Bio

The best advice I was ever given is you either make the dust, or you’ll eat it. Be bold, and don’t waste time on things you don’t believe in. I’ve never felt more motivated to help put business in service of humanity. I want to prove that the most successful companies are what I (and my exceptional co-author Andrew Winston) call “net positive” in our upcoming book. Net Positive means you thrive by giving more to the world than you take. Put another way, you can profit by helping fix the world’s problems – including runaway climate change, rampant inequality and diminishing biodiversity – rather than by creating them. This is what we aimed for at Unilever, which I ran for a decade. With a tremendous team, we embraced a longer-term, purpose-driven approach that put the business in service of all our stakeholders: employees, customers, suppliers, the communities we touched, plus the planet and next generation. Our investors benefitted massively as a result, as we created one of the best consumer goods companies in the world, delivering ten years of top and bottom line growth. The truth is I’ve lost all patience with incremental CSR. Just doing slightly better or being “less bad” won’t cut it anymore. In fact, it’s actively damaging if it curbs higher ambition. I had the privilege of serving on the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel that developed the 2030 Global Goals, and our only hope of heading off our greatest planetary and societal challenges – whether health, jobs, poverty, climate, nature – is if business moves at speed and scale. Governments can’t do this alone, whole industries need to shift fast – finance, food, fashion and more. Otherwise we’re all toast. Fortunately, more and more CEOs get it. Through the fantastic organisations I am involved in I see first-hand the growing number of top execs stepping up to their responsibility as societal leaders, and the even bigger number of next-Gen leaders holding them to account. Will business change fast enough? I honestly don’t know, but we have to try. Time to make the dust.