear your perspectives on what could help accelerate great capacity, societal capacity for accountability, and I think particularly in relation to Scope 3 value chain emissions, but in general as well.

Yeah. Can we get one second question here, then we have 2 questions to go. Yeah,

hi, my name is Giles Jansen. I have a quick question about translating the lessons that you've learned for a large conglomerate such as Unilever How would these trickle down to SMEs, you know, on a mass scale?

Yeah, yeah, both of them are key questions. If I put them together, if you want to, accountability is the most important thing because we just have— you cannot have this contract with society and the confidence of the multiple stakeholders if you don't have that trust, if you don't have that transparency, if you don't operate with tight objectives, if you don't agree on the timeline by which you would do these things. And all that needs to be part of an integral process that we've put in the COP, if you want to. I think the main elements of there from a climate point of view is really disclosure. We have the Task Force of Financial Disclosure of Climate-Related Risks. Was in 9 countries before COVID started. It's now in 47 countries. We just have accelerated the conversion of these standard-setting bodies. There were frankly too many into one with the sustainable standard body. We have the European taxonomy that is coming in, is going to set standards. For the laggards amongst us, we will try to find mechanisms like the border tax adjustments on carbon as well. There are many things I think that the business can see writing on the wall. The most important thing is, even if it isn't required to be published, it is already shown by industry sector that the financial market values companies higher if they reduce their negative externalities, contrary to what you might want to think, that if companies don't give a hoot and continue to discharge these negative externalities to society, people might think they're more profitable or whatever. The opposite is actually true. These companies are increasingly being less valued by the financial markets. And so I think there's a whole impetus for change, and that change has to happen with the SMEs actually leading from the front. You know, in most countries in the world, 85, 90%, or sometimes higher of their economies are SMEs. And we've spent an enormous amount of time on ensuring that they are not only well represented in the policy setting, but also that they have the tools to implement. There are some advantages in being an SME. You're closer to the consumers and to society. You're more agile to adapt. For Unilever to move to sustainable tea or sustainable palm oil, we had to change total global systems. Of which we were not sometimes even the biggest actors. If you're an SME, actually, you can be more agile. In fact, I would argue that the disruptors in most of the sectors that you see now, from food to electricity to cars to other unthinkable things, actually are coming from these smaller, what you might call SMEs, that don't have this legacy. And in fact, the financial market is betting on them Increasingly more as well. That's where a lot of the money goes because they say, yeah, I might put it behind an oil company, but I still don't know how much of the money they invest in converting to green or how much still goes to fossil. And it is a lack of transparency in that story still. So we've created the Make Global Goals Local Business with the UN Global Compact. That's 17,000 companies. The ICC, which I used to chair until last year, has 48 million companies. There is the SME Hub, there is the Climate Accelerator and the SME. Then you have organizations like the World Business Council that openly source some of the data that you can use. So there's a lot out there, I think, that the SMEs can benefit from. And then we spent a lot of time at the governmental level ensuring that, especially also with the pressures of the pandemic, with the nationalism and sometimes dysfunctional trade protection measures, that we ensure that we keep the SMEs high on the agenda and that they don't suffer, because often they have the least access to financing and the least buffer that Andrew talked about in terms of resilience. And so that's where we are, and I hope that as we Rebuild Better, which is now where we are going to, that a disproportionate amount of the energy and funds actually goes to supporting these SMEs.

Andrew, are you— you got anything to add to that? We're pretty much out of time, I am aware.

I just want to say quickly that the SMEs, you know, they kind of have One advantage and one disadvantage. I guess the disadvantage, obviously, on kind of a whole sustainability agenda is leverage over, say, suppliers, right? The kind of power that the big guys can have together. But the advantage is, as Paul said, the innovation. And almost all the growth, say, in consumer products or food is in sustainable brands right now, right? It's— the growth is coming from these small and medium, and then the big companies could come in and help them scale. And even some of our, you know, our agenda in net positive of developing partnerships with government, having net positive advocacy as we talk about it, SMEs also have governments. It might be the town or the state or the region. It might not be global discussions, but they're having direct influence and conversations and maybe even closer relationships with more local governments. So there's all of the agenda of being net positive should be accessible to SMEs and they should be part of the solution.

Fantastic. Well, I think that's a really uplifting note, actually, the fact that the small players can make a significant difference. They've got that agility, they've got that room for maneuver, and I think that gives lots of people hope in this room, certainly me too, that there's going to be lots of green shoots coming up that are going to be chasing the big Unilevers of this world and keeping them moving forward. So I think that's a great point for us to perhaps finish the conversation, but thank you both very much indeed. 42 minutes, 43 minutes has flown past, and I know there's lots more that we could be discussing, but Andrew Winston and Paul Polman, thank you both very much indeed. Thank you.