EP — Lucy Parker explains why sustainability only works when leaders stop hiding in the castle and start engaging with the real world.

Lucy Parker argues that the real challenge in sustainability is leadership behaviour: large companies still operate as if they can stay behind the walls, even though stakeholders now expect open engagement and socially relevant decisions.

The conversation covers ESG’s collapse, system‑level change, supply‑chain realities, political headwinds, and how SMEs can act when resources are tight. The focus is practical: decision points leaders face, how to prioritise material issues, and why recalibration is normal rather than failure.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• Decide which sustainability issues actually fall within your remit

• Shift from corporate‑centric thinking to socially relevant leadership

• Work with competitors without breaching competition rules

• Recalibrate sustainability targets without losing direction

• Spot where system‑level change is possible in your sector

This episode is for UK business owners who want clarity on sustainability without noise or posturing.

*For Apple Podcast chapters, access them from the menu in the bottom right corner of your player*

Spotify Video Chapters:

0:00 Sustainability without BS begins

01:00 Tom’s intro and why leadership matters

02:20 Lucy’s role and the social value of business

04:40 What leaders still haven’t caught up with

07:00 Corporate‑centric vs socially relevant

09:40 Who owns responsibility for global problems?

12:20 Is ESG dead?

16:00 Data, measurement and unbundling ESG

20:20 The ESG backlash and political noise

25:40 Net zero, realism and recalibration

32:10 Supply chains, plastic and system constraints

38:40 Consumers, behaviour and plastic reality

44:00 Regulation, CSRD and where responsibility sits

50:40 System change and pre‑competitive collaboration

57:00 Leadership, conviction and next‑gen expectations

1:10:00 What SMEs can actually do this week

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If you'd like to be on the show, get in contact - mail@businesswithoutbullshit.me

Everyone's talking about sustainability, but most people don't really know what they're talking about.

So we are launching a new series called Sustainability without bs, when I'm joined by Tom Otley from Ori Clark's sustainability team to unpack what's real, what's noise and what businesses should actually be doing.

Because sustainability isn't just about climate, it's about leadership, decision making and how businesses show up in the world.

And to kick things off, we've got Lucy Parker back in the hot seat.

She's senior partner at Brunswick Group and one of the leading voices on leadership and social value in business.

We talk about what's changed, what leaders are struggling with and what good actually looks like today.

So if you've ever thought this whole space feels a bit muddled, this episode is a good place to start.

Welcome back to Business without bs.

And today is a special sustainability episode which we're going to have a series of.

I am joined by my eminent colleague Tom Otley, who is passionate about sustainability, works at Uri Clark, and me and him are going to host various guests and talk about this big subject that we all need to understand.

And if I may, I may be playing the cynic at some points because I think we have always good cause to be cynical in life.

You know, it's no point signing up to everything.

Things all need a bit of a poke.

So, Tom, tell us a little bit about yourself, if you could, or tell the audience.

And also, could you introduce our fantastic, amazing Lucy Parker, who's delighted to welcome back to the podcast.

Yeah, no problem at all.

Thank you, Andy.

I am an environmental lawyer, originally a barrister.

I've been working as a sustainability consultant for the last three or four years and I've been at Uri Clark for the last 18 months.

And as you say, I'm passionate about sustainability and making a change in the world.

And one of the best ways of making a change in the world is having the correct leadership at the top of organizations, whether it's political organizations or whether it's business ones.

And that's why I thought Lucy would be such a great guest to have with us, because she's an expert on leadership and particularly sustainability and leadership.

So, Lucy, welcome.

Thank you.

I'm really, really delighted to be here.

And Lucy, maybe just remind us, I mean, I could read out what's on the paper, but remind us what you do for a living.

I guess I'm not sure what's on the paper, but I can certainly remember.

It's outrageous.

I think the particular thing that relates to this is I work at the Brunswick Group as a senior partner and I lead the part of the firm that's about the social value of business.

How does business show up in the world as a positive force for the things that need changing?

And that covers everything from climate in the area you talk about through to human rights and other social factors.

So how does business look at and act upon those kinds of questions in today's world?

I think that's great.

And I like the framing the social value of business because I do think the word sustainability has sort of become ever attached to climate change, whereas actually it means a lot more than that.

And also, I mean, what's, what's always key for me is trying to work out what are SMEs, what do smaller businesses do?

Because the bigger businesses of which you advise and things which, you know, gives us some guide and steer as to what a bigger, you know, with huge resources and also huge problems, as it were.

Smaller businesses have smaller problems, but also much less resources.

So trying to translate down what the big companies to the little companies.

And indeed, when we spoke last, one of the things I found really interesting is obviously big companies have these really difficult challenges that they don't necessarily know how to do.

And that's, and that's that.

You did the book the Activist Leader, that's sort of what, trying to retrain leaders to solve problems they weren't trained for.

Yes, my colleague John Miller and myself, and we set up the practice, I lead with him, I have been leading with him, wrote the Activist Leader.

And the point was to say, in today's world, if you take the reins of a big job in a big company, one of the questions will be, how are you going to relate to this?

It's impossible to be a leader in a big company today and for this not to come onto your agenda.

And of course, most people who get those top jobs haven't ever really thought about it much until they're in those positions.

And so we were meeting leaders over and over again going, how do you meant to respond to this?

What are we meant to do?

What does good look like?

And in fact, because we work with loads of companies and loads of leaders, actually the pattern of what works and what good looks like is pretty clear.

And the companies that do it, well, the examples are really clear.

And so we thought, would it be helpful to just spell that out so that you can start to see it and do it yourself as a leader in any role, in a senior role, in a company.

I mean, let's start there.

What do you feel is one leadership behavior?

I guess that still hasn't caught up with today's world?

Yes, well, one of the things about being a leader today is everybody wants a piece of you.

I mean, talking about big businesses, but in big businesses it used to be I'm running the show.

It's a kind of command and control structure.

We put these products into the market, we sell them to customers, we get the money from them, we give them money to shareholders and it goes around in circles.

Very straightforward.

And communications were mostly on transmit.

Now that is just simply not the case.

People are coming at you, stakeholders are coming you every single direction by the way, including on the inside.

And everybody's got a voice and everybody's got a two way street of communications.

But interestingly, when I started to work in this field 15 years ago, most boards would kind of look at this slightly quizzically and sort of say, well, there's somebody down the corridor who's quite interested in these things.

And now these things are absolutely squarely on the board agenda.

They need to know what to do, they're wondering what to do and they've not caught up with that.

So the thought about what have they not caught up with is intellectually people know they're supposed to deal with this, but behaviorally they don't know what to do about it.

And it's interesting we captured this phrase that there's a shift, if you like, from corporate centric to socially relevant.

And big companies often run corporate centric to socially relevant.

Yes.

What does that mean?

Well, what I think it means is if you imagine a medieval castle, you know, tall thick walls, tiny little arrow slits and parapet on top, you know, you could be a, it's a caricature, but you get the point.

You put a leadership on the top in the parapets and they're looking out over the world and if they want to send a message, they're targeting people through those little arrow strips slits with their message.

And what they get across is what they wanted to say.

Where that doesn't work in today's world, you've got to let the drawbridge down, you've got to walk out, you've got to be in dialogue with people, you've got to understand what they're talking about and you've got to be relevant to them.

And so that's a different posture, that's a different behavior, that's a different set of rules.

And these big questions that were thought of solely as societal Questions are now really business questions.

You cannot be a leader in a big business and not have a point of view about where you are on climate or on living wage and inequality or whatever.

Too much for the business in a way that we've now got to sort of pander to so much or.

Well, that's an unfair word.

But no, I think, I think it's.

I think it's a really great point because I think that you could say one of the defining things of this generation of business leaders is you often hear them sort of say, I'm snowed.

It's just coming at me from all directions.

I don't know what to do.

But when you say expect so much, that's just a reality of how life is today.

So those are kind of get with the program thing.

You do need to know that it's a, you know, people are talking about you on TikTok, and NGOs are prepared to take you out of your post as CEO of a big mining company from a small tribe somewhere in Australia.

You know, that's the reality of today.

So how do you stay alert to that reality, then?

The question of, are we expecting too much?

Is, should you really have something to do about these questions?

Are they really your questions?

So one of the things that's happened in big business over the last decade, 15 years, is big businesses have become much, much bigger.

I mean, hugely, much bigger.

So you can be in a situation where half a dozen companies basically drive the food system for the world.

You know, if your particular company, how you define what you want from potatoes or tomatoes, defines how potatoes and tomatoes are grown in the world.

Now, if the world and all of us and your workforce and the communities you serve, as the language goes, are seeing and feeling the consequences of the physical risks of climate change, who's going to do something about it?

Well, governments can kind of set the frame, academics can point at the problem, NGOs can jump up and down and try and whip up action, but really the change is going to come from the big corporates and their supply chains, which is where the smaller companies come in.

And if their growth has been huge over the last decades, do you not think.

Would they not think that they should be responsible for the impact they're having in a world?

I guess it's the balance, isn't it?

There's a balance between being socially responsible and not being.

And then making any small mistake at being plastered all over TikTok and you get canceled 100%.

100%.

So that's why What I think you see and you ask a great question, what is it to be a leader in this space?

The leaders are going, what part of this is actually mine?

I mean, this jumps straight into an example.

But I was looking at it only yesterday.

If you look at Walmart, one of the biggest food producers in the world, they sell a lot of fish.

They are saying, and they say in their sustainability report, 75% of the world's fish are in risk of overfishing.

Well, if you're producing that much fish, you mean you have nothing to do with that challenge.

And by the way, in terms of your own long term sustainability, if you can identify that 75% of the world's fish are overfished, wouldn't you need to do something too?

So that's where it meets.

So where it meets is not, oh, you must do everything about everything.

And by the way, signal you're good.

But recognize that you are not only a part of the system, you're probably the biggest part of the system there is today.

And how you act and what you decide to do and how you change things affects everybody.

And by the way, you're on long term sustainability.

I love that example because to me it illustrates so many hypocritical things because what's.

The demand for protein is skyrocketing.

The demand for protein is skyrocketing because everybody wants to look ripped, because they're all on TikTok.

They, they say it's about health.

I'm sorry, I'm calling bs.

It's not about health, it's about vanity.

And it's kicked off since Instagram and TikTok happened.

They're all obsessed, the kids, about how they look and that they all only want to eat protein and they want to eat fish and they want to.

Eat chicken and they don't want it to be meat, by the way they want it.

Yeah, it's like there's an irony here that the sort of, they would be almost, you know, half of them might be the same people who could be angry about climate, but they can't even see in front of their own eyes that are being influenced by a TikTok, by a sort of social drive to be.

It's not about health.

It's to be like, I've got to have a six pack because all my friends have got a six pack.

And you know, it's like they're so interlinked these problems and I think it's.

Such a good question, what are people not caught up with?

What have leaders not caught up with.

These are fantastically complicated problems and decisions.

And people have begun to realize in the last 10 years quite how many things they could or should or might act on.

So actually, part of the role of leadership in this space is to go, okay, where can we make the biggest difference?

Where is our footprint biggest?

Where will it make the longest difference to our sustainability?

How can it help the wider ecosystem in which we operate?

And let's focus there and do something.

So a lot of the noise you're seeing around subjects which these days, for example, are called esg, is people trying to determine how to get to grips with this fantastically complicated problem.

What do you feel about this, Tom?

Well, no, I think he's right.

And in the book the Activist Leader, it was, you say how to think like an activist and go through the various stages so it's less, you know, kind of amorphous and say, okay, you know, focus, which is what you've just said.

Be clear on what matters and why.

Perspective.

See the world as the world sees itself, rather than just from that standing on a castle parapet and then pivot to adopt that mindset and you go through all the ambition, disruption, core system.

Each one of those is a step that a leader can take.

Precisely.

And then start thinking, what is it we should be focusing on and not fight every single battle?

And I think you used the example of Roe and Wade in the States.

It's clearly a very divisive issue, and it's one which is CEOs are probably going to get asked about, but unless it's actually core to their business, why don't they stick to something else, like whether it's fish and Walmart or, I don't know, plastic.

In the case of Coca Cola and PepsiCo, it helps the leader, particularly if it's a leader saying, I'm just into a blizzard of this stuff.

Just say, look, let's focus on what is important to your business and what's material to your business.

What's material?

Yeah.

And so I think, I mean, one of the questions that's knocking around live, live, live at the moment is esg.

And I've been working in this field for a while, and it's really interesting because it is such a live question now is, what is esg?

Is, is ESG dead?

That's what people say, by the way, was it all a nonsense?

Is it dead?

Because it's all a nonsense.

I think this is a riveting question because I remember saying about two years ago, ESG would blow up.

It doesn't matter.

The term will blow up.

That doesn't matter.

What matters is that underneath it, the impetus that created ESG is driving forward and that's actually what's blowing up, ESG.

So there's a picture in my head which is bunked 20 years ago, the term started to really crystallize and people started to talk about it.

And it was.

Investors talked about it.

And so that made it very sort of grown up and financially relevant.

Let's talk about esg.

And it was, as we all know, it was putting together environmental, social and governance.

And there weren't many people in the corporate arena who really cared about it.

So I think what you would see is people might have an ESG point of view, but it was voluntary anyway and it lived in a cupboard, sort of.

And then about once a year, leadership would come out and talk to socially responsible investors and chat about it and put it back in the cupboard, but it wasn't driving the company.

And then people started to realize that these issues, like climate change, like natural systems, regeneration, like water, like inequality, were really core to their own future.

Sustainability shot up the agenda in corporates and they started to look at what there was to do.

Took it out of the cupboard, unwrapped it, put it on the boardroom table and people went, that doesn't make sense.

So in an odd way, although what was exposed by that is that it's not fit for purpose, the question was, what are we going to do about it?

Because the underlying driver to having ESG has suddenly really come to the fore.

So why doesn't it work?

And we know that some of the reasons that people think it doesn't work, the most important being bundling.

You can't put all these things together and come up with one measure, which is obviously true in terms of the.

Environmental, social governance, is bundling.

Are you good at it or bad at it?

Well, you might be good at this bit and bad at that bit.

Tesla's a good example of this.

Very good for environment, not so great on the social side, governance.

I mean, if you think every company is, well, governed, is Tesla well, and.

I forget his surname, but Alex, he was brilliant on the podcast and he said, look, but you know, I think you actually, you honestly have to cross out the G. It's not.

I don't think companies should be governed.

I think companies by their very nature, their job is to govern themselves and adding it to just creates noise and confusion.

It's really about what is your environmental and social impact.

Could be, but it could be defended as well, because to have good environmental policies and to have good social policies is in itself good governance.

So there are links between them.

They're not completely irrelevant concepts.

No, but I understand it as a sentence.

Environmental and social governance, I. E. Govern your environmental and socialness.

But that's.

I've seen they split it into three bits and they say, our environmental is this.

Yeah.

Which, to your point, our social is this and our governance plan how we're going to run our business.

And I'm like, well, that third one that you just.

You've got that job, whether you like it or not, it's charted in the.

Law, there are cases to be made for it.

But actually, I think the point underneath it is the important point.

We don't have to worry about it because that's not the question any longer.

The question is, what are the underlying drivers to this?

And ESG as a concept was an initial attempt to make this serious for investors, languished around for around 20 years until people really understood how significant it was.

Now we see it's not fit for purpose and it's being recreated.

So the noise was, you can't bundle this.

It was also, well, you can't measure it because the data isn't there.

And I look at the business leaders I work with and I think, oh, there's no surer telltale as to whether they're serious about this or not.

When they say the data isn't, and some of them go, well, you know, we would do it, we would care, but the data isn't.

When the data gets better, come back and talk to me.

And others go, the data isn't there.

So what we thought we'd do is try and find it this way, try and improve it that way.

Some people are trying to make common sense.

Yeah.

And start collecting the data.

You know, things like gender pay was a good example.

Things like plastic waste.

Companies didn't collect the data on plastic waste.

They now do.

That means you've got a decade worth of suboptimal data.

But it's.

You're only going to get the data by people trying and so young trying this industry.

I mean, we could look at financial services and I'm sure if we go back to the first draft of financial services protection for individuals, it was probably rubbish.

Or you go, health and safety.

I mean, people were losing arms in looms.

Yeah, we need health and safety.

I mean, you could well argue we've probably gone a bit too far, maybe 150 years later that we're Kind of like, oh, you know, you can't eat that cake because someone was near it an hour ago or whatever, you know.

But I think it's so young, isn't it?

So he was just a first stab at it.

People are struggling with it, you know, And I remember working with the palm oil company and being absolutely fascinated because of course, they're red hot question in the sustainability, deforestation, palm oil.

Right.

Yeah.

Which was supposedly a really good idea at one point or something, wasn't it?

Yes.

Well, this is another very interesting thing.

One of the things one has to watch out for is a lot of things that were a good idea, were a good idea at the time, and genuinely.

But then you turn around and you go, oh, wait a minute, we've spotted these problems.

So I remember when I first started to engage with the palm oil question, really the only way of finding out where deforestation was or what was happening was people were putting on boots and tramping through the forests.

Well, now you've got eyes in the sky everywhere and you've got little tags on every tree telling you when it's thirsty and when it needs more water and what it needs and so on.

So I think ESG is being blown up by the data.

Blown up, you're meaning destroyed?

Yes.

I mean, people are fussed about, does ESG work?

That's not the fuss.

The fuss is what are we doing and what can companies do to improve their performance on these questions, on the.

Real questions, on the real risks and.

The real risks and the real opportunities.

And investors do want to know that.

And the way they'll get it is the data on each of the individual pieces.

That's what will do the unbundling.

That's really what I mean by blown up.

It won't be bundled anymore.

You'll know down to the tree where the deforestation is.

In palm oil, you'll know the water measurements, both in operations and in watersheds.

The data that's available today is increasing literally year by year, and AI is only ramping that up further.

So I think people will, you know, people can see what's happening to fish in a way they couldn't before.

And so I think that the anxiety that ESG doesn't work because all the metrics are bundled will literally evaporate.

I mean, I agree with you completely.

But then we've got this.

I mean, you were writing about it three years ago, the ESG backlash.

Now it's because esg, the term has become weaponized like net zero here in the uk.

But there is also underlying that, you know, very powerful forces trying to undermine each aspect of it, the environment side, the social side and maybe the governance side.

And I mean, when you were writing about the ESG backlash, I think now, two, three years ago, if anything, it's only got worse because political and, and, and you go through each, I mean, we don't need to go through each argument, but you go through each argument and present evidence of why those arguments are not true or certainly counterfactuals to them.

And yet they seem to become almost the narrative.

Now, I do take the point to say underneath, companies are still doing this.

They're just not broadcasting anymore for various reasons, political reasons.

But we do have the problem where if people are reading in the right wing press, let's say, or just reading what's being put out by some companies, they will believe that it's not just the term ESG that's the problem, it's actually the policies behind it.

And that that must be a challenge for those of us who care about it.

We should do an episode on Net Zero because our dear friend Andrew Craig, you know, very clever, able people I know, and I think I won't be able to do their arguments, so I'll get lost in it.

But I think there are, as far as I understand it, some really difficult or questionable decisions we've made about approaching Net Zero.

And I know very intelligent, very conscious people, not like I'm a right wing bastard who have severe, severe issues with what Ed Miller man's been doing to the country in terms of what it's over.

So I think that's worth it.

We should put it on the list.

We can definitely do a whole thing about Dieter Helm and you know, I.

Think it's always this balance.

It's.

What is it?

You know, it's the truth, the two sides of the story.

It's like you will advocate because, because you, you know, you care deeply about these things and you know, you're, you believe in them and stuff.

But I think some cynicism is helpful because you can get a bit carried away with it all and we can get it wrong.

You know, I remember doing a tour years ago with Cambridge's leading guy and we're going around Australia.

There's loads of climate denial which is winding this guy uploads.

But, you know, he was talking about peak oil there.

He's like, we've reached peak oil oils.

You know, we're listening to peak oil for decades now.

We're really at a stage oil's going to be around forever.

And then you sort of get into the science, you know, like, and there's much worse things than burning oil that are screwing up our environment.

You know, methane, whatever.

There's all these other sort of complications to it.

And it's like we may have to slightly shift our idea that I don't think we're going to be getting rid of oil anywhere soon.

And actually, fundamentally, as we know, whether you name pharmaceuticals or getting a plane into the air, this is an energy source or a component that is so valuable to our society that possibly it's going to play a part for a very, very long time.

I think a lot of people accept that.

But, but you've got to be careful because that's the what about if?

Argument, which is whenever you get to one place you'll say, what should we do in the uk?

What about India?

What about China?

Or what should we do about oil?

Should we try and use less oil?

Well, we haven't even reached peak oil yet, which we haven't.

We haven't even probably reached peak coal.

Yeah.

The way that China and India are.

Building, it's a bit like when we used to, you, I don't know if we did this on there.

When you start with, if you try and say it's like veganism doesn't work.

If everyone gets overly passionate about veganism, it's flexitarianism.

It's like being more open minded.

So where there was a thing about, well, oil's going to run out and we have to get rid of it because it's the enemy.

It's like actually that's not exactly.

We just have to like work out ways to solve these problems because this is going to be part of our life for a long, long time.

It's a very valuable commodity.

It makes plastics.

Whether we like, like, it's like the classic.

You talk to supermarkets, you talk to people about there aren't that many good alternatives to plastic.

It is good at what it does.

So it's that balance, isn't it?

But you, like you're illustrating the problem is, is you say, oh, we've got this ESG and we've all got to get behind it.

Then people say, well, that's a.

So then they go, well, it's all, it's not either.

Exactly.

It's not.

It's a binary, it's a binary way of looking things, which is incorrect.

I mean, when one of the, you know, the ESG backlash, one of the arguments that you undermine is ESG is politically Motivated ideology?

Well, in one sense, yes it is.

But in another sense, what's the, what's wrong with that?

Yeah, what's, I mean, if you, if you honestly believe that there are environmental risks and that there's a lot we could do socially and that many companies aren't running particularly well from a governance point of view, particularly where they're situated, the way they pay taxes, that sort of thing, then you would, I mean, that is a politic.

Because you believe in politics to do something about it.

And you know, we were speaking earlier.

Are we expecting too much of our business leaders because political leaders have let us down?

Well, it's a separate thing, but we are expecting a lot of business leaders and if thinking about it in a structured way can help them make some decisions rather than saying it's just too much.

I also think that there's an angle that gets talked about less precisely because it's so difficult.

And the reality is that there's a sort of quick surface level.

What are the headlines?

What's the next move?

Level of the question.

If you took the energy transition as a way of looking at climate, and as we said earlier, climate is by no means the only subject, but it's such a dominant spike subject and also the pattern of it helps represent the other questions.

If you look at what's going on, of course there's going to be a huge political tussle about how we manage energy.

And by the way, we've got a deeply embedded installed source, so the people who run that source are going to protect that source.

None of that's surprising or news.

I think what happened with Net zero a few years ago is partly because of the IPCC and also because of other forms of public discourse.

A lot of society, including business leaders running very big businesses, recognized almost quite suddenly what the scale of the risk is and the speed of acceleration of the problem.

And so well ahead of having an answer, a lot of people, organizations, governments and businesses went we need to sort this out.

And so it's easy now to look back and go, oh, that was grandstanding or nonsense or silly them.

They shouldn't have done that because they didn't have a plan.

And, or you could look at it another way, which is how I look at it.

The world woke up to just how serious this was and people in a lot of very seriously responsible positions went, we don't know how we're going to tackle it.

But we've got to commit to starting and where we're going, we've got to commit to the ambition to change this, because it's not okay.

Now, actually, a bit of the backlash, as it's called in common parlance now, I think the most interesting bit is under the surface.

It's not actually the headlines.

So often the truth, isn't it?

But it's not the headlines.

Even the headlines being generated by.

They're unhelpful.

Almost all headlines.

Almost all.

And.

And the American administration is churning out headlines which are deliberately unhelpful so that we know that.

You come to work in the morning, let's get it down to basics, isn't it?

I've got my cup of coffee, I've got a couple of emails, got a phone john about saying, I'll give Tom a call, you know, absolutely failed on that.

And, you know.

And then you've got the Save the Planet.

That looks a bit difficult.

Yeah.

Why don't we do that after Christmas?

And by the way, I. I need to get in the car and I've got to have a shower before I leave the house.

Yeah.

So we've got an embedded structure and this is difficult.

Yes.

And the most difficult thing on your desk, I would argue, because the other stuff is better understood.

Yes.

Even though sales is difficult or building a business difficult, managing a business is difficult, but you've got something on your desk which is, you know, close to impossible.

Yes.

So I worked with a guy who leads a big franchise chain that sells a lot of fast food, and he suddenly went, oh, my goodness, I see.

We're a victim of our own success.

We've grown at this scale.

We're pumping this amount of plastic into the ocean.

We never quite meant.

But what do we do about it?

And then you realize actually there isn't an alternative to plastic.

So how do you innovate?

Do you innovate by yourself?

Do you innovate with other people?

This works, but not at scale.

Well, people tend to make targets in five years.

Yeah, a lot of people made big commitments.

That was.

Yeah, exactly.

And they weren't doing it disingenuously.

They were doing it out of an understanding of urgency.

The COP went well that year almost.

And.

Yes.

And.

And also other people were literally seeing it, literally beginning to understand it.

So there was a lot of what I and my team call recalibration, which actually wasn't and isn't companies stepping away.

They're more going, I know we said we'd reach 90% of this.

It's going to be 85% three years later, actually.

Or yes, we thought we'd do this because we were being told by the governments that we had policy that would back it.

The government's changed their policy and now the supply chain doesn't have to do this.

They're trapped, aren't they?

Because they can't say, we'll solve this by 3,000.

Yeah.

Because the public.

Well, that's not good enough.

You need to move quicker.

So what you're going to do.

But we have no idea.

It's like bad tax.

It's like difficult tax.

I have no idea how long this is going to take.

So.

And I sat with a wonderful woman yesterday evening who.

Who worked a lot in communications, in supply chains, and.

And she was doing it for a big multinational 10 years ago and going, you know, oh, I see.

If you're going to ask people to do different things about bananas in the fields the other side of the world, you've got to buy for different things.

That means you've got to incentivize people to do different.

This takes years and it's detail and difficult and involves thousands of suppliers and thousands of small companies.

So I think people spent five years working out how difficult it was in plastics.

Today.

Everybody says it's flexibles, those little soft bits of plastic that sachets and stuff.

That's the problem.

Well, there is literally no solution on the planet for it.

And so you're not going to make the targets because you thought your innovation will get you there.

And it Didn't.

Now you're not allowed to go, oh, I'm sorry, that was a bit tough.

But there's the problem.

And you're not allowed to because the assumption is that business is bad and they're all liars and they always were liars and they're never trying really.

And they're.

McDonald's is evil and whatever.

That's, you know, that's all the.

And so therefore they.

Oh, let again, they've let us down.

And.

And yet you made an interesting comment, said, you know, businesses aren't well run.

It's like, well, it's actually really hard to run a business well, even if you've got really good management, your business probably still badly run.

If you were, if you came in as outsiders, you said, we're not doing that.

You know, exactly.

You're what consultants are for.

Yeah, but the.

We need to be more forgiving and sympathetic and say, this is our target, but it's a target.

The likelihood is we won't hit it, but we're going to try our best.

And for me, the real revolution here, it's a very quiet revolution, but it's pretty serious if we take it seriously, is if you take a business like Unilever that recalibrated its targets.

This was not, you know, the big political debate.

This is them looking at the targets that they've created.

And actually what they were doing was a genuine recalibration.

We think this is going to take a few years.

We think we have to focus here more than there.

We think.

And it was interesting to see that the right wing press said, hallelujah, at last they've stopped trying to save the world.

And the NGOs said they should hang their heads in chains.

Actually, what that was was a very earnest leadership team going, what are we actually going to do?

So to be a leader in a company dealing with these issues, you have to be very clear yourself why you thought you were doing it in the first place, what you can dedicate to it by way of resource, how you're going to deliver on it.

Forgive the fact that there aren't answers.

This is an unprecedented pathway.

And tune out that everybody from every side is going to tell you that it's rubbish and nonsense.

So what you're actually seeing in the recalibration is sometimes people are getting quieter, not just because they're being pushed around by the politics, but because they're all really earnestly trying to work out, yeah,.

Let's stop sticking a press release out because you're Going to get a load of good press.

Also how you phrase it is how we live, isn't it?

Where the right wing thought that and the left wing.

What happened to the middle?

What happened.

What happened to the centers?

I signed up to the UK News.

Maybe they are either supposed to be centrist.

It ain't centuries.

I mean, sorry, it's rubbish.

Apart from anything else.

Yeah, it's not well that well written.

Gone back to the ft, which is, you know, probably the least worst option.

But I can't get my head around this left or right.

It's a bit like at the moment you've got people who are furious the Labour Party aren't more left wing.

I'm like, you should want the Labour Party to be in the center.

You should put.

You want them to be more.

You are aware there's some people who don't agree with you who are on the other side of the fence and you want to go more that direction.

Yes.

It's like what the is wrong with me?

If there were 10 of us in.

A room and we had three right.

In one corner, three right in the other corner and the three were like, I want to be even more in another corner.

You'd be like, how's this going to work?

We've got to row the boat together.

Yes.

So there to your question, Tom, that's exactly what.

When you said, well, what does it take to be a leader in these areas?

It's like really inform yourself where your impact is and where your intersection with these issues is.

Be prepared to have your own conviction as to why you're doing it your own way.

Because the outside noise is not going to help you.

It's going to pull you pillar to post, you know, so you have to go, why did we think this was important?

And you commented on this thing about laying the steps out.

Once you know that the next step and this is really important is what we call the outside in.

Take a different perspective, which is the activist.

The activist.

Think like an activist.

Think like an activist.

I think very frustrated.

Tom, when you sort of look at business generally, I mean we're talking about big business here and I think we carry on talking about business because I think it's the easier place to do.

But possibly we then have to think through what that means.

But would you find it very frustrating looking at.

Would be lovely if there were more activist leaders who could look outside in.

I think what happens with any big organization is it normally takes them quite a long time to get to the top.

And in doing so, you know, you always go into.

Well, you hopefully go into an organization saying, I'm going to be the change that I want to see in the world.

But the organizations are quite clever and they change the person.

So by the time they get to the top, it's quite unusual for that person to have that.

Funny thing is you're a cynic about business.

Do you know, I'm not.

I'm applying that to you.

But it's funny when you talk, I think, God, that's really interesting because actually you're very probably cynical of the business to do the right thing.

Big business, I think.

Big, big.

I mean, SMEs.

I've met a lot of activist mindset in SMEs, but of course they've got other constraints.

It's like, look, you know, my margins are.

Yeah, I am.

Because the margins aren't there.

And we're being asked to do this by our big clients.

We're 10 of us, and Barbara's on maternity.

You know, it's like, oh, you know, Barbara.

I think one of the things that makes it particularly interesting is that when you say when you get to the top, that is the citadel image in my mind's eye.

That is the centric, corporate centric.

And one of the things that actually I find is an unlocker for people in positions like this is what does one mean by.

Take an outside look at Mark Carney, who is obviously doing quite a lot to shake up the debate.

Exactly.

Head of Canada.

He's done a few jobs before as well.

He's done quite well and he was very clear.

If you want to look at being a leader in the disruptive world today, you don't just have to think, what am I going to do in the future?

How are you going to take a peripheral view as well?

How are you going to see perspectives that you don't normally see?

There's a lovely cadence like Obama that you kind of believe in.

And he's got a good track record.

I think he seems like a good chap, but he's got that ability to stand up as a leader.

And we're going to try and do something.

Yeah, exactly.

We may not achieve it, but God, yes.

And you feel better for trying.

No, but you believe him when he says it.

Whereas a lot of leaders, you might think, oh, know you.

He comes.

Well, interestingly, what he's talking about and what we certainly find ourselves advising all the time is listen to the people who are actually close to the issue.

So that might be, you know, I've met several people who are leaders of some of the world's most famous organizations.

They became CEO and amongst the things they did in their first few months is go and sit with some climate experts.

I'm running this big tech company, I'm running this big food company.

I don't think anybody ever really explained climate change.

If you talk to me, that is going, people who wake up in the morning really caring about these things, listen to them.

What are they caring about?

Why are they bothered?

Or it might be a group of people.

I remember sitting with a management team in the uk.

It was a big telecoms company and a question on the table had to do with zero hour contracts and they were hosting a conversation with a lot of companies who had many different kinds of workers.

And there were leaders of these businesses suddenly going, hadn't seen it go to zero hours contracts.

Makes a lot of sense to us from our point of view, from our corporate century point of view, makes a lot of sense.

You actually start to listen.

So what happened to that family?

They can't get clearance for rent because we've taken them off the credit.

They can't actually manage the phone bill for these.

And literally this is an eye opener for the people running the show up here somewhere on the parapet.

Oh, I see.

I hadn't really seen the consequence of what would be for us, very sensible action.

You've met lots of these sort of leaders, top CEOs, because the idea that people would put in their head, oh, they only care about their bonuses and shareholder value.

They don't give a crap about me.

My guess would be a lot of them are not like that at all.

Like, they're good people.

They just don't.

As you say, they're disconnected from disconnect.

They're disconnected.

Why this idea?

They're earning half a million quid a year and they don't understand the problem.

And they've never looked at them.

Nothing in their job has given them that problem to look at.

Which is why go out and find out what people are actually worried about.

Why are they worried about this?

Why are they in your face about this all the time?

There's a reason and if you understand that, you start to act towards it, you start to make different decisions.

And one of the reasons this ought to be very natural to a business leader is you look at a strategy conversation or a product launch.

Don't tell me you launch a product in a big company and you don't go, what do the customers really want?

They are all over the customer they buy from the fifth shelf, not the third shelf.

And they look, look, look, look, look.

What does the outside world want?

What are our competitors doing?

Where are the trends that are pushing things?

What makes the consumer buy or not buy at this price or on that shelf?

They look all over it, but they don't apply those kinds of techniques to these kinds of issues.

So before we crack on with the show, please consider subscribing to this wonderful channel and to our mating list@withoutbs.com you get free weekly classes from the best minds in business and free downloadable resources that strip away the jargon and give you the real world lessons.

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Thank you.

A lot of what's happening in regard to, you know, disparity and everything is to do with things like quantum easing government policy to do with the, you know, effectively, wages are becoming less and less valuable and assets are becoming more and more valuable, hence property keeps going up.

But they're quite fundamental things about inflation and printing money and, you know, various sort of.

And basically the west is getting poorer and has been relative to a lot of the rest of the world.

And so, you know, a company sort of how much they, you know, maybe that's the whole point.

Maybe the whole point is we're passing on what we would normally deem as almost government responsibilities to a company.

And I have to say that might be a better plan because I don't think the government.

What's happened, like with COVID and the government just paying 80% of wages and stuff in this country, it's like now everyone's expectation is, well, whatever problem happens, they'll print money and they'll give it to me.

Yeah, and I also think.

I think you're really onto something there.

I've seen a cycle in the time I've been working with this, which I found really, really interesting, which is I do think when you say what a business is like and what do people feel about.

Most people actually do think that businesses can be pretty effective on these kinds of questions.

And actually they think businesses should take a lead on these kinds of questions.

Why?

Because businesses are very effective at strategy.

They're very effective at implementation, which is crucial.

You want this to be changed.

Businesses know how to mobilize a system.

They know how to drive things through a supply chain.

And if they're the ones who are growing potatoes a particular way or paying their employees a particular way, they know how to change that.

So people have increasingly gone, surely you should do it.

Well, in effect, we're saying a bit like some people think the government should be run as a business is that businesses are in theory better run than.

The government, you know, and so people kind of go, don't you know how to implement stuff?

And anyway, you know how to innovate, don't you?

And you've got resources so surely you should do it.

So I think we've seen 10 or 15 years of you do it, you do it.

And of course governments have also said, well, we want, I'm taking something EVs.

We want the cars.

Electric vehicles.

Yeah, electric vehicles.

We want them to go.

And then so guess what?

The companies start investing in electric vehicles and then suddenly sort of halfway through a five year cycle, government goes actually no we're not, we're not going to.

And you can feel the companies go.

Even surprising companies go, hold on a second, you told us five years ago you wanted this.

We've invested a lot of money to be ready for this and you've just changed your mind.

It's a bit like we're trying to come up with simple things to aim for again, aren't we?

And it's all back to that press of like we need things that we could stick in a headline.

Everyone understand we all need an electric car.

And everything's always just so much more subtle than that.

It's like, well, we all need to work towards giving a crap about the whole picture and sort of picking these complicated issues and let's stop the press love it.

Oh, they said they were doing that now they're not doing that, you know,.

And it's by the day practically where actually what you're seeing and that's why when we were talking about people recalibrating a moment ago, I think what you see in the leaders is in the leading companies and by the way, therefore also the people leading it is that stuff.

Let's go back to net zero again because it's easy.

That thing we do mean to go there, we are going to go there, but it is decades and we're going to take it off in chunks and what we're going to try and do here is that.

And we're going to bump into things and we're going to tell you where we bumped into problems and we're going to change it again.

So it's as if having done kind of long term pathways, people are getting much more specific.

They're getting more specific by the sector, get more specific by the company and starting to lay out things, say hold us accountable for delivering on this bit at this time, but know that this is unchartered territory and we don't want to be putting plans out there that we can't see how we're going to deliver.

I mean, it's when leaders get together that we've got this idea of system change, isn't it?

Yes, because you're right.

I mean leaders have a lot of power, particularly the larger companies, but they do sort of need to band together to create a system change.

So if we're talking about most businesses will rely on nature and nature's in big trouble at the moment, not just from climate change, but biodiversity loss.

So if you had a number of those leaders get together, say and start organizing around supply chain, they've got more chance of doing things together than if they do it individually.

I mean, how do you give them advice about the best way of clubbing together, if you like, when they are fierce competitors and they're often scrabbling over a 1% margin?

I think it's absolutely, that's so fascinating because you, you've absolutely hit the nail on the head.

In my view, the people who are doing the most interesting stuff and really leading the way for others are all driving for system change.

If you had to say to me, what's the one thing that distinguishes the leaders?

They're driving for system change.

System change meaning how the business itself functions.

Take plastics for example.

One company can only do so much on plastics because the recycling facilities aren't there, the collection.

Also if your competitors use plastic and they're cheaper, all of those things.

Yeah, but the big companies.

So Coca Cola, I mean you've got the example.

You talk about Coca Cola, I think you read it in your book.

Well, I think it's a very interesting, it's a very interesting thing.

And all of the others, I mean you were saying Pepsi Cola could be other.

So I think the point being that if you actually want to change the game on plastics today, no one company can do it.

And that means several things.

It means things like a moment ago we were talking about flexible plastics.

There's no solution now.

There's no reason you couldn't have a pre competitive collective investment in plastics and flexible plastics because any one company couldn't invest that much.

And as you say, then maybe the competitor isn't investing in it and they're disadvantaged on the way because they're investing too much and so forth.

So there's a pre competitive gathering to have.

But almost the bigger idea is, I think what you were saying, which is we can Gather the plastic, or we can put less plastic out there.

But actually, isn't it the job of the local government to be picking up the waste?

And then what do they do?

They sort it and then how do they get rid of it?

And then you suddenly take the lid off that and you realize very few local governments are actually effectively collecting waste.

And don't you take the lid off that and.

And to some extent, it's the least of our problems.

Do you know what I mean?

It's like, you know, I remember speaking to someone about it.

It's like, well, how much can you fit in landfill?

And they were like, a lot forever.

And it's in like, you know, we think it's like, well, we can't use landfill.

That's terrible because then we'll just have piles of stuff buried and there's all these issues and it's like, well, no, there are.

But it's almost impossible to reset.

I'm not saying we shouldn't work on sustainable recycled products, but even the products that are in the market, they try and be recyclable and sustainable.

I mean, there's just so much a junk in everyone's house.

You know, does it ever really get fixed and sorted out?

Well, we're not, we're not, we're not.

You know, you see in India and places how they look after stuff and they reuse stuff and everything's reused.

Well, until we're in that state, we just got too much crap everywhere.

And I mean, I'm expressing it blandly, but it's like, is it the.

Is it really where we should focus our energy?

Well, it's a very interesting question because you've opened another door, which is if we've been talking about business and we've been talking about businesses, smaller businesses in the supply chain and governments.

The other is, in behavioral terms, we're all consumer junk.

Yes.

So if we actually want this to.

Change and Amazon, like ram that up about 5 degrees now, I can get it delivered in 12 seconds from the thought.

Exactly.

So it's not without reason that companies sometimes turn around and go, we wouldn't be doing this stuff if people weren't buying this stuff.

So that's why this is all so complicated and why.

Back to the subject of sustainable business or how do you make business more sustainable?

You have to decide where you can have an impact and what matters.

If you get to a point that we've got loads of robots and AI, you can have an amazing facility that you just pile all the rubbish into in any state.

Do you know what I mean?

And they can literally sort it all out and pick it all apart and spend hours.

Believe you said that.

Oh, really?

No, I mean, I mean, I'm laughing, but when you say, well, we can get to a state where the point is, what are the decisions to make we want leaders to make to get us to a place where.

That's the question.

And actually you do find that once you've asked that question as a leader, you start thinking maybe you should do different things.

Because we used to think, oh, there's just a lot of plastic, right?

There's a lot of plastic and it's not so great.

Well now, and it's very depressing.

But now when you look at these huge, huge spaces, I mean, the size of France, the plastic islands floating around the Pacific, you know, that's not right.

And then we start to go, do you see what it's doing to the sea and the seafood?

That's not great and by the way, we're eating it.

And then you suddenly start to realize, microplastics, microplastics are part of health.

So these things do matter.

They actually do matter.

And until people start to look at that reality, you think, oh gosh, one plastic bag more or less really doesn't make any difference.

But you look at the scale of plastic waste that wasn't on the planet 50 years ago and is now pouring into the oceans at the scale of looking at a place the size of France three times over out in the oceans and literally, as it were, killing the fish and poisoning our own health system, somebody's going to go, have we got any better next ideas?

And so that's what gears up.

But so when you say, well, surely the ideas will come.

They'll only come if we look at the problem and think, I don't think that's okay, we need to do something about it.

That's what's activist.

You look at the problem and you go, that can't be right.

You mean in all the ingenuity we've got, we're not, not thinking of a better solution to that?

Well, I guess I'm more illustrating the point that there's such amazing technologies and things coming over, you know, bacterias that eat plastic.

Yeah, but that's because somebody.

No, you're absolutely.

Your point that they're trying to seek.

This, they're trying to seek the solution.

You don't do that.

You don't find bacteria that eats plastic.

Until somebody says, we need a solution.

To plastic and someone has to pay for the research.

And somebody has to pay for the research.

Which, by the way, is a company.

Yeah, maybe it's like.

Like, maybe that's a sort of better way of putting it.

Like, there's the problem.

It's a big problem.

We need a big solution as opposed to, like, you know, I always think about the little sachets and stuff full of gunk, and I'm like, I mean, that's screwed.

Like, you know, what are you gonna do with that?

You know.

Exactly.

I'm like, get rid of sachets.

I always think we go back to that.

Things pumping out and paper.

And you just think, think.

So you get into that.

Why does everything have to be covered in plastic?

And we're also scared of germs now.

We've all got asthma.

And, you know, I mean, I was cheering my wife up because my kids have grown up with a dog.

And I looked up that, you know, the best thing about little kids growing up a dog is have much better immune systems.

And it's like.

Because she was getting so dirty and I was like, it's great for them.

So it's like.

But I think the point is, we're all living in that.

That mass of questions.

Yes.

If you are a very big company, we're lots and lots of little companies.

Nobody much says, you know, well, lovely, I hope you do something better rather than less good.

But basically, you can't move the needle.

You know, one of the big questions going on, for example, in Europe today is CSRD and all that stuff, the European regulation about sustainability.

Right.

Csrd, Corporate Social Responsibility, Social responsibility, Ancestors.

Triple D and all this stuff.

So it's all going on right now.

This is interesting because it goes to.

Where does responsibility and opportunity lie?

A little while back, as Europe pushing for regulation, because we want the plastics question solved, we want the climate question solved.

And so, perfectly reasonably, policymakers are going, okay, well, we've wanted solved.

We're going to expect people to do this, this, this and this.

And it sounded like Europe's on a roll and Europe's leading the world in this stuff.

Everybody's starting to go, this is a lot, we're asking a lot here.

This is very difficult.

It's fueling what happened with the American administration on some of these issues.

But the same is happening in Europe.

So in the last year or so, you look at this picture, under CSRD, you would have had 50,000 companies being required to do a lot more on sustainability and disclosure and action.

And Europe was going, okay, okay, how are we going to get ready for that?

Then starts to come this backlash, and the backlash is, is this all a bit too much?

Are we expecting too much?

Which is your question.

Over the year, they issued the omnibus, which is, let's look at all of this and come up with a comprehensive package that says, what's a better plan?

And if business is pushing back, they're now not going for 45 to 50,000 businesses that have to report, they're going for 5,000.

Now write that headline in yourself.

The way the media mostly covers it.

Oh, rollback, pushback.

What a disaster.

It's 10% of what it was going to be.

Europe's lost its nerve.

Blah, blah, Buy our newspaper.

Buy our newspaper.

This is total pullback.

Right.

And you go and.

Or you think to yourself, we absolutely understood you why you were doing this, and we understand that you want to lead the charge, but actually you were asking businesses with 250 people to do all this reporting and they're going, we actually can't.

So now it's only 5,000 more.

So suddenly, it used to be you could be pretty small when you have to do this, and now it's if you're a company of 450 billion euros, or whatever it is, is actually 450 million euros.

But actually the point being, they've pulled back to the big ones because it's the big ones that can do something about it.

And so you could say, well, everybody's experimenting, everybody's trying to go faster, everybody's trying really hard.

And we kind of went, oh, sorry, too far, and stepped back.

But actually that 5,000 more is really material and are the companies that could change the system in Europe.

So I almost feel it will make a difference.

Positive.

Yeah.

I mean, the 5,000 also have got big supply chains.

Exactly.

And the data that they have to collect then starts to cascade down.

So all regulation tries to do the big guys.

No point regulating small.

Regulate big.

And then it cascades down and then you do get an effect.

Oh, well, I guess that answers what I was going to say.

It's almost like you want to also go and do a test with 500 small companies.

They'll get tests and that happens through the supply chain.

But so the point being, if it's being played out at headline terms, by which I don't only mean media headlines though they have a lot to play in it.

Oh, it's all a disaster.

It's all rolled back.

And Gartner created the hype cycle concept back with the dot com boom.

You know, people get the and they.

Go, whoa, isn't it funny too?

It's like bar newspaper.

It makes you really angry.

You like being angry and you're like, no, I don't.

Well, that's social media for you.

I hate being angry.

Press the button.

But we're wired to respond to threats.

And also if this is, I sort of think, I don't know where the origin of the push me pull you phrase, but the sort of constant tug of war, constant pulling, let's go further, let's go back, let's go further, let's go back.

If you've got a lot of energy pushing things forward, it's going to try and go too far for a bit and then step back.

So the point of the hype cycle is if you looked at funds that invested in these things 10 years ago, which isn't very long ago, they were bumping along the bottom teeny little thing that was the socially responsible investors and ESG in the cupboard.

And then suddenly people began to realize how important it was.

The funds started to shoot up and then everybody went, oh, this is pretty serious.

Everybody piled in.

Just like any other hype cycle.

Lots of funds suddenly labeled themselves esg, doing nothing different.

And people went, this is all a rubbish.

So it crashes.

And also it's just not mature enough.

So people don't know enough what to do.

You know, AI does offer us many solutions actually, and one of them could be over this news because I don't know if you it like this.

I use it on topics, so give me a balanced view of what's going on in the subject.

It's really good at that.

And if you AI starts filtering our information to say, well, I've read the left, I've read the right, and then I've thought in the middle because I, I do it quite regularly on a topic when I like, I do want to be like balanced.

You know, I'm, I'm a libertarian.

But that doesn't make, well, maybe it does make me an asshole, but I don't know.

But you know, the point is, is AI interestingly, may help us with this news cycle that because I think so many, the silent majority, were all exhausted with this.

You know, I don't know whether you've tried to read the Telegraph or the Guardian, I find them Both nonsense.

I just find them both ranting about stuff.

You know, I think you're right, But I also think people like certainty.

So you might be comfortable saying, give me the left, give me the right, or give me the right and wrong and then I'll make up my own mind.

A lot of people are quite happy knowing what they know and that's all they need to know.

So if they've decided Net zero is rubbish or they decided ESG was something that was big five years ago but now is no good.

People don't like nuance.

Well, I don't think so.

People don't have time for nuance.

They don't wait for the second sentence.

They want the first sentence.

And I think that that thing about the Hype cycle that I was mentioning a moment ago, one of the encouraging things, looking at things like the CSRD and so on, is crash disillusionment.

Awful.

But in fact what you're seeing is it's building back up the other side.

So it's gone up, it's gone further down and it's building back up.

But the average company in the big company space is doing a lot more reporting.

A lot more has it built into the core of the operation.

Much more is driving it through their supply chain.

So actually there is huge progress in these areas.

The noise around it doesn't help you see that.

And you asked the question about, about system change earlier, what does one mean by the system?

One of the really encouraging things I think is I've sat with a lot of people who are kind of, oh, we have to work with our competitors on this.

This is really.

Yeah, I was about to ask when you said that earlier, isn't it illegal for companies to get there to price fix is illegal.

Well, price fix and the idea that people can come up because they do.

It in Japan a lot.

You know, Sony meets up with, you know, Yamaha and says, well, we're releasing a nice hi Fi next year.

Why don't you do your motorcycle?

But also very well established, allegedly.

Is it.

I don't know.

No, in Japan it's an excellent, well placed.

But actually in Japan, no, they do do it.

They sort of formally allowed there.

Yeah, there's like, you know, in Japan, what is the 20 massive companies high and you know, Yamaha and they basically get together and say, well, we were going to release our new motorbike and oh, we were too.

Well, why don't you do your Motorbike next year you do your stereo.

I think this is like airlines with safety.

They all talk to one another about.

Safety, but they should collaborate.

There's areas we really want them to collaborate.

Isn't that Davos too?

Is that the whole point?

It's talked about often as pre competitive collaboration.

Pre competitive, yes.

In other words, it's not what products are we putting out for what prices, but we've all got to solve safety and landings or we've all got to solve wrapping drugs that the industry needs to sort this and people come together to do it.

What hasn't happened much as yet is for example, flexible plastics.

No single company can do it.

Everybody using plastics needs that solution.

So there are plenty of ways of collaborating in a way that has nothing to do with your product and the way you approach the market.

But it is the underlying, it's a win, win, win.

It's in everyone interest to solve this problem because for the good of humanity and the good for our business.

And also the high product, you know, the high end, high value added engineering companies are very sophisticated about this.

All the science based companies are very sophisticated about, about this.

So we could actually be just doing a lot more of it in these areas.

But also what you're seeing now, which I think is really interesting, is an, an ecosystem, complicated, difficult word, but an ecosystem coming around a problem.

So if you took something like sustainable fuels in aviation, because as you said earlier, the fact is we need these fuels to get them off the, off the ground.

At the moment there's no alternative.

People are trying to, with sustainable aviation fuel and so on, whether that works or not, or whether it can go fast enough, different question.

But people are trying, right?

So how do you try?

Well, that's interesting because what you're saying is, say you're an airline company, but you have massive logistics because to bring a different kind of company, a bit different kind of fuel into your planes, that's a big logistics question.

Where's it's coming from?

How are you fueling it?

By the way, the companies like a DHL or an Amazon, who use what you might put on the plane, they need these solutions too because they've promised their customers that they'll have more sustainable practices.

Meanwhile, where are those fuels coming from?

Who's making those fuels?

Are you growing their biofuels?

Are they?

And by the way, then you've got, so who are the farmers who are growing those biofuels?

That's an ecosystem.

A range of different kinds of roles that people play in getting this thing happening, you can bring those people around the table and go, where's the biggest lever for change?

What's your role in it?

If we produce this amount, would you buy it from us?

If we got.

Got a different kind of fuel, would, would our customers sign off on using that fuel?

So they use these offtake agreements to guarantee supply, which then, yeah, they're called offtake agreements.

So basically DHL will say, we will buy this much, pay for this much sustainable aviation SAF fuel and that means gives confidence to Shell and BP to produce it.

And then Shell and BP go down the supply.

Sorry.

Yeah, go down the supply, absolutely.

And then it's dropped in.

So at Heathrow, the mandate, the EU mandate says that it's going to go up to 2% safety SAF into every plane because it can still, it can run up to 50% the existing engines.

So gradually that SAF mandate goes up, as in what airlines have to charge put in there and then there'll be a price.

But that's bringing an ecosystem around you that goes.

An airline alone can't say, solve this problem.

Yeah, Davos just seems like a private jet party, doesn't it?

If you've got a private jet pop over, you know.

But isn't.

Isn't that what Davos is supposed to be, that all the leaders, that all the business leaders of the world get together and sit and go, what are you doing about sustainable fuel?

Few times I've been there.

Have you been to Davos?

A few times.

And what I would say is there's lots of Davos.

So the Davos that have some highfalutin names, fly in on various planes, staying in very smart places overlooking White Mountains, that's bound to create a kind of circus.

And there's certainly a circus.

And by the way, if you have that number of journalism, well, journalists and heads of state, and then you've got to have all the security and it's a tiny little place, so there's so.

Well, yes, big circus.

And if you've got a private jet to drop in and Gates is coming this afternoon and somebody else is coming tomorrow morning, all that now, that's fine and I'm sure they have a marvelous time.

Lots goes on, which is one to one meetings about things like plastics.

And if you're in the field that I'm in, one of the things that's most interesting about it is five, six times a day you're sitting in a room with people going, what are we going to do actually about the sustainability of Palm Water.

And so are you working with that NGO or you work.

Can we listen to what the people on the ground.

Oh, so good stuff happens and there's absolutely masses of good stuff happening of concentrated people, which again, it's sad that.

The press just report how many private jets there are.

They're supposed to save the planet, but they just burned down a rainforest getting there.

But actually it's a very intense few days and the last couple of times I've been, Everybody is just turning around going, wow, this is encouraging.

I didn't know you had a go at doing this.

Why the hell do they do it.

Up a Swiss mountain then?

And all these private jets fly and why are they doing in London or somewhere logical that everyone just fly to and get like a normal hotel and.

And you say to everybody, no bloody pride the jets is doing, you know, come first class if you want, but just catch a bloody plane like everyone else, you know.

Yeah, there's a different story.

There's bread and circuses story.

And, and I guess if you, if, you know, the more important it gets, the more important people come, so the more important the cameras for field, you know, so all of that's going on and I, and I'm sure that there's some values in that.

And it's probably more difficult to organize a protest in the mountains as well.

Do you remember when they used to do the G7 and they used to say, oh, well, this, this is too near a center of population where everyone's going to demonstrate.

So very difficult to get into Davos.

Where could we go have a quiet chat, you know, I know.

Well, New York Climate Week is a, is, is a find, isn't it?

I mean, you know, that began as a sort of sideshow to Unger, and now, now it's hundreds, if not thousands of events and they're all bubbling up and people are rushing around New York doing all of these events, but you still have people flying in on their private planes and their black cars and so on.

So it's all going on is the point.

But there is a large and growing community of people in many, many businesses, big and small, collaborating with academics, collaborating with NGOs, working with policymakers, trying to look for solutions.

And 10 years ago or so, what I would say is companies used to say, well, we can't do it, government.

If their government wants us to do it, they should tell us and then we'll do it.

But they were kind of standoffish.

What I see now is businesses are deeply engaged, highly innovative, really looking for solutions and are turning around with something called advocacy, which really means we're really trying very hard governments.

Can you help because you said you wanted this to happen, can you help with the policies that will progress this?

Because we can't go any further, further without you.

And that's a big change.

It must be the most important thing for system change.

I mean, if you take fashion, everyone says fast fashion and we all agree we don't have any fast fashion.

You know, everything I buy or it's 10 years old and I've worn it and I buy quality.

But at the same time, we know that there's a hundred billion items being made every year of fashion, 40% of which are never worn because no one ever buys them.

And then they.

The 50% of that over 50% goes to landfill and 25 is burnt.

So 50, landfill, your favorite destination, 25% is burnt.

So if that 100 billion 40% never even gets worn, fashion we've all got, we all know we've got enough to wear.

You know, St. Francis said, if you've got two coats, you stole the second one from a poor man.

So they do need system change because it is.

But it's St. Francis's unfortunately, the, when it comes to the fashion side of things, that would need.

It needs system change.

Because Patagonia, which is known for its system, environmental and social and good governance, because it's actually sold itself, I think to its employees rather than the country well named though, wasn't it confusing itself with a country.

But their latest impact report, which is called work in progress, it finishes nothing we do is sustainable.

And the reason is because they've tried everything they can, but they can't even guarantee that where their clothes are made, the people are paid a living wage.

And that's after 50 years of trying and putting all their money, you know, as much money as they can.

And the clothes are not cheap, but they know that they're part of a system that is not sustainable and therefore what they are doing is not sustainable.

Do you know, I almost don't like the word sustainable in that way.

It's almost like part of a system that's not fair or part of a system that's not kind.

Well, it can't keep going.

That's what I mean by sustainable.

It can't keep going.

This is absolutely the heart of the question, is it not?

Which is one.

I don't really know what sustainable means.

And I find myself saying to people, I think you do actually, insofar as if I said to you, this is unsustainable.

You would get me real quick, especially.

If it was in terms of a relationship.

People do understand this is unsustainable.

So sustainable means it can keep going on.

And interestingly, I think this thing about waking up to the impact of natural systems is that that's really where the net zero thing came from and now other things around it.

Because people understood that operating to the scale we're operating and big businesses operating to the scale they're operating is so extractive in the end that it is fundamentally unsustainable.

And they know that.

That's why this is happening.

Take the example of fast fashion.

Let's just call it fashion, because fast fashion makes it sound.

We, you know, cotton will keep coming out the ground, although less of it may come.

People could keep, I'm not saying these are good things, but you could keep working people for too little money in the middle of nowhere and them living hand to mouth, you know, you know, they have cheap labor and the clothes keep turning up.

Why is that unsustainable?

Not that it should be sustainable, but why?

One of the reasons this is a very complicated question in the business world is, is time frames.

So if you're running businesses quarter by quarter, and I completely buy by the way, that they're not running them quarter by quarter, they're actually running them on a longer timeframe, but they have to keep giving updates quarter by quarter.

If they're listed.

If they're listed.

But that feeling of we're running it now, we're running it now, we're running it competitively for more sales.

Now.

The argument around sustainability in business is about long term resilience and long term sustainability.

So a lot of the world today is talking about climate as we've been talking.

In fact, the world turns.

Subjects change.

The new subject is regeneration.

Regenerative farming, regenerative systems.

Now why is that?

Because the point you make about the cotton keeps coming out of the ground is, doesn't the people who have industries that are based on growing things are absolutely noticing and measuring that soil health is getting poorer, water's getting scarcer, climate is changing enough that they can't count on the crops that they were growing.

Why do we think coffee prices and cocoa prices are going up?

Because it doesn't keep coming out of the ground.

And very large scale businesses, and there are not very many of them starting to see that the farmers in their supply chains are getting less good yields because it doesn't keep coming out of the ground.

75% Of fish is overfished means that's not sustainable.

I guess my argument, or my.

The reason I'm just.

Because I find it really interesting to think through is that we have way too much stuff coming out.

We're throwing our foot away anyway.

Yes.

I walk into the supermarket, I remember during COVID when and we had a very good chap on talking about, you know, there's a.

The.

The environment's collapsing, we won't be able to produce so much.

And I'm like, we've got quite a lot.

I mean, we've got too much.

I don't understand.

Like an ass.

But it's like if we only.

Only could produce 10% of the amount of T shirts we used to produce, that's plenty probably.

And we'd all be a bit more sustainable with our use.

But that's why then people go to what is this to do with the capital markets and the sustainability of the capital markets model?

If you're a business, you're busy going, but they buy it.

You want me to stop.

Is it my fault or their fault?

In fashion, they're locked into something where they're producing more and more at a lower and lower margin and accepting the fact that 40% is never worn and it just goes to landfill, is burnt.

But it's not a great business model.

But they go, what else are we supposed to do?

And everyone can buy fashion and then throw it away after five wears, seven wears.

Something like that.

So the businesses are locked in something that they don't particularly want to do, either from a moral point of view or probably from a financial point of view.

The planet certainly can't do it.

You're right.

In the end, maybe there won't be cotton, but then you'll wear polyester.

Which is why it feels to me that keeps coming back to so what are businesses to this question?

Because who's.

Who's to tell people to stop buying?

Is it businesses stop producing?

Do we want them to melt themselves down?

Do we want governments to tell them they can't do this?

Do we want to tell consumers they shouldn't?

Where.

Where does it lie?

So what we know is we're looking at a very messy system.

It's very hard just thinking about how do you stop?

Like where do you turn?

Some people would say use a price mechanism.

Put the prices up.

Yeah, put the price above everything.

Well, you would not buy 10t shirts if the price of 10t shirts became the price of 1t shirt.

I can lead to my very good tax point, which I really do feel.

But my VAT expert friend the other day said we can't do it.

Is that.

I just think you want to 0 Rate all of the essentials, say, right, you can have a black and white T shirt, you can have all these foods in the super.

Because it's already there, zero rating for a lot of basic items and sort of come up with a tax system that just basically says, look, if you're happy to live a reasonably conservative existence, you can have all of the food in the supermarket, you can have basic clothes, you can have all of these things.

What the nice flashy latest logos will make cost a fortune and we'll slap the crap out of you for it.

And the VAT rate is 50%.

You know, you want to go and buy a Bentley, well, we'll put 50% VAT on it and you could have a tax system there.

I mean, I met a very clever entrepreneur.

You get frustrated about this.

And he would say, my frustration, Andy, is I don't care if someone wants to private ride a private jet, they should just be taxed to pay for it.

They should just say, yeah, you can have the private jet, but it's double the price because we're going to.

To.

You've got to offset all this damage you're doing to the world, you know,.

So tax is going to save the world.

Well, I think, I think it's all about execution tax.

That's the thing.

It's.

And it's like people talk about the wealth tax at the moment and it's so unbelievably complicated, a wealth tax.

The reason it has knocked around for an idea for decades and the only time anyone's tried it, it's failed miserably is it's really, really hard to tax wealth.

And that just sort of illustrates this point that that tax can be incredibly useful, but it mustn't be driven by headlines and misinformation.

The same problems of sustainability.

That's like, oh, I'm really angry, let's go do this.

And we've got to do.

It's like, no, like you have to execute tax so cleverly and if you do it really well.

And I can give an example, EIS was a brilliant idea by dear old Ken Clark and it's changed this country in terms of encouraging people to invest in risky companies.

And it is the envy of the world and being copied in the world.

Someone got it right.

Well, it's so interesting to hear you talk about it because I'm certainly not an expert in your Area though extremely respectful of the detail involved.

But something like changing practice on soil health down your supply chain is as detailed as complicated and doesn't yield to the model.

And so people are talking at this superficial level, but actually you want your farmers to do something different.

I mean, we began talking about Walmart.

One of the things that is so impressive about what they've done on regenerative farming, back to this, take things from another point of view.

They go and get themselves educated by people who really know about pollination and bees.

And then they take it to their suppliers and go, do you see how urgent it is to do something about pollination?

And by the way, we now expect you to do something different in the way you operate.

That's what we're looking at, that's what's happening.

Execution is everything.

Execution, execution, execution.

And the detail is hard.

But if you're running an average business, you didn't know about pollination.

I saw the guys in the leadership talking to their suppliers and they were going, we've really just begun to understand the problem on pollination.

So when you say sustainable and unsustainable, it's literally the business world is waking up to, wait a minute, you roll this forward another 50 years, this is seriously not sustainable for us, for the capital markets, for the world, for people.

And then you get to do.

It's so not easy.

But it's the physical impacts of climate change and natural systems and their many forces, water and nature and so on, are easy to see, externalizing.

And what they've done in the last five years is kind of push out the social subjects.

And what I'm seeing, which I think is every time I hear it, I smile slightly because it's so obviously just a shoehorned word.

But it's all we've got at the moment, moment is people are starting to talk about social sustainability.

All they're really trying to do is bring the societal, social dimensions back into the debate about business and the social value of business.

But when you say, well, we can always go on low paying people, that's true, that is true up to a point.

But if you were to look at Europe today, and not just, I'm not.

Advocating that, but I'm trying to get into this.

But if you, well, if you think about it, you look at Europe today, what is really fragmenting our communities and creating some of the most aggressive parts of our politics is migration.

Why do we think we have migration?

Some people ask, argue climate change, some people argue wars, some people argue opportunism.

But for whatever it is, there's a bunch of people who've got nothing and they're living cheek by jowl by us who seem to have too many T shirts.

And so they're prepared to risk their lives to go, this is better than that because I am very poor.

Poor, very poor to the point of life.

And so they're making their way here.

Now, if you wind the clock backwards in business, we used to, apparently we used to chain six year olds to the machinery in the Industrial Revolution and somebody after, well, they're the only ones.

Who could get in the loom.

Exactly.

You know, but send a little kid up the chimney.

But it took a while for people to go, really, it's not a good look.

It's not, it's not great.

This is a very big network of people coming at the problem in different ways and keeps coming back to the question in a way which you put on the table as we sat down, which is, if you're a leader today, how do you lead?

And the answer is, you go.

Which are the handful of things that I could actually imagine myself and my team doing something about.

Educate yourself about them, understand what people are really concerned about.

What is your impact on those as a business and what does the impact of that going wrong on you?

And then have the conviction to come out with a strategy and keep driving it.

Know that you'll be pulled pillar from post for different people wanting different things out of you.

But why did you think this had to happen?

And it won't happen unless leaders make decisions to go, we need you to do something different.

That's why one thinks of it as an activist thing.

An activist thing is really only looking at a complex problem and going, we have to stay committed to changing this, even if we don't know how to.

And we need to mobilize other people to do the same because we have a large footprint and levers to pull and supply chains to influence.

We can do something about it.

That's all it means.

And every company I've ever worked with in this field, in the end you go, when you're trying to do this, can you look at yourself and can you look at the people you're working with on it and go, does that help?

Is that a contribution?

So we've spoken about plastic waste and obviously Coca Cola.

Its problem was that it had to measure, it just didn't have the data.

And it got the data and it made some commitments.

But rolling forward seven, eight, nine years, one of the problems is of course it found it far more difficult than it thought and it's quietly dropped a lot of those requirements and other milestones have been pushed back.

And there you've got that element where it's not just that making a target and then quietly dropping it could be considered greenwashing, but it's also, and as you know, Coca Cola and perhaps other companies, you know, every time you see an advert they're drinking out of a glass bottle where the majority of their products come in plastic.

I mean, how, how, how when you're advising these companies, do you fashion your advice to take account of the fact that they make commitments but then drop back when you spoke to them again, or if you did speak to them again, how would you, what would you say, do differently this time?

It's such a great question.

I think the combination of retaining the sense that there's a long term goal and ambition, which isn't just a rarefied, oh, why don't we set ourselves up in ambition?

What we really mean is why is this important and where are we trying to get to?

Can we be clear about that?

And then let's map out the fact that we're going to make a commitment to try and do this at this time.

Actually, I think you said it brilliantly earlier.

A lot of companies make the mistake of going, we're going to do this, we've done it.

And then they get in trouble when they didn't quite.

Or something where actually if people go, we're headed in this direction, we're working on this.

We're hoping to be able to deliver against these metrics, but we'll keep you updated because this is brand new territory.

So keeping the idea that this is forging the pathway to something, something that's not yet known, also allows you to say underlying thing that Patagonia says which is it's not sustainable, don't go, we now have sustainable milk Jerseys tables.

It's not it.

We're all working to make the whole damn thing more sustainable.

If you do it in that frame of mind, you protect yourself and it and you open the door to constantly innovating about the fact that you'll get a lot of it wrong.

We've never been down this road before.

What about leaders requirement of these big companies to have very strong.

You could again use the phrase personal brand, but isn't it, you know, the CEOs of these, CEO of Coca Cola, I have no idea who it is, but you know, it's almost their duty, not so much what the company's doing.

But to put their heart on their sleeve and be public and saying, listen, I really give a crap.

I'm not a bad person.

Here's my wife, tell them, you know, it's like.

Or here's my husband, tell him whatever you know.

To me, you're 100% right about that.

And I think that it's the biggest thing that's changed the light on that in the last year are the executive orders coming out of America because they made it more or less illegal in many instances and often risky to the point of executive orders.

What the things the president is signing that is sort of trying to abolish.

Is it making it illegal to do what kinds of.

All kinds of things?

You may not.

We will not give you government contracts if you have a DEI policy.

Wow.

Is that, is this as simple as that?

Some of the statements.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not.

It's very much as simple as that and more so.

So the companies are under threat.

And when you talk about governance, you have to run well run company.

Have they done that with es, ESG or sustainability?

Because we could go down the rabbit hole.

Die policies.

Climate and DI are the really big ones.

Wow.

But you know, they pulled up, America's pulled out of cop, they're melting down the ability of the EPA to do anything that.

What's the epa?

Environmental Protection Agency.

And that's literally last month.

But step by step, it has become risky to the point of if you're inside the company and your responsibility is governance and risk, you cannot risk not listening to this new context.

So a lot of people have had to completely reframe how they engage with these questions.

What does help is if you go back to the thing which I know is my mantra.

Why did you think you were doing this in the first place?

Do you actually think the long term sustainable profitability of your company depends on it?

In which case explain it and explain why you're doing it it and stick to your strategy to deliver on that rationale, then you're opening up lots of possibilities.

One could look like it's all vanished these days.

If you take last year or the year before, the investment in energy around the world for the first time ever, 2/3 of it was into renewable energy.

So there can be a noise up at the top here, but the transition to a different kind of energy system is underway and there are commercial opportunities in it and there's commercial risks in not recognizing.

So you listen to the insurance industry today, they are flagging the risks by the day.

They're saying, can you see the cost of doing this and the cost of inaction on these questions is becoming greater than the cost of action.

So there are plenty of commercial and business rationales to stay focused on it.

So companies are working out how to re speak, not in a trivial way, why this matters to the long term sustainable profitability of their company.

Then they can regroup and start to talk about these things again.

But the point you made, Andy, I think is incredibly powerful.

If you're a leader and you speak about the fact that this matters to you and why it matters to you and your company, you are not only leading through what you're doing, but you're setting a new norm.

This is a huge decision for a company.

And when I very first wrote with John over 10 years ago, we did a lot of interviews with people, people and the first three conversations we had, the CEO said and I literally quote, I really can't understand why my teenage kids hate me.

And you go, well, why, why do you think it is?

Well, they think we're working for a.

And you go, well, are you?

Well, no, because we are.

Now let's start to talk about it.

If you, if you feel your kids are.

Don't underestimate the power of teenage kids to change their parents.

Yeah, yeah.

So what are they challenging you about?

It goes back to listen to the.

When people are worried about how companies are behaving and your kids are challenging you at the kitchen table, can you take that on board and ask yourself the question, should you be doing something different?

And companies that are prepared to say, and leaders that are prepared to say, it really matters that we look at this, that we take this on differently from before.

In this disruptive world, to disrupt the system is to be.

To take an activist position.

And that is what leadership looks like.

Like to look at it clearly and go, why do we need to do this for the business, for the wider system?

And can I stand up and say so?

Very interesting.

I mean there's a few thoughts there.

I mean it's great example with how teenagers and young people affect in a good way.

Because sometimes I feel, I can feel a little bit like criticizing without responsibility is an easy place to sit that you know, young people can be like, well, you should be doing all these things.

It's like, well, wait till you.

In my position, you might find that that's much harder than your classic parental business.

You don't brush your teeth or really help anyone either.

But you know, but I think the thing is, and Tom may trust companies Less than me.

Like, it might be that Tom Bodie rolls his eyes a lot of the time reading about the.

And that's an unfair.

But just as an example.

But it's in like, you have less trust that this company is going to act in the good nature of the world.

I have a bit more.

Well, I'm incredibly cynical about how complicated their problem is, but I know the individuals in it a lot of the time are good people, people trying to do the right thing.

It's not like you should trust.

You should trust it as much as you trust yourself.

You should trust it as much as you're gonna do your recycling well tonight, are you gonna brush your teeth properly?

And also, I think that's such a marvelous point because not only should you trust it as much as you trust yourself, but this isn't just business.

This is any power source will run for its own interest.

That's why these debates happen.

It takes something disruptive to go, go look at it a different way, do it a different way.

We need it now to happen in a different way.

And one of the reasons, whether it's the teenagers or the kids, next generation, or whether it's the next generation of leaders, what is very exciting, you see it in things like AI, but it's not just AI.

The kinds of businesses we need for the future are very different from the kinds of businesses we needed before.

It wasn't because people were bad.

A while ago, these questions weren't on the table to answer in the same way they're on the table today.

You could probably use slavery, couldn't you, as a sort of historical context to look at something that was normalized.

It was very difficult to get rid of what we're going to do with companies.

And then suddenly you go, no, we can't do that anymore.

We really can't do that anymore.

And when I began this stuff, I honestly used to meet people over and over again where if they felt themselves to be good people and responsible, they would be talking to you about their values.

And the position would be, in some ways, but I don't think, you know, the people who run this kind, they're such nice people.

They've got such good values, you know.

And have you seen we're funding this orchestra or something?

By the way, please do fund the orchestra.

That's fantastic.

But actually, what we're looking at today is, oh, you are one of the biggest fish salespeople in the world, and 75% of the fish in the ocean are being overfished.

So we are asking a lot of leaders, which was your initial question, but not just because, oh, they're snowed with all of these things, but the times we're in are demanding different things.

We can't have organizations of that scale with these consequences and not expect the leaders of them to ask themselves questions about how they respond to that.

That would be a weird talk about governance.

That would be a weird company.

Today you'd be going, you'd be locked off in a citadel somewhere and go, did you not notice what you're doing?

And a way of looking at it is if you take it, if you take people in a business I was talking to that I'd met this fantastic woman who worked in supply chains.

Now, you might be a supply chain leader, you might be a human resources leader, you might be the sustainability director, you might be running operations, you might be heading R and D. So it's not just, oh, the CEO is the leader.