Ranjay Gulati:
In the first season of this Deep Purpose Podcast, I profiled Alan Jope. At the time, Jope was the head of Unilever, a British-based consumer products giant. Our Conversation was all about Unilever's exceptional commitment to equity and sustainability goals. This time I'm sitting down with the man who first set Unilever on that path, Paul Polman. Paul was Unilever's CEO from 2009 to 2019. In that time, he demonstrated that a responsible business model could deliver exceptional performance. Shareholder returns climbed by almost 300% as Unilever consistently ranked at the top of the charts for sustainability and as a great place to work. Since then, Paul Polman has continued to be a global leader in combating climate change, promoting corporate responsibility and fighting social inequality. Paul also co-wrote a book titled Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take.

Paul, I want to dive right in your book, Net Positive, which I loved reading. You emphasize that leaders need to be courageous above all else, courage is a currency that you really draw attention to. How would you define courage and why do you see it as such a critical leadership skill today?

Paul Polman:
Yeah, so we like the word courage because it comes from the Latin word "cor" or the French word "core," which is the heart. So I always believed myself that anything that first goes through the heart before it gets to the brain, most likely will stick there. But anything that goes straight into the brain, it probably goes out again. So to speak one's mind by telling one's heart is quite an important thing I've always believed. So that's for me the word courage is being able to deal with fear, to make the difficult, sometimes unpleasant decisions to go outside of your comfort zone are all signs of courage if you want to. In our book, we like courageous leaders because courageous leaders make courageous companies at the end of the day. But some signs that we describe in the book as courageous leaders are leaders that have the courage to take responsibility for their total impact in the world.

I meet so many CEOs that outsource their value chain and also outsource their responsibilities. They don't care about what happens with human rights or livable wages, child or sex abuse or slave trade in their value chains because they say, that's not my business. I'm only buying the shirts or I'm only buying these products. So that takes courage to take responsibility of your total impact. It also increasingly takes courage to set targets in line with what science demands. There's a real movement to deny science or undermined truths, which is really an important thing because otherwise it weakens democracy and you've seen it in your country as well. And yet so many leaders set targets that they just can get away with, but not targets that they actually know in essence are needed. Take on climate change, how many are happy to say something about 2050 but refuse to do something between now and 2030? So that takes courage.

The issues that business now faces are of such magnitude that nobody can really solve them by themselves anymore. It requires the broader systems changes that needs partnerships, sometimes uncomfortable alliances. You have to deal with the truths or perspectives that you're not familiar with. That takes courage. And then last but not least, ultimately, we will not solve these issues in the world if we don't get governments behind us and have the right frameworks to operate in. And frankly, you look in the US once more, very few CEOs are willing to go now to Washington. I understand that. But we cannot solve it unless we have people work together across all different parts of society. So these are all symptoms. Why that word courage is so important that we address in our book in terms of what are the type of leaders that we need.

Ranjay Gulati:
Because we learn so much from the example of others, I always like to ask successful leaders whom they look up to as role models. They'll often talk about their parents or grandparents. Some are inspired by great bosses they've worked for. Others find inspiration in leaders outside the business world. Paul Polman answered that question with two examples. The first is Ukrainian human rights activists. Oleksandra Matviichuk, leader of Ukraine's Center for Civil Liberties, which won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. Polman had seen her recently at Amherst College in Massachusetts where they were both honored during commencement ceremonies.

Paul Polman:
I actually had met her in Oslo when she got the Noble Peace Prize and they're documenting all the cases of human rights abuse in the terrible war that is going on right now in Ukraine. She's lost a lot of her friends investigating these crimes and falling victim themselves. She's dealt with horrendous things that they had to deal with to document the cases. She's the one that brought Putin to the International Court of Justice in the Hague International Criminal Court. So that to me was a person in her 30s I imagine that just goes way beyond the call of duties. He could have had a successful law career and make a lot of money and she became a human rights lawyer and doing this. So the week before, I was in Kenya for one of our foundations that deals with the blind and deaf-blind in the schools in Africa, and I was at one of the schools for teachers at a pittance of a salary to spend day and night 24 hours with people that are blind and deaf-blind to ensure that they improve their lives. That's courage.

The doctors that go to treat Ebola patients or COVID patients, when you don't have a cure yet. That takes courage. So to me, it goes beyond just a simple act of bravery. To me it goes really nearly putting your own lives at risk for others. Ultimately, it's about putting the interest of others truly ahead of your own and knowing that, by doing so, you're actually better off yourselves as well. These people have achieved a higher sense of fulfillment or happiness than I've seen in many other people. So that gives me an enormous energy and I can give you a million other examples obviously.

Ranjay Gulati:
It's interesting. I've also been thinking about courage a lot, Paul, and I think unfortunately in the world, courage is the exception rather than the norm. In fact, I was always looking for the opposite word for courage. It really is cowardice. And most of the time we see people behaving in cowardly manner. Why is that? Why is courage the exception more than the norm in the world we live in today?

Paul Polman:
Well, I don't know if it's the exception because we always try to look at these people that are in the public limelight and when they do something that we don't like, we say they're not courageous. But really society is made up of 8 billion people, and you go to Africa and see all these women fighting for what is right or bringing their families to a higher level of dignity and all that stuff. So I think you'll find a lot of people with courage, but we just don't seem to recognize them. What is broadly happening is that many people's behaviors, I believe, are defined by the boundaries in which they operate. In essence, there are not many CEOs who want more unemployment or more climate change or more people going to bed hungry, but collectively they certainly act that way, and it's because of the boundaries that are put upon them. The market, short-termism, not putting a price on a natural or human or social capital. So it makes people behave in certain ways, often not consciously, but unconsciously. That's why it's so important that the real leaders work on these boundaries.

Too many CEOs right now stay silent on things, especially now with these political attacks on the ESG for example. They stay silent on things when they know that they are in a position to do something about it, and they know that society expects them to speak up. And then if you stay silent, it's like witnessing a crime and not saying anything, you become complicit to the crime itself. You actually become without perhaps realizing it, part of that problem. Look at how values were attacked in some forms of governance that yet in the US when a lot of the CEOs say after January 6th, I'm not going to finance this or that politician anymore, but six months later they're happily donating again to the same parties. It's an act of cowardness.

When people stayed silent, then these norms become accepted. And given the fact that we are at a very delicate situation in society where I think business has an incredibly responsible role to play. It is important that we help the CEOs give that courage. And one of the ways to do that is to focus what's moral, the boundaries that drive these behaviors as I talked.

Ranjay Gulati:
I asked Paul to dig a bit deeper into the question of courage. Courageous leaders in business or in society feel fear, just like the rest of us. It's what they do in the face of fear that makes the difference. Paul says he's felt fear plenty of times and that living by a set of clear guiding principles helps overcome fear.

Paul Polman:
Because when you have a fear, your brain goes into a certain overdrive and we become a little bit of reptile behavior and I've certainly been subject to that myself as well. But when you have a little bit more courage, often driven by a stronger sense of purpose, you're able to put it in perspective and deal with that. When I'm faced with a situation that I feel uncomfortable in or when you get moments when you feel sorry for yourself, and many of these instances that we all go through as human beings, they're not bad. They help you become more resilient. But I always put it in perspective. Unilever is a small part of a total wealth. So the wealth doesn't turn around Unilever, the wealth certainly doesn't turn around me. If you see what small moment we are on this wonderful planet Earth in its long existence. But I also think about issues that are much bigger than what I have to deal with.

I'm very fortunate to work with my wife on this foundation in Africa that has blind and deaf blind children in school in East Africa, we have about 25,000 children there. But anytime I go there, it's an act of selfishness because I listen to them and how they have their aspirations, how they deal with their challenges, and how they have this incredible fuel on what they want to be in life. And each time I find myself in a difficult situation, I think about them and I make it very clear to myself that I have nothing to complain about and that sort of keeps me humble and makes me deal with things.

Ranjay Gulati:
Here's a bit more background on Paul Polman. He was born in the Netherlands, one of six children. His mom was a school teacher. His dad worked in a tire factory. Paul earned graduate degrees in economics and business studies from the University of Cincinnati. He worked his way up the ranks at the consumer products powerhouse Proctor and Gamble, then took on senior positions at Nestle, winding up as chief financial officer. Then in 2009, he was hired to lead Unilever. He chartered a bold new path for a company that started 140 years earlier selling soap. But Paul Polman says a C-suite office was never really his objective. And before long, he had to fight off a hostile takeover bid from Kraft Heinz.

Paul Polman:
When I got the job of CFO and Nestle, I had never been a CEO. When I got the job in Unilever to be a CEO was a surprise to me as well, but I had no ambitions to be a CEO, nor had I ever been a CEO. And then coming in from the outside, these are moments that are moments of fear in a sense that you wonder, have I done the right thing? Is it worth the price you might be paying as a result of this, the trade-offs you have to make? During the time in Unilever, you get a lot of skeptics and cynics when you start a new path that nobody has walked, you get the fasted interest that speaks out against you. Especially in my time when we didn't have much proof that what we were trying to do to make this more sustainable or equitable business model that really was also good for the shareholders. I had a certain amount of pressure to deal with.

But I felt it was worth doing because we were in a world not to make things worse, but to make things better. So I tried to put that into action in our business model and that determination helped me to overcome some of these things. The attack of Kraft Heinz, when you have two conflicting quite opposite business models, one to enrich a few billionaires, the other one to serve the billions of people, both legal models, but completely based on a different value set. And you get a lot of pressure from the short-term part of the market that wants to capture that premium that one of these hostile takeover bits will offer them versus what is the long-term value creation.

Ranjay Gulati:
What did you have to do that day? Can you tell me a little bit more about that moment? That was a very intense moment, people say, for the soul of the company, how did you tackle that moment?

Paul Polman:
If you run a company, you always have to have scenarios in your drawers of the what ifs and be ready for that. And I was very fortunate to, at that time I was CEO for eight years. We had already then a very good shareholder return that has never been an issue in those 10 years that I ran Unilever, and we were outgrowing our competitive set as well. So it wasn't a performance issue. I had a board that was very much aligned with our journey. We had a network of multi-stakeholders that were really behind the company. At this moment, that is a little bit of a tense moment, I discovered one thing that if you stand with the world, the world stands with you. And you get an enormous amount of support from people around you that might unlock a little bit more courage in you than you otherwise would've had.

But it was certainly a moment of tenseness because Unilever's been there since the end of the 19th century, and I certainly didn't want to be the CEO that would've lost the company to a business model that is totally opposed to its values. And frankly, the proposal itself by leveraging up a company seven times, basically they were buying us with our own money if you want to. So we were not an over-leverage company. We thank God. Look, what happens now is the interest rates going up, with COVID that you had to finance your value chain. Unilever was able to do that and be resilient. Kraft Heinz has basically collapsed as a company. Their share price went down 65%. They've had three CEOs. They've had court cases for misstating their books. Warren Buffet has written out over 20 billion and said, it's the worst investment I made. So it's not a way to build value.

We are in the business of building value, of touching people, of reaching the bottom of the pyramid. That's really what we are doing in a very humble way, selling soup and soap. And we're able to do that better than others, that we get rewarded for that, including our shareholders. And that was really the conflict. Not easy because a lot of the market is driven by greed. You get the speculators to come in and the short-term ones, you even get the long-term shareholders selling apart because lots of them get rewarded on quarterly performance and before you know it, these people are manipulating your shares. A consequence of a market where you have a lot of index funds not actively participating anymore. So you don't want to get to that point. So we avoided that and we had to make some compromises.

At that time also, I had to compromise a little bit my principles. I always say to people, you can be principally right, but practically wrong. So here we had to be practical. We had to give a little bit of share buy back, which I wasn't normally willing to do an extra share dividend. So we pampered the shareholders so that we wouldn't lose them in that transition. So it was a little bit of compromise at the end, but not in the essence of what we were doing, not in the essence of our multi-stakeholder model, not violating our purpose, putting sustainability at the core of our operations. So we preserve the fabric and we preserve the company by doing so.

Ranjay Gulati:
Paul, you have now mentioned the word purpose a couple of times. That purpose really actually activates courage that when you are living your purpose, you are more courageous. Since this is a word I've also been thinking quite a lot about, could you tell me more about purpose and why is it important? What is purpose? And tell us about how you then did that at Unilever and even after. And we can talk about the company's purpose and then I want to ask you about your purpose.

Paul Polman:
Well, they're actually not far disaligned. I've been very fortunate, Ranjay, that I've been able to work for great institutions. But one of the reasons I worked for them was because I felt that the values of these institutions were aligned with my own values so that I could be myself. And I think that's always very important than making an employment choice so that you're able to develop yourself to the fullest potential. There are very few people that go to work being engaged. The numbers differ from between 15 and 25%, which means 75% of all what we give basically one third to half of our lives is done without really unlocking that full potential in every individual. It's probably the biggest human tragedy that we have invented on this earth, and I was always very worried about that.

It starts with a notion that you cannot be a purposeful company if you're not purposeful yourself or you cannot be a sustainable company if you're not sustainable yourself. I would argue you cannot love other people if you don't love yourself. It really starts with that. Rumi, the poet from the 13th century in realm that you well know. He said, "Yesterday, I was clever, I tried to change the world today. I'm wise, I'm trying to change myself." That's the journey that everybody has to go through. I've always seen my purposes as representing the ones that are underserved, dignity and respect, equity, compassion are very important values I grew up with. I think business should enhance those, not destroy those. So I've always said for me also the reason I joined Unilever is to really serve the underserved.

Ranjay Gulati:
Under Paul Polman's leadership, Unilever forged a new company-wide call to take action: to make sustainable living commonplace. Unilever reached back to its Victorian era beginnings to create a map for the future. In the 1880s, company founder William Lever was on a quest to make personal hygiene commonplace in Victorian Britain. At the time, squalor and disease threatened the wellbeing of working people. Lever started selling a new kind of soap, which eventually led to many other products that are now familiar names like Dove Beauty Bar and Axe Body Spray. Paul Polman recognized that William Lever's mission was a 19th century version of sustainability.

Paul Polman:
What we saw was, once you have that strong alignment for us, making sustainable living commonplace, it really was built on going back to the core of the company when Lord Lever started the company with making hygiene commonplace at that time, Victorian Britain issues of hygiene. He invented bar soaps like Sunlight or Lifebuoy, that was his mission in life. He didn't have any other mission. He actually called it shared prosperity. He built homes for his workers before the factories were fully run. He introduced pensions in the UK. So this guy was well ahead of his time. So Unilever had forgotten that. It had become a short-term focused. It had become internally focused. It had become self-serving, and we had to break that again in a significant way.

So we went back to the core. We worked on our collective purpose. And what that did was it gave a great beacon, but more than a beacon for us to go after, it also aligned all of us in an organization to put some plans and targets behind that with more courage as we talk, with more intensity, with more belief than we otherwise could have done.

So it unlocked an incredible amount of energy, and I think that is true leadership. True leadership is not giving that energy, but to unlocking that energy in others, and that certainly was something that we saw happening in Unilever. To the extent that, as I said, engagement scores went through the roof, 2 million people started applying every year to the company. The third most looked up company on LinkedIn after Google and Apple. Suppliers wanted to work with us and be part of that mission and brought us the best innovations. Communities who were proud to have us around and all of that ultimately got translated into better business results over time.

Fast forward 15 years where we are now, and we increasingly have that backed up by facts, by hard data. The work that George Sarazen is doing in Harvard on the weighted impact accounts show that companies that more aggressively attack these negative externalities are already higher valued by the financial market as well. It shows that more purpose-driven companies have a higher return over time. So now we have the data to more or less back it up, but in those days it was more of an act of faith. But nothing wrong with an act of faith because a lot of issues we deal with in business don't have the science and the facts to make these decisions.

Ranjay Gulati:
When you launched Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, you didn't have the fact-based, but you had the belief that somehow this is going to really drive it. And as I said, I still stand by the idea maybe the world that fallen behind, but I think you were ahead talking about sustainability. This is before United Nations sustainable development goals before ESG.

Paul Polman:
Yeah, but that was at the time that there was already enough evidence that climate change was an issue. That was at a time when there were still a billion people going to bed hungry. One and a half billion people didn't have access to a toilet and were open defecating. This was at the time already then that 240 million children were not in school. It had nothing to do with a plan that needed to be developed or a powwow session in the UN and New York that needed to take place. The issues were transparent. We were just denying them. Because the stock market was going up year after year and we were in a comfort zone, and that's a moment when nobody asked questions. Unfortunately, it was at the height of the financial crisis when I came in and at that moment, at the height of the financial crisis, actually many people were already asking themselves the questions of what we needed to do differently.

Unfortunately, collectively, we took the wrong decisions. We built out the banks, but we didn't take care of making our economies grow more inclusively and more greener or more sustainable. So people thought banks were too big to fail, people were too small to matter. That started not occupy Wall Street where the 99% that got you into elections in the US and the polarization, that's a direct result of why we see Brexit in this country. So these issues were there, Ranjay. It's not that they weren't there. So we brought humanity back to business, if anything. Which is the essence also of the book Net Positive to put humanity back in business. We had just become short term, win-lose, computer trading, shareholder primacy. We have taken in many cases, still today, that humanity out of business. We've forgotten why we are here. And as long as you are self enriching yourself, which seems to be important for a lot of people, they are not willing to be part of a process of change that you know we'll ultimately needs to happen.

Ranjay Gulati:
What do you say to people who say, "Oh, this is not the job of business. It's undemocratic. You have unelected officials involved in redistribution and social projects. And by the way, this multi-stakeholder world that you're entering into is a morass because you can never placate. Everyone wants different things, and now the CEO is having to adjudicate across. Employees want to get paid more, customers want to pay less, community wants more, and environment needs something." So now you have a very complicated job for the CEO.

Paul Polman:
Oh, absolutely. It is more complicated for a CEO, but the CEO is in his job because he's supposed or she's supposed to be capable of managing trade-offs. That's always been the case. We had to make decisions of opening a new factory that pays out in 10 years from now, or invest in training and development that might pay out in 25 years from now. Go into a new country that might take 15 years before you see returns. And we were able to handle these trade-offs, even the short- and longer-term [ones], for many of these companies. Why wouldn't we be willing to discuss or be responsible for other trade-offs, especially when it is concerning the future of humanity? These are actually the most important things that should be on the agenda. Climate change is affecting any business. Business is incurring trillions of dollars now already every day in disruptions of value chains, in natural disasters they are subjected to, because of climate change. Business immediately sees the effects of destructions, of biodiversity.

Look at the cost of COVID, a direct result of destruction of biodiversity. Look at the increasing inequality that you have in every country, including the US, or less people in quality education. Business is immediately affected by that. In other words, business cannot succeed if these societies fail, nor do I think business can be a bystander in a society that gives them right to exist in the first place. So business has money, resources, innovations that are absolutely needed to be part of that puzzle to advance humanity has always been. In fact, the origins of business is to solve a problem that others can't solve. We thrive by that. So these are the bigger opportunities now.

So what I say to people is you cannot be a bystander, but all the basic essence of how do we create a more sustainable, equitable society, now and for generations to come, goes to the heart of business. You don't have to have an opinion on everything and every law that's being discussed in the US, but you certainly need to stick to some of the basic things that we're talking about here. And society expects that - 80% of your employees, 75, 80% of society - if you are not doing it, I think you'll put your business at risk.

Ranjay Gulati:
When I talk to business leaders about charting a deep purpose for their companies, I explain that defining a deep purpose can revolutionize their business while delivering performance benefits that reward employees, communities and beyond. And I'm often asked, how should business leaders go about deciding which of the many pressing social and environmental issues to take on, what should they leave to others? I asked Paul how to answer that question.

Paul Polman:
Many of these issues are actually interrelated. If COVID has shown us something, it's that we can't have infinite growth on the finite planet. It has also shown us how the issues of biodiversity, destruction, human health, inequality, racial dimension with the tragic death of George Floyd, the economy itself, how it is all interlinked. If we've learned anything, is that poor people pay a disproportionate price of our shortcomings. So it is more complex than people thought, and that is because we first and foremost are interrelated. We first and foremost are citizens of planet Earth and we first and foremost are all connected, including with nature. People see nature as something distance I shouldn't get involved in, but our whole existence depends on nature. Humans and humus, which is the soil, the ground, have the same derivative. We are nature. So if people that run these companies don't see that interconnectivity, they're missing a very important part to run their companies effectively.

So coming to your point of where to get involved in, you need to get involved in things that are important to your business. Sanitation is a very important thing for Unilever selling bar soap. So we were fighting for the rights of everybody to have toilets, for the rights of everybody to have clean water at home, for the rights to wash your hands. [It's a] very simple thing can save 4 million deaths a year amongst children below the age of five. Don't you want to be part of that tremendous opportunity for business? So it has to be relevant for your business. You have to be able to have a solution for that, and it has to be something that is a value that you believe very strongly in. I fight for people with disability. I fight for LGBT. I fight for racial tension. I fight for gender equality. These are not different issues. This is the same issue. Dignity and respect for everybody. Give everybody the opportunity to participate in this wealth and don't make any segmentation based on whatever line you are able to draw. This is the same essence.

When we were trying to go to CEOs and say that [there are] 1.3 billion people with disability in the world, why don't we sign up jointly to improve the presence in employment? Because less than 1% are in employment when it's 15% of the world population. It's not a good statistic. Tremendous waste of resources, but also an undermining of dignity and respect of people. My point here is to say that these issues are often interconnected that need to be seen holistically. Are you having a solution? Is it relevant for your business? Does it detect the values that you really stand for that are important to you and your employees?

And then regretfully or not, it requires you to speak out more and the people that do are part of these discussions are actually getting rewarded for that. This is hard business for the ones that only want to see results of all the actions that they do expressed in more profit or faster growth. We have the evidence that that is also the case, but there's no reason to be silent. There are now too many CEOs in the US that have taken the position of being silent, and I think they're going to be held accountable for that. Ultimately, I think [they] will have to live with that themselves. And it's at these tension moments that courage shows up or disappears.

Ranjay Gulati:
All of us are formed in the crucible of our experiences, and so it is with business leaders. Paul Polman has written eloquently about his life story, which is full of deep connections and surprising, often difficult moments. In 2008, Paul was in the Indian city of Mumbai when terrorists attacked a train station and other targets, including the hotel Paul was staying in. Many people were killed in a siege that lasted more than two days. I asked Paul about that experience and other defining moments in his life.

Paul Polman:
Well, Mark Twain said it well, that there are two important moments in life, the moment that you were born and the moment you found out why you were born. And I think it's the same for us. You always discover, you always go through things and you have to do that with a certain sense of humility and humanity because it also keeps you curious and learning. And that's a process that will always continue. I don't think I'm more courageous now than I could be five years from now. There are many areas I don't find myself to be courageous. And when I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, we decided to go with eight blind people and my blind friend Eric Weihenmayer asked me if I wanted to join him, he got married on the Shira Plateau.

We said, "Let's take a blind person from every part of the world." And it changed totally my outlook on people with disability. All they saw was possibilities. It was absolutely, totally different mindset that came. So it changed my perspective there.When I was in Taj Mahal, the tragedy of poverty and desperation led to these terrorist attacks. And then you come out and you see the goodness of people and at the same time as you see this incredible price that we pay for poverty. So it makes you realize that above all that these issues need to be tackled. And if you're in a position to do that, I think it's your obligation to do it. It's not even less than that.

I've been very fortunate that I was born in the Netherlands, and I always say to people, "I won the lottery ticket of life. I had food at home. The Dutch government gave me free education, but there's still 95% of the world population that just doesn't have that lottery ticket." So wouldn't it be better for us to ensure that more of us are in that situation and put ourselves to their service versus worrying about ourselves the whole time? The world would be so much better. First and foremost, we are citizens of this planet Earth, and if we don't understand that interdependence, we don't understand really what life is all about in the end.

Ranjay Gulati:
What gives you strength, Paul? I mean, you are an energizer. Ever since I've known you, you always have energy to do something, have impact, make the world a better place, inspire people. Is it faith? Is it family? Is it just sense of responsibility that came to you somehow? What energizes you?

Paul Polman:
We sometimes are down or we sometimes zap energy and others or we sometimes feel desperate that we don't know what to do. But I think then we have to dig a little bit deeper and find some more strengths inside of us. I've been in a very fortunate position because people believed in me in my life to have an independence to a certain extent because of an education, because of the jobs that were accessible to me. That's not given to most people in this world. So you have to appreciate that first and foremost. And when these challenges are big, you have to work a little bit harder to find the solutions. But once more, if you are in a position to do something, you should. And it's actually very satisfying. For many people greed might be good, but actually generosity over time always wins. It's actually a good life. It's a very healthy form of selfishness.

Ranjay Gulati:
Couldn't agree with you more. Last question for you, Paul, I want to be respectful of your time, is that... You retired, you reinvented yourself. You really charted your own course in a very distinct way from how a lot of other people did. How did you think about post-CEO life?

Paul Polman:
So I didn't think about that. First of all, I never wanted to be a CEO. I think of it as a continuum of life. I don't see it in compartments. When I was at Unilever, I had formal or board authority. Now I need to deal with moral authority. It's a much better space to be in. The reason I said after 10 years Unilever, I want to do something else, is that I saw the limitations of formal or board authority. So I needed to move on to the natural evolution in my life to actually have a bigger impact than I had as CEO of Unilever. I never believed in the word "retire" because to me it sounds like you were tired before you're tired again, and that was never appealing to me. I've been fortunate enough, like your mother taught you, that it's not about work when you really have a strong purpose, it's really a great life.

And so I get that energy from being able to make that difference with others, from unlocking that potential in others, from trying to see things happen that otherwise wouldn't. We are working now with broad industry groups that we bring together and fashion and food and tourist and travel in the built environment to make the CEOs collectively more courageous, to make them do more together than they can do individually. That's very satisfying. We work with the financial market to look at private equity and put purpose in the core. Impact first before you look at risk and return. They're discovering it gives them actually a better risk and return. I work in education too with the book Net Positive. Can we unlock education? Because we're not creating the right leaders at the skill that we need. So these are major systems changes that you can influence at different levels, and that's very satisfying. It's actually - I find at this time in life for me at least - more satisfying than the other things I've been involved in so far.

Ranjay Gulati:
Paul Polman is co-author of the book, Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take. He is the former CEO of Unilever and a world leader in challenging businesses to take on climate change and other vital social issues. For more of my conversations with leaders in the business world navigating the 21st century business environment, visit my Deep Purpose website. While you're there, you can also find out about my book titled Deep Purpose. Companies that are serious about establishing and working towards a Deep Purpose find that it delivers game-changing results for the workers, the shareholders, and the larger society. So visit with me at deeppurpose.net. This podcast is produced by David Shin and Stephen Smith with help from Craig McDonald and Jennifer Daniels. The theme music is by Gary Meister. I'm Ranjay Gulati, thanks for listening.