Why the World Needs a New Kind of Leader | Paul Polman

Greetings, humans, and welcome to Lead Human. I'm Tim Spangler, along with my co-host, the futurist and prolific author, Mr. Jack Myers. Together, we are part of the Acast Creator Network. And each week in about 30 minutes or so, we aim to prove that despite all of the talk today about data and dashboards and AI, that the real competitive advantage in business today is still less about managing the machine and more about unleashing the human potential. This is Lead Human. Jack, we have an amazing human guest today. Tell us about him.

Paul Polman is not merely the former CEO of Unilever. He's the leader who transformed Unilever into one of the world's most admired purpose-driven companies. He's the co-architect of the United Nations Sustainable Development goals. He's the former chair of the B Team. He's an investor. He's a philanthropist now. He's the co-author of Net Positive. More importantly, he spent decades operating really where you and I are with Lead Human at the intersection of business performance and human progress. And, you know, during his tenure as CEO at Unilever, Unilever delivered extraordinary True. While they also advanced a world-leading model of leadership that, you know, really challenged conventional assumptions about the role of business in society and culture. And that's why I'm so interested and excited to have Paul join us today as our guest on Lead Human. And I'm anticipating an amazing conversation.

Yeah. You know, when I was at Initiative Media, we had the Unilever account in about 30 countries, not in the US, but in many countries. And, you know, Jack, you and I always talk about leadership starts at the top. And Paul was CEO. And the respect— I remember the respect we had for that Unilever company. You know, I, I maybe I took it for granted or didn't subconsciously didn't think about it until thinking about this. We really did. Yeah. You know, we liked our clients and they were— it was a good two-way relationship back then. But the respect that we had for Unilever was something special. And I now thinking about it, I know it starts with— started with Paul.

You know, and back to when I founded the Advancing Diversity Hall of Honors as part of the Media Village brand, we reached out and Unilever was absolutely the first brand marketer company that we wanted to induct because they really personified a commitment inclusion, diversity, equity, some of which are challenged today. So I'll be interested to see how Paul responds to what's happening in the world today in that category.

Let's bring on Paul Polman. Paul, great to have you. Welcome to Lead Human.

Thanks for joining us, Paul.

Thanks for having me on the show. Look forward to it.

All right, let's jump right in. So Paul, as a leader, tell us about your leadership style. What were some of the things that you were really conscious to do and maybe even not do as a leader?

Yeah, I find it always difficult to be honest to both of you to talk about my own leadership style because first of all, it varies depending on where you are and what your role is. And there are multiple roles. And secondly, you know, everybody will have a different interpretation of what it is, and that's not surprising. It also will evolve over time. I'd probably say it's purpose or mission-driven. It probably is demanding in terms of what we expect from people. It's— you might call it collaborative or long-term focused. It's definitely based on the values that I got from my parents. We grew up only 10 years after World War II. My father held 2 jobs to be sure that he could feed his 6 children. So I don't really like lazy people and hard work. Yeah. And my mother was a teacher, so she values that. But most importantly, both of them were entirely focused on just making things better for us, you know? That, uh, that they had definitely suffered from the interruption of the war. So they wanted us to be better, they wanted communities to be better, they wanted peace in Europe. They met in Boy Scouts, so that was an important thing for all of us, and we continued to, uh, that tradition. So these were values, I think, that, that shaped me in terms of what my role is. Being Dutch, there's a stubborn side to it, so And if you're if you're mission driven, you sometimes have to watch it that you don't roll over people, but that you enroll people. So these are the type of things that I have to be mindful of in my leadership style. But you know, it's still evolving. I have a long time to go.

That's good. Where did you grow up specifically?

I grew up in the east of the Netherlands, actually in a city called Enschede, which was on the German border. It's about a city of 150,000 people, but it was the first one hit during World War II. My father had to go in hiding. He was 15 at that time, 20 when the war was over. So his high school was deprived of him. So he is a self-made— he started in a factory, worked there his whole life, held 2 jobs, and unfortunately passed on at the tender age of 67, which was way too early. And I think partly because— Very young. Yeah, he literally worked himself to death for us. So I actually appreciate him more and think of him more now that he's gone. You know, if I regret some things, because we were young and making our careers, etc., if I regret something, it's not having spent more time with him. But, you know, that was at that time, and, and you learn from that. And that's why I say it probably shapes some of the things you're doing now.

My dad passed at 71, so I, I share that Lost time, missed time that we should have had at such an important time in our lives, and what would have been such a valuable time in their lives too.

Yeah, 100%. 100%.

I want to get I want to get this right. Something you said, and then ask you about it. Something you have on LinkedIn. As a CEO of Unilever, my personal mission was to galvanize our country to be an effective force for good. So amazing statement. Here's the question. So you come from Procter& Gamble, a long time at Procter Gamble, and time at Nestlé. As you're interviewing for the job to be the global CEO of Unilever, is this in your talk track with the board, with the people hiring? Did you say, hey, if you want Paul Polman, here's what I want to do, here's what I want to bring to the company? Or did you have to get in and then have enough wins and then become this? How does this mission come into someone interviewing for a job?

Well, first of all, to be honest, Tim, I've never asked anything from anybody. So, when I got the job at Unilever and that opportunity came along, which is purely serendipity, I spent a lot of time convincing them that I might not have been the right person for the job. I was actually very worried about taking that job. I'd never been a CEO. My aspirations in life have never been a CEO, to be honest. But it might have been reverse psychology because they did offer it to me. But the situation was quite different at that point in time. It was the height of the financial crisis. The company hadn't performed for the last decade. And for the first time in their history, the company started in the 1880s when Lord Lever started this company. For the first time in their history, they had to go outside to find a CEO. And taking a CEO from a competitor, as it was seen— Nestlé, P&G— must not have been easy for a lot of people there. So it wasn't really a moment to demand things. It was just a moment to understand what needed to happen. And at that time, the clear mission of the board, which was also forming, frankly, was How do we get this company back on track? And what attracted me to the company was its values. Obviously, I'd studied it from the outside, having been a competitor, where the brands they had, the people, and a little bit emotional because I'm Dutch by nationality and this was at that time an Anglo-Dutch company. So, and I like challenges, to be honest. When I took the CFO job of Nestlé, I'd never been a CFO. I didn't know the difference between an income statement and a balance sheet. But I liked the challenge and this, this, uh, opportunity with Unilever was a real challenge that makes you grow. So I took it, but a little bit blindsided, but then I called my friend right away, Bill George, who had written a wonderful book called True North. And Bill teaches at Harvard. He's the former CEO and chair of Medtronic. I got to know him, uh, got to know him when I lived in Switzerland. And I said to Bill, I really need your help. I admire you, but I'm actually worried that I'm not the right person for the job or don't know how to do it. Now, I had some ideas, you know, because the financial crisis shapes your thinking a little bit. When I was the CFO of Unilever, I was lucky enough not to fully understand things. And when the financial community would come to me with very fancy financial instruments, I just didn't accept it because of a simple principle: if you don't understand it, don't do it. And then when the financial crisis came, fortunately Nestlé saved itself a lot of money because I hadn't gotten myself in a pickle. But the one thing I had discovered was very clearly that even in the US at that time, 40% of the corporate profit came from the financial world. That to me was stunning because the financial world was there to serve the the, the real economy, not the other way around. You know, we've created financial instruments 2 or 3 times the size of, of the real economy, and it's all chasing money, and it's all becoming shorter term. So I was worried about that. And value creation you do over the longer term. So I said, we really need a different business model. In the financial crisis, everybody was sort of cutting costs and hunkering down. I didn't think that was a good way of creating value. You know, you can't save your way to prosperity, as people say. So I needed to find something else. I had worked— I was at Rio+20, at Rio, at, you know, we— I was chairing the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. So, you know, everybody had read Rachel Carson's book, The Silent Spring. So we knew that there were things in the world that were going on that weren't that weren't really helping us. And I've always felt that the role of business was to make a positive contribution. The word company is compañero, the word profit comes from proficiera, to make progress. But you know, in this time period of Milton Friedman, we became a little bit more focused on the shareholder, the neoliberalism hijacked it, to be honest, a misinterpretation in my opinion of many things. And we became victims of short-termism. So I wanted to change that. I said, if we really want to build value in this company, we need a business model that addresses the societal issues, that tries to have a positive impact instead of a negative impact, because these issues affect you directly as well, as you well know by now. And that creates value over time for our shareholders for sure, but also for society. That's the best way To keep to keep the company going. So we spent a year working on our purpose and on influencing others with that or getting results with it because I felt you can't be a purposeful company if you don't have your own purpose. You can't be a sustainable company if you're not sustainable yourselves. So we invested a lot in people and I needed Bill George for that. I went back to the history of the company, my first management meeting, and I frankly didn't know many people in the company and. who did what was actually at the house that Lord Lever used to live in, because I wanted to go back to the core. Uh, Jim Collins in his book From Good to Great talks about nurturing the core before you stimulate progress. I understood very well that even though I was the CEO of the company, I could not demand respect. I had to earn respect. So I studied the company a little bit better than what had happened. when some of these values were eroded, when the business results were not there and people became more internally focused or self-centered. And what I found was that Lord Lever had his mission of making hygiene commonplace. In Victorian Britain, 1 out of 2 babies didn't make it either past year 1. That was the issue then, and that's why he invented the bar soap. So we made our mission make sustainable living commonplace. Lord Lever talked about shared prosperity already then. You know, he built houses for his workers before his factory was up and running. You know, he introduced pensions in the UK when everybody accused him of being a communist. I mean, think about that, the business people losing money because you have to pay a pension. He guaranteed a 6-day workweek. In fact, he is until now the only person when he went into the House of Lords that he took the name of his wife. So an extraordinary man in many respects. So I took these values and said, let's see if we can relive those and build on that success. Because once you go back to the core and know what makes you exist for 100 years or longer, then it's also easier to drive change. And that became what is known as the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. I don't know if it was a courageous plan or if it was an insane or stupid plan in a sense, because there's a fine line between these two. But I think it worked out for us, fortunately, because partly because we had invested that year in working on our purpose, our inner core. So many businesses jump to the outer core and to solutions on problems. I personally think always that you cannot really build a long-term company if you don't take care of yourselves first.

There's a lot of Pearls right there. Legendary choices.

A lot to unpack there, Paul. I'd like to go back, though, to your earlier comment. There's a lot to unpack and much of which you've shared previously and in your book. And I'd like to go back to your saying you didn't aspire to be a CEO or a corporate executive. And I read earlier in your youth, you thought about going into the priesthood, I think. So in that context, what did you aspire to be, and were you mission-driven from the beginning or evolved to become mission-driven?

Well, I think what is mission-driven— and it definitely evolves over time because there are things that happen in your life called crucibles that form you, you know. When your father passes on, it shapes you differently, or when your mother passes on, or anybody close to you. You know, I was in Newcastle where I saw second-generation unemployment. They'd never seen their parents work. You know, coal, steel, shipbuilding, all that gone bankrupt. And it shaped me a little bit on the role of business in that community. At that time, we were the biggest employer. I was in Mumbai when the attacks were there, and we, by serendipity, were saved. Lots of people lost their lives. It makes you think about how precious life is and what poverty does, but also the goodness of people you then see afterwards. I climbed with an American blind climber and 8 other blind people Mount Kilimanjaro, and I got a totally different perspective of what it is to be a person with disabilities and in fact them seeing more than we do. And so it shapes your life and leadership, all these experiences. And you

support an organization now around Kilimanjaro, blind Yeah,

well, the outcome from that was that we started a foundation which now has 25,000 blind or deaf-blind people in schools and in employment increasingly. So it keeps you humble a little bit. But I think, I don't know, the role model, in fact, it's always interesting. I grew up Catholic and we had 6 brothers and sisters and there was always sort of a priest in the family and for some reason, when I was in elementary school. You know, if you did well in school, you could be altar boy and could go to the funerals and the weddings. So I was out of school a lot and in church a lot, and I actually played priest at home already at a young age. Perhaps I was attracted by the collection of the money that came with it, or the wine that you could drink. I don't know what the drivers were, but, um, but, you know, uh, and then I wanted to be a doctor because, uh, I felt that you know, close to the same profession. And perhaps it comes a little bit from my parents. I've always said that ultimately leadership is about putting yourself to the service of others and knowing that by doing so, you're better off yourself as well. And I've always asked myself the question, even now when I moved on from Unilever, I don't like to use the word retire, but when I moved on from Unilever, you know, would I join again one of these big corporations? My 3 sons decided no after trying. I probably wouldn't do it myself either. I might still go into the priesthood or do some other thing. And so now I have an opportunity to do that in another way. But, you know, my father made clear he didn't have any money. I was very unmotivated as a student, but I raced through it because I didn't want to make it painful. I always have more admiration for people that run a marathon in 4 or 5 or 6 hours than the ones that do it in 3 hours because it's more painful. So then he said, you know—

I love that point. That's a great point, by the way.

Well, you know, I don't know. But then I said, I'll go to the US because in the Netherlands all the books were in English and my father had arranged an internship by an American company called Goodrich. that had bought the company that he worked for. So I was supposed to do an internship in Akron, Ohio, and I went to the US. I ended up in Cincinnati because friends of my family were there. And then again, I decided, I chickened out, I don't want to really work in Akron, Ohio or be in business. So I rang the doorbell on the universities around there and nobody wanted to accept me. I had no money, I had no grades with me, I had no visa to be in the US in the first place. But a professor at the University of Cincinnati in economics, after I had knocked on the door of home economics, but when I ended up at economics, he said to me, he gave me a challenge, pass TOEFL as an English test, teach Samuelson 101, get straight A's in your first semester, and we give you a scholarship. So I worked very hard. And then I had to earn money, so I was in a building with P&G people by coincidence. I did finance and economics at the same time, an MBA and an MA, and I had to take night courses. So I met P&G people. So it was kind of an easy step to enter into P&G being headquartered in Cincinnati. In fact, I didn't give it much thought. Perhaps I, you know, but you know, I had to live in those days. And then I increasingly started to think about business as a force for good, as a, as a way to catalyze change. And that has kept me sane despite some of the things I've seen business do that I didn't like. But as I got in more positions of influence, I also had a bigger opportunity, fortunately, to do something about that.

I love the journey parts of this. Thanks for sharing all of that. Here's a leadership question I want to get you to get your take on how effective leaders do this. So, with your background, 27 years Unilever, 3 years Nestlé. Then you come in— sorry, P&G. 27 years Procter& Gamble in Cincinnati, and then 3 years at Nestlé, as you said. So now you come into Unilever. And what is the— well, this is not the way we do it, or we used to do it, because there's always the, here's how we used to do it, and here's how you do it. How do you balance all of that expertise and knowledge of Procter& Gamble and Nestlé, successful companies. Now you're coming into a different company, a different environment. How do you get the balance right of the, this is how we used to do it versus how they do it at Unilever so that you don't overwhelm with the new, but you respect? And how do you walk that line as a leader?

Oh, it is a fine line. And sometimes you have to— you catch yourself on saying the wrong sentence and you apologize. It's not really that you want to bring in P&G or Nestlé. You want to be respectful to P&G and Nestlé. You want to build on the learnings there. P&G, an incredible marketeer, enormous discipline. Nestlé, very dispersed, decentralized, very much into working with communities and farmers because of a food business, very localized. So I was very fortunate. I could never have gone from P&G to Unilever, not only for competitive reasons, but also I would not have been prepared. So that combination at board level made it fairly unique. And obviously, but what I found at Unilever was a little bit of a paranoia because Nestlé and P&G had beaten them in terms of what you might call success being the share price or being the success of some of these business numbers. And I just really concentrated on bringing Unilever back. That's why I called it the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. People would come into my office and say, what is this sustainable living plan? I said, we don't have a sustainable living plan. We have a Unilever sustainable living plan. What is this leadership development program with Bill George? We don't have a leadership development program. We have a Unilever leadership development program. I gave them cufflinks or I gave them little pins. I even had hats with Unilever, a little bit American, but you know, be proud of the company you want to be. If you start to emulate others, obviously you need to benchmark and draw from that. But for logistics, benchmark with FedEx or UPS, don't benchmark with us. Right. So get out of this paranoia was one of my main things. And really I could serve a function because having worked there, I could tell them, you know, it's not so bad. We can actually play a game at a different level and be successful in our own way. I also remember a long time ago when I was at P&G still, that one of the competitors said, every morning I look in the mirror and shave myself, I ask myself, how can I beat my competitors? And at that time already I said, that's a pretty sad life if that's your life. So I made it very clear in Unilever that every time I woke up in the morning and shaved myself, which I then did, you know, I think about how I can better serve the consumer. And become passionate about it. Become an outside-in company versus an inside-out company. And you don't have to say, look at what this person does, or in this company or that company. You can just build your own step by step, build your own confidence. And the way you do it is, is with humility, with humanity, with compassion, with empathy. Uh, I've often said publicly and privately that I'm the one in the company that knew the least. And people started laughing when I mentioned that, but it is true. My finance guy is better in finance. The person who runs a brand like Dove will know more about it. The person who runs the Americas will know more about America. So my role is really an enablement to make them successful. And what I've found over and over in my career is that if you invest in others, they invest in you. If you're focused on making others successful, you don't give them energy, you unlock energy, and that's a different ballgame. And it's hard work and it's difficult and it's not easy and you make mistakes, but it works. It's a little bit— so many people are self-centered and they think greed is good, but generosity always wins over time. And that's the same with leadership.

Hold on, Jack. Hold on, Jack, before you go. Hold on, Jack, before you go. I would like to take this moment to say, I think we're going to create a Mount Rushmore. And I think, Paul, your head is going to actually be the first face that we put on the lead human Mount Rushmore with that multi-pronged answer. I think you just go on Mount Rushmore. You're on leadership. You're on many Mount Rushmores. I hope you'll let us put you on our Mount Rushmore with that answer. Sorry, Jack. I had to say that.

Yeah, but it's not about the individual. Mount Rushmore is wrong. I mean, you look at— I was just reading the book of Walter Isaacson on the Constitution because you're celebrating the 250 years. But you shouldn't celebrate the humans, you should celebrate what the institution stands for. And then actually, you'd be able to solve many more problems than you now deal with. And that's the same in business. It's not about— Right. people. It's about what you put in place that permeates them, that gives everybody that opportunity to contribute to something bigger than they're able to do by themselves. So it's actually one of the reasons I really didn't want to overstay at Unilever either and left after a little bit more than 10 years, because if it gets associated with you, it's not good. It's actually not good. And we shouldn't celebrate ourselves. People sometimes ask me, what do you want your legacy to be? And I've thought about it many times, and my answer has been fairly consistent that when I say I don't believe in legacy, then they say, yeah, but how can it drive your behavior? How can you get to a higher purpose if you don't have a legacy? Because I've seen so many people that were more worried about their legacy than what they were actually doing. It just frightens me. So you create a legacy that is not in the interest of the common good, that's not in the interest of society. And then you might have a great legacy. You know, I don't want to call out anybody, but Jack Welch had a great legacy when he was the CEO of GE, but the company is completely blown to pieces. You know, and he was so proud that every quarter he hit exactly the market estimate except 2 quarters where he missed by one penny. He should have been in Las Vegas. What is there to be proud of? And only when he retired, he says, You know, shareholder value was the stupidest idea that I ever saw. Why didn't he have the courage to say that when he was CEO? Wow. I mean, he's not there anymore now, so we should be kind to him. But too many CEOs are there. They make their legacy or they write their book about themselves, big photo on the COVID and rewriting the history. Legacy has a lot of sides to it that I actually personally don't rally to. So it's that what you have to unlock in common. that makes us bigger and better.

So Paul, I think of the things you've been saying, I think Tim and I probably have like 3 dozen follow-up questions to input here. And your legacy has been built, and you've built— you've clearly established a legacy today of mission and purpose and impact and continued influence. And one of the things, advice that you've been quoted as giving to leaders is to Understand why you're here. Understand why you're here. And as you look at your own reality today and what drives you, what motivates you today, why are you here right now?

So I've been very lucky. In 2012, when Ban Ki-moon asked at Rio+20 if I could be part of representing the business community on developing the Sustainable Development Goals. Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the UN before, had started the Millennial Development Goals, which had as a simple objective to halve the number of people in poverty, at that time defined as $1.25 a day. With the rise of China and all these things, we actually achieved it. But then people said we shouldn't go halfway. You know, you don't go halfway to the moon to go home because you're hungry. Or Eugene Bolt doesn't run the 50 meters and then say, I'll do the other 50 meters tomorrow. So you finish the job. So we started working on what is then called the Sustainable Development Goals. And I sort of got the bug of it. We spent 2 and a half years drinking from a fire hose and talking to all different people in all parts of life, from the farmers to women, to youth, to people with disabilities from all different parts. And it was to me an eye-opener in what the role of business could be and how you could put that in the center of of business and make it actually a strategy. And as a result, for example, we reached over these 10 years 1.2 billion people with handwashing and saved millions of people's lives in doing so. So it's very powerful. And the objective of the Sustainable Development Goals is really to not leave anybody behind, to irreversibly eradicate poverty and do that in a more sustainable and equitable way. And it goes back to the values that my parents have given, the values of dignity and respect, equity, compassion. The world will not function otherwise. I've told myself many times that I won the lottery ticket of life by being born in the Netherlands. We had a piece of bar soap at home, so unlike 5 million children who don't make it past the age of 5 because of infectious diseases like pneumonia, diarrhea, I was lucky. We had food at home, so I got nutrition. 160 million children are stunted for the rest of their lives due to malnutrition. We had a bathroom at home and running water. 1.5 billion people are deprived of that type of sanitation. And then lo and behold, the Dutch government paid for my education. 240 million children don't have a chance in this world still. So I won the lottery ticket of life, and I've always said to myself, if that is the case, then it is your duty, it is your obligation to put yourself to the service of others. And it happens to be that the Sustainable Development Goals is an incredible framework, but also an enormous opportunity. We're in a world right now where unfortunately we sometimes behave like ostriches. You know, inequality is going up, we're destroying biodiversity at a rate we've never seen, and yet we are an integral part of it and depend on it. We can discuss the issues of climate change, but there is global warming according to any of the scientists, except the few that are deniers. But I can tell you, climate change doesn't care who's in the White House. And increasingly, we see people suffering as a result of that. And we see costs going up that we all carry. And if you're then in a position to do something about it, Yeah, you have to. And I was very fortunate to create a network that spans civil society, governments, private sector. I had a track record that Unilever had a 300% shareholder return. So we were very performance-driven. We saw it as an engine for growth. So we can get some credibility with shareholders as well. So then we can bring these people together and create these coalitions now. To have a bigger impact. And that's really what I'm focused on now, to see if we can move more aggressively to this more sustainable, equitable, inclusive future that we all want, irrespective of our political background. We want our children to have better opportunities than us. We want to value nature. We want to have decent and honorable jobs. We want to breathe the air, drink the water. And these are all things we might talk about them differently, we might not like this word or that word, but these are all things we share in common. And not surprisingly, we are all connected through it. We eat from the same land, we drink from the same water, we breathe the same air. So we have to celebrate that commonality and not to dwell on the differences. Now social media, newspapers, they have discovered that these differences sell better than the commonality. So it has created some things in our minds that we think has been normalized. We have to fight against them. We have to celebrate what makes us together great. And, you know, and that gives us hope and faith as well in attacking these issues. So that collectiveness is a very important part of where we are now. I would argue even that you're talking leadership now, that collaborative leadership is more important than competitive leadership. But we've created the wrong leaders. You see, if you go to MBA programs, I just stepped down from chairing the Saïd Business School at Oxford. I'm on the advisory boards of ESA and INSEAD in Europe. But if you go to MBA programs and the Aspen Institute did some work on that and you ask people, why do you want to do an MBA? 60 million people in the world take business courses and they will tell you, because I want to change the world. I want to make it better. They asked those same people 2 years later, why did you do an MBA? What do you want to do now? I want to earn a lot of money. I want to basically screw the rest of the world and work for Goldman Sachs. So what we do in these programs in a very short period of time, from wonderful human beings, we create little Milton Friedmans on steroids. Wow. So we have created the wrong leadership, which has taken humanity out of business. It's about numbers, it's about balance sheets, it's about short-term. So we have to bring that humanity back. And that's probably the most important thing that business can do. How can it profit from solving the world's problems, not creating it? Right. Can it truly answer the question that if the world is better off, yes or no, because this business is in it? Because if you do that, then I think also you have a higher chance that society lets you be around. We are at the mercy of society in a sense. So businesses that understand that not only unlock an enormous opportunity for economic growth, because we are at a point now that the cost of not acting is actually higher than the cost of acting. We see that companies that do the right things are higher valued. They're more resiliently positioned for the future, more motivated employees, better employers, more resilient value chains. It all gets translated in the bottom line in the end. But we also see that society will actually more embrace those type of companies.

I love this, celebrate the commonalities. We're getting too polarized. It does take a conscious effort probably from somebody like you and others to get us to reorient our thinking around that. But it's so true. I'm throwing out the prepared question to ask you this following question. So I love this when we talk about the study of people, and I always often come to this nature versus nurture, the concepts of nature versus nurture. And you are such an interesting person listening to you talk, Paul. And you talked about your parents right at the beginning, about the influence of your parents. Here you are as this businessman, but you could have been a priest. The nature of— you came onto this planet. I mean, who has these perspectives? Fine, your parents gave you some of it. Where were you in the birth order? I mean, were you a middle child? Where did you come up with this kind of a brain, this head and this heart? I mean, this is just unique stuff. That's why you are who you are. But just tell us more about that. Come on.

Well, you could have given the answer to your question because normally the second son become the priest. So this is true, was true in most families, because the first one would inherit the family wealth, so the second one was making a career at the Vatican, was normally the pattern. But I want to correct something there, because society has come to equate leadership and success with titles, with wealth, with a certain status in life that is imposed upon us from the outside. The real heroes are the ones we don't see. Often you get the question of, yeah, it's Martin Luther King, it's Mandela, it's Gandhi, and we have the same list. And these were great people and role models for all of us, but isn't it Rosa Parks who changed the face of racial segregation in the US? Isn't it the people that work in our foundation for a pittance of a salary to spend 24 hours with a child that is deaf or blind deaf? And isn't it the mothers that give up everything themselves, including giving them food in the regions that are food-starved, which is nearly a billion people, to be sure that their children get their food? So the real heroes are not for— not found amongst us. We get the energy from them to do a little bit more than we thought we were capable of. I've not invented anything. Anything I do or try to do is given to me by others, by observation or by Osmosis or by just thinking about it, and you know, and I and I do believe that there are some reasons that cannot be explained. I'm I'm happy in a sense to to rely on some spiritual parts in my in my thinking because not everything has to be explained. But but you know so so you know and so I think it's interesting now by for example the Pope coming out with his Like the previous Pope with the Laudato Si' or the Fraternitutti Frutti on all of the roles that we have to play versus Mother Earth or with each other, and now making humanizing AI. You know, they hopefully make us read it and think about it and make us a little bit better than what we thought before. Take AI as the red race and It's a bubble in many senses, not least talking it up that it will change the whole world. And we forget the human side of it quite often. We've raced into this without having guardrails. We create anxiety and fear more than we provide solutions. Especially in the US now, there's a real backlash. It's not only on data centers, but it's really because it's going faster than institutions or people can handle. We're linear thinkers, not really exponential, as we saw with COVID or climate change, we have a hard time with that. So you have to, you know, sometimes take a pause and think and reflect. And a lot of people from the outside provide that, call it manna from heaven, or that oxygen that you need to develop the thinking. But it's not your thinking, it's a collective thinking that you can perhaps verbalize better. But, you know, and it has to be collective because If you can collectively do that, you create a groundswell of change. Like Project Dandelion that Pat Mitchell is doing and Rhonda, which are wonderful people, is to me a wonderful example of how we learn. There they started with, you know, we have a crisis, an existential crisis, which is the changing temperatures in this world. It's affecting people, especially the ones that have nothing to do with it. But we're going to use the force of women, which inherently are— any study, look at Peter Senge at MIT and others will point out that women are more purpose-driven, think a little bit more long-term, are better collaborators than we men in general. So let's use that common force of women, use dandelion as an example of resilience and of growth, of you know, a united force to create a movement for change. I get strength of that. I want to support them by definition, but I've learned more from them than I can give them. So that's how we form and that's how we create these changes, I think. And if it's not collective, it's very hard to get the impact at scale that we now require.

And I do want to Thank you for mentioning Project Dandelion, and I know you're very engaged and involved. My wife, as you mentioned, Rhonda Carnegie, is a co-founder with Pat Mitchell and Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, and Hafsa Abiola. And I know that you're very present in a lot of the conversations globally with, you know, Plan B and the UN, Project Dandelion. You mentioned Kilimanjaro Blind. There are so many organizations. And to come to the recommendations stage of the conversation, you've said using 20th century scorecards to manage 21st century challenges doesn't work. And there's certainly a lot of 21st century challenges that you've outlined. So what are the scorecards, Paul, today that leaders who are in the positions of power, who are focused on the on the fiduciary responsibilities they have to shareholders, their companies, their teams. How do they move towards systemic goals like you've outlined? And what are the scorecards they should be using today for 21st century challenges?

Yeah, so the first question I want to get immediately out of the way, there is no jurisdiction anywhere in the world where the fiduciary duty is to the short-term shareholders. It just doesn't exist. We've just come to interpret it that way. The fiduciary duties of any board is to the long-term well-being of organizations. That would be most of the fiduciary duties in most of the jurisdictions. And then in the US, you have some extra protection by a B Corp movement or stewardship models or mission entreprise in France and some other things. So the issue is very simple, if I keep it very short. We are destroying a system that actually gives us the reason to live. We've destroyed 50% of the world's forests in the last 50 years. We've lost 80% of the world's species. So we're playing with fire. It's not about saving the world. It's about saving ourselves. And the costs are tremendous, and increasingly higher, as I mentioned, than what it would cost us to avoid these issues. The second thing is that The way we grow is now very lopsided. We have economic systems that are to the benefit of increasingly fewer people, whilst the negative costs are discharged to others. Look at the anxiety around AI. Look at the billionaires or soon trillionaires being created in California. So this rising inequality and these rising overshooting of these planetary boundaries that we need for human viability is causing the stress in the system. Because we're not addressing that, you see also the stress in the political systems coming in. Very much the political system dealing with symptoms but not addressing the underlying causes. We missed the opportunity in the financial crisis where banks were too big to fail, people too small to matter. We missed the opportunity in COVID where we showed that we could have 4 to 5 times the number of vaccines in Europe and the US. To save our lives and livelihoods, but we didn't care about the rest of the world. So, and we never spent the money to right-size these economies to avoid these issues. So people are really living with a high level of anxiety or fear that needs to be addressed. Trust in business is low. Trust in CEOs is low. There's only 10% of Americans that think that their CEOs are moral leaders right now. with some of the work we did with the Howe Institute and Dov Seidman. Right. So we have a real crisis there. We have a crisis of humanity. Now we have the awareness. We've never been more aware of what is going on in the world. We actually have the solutions for 80, 90% of it. We have the technology and we have the cost to do that. So the real question at the end of the day is, do we have the willpower? And that is a leadership question. Do we have the willpower? And what we are advocating is that it is time that we change our mindsets. Our mindset currently at best is for most of the brilliant companies that we have is a CSR, corporate sustainable responsibility. CSR mindset talks about less plastics in the oceans, less carbon in the atmosphere, less deforestation in the value chain. But when we've overshot these planetary boundaries to such an extent, less bad is still bad. That's why we're not addressing the issues fast enough. We need to move to a mindset now of regenerative, restorative, reparative. That's what we call a net positive mindset. So what is required very practically for CEOs? The first thing that a CEO needs to do is take responsibility of his total impact in the world. You know, I was taught when I grew up, when you break it, you own it. Now many companies outsource their value chains and also think they can outsource their responsibility. That doesn't work anymore. You know, Viktor Frankl in his book Man's Search for Meaning said it very well when he said, when they built the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast of the United States, they forgot to build the Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast. It also requires us to move a multi-stakeholder model. If you want to grow value at 5, 10 years out, it automatically brings you to the multiple stakeholders. It helps you identify then that profits is a result of what you do. Of course we need profits. The shareholders are one of your stakeholders and they need a decent return, not a maximum return, a decent return. But the profits is a little bit like white blood cells in your body. You need white blood cells to live, but none of us in the world lives for white blood cells. Hey, how are your white blood cells today? Do you have a good white blood cell there? Never heard that. So we need to go to purpose, a little bit bigger contribution than that. And then you need to do that in a collaborative way. I think then the targets you set need to be in line with science. And then you will discover that it's tough, that it cannot be done so easily, that there are trade-offs, that there are dichotomies, that there are tension fields. So then you look at partnerships. Partnerships within your industry, across industries, with civil society, with governments—how high you want to go. And then it's consistency. So many companies say one thing and do another thing, or they say the right thing themselves, but they use a trade association to lobby the other thing. Six percent of American companies goes to Washington, and most of that is lobbying for their self-interest when they know it's not in the interest of society. There's 25 percent of the Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. that have not paid tax for the last five years. Years, where it's more important to avoid paying tax than actually running their businesses. I would argue that was one of the Achilles heels of GE. But how can you do that when you hire from the schools, when you drive the roads, when you get the security and safety? So it is that consistency in all we do. The CEO salaries in the US are now 600 times what the average salaries are of the workers, who frankly have not seen their salaries move for 40 years. The minimum wage in the US hasn't moved in real, in real terms. The housing goes up, educational costs go up, healthcare costs go up. And if you then put that into how wages have risen, it's no wonder that most of the Americans feel that they're worse off and are even more worried that their children will be worse off. They've never been in that situation. So these are the environments that we're in and net positive leaders. Understand that, internalize that with a lot of empathy, and do something about it. So take that responsibility, set the targets in line with what science demands, work with other people, be consistent in all these things what you do. And that's how you have to run your business model. I understand it's not easy, but this is not going to be easy when you have to create a whole new Way of growing our economies. Call it a well-being economy versus this narrowly defined produce more stuff GDP economy that Simon Kuznets invented in the 30s, which was never to be what we've become, what we've now started to use it for. He was very clear on that. So we have to change the way we grow our economic system. We have to change the way we provide energy. We have to change the way we provide food to people. We have to change the way we provide healthcare. Right now, we have sickness care, and it's blowing up. So all these things need to be transitioned. And that's an enormous challenge for people. There's an enormous, at the same time, enormous opportunity for the business community that probably we've never had in the history of mankind. So seize it. And the companies that are starting to do it, they are doing very well in general. Of course, there are some things like you need to still run it in discipline, hire the right people, make the right M&A decisions or innovations. There's some basics that always work. But broadly, we're seeing increasing evidence that this is the business opportunity of the century. So I'm hopeful in a sense that the interests of the longer-term shareholders are increasingly converging with the other stakeholders that we have, which includes planet Earth, which includes future generations. So these are important stakeholders. And increasingly, we see that as these interests converge, perhaps we are at the verge of creating something that works for everybody and creating that world that we all aspire to.

Paul, I really wish you thought bigger. I mean, I don't— you know, if I could give you some advice. Just kidding. Jack, I think we should—

Takeaways?

Wrap there and be— we usually like to keep each other honest about our favorite one takeaway. I think we should give each other 2 this time because there's so many. How about each of us do a top 2 before—

I think my takeaway, first of all, Paul, what you've— my one takeaway is that what you've described in the last 40-plus minutes is the reason, so many reasons why Tim and I focused this podcast on Lead Human and empathetic leadership and where we're headed in leadership and management. And it's been not just my life's work, but my passion as well as I've written my last book and next book. But more importantly, where my takeaway, Paul, is the collective. Your response to Tim on the Mount Rushmore, that it's not about the individual, it's about the collective. collective. And it's not just the collective of the team you're in or the company you work for, the industry you're in, or the country that you live in, or where your company is, or the stock market. It's humanity. And that's the collective that we all need to be conscious of. And at the forefront, it seems to me you've put consciousness and certainly awareness of how companies and individuals can lead in the conflicted and challenging world as AI accelerates. So thank you. Thank you for being who you are and for joining us. Tim, what are your takeaways?

I think they had this notion of we have more— we need to be conscious about our commonalities versus our differences. And there's been too much, for all the reasons we know, the clickbait of the world, about the differences, drawing more attention to the differences versus drawing more attention to the commonalities we have as humans. And since I said 2, that's one. I also love, and this is more back to a business one, but when Paul said woke up every day when he was shaving thinking about how can I serve the customer better? What I love about that is, yeah, we all think that, but when you consciously Think of it like every day. Not like, you know, when it gets to the end of the quarter, I've got a big meeting coming up, let's talk about it, or it's kind of been on my mind. But when you put that rigor behind something that's that important, any of us in any jobs we have, our customer, the consumer, pick what it is you want, but your focus is daily on it, especially in those moments where the world's not so cluttered, right? You're in the morning shaving. I just love that as a brain, kind of a brain exercise. So those are my 2 favorites.

Well, thanks, Jack and Tim. Really, you are way too kind. All I can say is the world needs more of you. So if we can clone you, we should do that. You're great human beings, and that's probably the best compliment I can give you. And thanks for what you're doing. If the show makes anybody change a little bit from what they're doing today, then all the better for it.

That's exactly what I was just going to say, is that Thank you everyone for listening there. Everyone, you all in the audience, and we know you learned a lot today. And I'm going to ask you, as part of gaining this knowledge, I'm going to put it on you to share this episode. It is your responsibility as listeners. Jack and I'll do the best we can, so will Paul. To share this episode. There is too much for everyone to learn, to be better humans, leaders, that we all can gain from listening to Mr. Paul Polman. So please, so thank you for listening. Please flex the muscle to share this episode. I think Jack and I have set out on a mission to say that It is much more about unleashing the human potential than managing the machines. I think we didn't even talk so much about machines today with Paul because it was just about unleashing the human potential. We didn't even talk about the other aspect, which was awesome. And again, thank you for listening. This has been a very special edition of Lead Human.