The Power of Unexpected Allies

For years, Unilever skeptics had been eager to see the company stumble. Many mainstream investors who preach shareholder primacy found the sustainability thing too hippie. But Unilever’s model was working. At the time of the takeover bid, Unilever’s operating margins were not at the top of the peer pack, but higher than those of competitors Nestlé, Danone, and Mondelez. Its revenue and bottom line were growing faster as well. Unilever consistently delivered 19 percent return on invested capital. It was creating long-term, reliable shareholder value, but as a result of its business model, not as the primary goal.

Still, the premium 3G offered sent a message: current leadership is leaving value on the table in the short term. That impression would normally be enough to ensure a successful bid, but 3G and Unilever’s critics underestimated how strongly the leadership, the board, and unexpected allies cared about the company’s approach to business. Critics had accused the company of spending too much time working with communities, governments, and the United Nations, and not enough on short-term profit-maximizing. But building those alliances paid off in a major way.

NGO and union leaders were among those who lined up in support. John Sauven, the head of Greenpeace UK—an organization that had scaled the headquarter buildings of Unilever, P&G, Nestlé, and many others to protest corporate misdeeds—had grown to trust the company, and he called to see whether he could help. Ron Oswald, the general secretary of the IUF—a federation of unions representing ten million workers in the agricultural and hospitality industries—went public opposing the bid. The IUF was fearful, he says, that Unilever’s model “would be wiped from the face of the earth … Kraft Heinz was the epitome of what a company should not be: pure financial engineering.”⁴

Public pressure mounted against the deal. Letters to Unilever’s board urged it, as one investor wrote, “not to fall into the [short-term value] trap of Kraft Heinz.”⁵ Some high-profile Unilever supporters contacted Warren Buffett directly to express their displeasure. Still, Unilever execs were unsure that all the support would sway a majority of investors to side with them. The investors had strong incentives to cash in to meet their own quarterly targets (they also maximize short-term returns).

In the end, the substantial momentum opposing the takeover proved decisive. 3G lost support for the deal and had to back off. Unilever had dodged a bullet, thanks in part to the goodwill it had painstakingly earned by investing in partners and working with stakeholders on their net positive journey.

The Aftermath

The moment Kraft Heinz’s Behring walked into Unilever HQ, investors faced a test: Which model of business will you invest in? The financial outcomes of that decision were substantial. The stock prices of the two consumer giants took off in different directions. Based on total shareholder returns, over the next few years, money put into Unilever yielded four times as much as the same amount invested in Kraft Heinz. Unilever’s subsidiary, Hindustan Unilever, which trades separately on the Indian stock market, is now worth more than all of Kraft Heinz. Across Paul’s full ten-year tenure, shareholders saw returns of nearly 300 percent.⁶

When the financial crisis that was tied to the 2020 pandemic hit, the relative strength of Unilever’s model became clear. The company was in far better financial shape than 3G, with a stronger balance sheet. Unilever had the leeway to guarantee jobs for three months for both its direct and indirect employees.⁷ It also allocated €500 million to support its partners, paying some suppliers early and extending credit to customers to help them stay afloat.⁸ Meanwhile, in 2019, Kraft Heinz had to write down $15 billion and cut its dividend, and its debt was reduced to a junk rating before the global pandemic lockdown—it then had to tap an emergency line of credit.⁹

The point here is not to revel in 3G’s misfortune, but to highlight the differences in business models and outcomes. In a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, resilience is everything. Unilever’s model yielded a strong financial position and deep connections to its employees, communities, business partners, and governments. Those relationships gave it speed. Within days of the lockdowns, Unilever reinvented supply chains to source and ship medical equipment, increasing the production of hand sanitizer, for example, by fourteen thousand times.¹⁰ As billions of people changed their consumption habits overnight, Unilever moved quickly to shift employees between divisions and geographies. It assigned 300 of its 2,000 global procurement managers to focus on emergency supply chains in China. Unilever moved faster than its peers because of the trust it had built up with stakeholders over years.

Even in a grueling economic environment with so much disruption, Unilever did not sit still on its commitment to a long-term, multistakeholder business model. The company launched aggressive new goals, including carbon neutrality by 2039 and plans to label seventy thousand products with carbon footprint data.

While Unilever did not emerge from the failed takeover unchanged—the leadership team and board stepped up the company’s short-term financial delivery—they remained firmly committed to the purpose-driven strategy. A long-term focus on serving stakeholders was too ingrained, and the value too clear, to retreat.

All businesses now face a profound choice: continue pursuing the shareholder-first model that forces shortsighted decisions, hurts business, and endangers our collective well-being … or build businesses that grow and prosper over the long haul by serving the world—that is, by giving more than they take.

A Better Model: The Net Positive Business

The Unilever versus Kraft Heinz standoff was not about which company makes better, more profitable condiments. Nor was it an academic exercise to debate in business school. It was a larger battle for the soul of business.

The companies represented two models at different ends of a spectrum. One serves a handful of owners of capital and funnels the gains to them. It maximizes shareholder returns and obsesses over cutting costs to raise profits now. It takes limited responsibility for externalities—or spillover impacts on others—of the business. The other model sees the purpose of business differently and aspires to thrive, over the long term, by serving all stakeholders. It helps the world tackle the biggest challenges, such as climate change, inequality and poverty, biodiversity loss, and racial divides. When people talk about the difference between shareholder and stakeholder capitalism, they’re describing these two models.

The second model, which a small but growing number of companies pursue, is the only one fit for a thriving future and a stable society. But it needs to be pushed even further, so that businesses—through better operations, products, and services—create more value, attract more customers and partners, heal the planet, and increase the well-being of everyone they impact. Companies pursuing this model are better positioned for the future and ultimately more successful. Its time has come.

We’re living in a unique era, with an incredible opportunity to reimagine the world and make business net positive.

Business Has to Step Up

For many people in civil society and NGOs, the idea of business creating a thriving world is laughable. The skeptics say that profit-obsessed companies got us into this mess. It’s a fair point. Industry overuses resources, externalizes costs, and uses corruption and political influence to put its own needs above the common good. Critics also say that the challenges facing us are societal, and thus government must solve them. They are right, to an extent—only governments can establish rules and enforce prices, like a carbon fee, on externalities. Governments also set the right policies to enable better business practices and outcomes.

On the other side, libertarians suggest that the private sector can solve any problem. Just privatize everything and the profit motive will take care of it. Neither of these views are right. Dominic Waughray, who runs the Centre for Global Public Goods at the World Economic Forum, says, “It’s charming, but naive, to think either large companies or governments will solve it all.” We need a partnership, he says, with the innovation, speed, and execution mindset of the private sector with the convening power and reach of governments.¹⁴

Business will take a big role based solely on the reality of its oversize share of the economy: in developing countries, the private sector accounts for 60 percent of GDP, 80 percent of capital flows, and 90 percent of jobs.¹⁵ But there are two additional reasons business has to step up. First, global governance is failing us, right as problems that know no boundaries are growing. The multilateral institutions that, mainly, the United Nations created eighty years ago (after WWII) cannot manage today’s sprawling, complex problems, including climate change, cybersecurity, and pandemics.

Second, transforming the world will require shifting a ton of capital to cleaner, more just pathways. Governments face financial constraints placed by economic neoliberals who have driven tax rates down for years and defunded public works. Corruption also siphons away money from the common good. Few governments have the necessary funds to do what’s required. The UN estimates that the financing gap to achieve some of the world’s sustainable development goals is between $3 trillion and $5 trillion per year (a fraction of the spending on the global Covid-19 response of $16 trillion and growing), or about twenty times the total of all international development aid today.¹⁶ The bill sounds high until you realize that the global GDP is about $80 trillion, and banks have created a $600 trillion market in derivatives and other made-up financial instruments.¹⁷

People want business to step up. In a global survey by Edelman, three-quarters of respondents say they would like CEOs to take the lead on social change, not wait for governments to impose it. A similar percentage want their own CEO to speak out on climate, inequality, and other big issues.¹⁸ Leaders are hearing this message. Walmart’s CEO Doug McMillon has said, “It’s time for businesses to take the lead, working with government and NGOs on serious issues like workforce opportunity, racial equity, climate, and sustainable, responsible supply chains.”¹⁹ McMillon also told Time, “We simply won’t be here if we don’t take care of the very things that allow us to exist.”²⁰

Given its outsized role in society and in creating the mess we’re in, business has a fundamental responsibility to help clean it up by moving to net positive action. It’s also irrational to think business could stay on the sidelines and watch environmental systems degrade and society sink. Business cannot be a bystander in a system that gives it life.

Some Bad News: Our Planetary and Moral Emergencies

It’s fair to ask why business needs to step up—that is, what’s the burning platform? Unfortunately there are multiple emergencies, and we don’t have much time (but there’s also incredibly good news).

We humans have created an amazing and ruthless contraption, capitalism, to trade goods and efficiently match supply and demand. The machine has produced exponential economic growth and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. But it has also brought about existential crises that threaten humanity. Our current economic system has two fundamental weaknesses: it’s based on unlimited growth on a finite planet, and it benefits a small number of people, not everyone.

Humanity’s consumption of resources can’t continue at this pace, unless we find another planet. In recent years, we’ve hit Earth Overshoot Day—an estimate of when we’ve used more resources that year than the earth can regenerate—by about August 22.²¹ Every day after that, we are stealing from future generations. This system can’t continue. Economist Ken Boulding once quipped, “Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.”²²

Markets are the main tool of infinite capitalism, but as currently designed, they have fatal flaws (not logically fatal, just deadly to us). Unless we force them to, markets do not include the price of externalities, those negative impacts like pollution or reduced health, nor do they charge us for the shared natural resources we use up. Markets also leave billions of people behind and funnel money upward. They do not optimize for collective well-being, or even for our survival.

To talk about our existential crises, we’ll use “climate and inequality” as a blunt shorthand for a range of intertwined challenges that affect planetary and human health. Climate is a proxy for environmental issues, such as air and water quality, or biodiversity degradation, its own existential crisis; and inequality is a stand-in for social challenges, such as unequal access, systemic racism, gender discrimination, and lack of inclusion. Some measures of societal health have improved, like the reduction in the percentage of people in dire poverty, but most of our challenges are large and growing.

The biophysical underpinnings of our economy and society—a stable climate, a web of life we are embedded in, natural resources like clean air and water, and more—are all threatened. In less than five decades, populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, and fish have dropped a shocking 68 percent.²³ As we increase production of material goods and continue tearing down the forests of Indonesia and the Amazon (we’ve lost half the world’s rainforest), we create deadly air pollution (nearly nine million people prematurely killed every year) and accelerate climate change.²⁴ The links between biodiversity, climate, human health, societal development, and economic growth are getting clearer. We can’t have healthy people on an unhealthy planet.²⁵

As global warming advances, an estimated one to three billion people will become climate refugees when their communities become too hot or too flooded to live in.²⁶ If we don’t tackle climate, everything else is moot. Apple CEO Tim Cook has said, “The stakes are high and failure is not an option … if you have not developed [a plan on climate], you’ve failed at your job.”²⁷

At the same time, inequality has soared. The economy is failing to build a just world where wealth, power, and well-being are available to all. Racial inequities are rampant, which Covid-19 made very clear; it will long be a stain on the US soul that people of color suffered hospitalization and death rates two to four times higher than whites did.²⁸ (Indigenous people in Brazil were also twice as likely to die.²⁹) Opportunities for women still lag badly as well; at the current pace of change, it will take 257 years to close the gender pay gap.³⁰

The massive income and wealth gains of the last thirty-plus years have all gone to the top 1, or even 0.1, percent. The people living middle-income lives have gained no ground. Even before the pandemic, roughly half of the world population still earned less than $5.50 a day, 260 million kids were not getting education, 820 million people were going hungry, and 5.2 million children died every year before their fifth birthday because of mostly preventable infectious diseases.³¹ All of these are worse now. As the secretary general of the UN António Guterres put it, a tiny number of people are sailing around in “superyachts while others are clinging to drifting debris.”³²

Some ask why inequality, however morally unacceptable, is a business issue. The basic answer is that economies don’t thrive without a growing number of people having disposable income. But a harsher reality is that it destabilizes society. Mellody Hobson, co-CEO of Ariel Investments and chair of the board of Starbucks, says inequality is a threat to growth because “civil unrest is bad for business … and civil unrest is based in economic inequality.”³³

Our existential challenges carry a heavy economic toll. A RAND Corporation study estimated that if the income distribution in the United States had held steady from the mid-1970s, the bottom 90 percent would have gained $50 trillion in wealth.³⁴ The median income would have doubled from $50,000 to about $100,000 today.³⁵

On the environmental side, Swiss Re estimates that half of global GDP ($42 trillion) is at risk because it is “dependent on high-functioning biodiversity.”³⁶ For climate change, it’s easy to find estimates of loss to global GDP in the trillions of dollars. Swiss Re says we’re on track to lose nearly one-fifth of global GDP by 2050.³⁷ Those are specific and scary numbers, but an existential threat has a different, more binary calculus. What’s the “cost” to coastal cities such as Miami, Dhaka, or Manila if they become unlivable? It’s infinite. It may be easier to get your head around the costs to a particular organization. Over five years, AT&T has spent $1 billion repairing damaged equipment and infrastructure from climate-related weather extremes.³⁸ The harsh reality of rising costs is flipping the script, challenging businesses to prove why they wouldn’t pursue sustainability (see the box “From Why? to Why Not?”).

On top of profound environmental and social challenges, nationalist or populist leaders have gained great power and democracy has weakened in more than eighty countries.³⁹ The United States took a turn back toward democracy in the 2020 election, but the focus on self-interest, both personal and at the country level, remains. Nationalist governments will not readily collaborate on shared challenges.

Given our nearly broken system, it’s not surprising that, in the early months of the pandemic, only 9 percent of British citizens wanted to go back to the way things were. (This desire is a global phenomenon).⁴⁰ People want to “build back better” or institute a Green New Deal. As governments invest tens of trillions into economic stimulus, it would be a tremendous waste of lives and dollars to re-create the old, broken system. We missed an opportunity during the financial crisis in 2008 when banks were too big to fail, but people too small to matter. We should focus now on job creation, enhancing social cohesion, and accelerating the clean economy.

Changing the way business and the economy function, while continuing to produce goods and services for eight billion people, has been compared to changing the engine on a plane while it’s flying. It’s a good analogy that puts the famous innovator’s dilemma in concrete terms. Destroying the old to make way for the new without stopping is a feat of engineering. It’s also terrifying for those who lose out in the new world. It’s easy to fall toward despair, fear, or anxiety, but we’ll accomplish more coming from a place of positivity and compassion.

The choices we make now about investments in a low-carbon world, and in the well-being of people everywhere, will determine what’s possible and if humanity thrives … or even survives. The stakes could not be higher for business or the global economy, which is, as the economist Herman Daly once noted, “a wholly owned subsidiary of the planet.” Early sustainability pioneer Ray Anderson from Interface used to ask pointedly, “What’s the case for doing business on a dead planet?” Similarly, there’s no business case for enduring poverty and, in fact, vast business opportunity in lifting billions up.

In short, businesses cannot thrive in societies that fail.

The Great News: Tailwinds and Accelerators

If we only look at the challenges and system failings, it can be daunting. But a global effort to build a thriving world is worth it—it’s the greatest business opportunity ever. The path to net positive is challenging, but great things are happening that are increasing buy-in, proving the value of sustainability, and making the shift easier.

Net positive pays off for business.  Businesses that pursue a long-term, multistakeholder model create value in many ways. Not every step is automatically win-win, but over time the leaders save money, reduce risk, innovate more, build valuable corporate reputations and brands, attract and retain talent, and have higher employee engagement. Gallup’s famous workplace studies show that engaged organizations see 17 percent more productivity, a 20 percent increase in sales, and 21 percent higher profitability.⁴⁴ Businesses that are more sustainable often find the holy grail of increasing revenues, as more consumers look for products that are good for them and the planet.

Unilever has reaped this reward. Its purpose-driven brands—the ones that connect to larger societal issues, such as sanitation and children’s health, and work to help solve them—have grown 69 percent faster than the rest of the business and with higher margins.⁴⁵ By serving the needs of the countries it operates in, the company has built deep trust and gained unique access to new markets and growth opportunities. Unilever has also thrived in part by acquiring fast-growing, purpose-led businesses that would only sell to Unilever because of its track record.

The numbers back all of this up. An NYU meta-analysis of thousands of studies found a strong correlation between companies adopting sustainability practices and improved financial performance, especially over longer time periods.⁴⁶ JUST Capital ranks more than nine hundred public, US-based companies on their environmental and social performance and created a list of the highest ranking, the JUST 100. The leaders pay their workers 18 percent more, use 123 percent more green energy, and are six times more likely to have set diversity targets … and produce a 7.2 percent higher return on equity.⁴⁷

Net positive pays off for investors.  Doing right by stakeholders is good for shareholders. After years of guesswork, solid data now shows that companies focusing on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance get equal or higher returns in the market. In 2020, 81 percent of sustainable indexes outperformed their benchmarks, and over a four-year period, portfolios weighted toward higher ESG scores “outperformed their benchmarks by between 81 and 243 basis points.”⁴⁸ And yet, investors still ask nervously whether ESG will outperform. That’s an odd question—no asset class in history has had to prove that it always does better.

The money is moving fast in one direction. Global assets in sustainable investing have topped $40 trillion (and growing).⁴⁹ Moody’s reports that the total sustainable bond market reached $491 billion in 2020.⁵⁰ With this much money in play, investors are pressing companies to explain their climate strategies and their approach to ESG issues. Shareholder activism on climate change is getting teeth. In 2021, ExxonMobil shareholders elected two board members (that management did not recommend) who were nominated by a hedge fund focused on long-term, stakeholder value.

No investor is asking tougher questions than Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the largest asset owner in the world. The man running a $9 trillion fund has a megaphone. For years, Fink’s annual letters to CEOs and his clients have focused extensively on ESG. He has increased demands on company leadership to provide data on carbon footprint and climate risk. In 2021, Fink told CEOs that “there is no company whose business model won’t be profoundly affected by the transition to a net zero economy … companies that are not quickly preparing themselves will see their businesses and valuations suffer.”⁵¹ The promise of higher valuations is a big tailwind for pursuing net positive.

Finance has begun to rewire itself to reward companies which put a premium on long-term value creation, but the sector is conservative about change. A net positive bank would move away from the derivatives madness and point capital at the real financial market. We need to finance an economy that operates in service of human values and life (not the other way around), delivering real goods and services to real people.

Business leaders are rethinking the purpose of business.  In August 2019, the Business Roundtable (BRT), a group of more than 180 CEOs from America’s largest companies, issued a statement on the purpose of business. We serve multiple stakeholders, not just shareholders, they said. A few months later, the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Davos Manifesto declared that “A company serves society … supports communities … pays its fair share of taxes … acts as a steward of the environment … consciously protects our biosphere and champions a circular, shared and regenerative economy.” These are just statements, and the aftermath of the BRT pronouncement has been underwhelming—most of these companies haven’t changed much. But rhetoric matters. These groups are saying clearly that business cannot solely maximize shareholder return anymore. A new consensus has arisen: just 7 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs believe their companies should “mainly focus on making profits and not be distracted by social goals.”⁵²

We have powerful frameworks to guide us.  In 2015, 193 countries agreed to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also called the Global Goals. The SDGs are broken into seventeen interrelated focus areas and 169 individual targets, providing a road map and scorecard for what a thriving world could look like by 2030: no hunger, clean water, education for all, gender equality, reduced inequality and opportunity for decent work, clean energy, climate action, and more. No company or country prioritizes all the goals equally, but they provide a viable model for long-term growth, as long as businesses move towards them, at times, in partnership. The SDGs “give us a common language—it’s a Rosetta stone,” says Kathleen McLaughlin, EVP and chief sustainability officer of Walmart.⁵³

Along with this blueprint, we now have brilliant ideas to provide a North Star. Frameworks like the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s work on planetary boundaries (fifteen natural systems, such as climate and freshwater, with nine estimated to be nearing tipping points), economist Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, and Bob Willard’s Future Fit all offer important perspectives. They deserve deeper exploration, and we recommend everyone internalize them. We won’t do it justice, but these boil down to a big idea: the world is finite, with biophysical limits that we can’t exceed without threatening our survival, and we have human and moral minimum standards that we don’t want to live below—that is, providing a level of sufficiency for everyone to have enough to thrive. In between those minimum and maximum limits is what Raworth calls the “safe and socially just space in which humanity can thrive.”⁵⁴ A net positive company operates in that space and helps others get there as well.

It pays off for the world.  Achieving the Global Goals would create a world that is socially fair, environmentally secure, economically prosperous, globally inclusive, and more predictable and resilient. The Better Business, Better World report calculated that hitting the targets will open up at least $12 trillion in business opportunity and create 380 million jobs by 2030 (in just four sectors of the economy).⁵⁵ Beyond the SDGs, opportunities are everywhere. By spending 1 to 1.5 percent of GDP to get to net zero emissions, we can avoid $160 trillion of climate-related costs over thirty years.⁵⁶ An analysis of how the world handles resources, the Circularity Gap report, estimates that the global economy only recycles 8.6 percent of the material that flows through it.⁵⁷ That’s an enormous failing, but it leaves trillions of dollars of value to extract through circular business models.

The cost of inaction is higher than action.  The World Economic Forum’s Nature Risk Rising report has identified more than half of global GDP as moderately or highly dependent on nature. All of the bad news items, including the record 22 weather disasters costing more than $1 billion each in the United States in 2020, will easily cost many trillions of dollars in the coming years.⁵⁸ Our whole economy is at risk. Combine that with the financial tailwinds and you get one inescapable, head-slapping conclusion: It’s going to cost us orders of magnitude more if we do nothing than if we take action on our biggest challenges. Better still, much of the action is not expense, but investment in lower-cost, healthier businesses and economies.

Technology is (mostly) on our side.   In 2014, the International Energy Agency forecasted that solar would hit $0.05 per kilowatt-hour by 2050—a mark achieved thirty years faster, in 2020.⁵⁹ Over the last ten years, the costs of solar and wind power have plummeted 90 and 70 percent, respectively.⁶⁰ Renewables are now, on average, cheaper to build than all other forms of electricity.⁶¹ Battery prices have also dropped as fast, accelerating the electric vehicle market. Most major automakers have committed to phase out gas and diesel and go all-electric (for example, GM by 2035 and Honda by 2022 in the EU market).⁶² Daimler stopped all R&D in internal combustion engines.⁶³ Moving quickly to renewable energy and electric fleets is now a no-brainer. As the US national climate adviser Gina McCarthy said, “The question won’t be whether the private sector is going to buy into it; the private sector is going to drive it.”⁶⁴

It’s not just clean technology. Revolutions in big data processing, GPS modeling, drone-based aerial photography, robotics, computer vision, AI, and many more techs are powering what WEF calls “the fourth industrial revolution,” an exponential change in how technology affects the world. These new tools can help solve our big problems. In our food system, “precision agriculture” is greatly reducing waste as seeds, water, fertilizer, and pesticides are placed exactly where they’re needed and in precisely the right quantities. A modern Deere tractor is a rolling AI-driven computer. Companies such as Schneider Electric offer advanced building management systems that can slash energy waste. We have the technologies and know-how to build smarter homes, grids, cities, and food and transportation systems. And access to technology, specifically mobile, is also proving to reduce inequality and extreme poverty.

A big caveat here is technology’s dark side: the information bubbles that social media creates are fomenting hate, misinformation, and the opposite of the solidarity we need to tackle shared challenges. These companies should take a broader view of their impacts on the world and take responsibility for them—that ownership is a core attribute of net positive businesses.

Young people want to see change.  Young millennials and Gen Zers care much more about sustainability and climate change than their elders, and also believe strongly that business needs to do something. Nine in ten Gen Zers think companies have an obligation to solve environmental and social problems.⁶⁵ The McKinsey True Gen report concluded that “In a transparent world, younger consumers don’t distinguish between the ethics of a brand … and its network of partners and suppliers … actions must match its ideals, and those ideals must permeate the entire stakeholder system.”⁶⁶ Younger generations choose who they work for and buy from differently. They also act on their beliefs—look no further than global climate campaigner and teenager Greta Thunberg. Companies soon will find they have more than one Greta inside the organization.

So, the pressure is on, and that’s a good thing. We have to fight through some persistent myths and preconceived notions, such as: renewables are too expensive, diversity and inclusion targets are impossible because there are not enough qualified people of color, or we can’t operate with no waste. All wrong. Humanity has many of the technologies and solutions it needs, it is filled with problem-solvers and entrepreneurs to figure out the rest, and there’s a lot of capital out there. What holds us back then, if anything, is a lack of willpower, moral leadership, and imagination—things that net positive companies embrace.

We have a choice … between less prosperity, slower growth, widening inequality, and rigid borders … or a burst of innovation and productivity, inclusive growth, more resilient industries, and the emergence of a reconnected world. The courageous crowd of leaders moving in the right direction is growing. Business is ready to tackle the hardest issues, and the wind is at our back.

We can do this.

A Map of Net Positive, the Book

Because we can offer an insider perspective, this book draws heavily on the experience of Unilever, a company that’s traveled a path toward net positive for years. But others are leading, too, and we’ll learn from some of those stories as well.

This book is not a detailed how-to on achieving operational goals, such as slashing carbon emissions. Instead, our purpose is to help organizations transform themselves so they achieve those big goals as a natural course of doing business. We hope to provide core principles and strategies for building a new kind of organization that serves the world. While much will need to happen at once, we recommend a rough order of battle, which the book follows.

Here’s a short summary of each chapter.

In chapter 1, You Break the World, You Own It (Core Principles of a Net Positive Company), we lay out five foundations of a new, long-term, multistakeholder model. A core story in this chapter is how Unilever pushed back on investors to stop quarterly reporting, unleashing the organization to think longer-term. It’s an important example that will pop up multiple times.

We then move into the strategies, starting with three areas that make up an inner core of change and action. The first step is looking inward to your own purpose (and we mean you). Chapter 2, How Much Do You Care? (Becoming a Courageous, Net Positive Leader), starts with the traits leaders need to run a net positive business—a mix of purpose, humanity, humility, positivity, inspiration, collaboration, and courage above all. A purpose-driven leader understands that they are here for something bigger than themselves. They serve today’s world and future generations.

In chapter 3, Unlock the Company’s Soul (Discovering Organizational and Employee Purpose and Passion), we move from self to organization. Using Unilever’s history as a jumping off point, we explore the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP), the core tool of the company’s decade of success. But, as we’ll discuss, an organization can only find its soul if it has its own house in order—that is, the business is running well—and the leadership is sending the right signals to drive net positive behavior. It’s also critical for employees to find their purpose and connect it to the organization’s mission.

In chapter 4, Blow Up Boundaries (Thinking Big and Setting Aggressive, Net Positive Goals), we start to unpack a fundamental and important tension. The transformation starts inside, with self and organization, yet an outside-in perspective will guide us. The world’s biggest challenges and thresholds inform the goals the company sets; a company pursues net zero emissions in large part because of the planet-wide emergency of climate change. This chapter provides guidance on goal-setting, with “science-based” targets—commitments to move at the pace facts and science demand—as a critical bare minimum. The bigger goals meet the world’s needs, but also remove mental constraints from the organization and help it prepare for larger, systemic change.

Chapter 5, Be an Open Book (Building Trust and Transparency), describes the importance of opening up as a bridge between the inner work and the necessary partnerships with external stakeholders. With trust in decline, but transparency on the rise, it’s a tricky time for business. Putting the needs of others ahead of yours and serving all stakeholders, including those who normally serve you (suppliers), builds deep trust. Those who earn that trust experience unique access to markets and partnerships.

The outer core work comes with three fundamental strategies. At the start of chapter 6, 1+1=11 (Creating Partnerships with Synergies and Multiplier Effects), we offer a model for thinking about partnerships in two large categories. First up, collaborations that work on issues that your sector may share, both risks and opportunities, or things that you and key suppliers may productively manage together. These partnerships can be very fruitful, but don’t change the wider system.

Chapter 7, It Takes Three to Tango (Systems-Level Reset and Net Positive Advocacy), moves on to partnerships that do work to change full systems. These require the three prongs of society—business, government, and civil society—to work together in new ways, change the rules of the game, and build policy frameworks that are more just and help us live within planetary boundaries. It’s the end of traditional, self-serving lobbying, and the exploration of net positive advocacy that moves a sector or region down a better path. The work at this scale also aims to help entire economies and countries develop so that business and people thrive.

The last pillar of the outer core brings up issues that companies work hard to evade. Chapter 8, Embrace the Elephants (Managing Issues Nobody Wants to Talk About … but We Can’t Avoid), dives into tough topics like excessive executive compensation, tax avoidance, corruption, human rights, money in politics, and diversity and inclusion. These issues are contributing to our largest problems, in particular inequality and power imbalances. A company cannot be truly net positive if it doesn’t address these thorny issues.

Finally, we end the strategies and action ideas with chapter 9, Culture Is the Glue (Putting Values into Action, Deep in the Organization and Brands). Culture runs through all the strategies, but we see it as a culmination of the work. Embedding culture into the business at the brand level, like Unilever’s well-known work with Lifebuoy on hand washing and Dove on self-esteem, is next-level work. We look also at how a strong net positive culture comes through diversity and inclusion, changing reward systems, bringing new entrepreneurial businesses and leaders into the company, and challenging cultural norms of intolerance.

We end the book with chapter 10, Net Positive World (Looking Around the Corner to Greater Challenges and Opportunities). We explore what is coming at business in the near future and making the net positive agenda bigger, tougher, and more rewarding. Companies will need to help rethink capitalism, economic metrics like GDP, the nature of well-being, the purpose of a consumption-based economy, and the role of business in defending pillars of society like democracy and freedom. This is a call to action to join all of those who want to build a thriving world together.

We live at a critical time in human history, with ever-rising expectations on all businesses and humans to be better. As former secretary general of the UN Ban Ki-moon has said, “Ours can be the first generation to end poverty—and the last generation to address climate change before it is too late.”⁶⁷ Time is very short, but the opportunities are vast.

With the right leadership, working together on our hardest issues, we can heal the world. We can be net positive.

So, let’s get going.