Chapter 4
Leadership for a Net Positive World
Net positive leadership requires more than traditional business skills. Leaders must be fundamentally good human beings with integrity whose words and actions align. Five critical traits define net positive leaders:
1. **Purpose and Service Orientation**: John Replogle's transformation illustrates this power. Despite success as president of Guinness, he realized he wasn't living his purpose and committed to only working for sustainability-minded companies. This led him to successful CEO roles at Burt's Bees and Seventh Generation, describing the shift as going "from living in black and white to living in color." While passion is about finding yourself, purpose involves losing yourself in something bigger.
2. **Empathy and Compassion**: True leadership requires acknowledging privilege and cultivating empathy. Only 45% of employees believe their CEOs have empathy, yet seeing others as "human beings, not human doings" is essential for sustainable business. Mastercard's Ajay Banga emphasizes "decency quotient" alongside IQ and EQ, while Wipro's Azim Premji demonstrates humility by donating $21 billion to help the vulnerable.
3. **Courage**: Courage underpins all other virtues-as Maya Angelou said, "without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently." Net positive leaders tackle seemingly impossible challenges, like Dalmia Cement's carbon negative by 2040 goal-"difficult to understand, difficult to visualize, but easy to dream." Dick's Sporting Goods CEO Ed Stack showed moral courage by ending assault weapon sales despite projected $250 million losses and death threats.
4. **Moral Leadership**: True leadership means inspiring and uniting people behind common purpose-not just giving energy but unleashing it. Authenticity is crucial-employees immediately detect hypocrisy when leaders' words and actions don't align. The "shadow of a leader" defines organizational culture. Paul Polman demonstrated personal connection by visiting homes to understand customers' lives before visiting offices, writing personalized notes to hundreds of executives, and taking personal responsibility even in difficult situations.
5. **Partnership Building**: Net positive leadership requires shifting from an inside-out perspective (what can we offer?) to an outside-in view (what does the world need?). Leaders must demonstrate openness to working with others-not just commanding from behind desks but actively seeking collaboration with diverse stakeholders. Successful coalitions require equal partnerships where everyone sees benefits.
The world needs more decent, empathetic leaders who feel obligated to improve society. When asked why he pursued sustainability-for business or grandchildren-Paul instantly answered "My grandkids." This simple truth reveals our deeper motivation: serving loved ones and leaving a positive legacy.
Chapter 5
Unlocking Purpose Throughout the Organization
What truly motivates people? While traditional economics assumed people simply maximize utility and seek money and possessions, newer fields like behavioral economics reveal we're not purely rational actors. Harvard professors identified fundamental human drives that include not just acquiring and defending (fitting the competitive economic model), but also bonding with others and comprehending our world. A net positive company satisfies all four drives, helping employees discover purpose by connecting heart and brain.
By 2008, Unilever had stagnated-its share price hadn't moved in a decade, revenues had fallen from 55 billion to 38 billion, and it had shrunk from the world's largest consumer goods company to a distant third. When Paul Polman arrived as Unilever's first outside CEO, he found an internally-focused organization lacking pride and cohesion. His revival strategy focused on rebuilding fundamentals before pursuing purpose, increasing investments in people, brands, R&D, and manufacturing.
The company created the Compass strategy framework articulating why Unilever existed, followed by the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) that aligned strategy with sustainability. The USLP translated Unilever's purpose of making sustainable living commonplace into three audacious decade-long goals: improve health and well-being of over one billion people, reduce environmental impact by half while decoupling growth from resource use, and enhance millions of livelihoods.
Nothing is more powerful for an organization than discovering why it exists. Colin Mayer of Oxford defines business purpose as "solving problems profitably, not profiting from causing problems"-a tactical expression of "giving more than you take." Purpose creates more unified organizations, motivated stakeholders, and profitable growth. The JUST Capital 100 companies produced 56% higher shareholder returns over five years. Mission-driven companies show 30% higher innovation and 40% better employee retention.
To drive the USLP's success, Paul partnered with leadership guru Bill George to create the Unilever Leadership Development Program (ULDP). This week-long intensive training helped leaders identify their individual purpose through exploring personal "crucible" moments-transformational events that shaped their leadership style. Paul modeled vulnerability by sharing his own crucibles: his father working two jobs to provide for his children, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with eight blind people, and surviving a terrorist attack in Mumbai.
Engaging employees in purpose is essential for organizational success. Younger workers, particularly Gen Z and millennials, demand transparency and prioritize climate change and environmental protection. Studies show purpose-driven employees are more likely to stay with a company-71% when they know what the organization stands for versus only 30% when they don't. Unilever's approach has made it a talent magnet, receiving two million applications annually for fifteen thousand positions.
Chapter 6
Setting Ambitious Goals That Break Boundaries
Breaking boundaries in thinking and goals is essential for net positive companies. Just as breaking the sound barrier or running a four-minute mile seemed impossible until someone did it, achieving net positive impact requires courage to go beyond conventional limits. Goals that make you uncomfortable are necessary-if they don't, they're not aggressive enough. The key is replacing "or" thinking with "and" thinking, recognizing that sustainability often brings multiple benefits rather than tradeoffs.
To achieve systemic change, companies must transform internally by breaking down silos and abandoning incremental thinking. Ambitious goals drive creativity-when Unilever's Lifebuoy soap set out to teach one billion people healthy hand-washing habits, it pushed the team to think differently about partnerships, rural outreach, and behavior change innovations.
The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) refocused the company outward, drawing inspiration from planetary challenges. The plan's three ambitious goals were deliberately boundary-breaking. The frequent use of "zero" and "all" in targets forced systemic thinking and partnership approaches. The USLP was a living document that evolved as understanding matured, with increasingly aggressive targets.
Effective sustainability goals should make organizations uncomfortable. As Wipro chairman Azim Premji says, "If people are not laughing at your goals, your goals are too small." The traditional SMART goal framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound) needs updating for sustainability goals. Instead of "achievable," the authors recommend "aspirational," "ambitious," or "audacious"-targeting carbon neutrality by 2030 or improving a billion lives.
Science-based targets represent the bare minimum both biophysically and morally. Leading companies are setting increasingly ambitious climate targets. Microsoft committed to be carbon negative by 2030 and remove all carbon it has emitted since founding by 2050. Google responded by offsetting its historic emissions immediately and committing to use only on-site renewable power for all data centers by 2030.
For companies facing disruption, an honest examination of planetary boundaries may require a deep pivot to avoid irrelevance while seizing enormous market opportunities. DONG (Danish Oil & Natural Gas) made a dramatic transformation, shifting from 85% fossil fuels to 85% green energy. Renaming itself rsted, it built the world's largest offshore wind business. Markets have rewarded this pivot-despite BP's revenue being 33 times larger than rsted's, its market cap is only 1.4 times higher.
Chapter 7
Building Trust Through Radical Transparency
Trust in institutions has been declining for decades, with only 48% of people trusting CEOs and 41% trusting government leaders according to the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer. This erosion of trust is costly-requiring more legal oversight, impeding collaboration, and reducing efficiency.
In today's world of radical transparency, hiding problems is virtually impossible. With employees carrying cameras everywhere and posting on social media, the tide is always going out, revealing who's "swimming naked" as Warren Buffett puts it. Companies that understand their operational problems and work genuinely toward solutions have nothing to fear from transparency.
The old strategy of secrecy is counterproductive-it hinders trust-building and misses opportunities for connection and learning through openly sharing challenges. Trust backed by transparency creates powerful goodwill and intangible value-which now comprises over 80% of S&P 500 companies' total value, compared to just 20% forty years ago.
Trust "comes on foot and leaves on horseback," as the Dutch proverb says. It requires time, consistency, and humility to build. The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan functioned as both strategy and transparency tool. By publishing detailed goals across fifty targets, Unilever created accountability and urgency. Their ambitious commitment to 100% sustainable agricultural sourcing by 2020 gave them credibility with partners.
Unilever's progress reports, audited by PwC with green/yellow/red ratings for each target, openly acknowledged challenges like reducing consumer water usage. This level of transparency transformed critics into collaborators. Stakeholder demands for information are constantly rising, requiring companies to adopt the mindset that they don't actually own the business-stakeholders do.
Inviting knowledgeable critics inside builds valuable trust and accelerates improvement. Unilever's 2013 Oxfam report on Vietnam operations revealed adequate policies but implementation gaps, including wages above minimum but below living wage levels. Following this report and the Rana Plaza tragedy, Unilever issued its first company-wide human rights report in 2015, being truthful about operations across 190 countries with different norms.
When trusted, companies gain seats at important tables. Unilever earned a unique position as the sole business representative on the UN's Sustainable Development Goals working group. This access provided insights into global development thinking and regular engagement with world leaders, while allowing Unilever to influence outcomes.
Chapter 8
Creating Powerful Partnerships for Systemic Change
Partnerships create multiplier effects that can solve challenges no company can tackle alone. Like bucket brigades passing water to fight fires, collaboration yields nonlinear returns. Net positive companies need partnerships to reach ambitious goals like zero waste facilities or addressing climate change, especially Scope 3 emissions in supply chains and from customers.
Two core partnership types exist: 1+1=11 collaborations that optimize within current systems (like competitors working on recyclable packaging), and system-changing partnerships that require all societal players to transform underlying dynamics (like creating circular economies through policy and infrastructure).
Net positive partnerships differ not in management mechanics but in purpose and approach-they serve the greater good while helping partners, creating impact, scale and staying power. These partnerships expand across six approaches: within your value chain, within your industry, across sectors, with civil society, with governments, and in multistakeholder groups.
The first step in expanding ownership is genuine partnership with your direct value chain-not viewing suppliers as mere cost centers but as innovation partners. Unilever's "Partner to Win" program transformed transactional supplier relationships into strategic partnerships by having top executives take personal responsibility for key supplier relationships and develop joint five-year business plans.
Net positive companies collaborate with competitors on shared challenges that are impossible to solve alone, too costly, or require industry-wide action. The principle is simple: we should not compete on the future of humanity. Industry collaborations reduce risks and costs while creating more robust solutions.
Cross-sector partnerships create some of the most impactful collaborations. During the pandemic, Unilever joined the Ventilator Challenge UK consortium with Airbus, Ford, Formula 1 teams, and others to rapidly produce medical equipment. One of the most successful long-term cross-sector efforts is Refrigerants, Naturally!, founded in 2004 by Greenpeace with Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Unilever. They've developed climate-friendly refrigeration technologies to replace harmful fluorocarbons, putting over seven million units into service.
Chapter 9
Confronting the Elephants in the Room
Businesses often avoid confronting major systemic issues-the "elephants in the room"-that they know exist but prefer to ignore due to cost concerns or stakeholder complications. These include tax avoidance, corruption, executive compensation, shareholder priorities, unprepared boards, human rights violations, problematic lobbying, money in politics, and diversity challenges.
Addressing these issues is challenging for multiple reasons: they create discomfort by requiring harder choices over easier ones; they may conflict with short-term shareholder demands or threaten vested interests; early movers become vulnerable without coalition support; metrics are often unclear; and systemic failures including government disincentives can create races to the bottom.
Major corporations are systematically avoiding taxes through aggressive strategies. Amazon paid just $3.4 billion in taxes on $960 billion in revenues and $26 billion in profits over eight years, sometimes paying nothing at all. Though often legal, this behavior undermines society's infrastructure that businesses depend on. Countries lose $500-600 billion annually to corporate profit-shifting, with 10% of world GDP hidden in offshore accounts.
CEO compensation has exploded to indefensible levels, with the leaders of America's 350 largest companies making 320 times more than their average workers in 2019-up from just 21 times in 1965. While CEO pay rose more than 1,100 percent over forty years, typical worker wages grew only 14 percent total, with inflation-adjusted wages actually peaking in 1973.
Companies increasingly manipulate earnings to present Wall Street with steady growth narratives. Stock buybacks have become particularly problematic, with S&P 500 companies spending 92% of profits ($4 trillion on buybacks, $3.1 trillion on dividends) from 2009-2018, compared to just 5% in the early 1980s.
Modern slavery persists throughout global supply chains, with migrant workers paying enormous "finder's fees" to employment agencies, earning too little to escape debt, and having passports confiscated. Corporate performance on human rights is abysmal-the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark shows an average score of just 24 out of 100 among the 200 largest companies in high-risk sectors, with almost half conducting zero due diligence in their supply chains.
Chapter 10
Building a Culture That Sustains Net Positive Impact
Culture is the palpable essence of an organization-you can sense it immediately upon entering a workplace. When Paul left Unilever, many worried the sustainability focus would diminish, but his successor Alan Jope acknowledged that would be impossible: "If I tried to change direction now, the company would not accept it... about 70 percent of our people joined because of the mission. If we backed off being driven by purpose, I would get kicked out by a people's revolution."
Like an iceberg, corporate culture has visible elements above water (what you say), elements at the waterline (what you do), and the massive foundation below (what everyone believes). While values are fundamental beliefs that rarely change and purpose is the meaningful reason for existence, culture is values in motion-how beliefs manifest in behaviors.
Building a net positive culture takes time to reach critical mass, though it's accelerating as purpose-driven younger generations enter the workforce. At Unilever, it took nearly eight years before the large majority embraced sustainability as "part of the fabric of the company." Cultural shifts follow a pattern seen throughout history-they seem to happen suddenly after decades of groundwork.
Diversity is essential for a company that serves the world to look like the world. Without broad representation, companies make avoidable mistakes, like Dove's controversial body wash ad showing a Black woman turning into a white woman. A diverse, inclusive company transforms its culture by allowing people to flourish without barriers or biases.
People talk about building innovation or responsibility "into the DNA of the organization," but without proper structures, purpose can fade into the background. To make net positive culture a dominant gene, it must permeate every aspect of the business. Sustainability roles should rotate through different functions, with the ultimate goal being that everyone takes ownership rather than relying on "sustainability folks."
Purpose work must start at the corporate level-taking consistent stands on issues like human rights and sustainable sourcing across all products, as a company is only as credible as its worst brand. But the brand level is where purpose truly comes alive for consumers. At Unilever, purpose took off when marketers embraced it, with purpose-driven brands growing 50-100% faster than others and delivering 75% of company growth with higher margins.
Finding authentic purpose can breathe new life into stagnant brands. Lifebuoy soap's transformation exemplifies this, focusing on preventing child deaths through handwashing education. Since 2010, they've reached about 500 million people across 29 countries. Financially, Lifebuoy grew from decades of flat sales to double-digit annual growth, becoming one of Unilever's 1 billion brands.
Chapter 11
Creating a Net Positive Future
Reaching net positive milestones is rewarding but only the beginning. Even if every company immediately became a B corporation and matched today's sustainability leaders, we'd still face dangerous planetary trajectories. The real question is whether we're changing systems enough to create a truly thriving, equitable world for all generations.
Net positive companies must evolve to address six critical society-level challenges: taking even greater responsibility for broader impacts; questioning consumption and growth patterns; rethinking success metrics beyond GDP; improving the social contract with focus on livelihoods; reforming capitalism and finance; and defending democracy and science as societal pillars.
Our current consumption patterns are unsustainable-we're depleting Earth's resources faster than they can regenerate. Companies can pursue three increasingly ambitious paths: decoupling production from resource use; building circular economies that endlessly reuse materials; and developing regenerative solutions that actually improve the world through consumption.
Our current measures of success are fundamentally flawed. We evaluate people by dollars or followers, companies by stock price, and countries by GDP-a terrible indicator of societal well-being that counts everything increasing spending (even cancer treatments, disaster reconstruction, and forest destruction) as positive while ignoring peace, education, mental health, and natural capital.
The dominant economic model worships shareholder value and free markets, believing competition will solve societal problems. But this requires believing in fairy tales-markets don't function seamlessly, power is concentrated, information is imperfect, and markets were never truly free. Externalities-societal costs and benefits not reflected in prices-are capitalism's fatal flaw. Climate change represents history's greatest market failure, with polluters using the atmosphere as a free landfill while society bears trillions in costs.
A just society rests on fundamental pillars-democracy, protected freedoms, equality, free press, and commitment to science-all currently under attack. With autocratic leaders rising globally, businesses face difficult choices. Companies must defend values without becoming partisan, challenging attacks on freedoms while continuing community work even in problematic regions.
Perhaps for the first time in history, our generation truly faces unprecedented challenges. Technology advances at breakneck speed, nearly eight billion people compete for resources, and two-thirds of humanity is connected in one global organism through mobile technology. The existential issues we face-climate change, biodiversity loss, inequality, racial division, poverty-require empathy, compassion, systems thinking, and collective action.
As Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai said in 2004: "There can be no peace without equitable development, and no development without sustainable management of the environment in a democratic and peaceful space... In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now."
