Paul Polman

And one of the big lessons from the book and what I see is an understanding of not how to manage our time but how to manage our energy.

So Paul Polman, my ex-boss, who was also a contributor to Superfast and was obviously for years CEO of the world's fourth-largest consumer goods company, he ...

I was talking to him about how he could stay so serene when there was so much going on, purpose to avoid purpose, all this happening.

And he said to me, "Sophie, time management is not important.

I think it does require leadership.

One of the best stories I've heard about this is Paul Polman, who was the CEO of Unilever, this enormous consumer goods company.

And when he was the first appointed CEO, he was a big believer in all the stuff you were talking about, long-term capitalism and purpose-driven capitalism.

And he really, really hates quarterly reporting.

Let's get the companies that at least are talking the talk [chuckles] and not walking the talk to, to really s- ask what does it mean to govern your organization from the beginning and how it works with others differently, and to start bringing those actors.

I'm thinking of people like Paul Polman when he was the head of Unilever, or the guy who was running Danone before he was sacked, right? There, there have been some leaders of big companies, I'm not saying they were perfect, but who definitely seemed very willing to work in a different way, both internally and with others.

And we need a coalition of those business leaders and to say, "Okay, let's not just make this a dinner table talk," and then you go back to the company and do things as it was before, 'cause everyone loves to talk about purpose and missions.

Yeah.

Even if that meant you should be doing something else, they wanted us to really understand.

And I think part of that was because Paul Polman, who was the CEO at the time, was very big on purpose for our brands as well.

That's why you see a lot of the brands under Unilever that had kind of double bottom line goals.

There was like a sustainability and social good, environmental goals, as well as the revenue goals.

But I was, again, I think I was 50.

And I'd just seen Paul Polman do his thing and everybody else.

And I was like, yep, of course, all of this is logical.

I'd just gone to MIT to do various things.

And I'd probably still be holding a lot of fossil fuel stocks, which are now tanking.

On the other hand, this other fund that was focused on ensuring that there was value for all stakeholders and how I operate would have companies like a Unilever, where Paul Polman made sustainability and circularity a key of his management style at Unilever and far exceeded the returns of his competitors.

You'd have companies in there like SodaStream that Pepsi acquired for $3.4 billion, companies like Seventh Generation and their method cleaning products, so on and so forth.

So It's been my view, and I think the data backs this up, that not only are you going to end up investing in companies that outperform the market, equally or more importantly, you're going to screen for companies that are either long-term going to lose significant value because of something that they're doing that they're not exposing the market to, something that you're trying to hide, or because they just don't recognize where the world is

Behring would prove it emphatically nine years later.

In February two thousand seventeen, he flew to London and met with Paul Polman, the CEO of Unilever, at the company's Art Deco headquarters.

Over sandwiches, Behring said that Kraft Heinz, which 3G controlled with Warren Buffett, would like to acquire Unilever for one hundred forty-three billion dollars.

It would have been the second-largest takeover in history.

Executives at food companies around the world began studying what 3G was doing.

They adopted zero-based budgeting and started talking about efficiency and accountability and ownership.

Even Paul Polman at Unilever, who publicly rejected Bering's approach with disgust, announced a three-year margin improvement plan.

The industry was 3G-ing itself.

[gentle music] So there's a moment in 2009 when Paul Polman, the brand-new CEO of Unilever, looks at the company's quarterly earnings report and decides he's done with it.

Not with the report itself, but with the whole ritual of giving Wall Street earnings guidance every single quarter.

That was a pretty radical move, even now.

But I think the bigger lesson for CEOs is that you can't just have a purpose statement on your website.

You have to live it, especially when things go wrong.

And that's maybe the ultimate takeaway from Paul Polman's time at Unilever, that purpose isn't a shield, it's a compass.

It guides you through the difficult decisions, and it builds trust with consumers, employees, and even shareholders in the long run.

It's not perfect, and it doesn't guarantee success, but it gives you a framework for leadership that's about more than just the next quarter.