How can businesses make a positive contribution to society, beyond the short-term financial benefits for shareholders and staff?
Net Positive is a glowingly-reviewed book by former Unilever CEO Paul Polman and writer/consultant Andrew Winston which explores why businesses should seek to do good – and why that’s good for business.
They define net positive as not just minimising negative impacts such as pollution and degrading treatment of workers, but taking action to deliver meaningful benefits to society. It’s about giving real value to the society which enables your business’s existence.
A lot of that falls under the sustainability banner, but it also involves broader social aims around inclusion, equality and justice. The authors recommend using the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals as a framework to consider the full range of economic and social development, from combating climate change to reducing global inequalities.
Obviously, it’s a very different strategy to the old ideology of shareholder primacy. But as the authors note, business as usual over the past 50 years has broken the world, contributing to the climate crisis, inescapable pollution, rising inequality and a host of associated social woes.
The bulk of the book outlines practical ways that businesses can help the world achieve all this good stuff, based Polman’s achievements at Unilever. After launching the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan in 2010 and making a string of strategic acquisitions and divestments, the company consistently outperformed competitors and fended off a well-funded hostile takeover.
The bulk of the book sets out how Polman’s team achieved this. The first step is to set ambitious goals – ambitious enough to raise the eyebrows of even your staunchest supporters – and then commit to taking the measures needed to make them a reality.
Some of the most interesting sections describe how Unilever’s corporate culture changed through this process, and how the values were put into action through every part of the business. Some senior management weren’t comfortable with the new direction and left the group, but the public commitment to sustainability and social good proved to be a powerful recruitment incentive for a younger generation of talent.
The book is clearly written and engaging by management literature standards, although it does lean on some over-familiar and occasionally confused metaphors. It may be a personal peeve, but the meaning of the elephant in the room is very different to that of the elephant groped by blind men – and probably different again to the ones which the authors say “have run through the pottery store of society” but now need to be embraced.
The question is how applicable this corporate positivity is to other companies, especially if they don’t have the size and reach of a multinational consumer goods giant. Unilever also had the advantage of a history rooted in a commitment to philanthropy, dating back to when the original non-conformist Lever brothers started out in a Warrington soap works with a mission to improve public hygiene.
For many businesses, the book may better serve as inspiration rather than a direct set of lessons, although it does conclude with a 24-question Net Positive Readiness Assessment which will at least provide a good starting point for discussions. But while smaller companies lack the resources or influence of Unilever, they also face a much more modest scale of change, and should be a lot more nimble in how they tackle their challenges.
Businesses of all sizes are also increasingly having to follow the decarbonisation and development policies of the corporations at the top end of the supply chain. Unilever insists that all suppliers pay their staff a living wage, for example. And if the top tier companies in your sector are committed to cutting their own greenhouse gas emissions, they will be looking at the emissions generated up and downstream – scope 3 emissions, in the terms of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. In many manufacturing sectors, that’s already driving a lot of activity along the supply chain, and giving the most engaged and active suppliers a clear competitive advantage.
The authors do note that much of Unilever’s new culture was forged at a time of social volatility following the global financial crisis, with a growing awareness that many things needed to change for the better. The book was published in 2022, when it was maybe easier to feel confident about positive change. Now that the “build back better” rhetoric of the Covid period is all but forgotten, and science-denying and aggressively reactionary politics has returned to the US and elsewhere, it’d be easy to be discouraged.
But that means it’s more important than ever for business leaders who can see that business-as-usual isn’t working to stand by their values, and keep sustainability and social positives at the top of the agenda – for the good of their businesses, and everything else.
I’m always looking for interesting books on climate, sustainability and communications topics to read and review. Recommendations are welcome – email me at tim@othersfield.com