Business & Society with Senthil Nathan
Inspiring and thought-provoking conversations with eminent thinkers and sustainability leaders about business in society. Hosted by Senthil Nathan, Chief Executive of Fairtrade Australia New Zealand.
Business & Society with Senthil Nathan
#2 Who's Embracing Sustainability? - Exploring Sustainable Consumers and Corporate Sustainability Leaders with Chris Coulter
Ever wonder how corporate sustainability has evolved from a fringe concept to a core business strategy? Join me as I engage in a compelling conversation with Chris Coulter, Chief Executive of GlobeScan. Chris takes us through the transformative journey from the foundational 1987 Brundtland Report to groundbreaking initiatives like Marks and Spencer's Plan A and Unilever's Sustainable Living Plan. Chris provides an insider's perspective on how companies have transitioned from merely minimising harm to actively creating value, aligning with environmental and social values in today’s purpose-driven business era.
In this episode, we delve into the complex dynamics of sustainable value creation, addressing the significant challenges businesses encounter in balancing immediate shareholder returns with long-term sustainability goals. We examine the growing anti-ESG sentiments and the crucial role of robust internal commitment and supportive policy environments. Chris and I explore the impact of global crises like COVID-19 and inflation on consumer behaviour and climate awareness, underlining the importance of consistent messaging to drive sustainable consumption. Tune in to gain practical insights into the future of corporate sustainability and discover how businesses can effectively engage stakeholders in their sustainability journey.
Link to Chris Coulter's books: https://allinbook.net
To listen to Chris Coulter's All In: The Sustainable Business Podcast: https://all-in-the-sustainable-business-podcast.simplecast.com
If you want to follow this podcast, please subscribe to the Business and Society with Senthil Nathan on Apple and Spotify. We welcome your comments and suggestions at bspwithsn@gmail.com.
Senthil 00:10
I'm Senthil Nathan, chief Executive of Fat Trade Australia, New Zealand. Welcome to my Business and Society podcast, where we discuss the role of business and society with influential thinkers. Joining me today is Chris Coulter. Chris is the chief executive of GlobeScan, a global consultancy firm that helps companies, NGOs and government agencies strategize for a sustainable and equitable future. Chris is a member of the multinational subcommittee of B-Lab Standards Advisory Council. He's also a special advisor to the Board of Canadian Business for Social Responsibility. He's a co-author of two books, “All In: The Future of Business Leadership and the Sustainable Business Handbook. Chris also co -hosts All In - The Sustainable Business Podcast.
00:59
Peter Drucker famously said that the purpose of business is to create a customer, but the sustainability challenges we face today demand a nuanced definition of corporate purpose, and businesses are taking note by setting sustainability targets. But what do consumers think of sustainability and businesses? Are they willing to pay more for sustainable products? Do they feel empowered to make positive change? Let's hear from Chris. Chris, thanks so much for joining me today.
Chris 01:29
Oh, my pleasure, Senthil, great to be here with you!
Senthil 01:32
Let's begin by looking at the corporate sustainability landscape. How has it evolved over the past few decades and where is it heading?
Chris 01:42
It's a great question because I think it's important to sometimes spend a little time on the history of this great journey, experiment, innovation, imperative that we're all trying to realize, and the importance of all this, of course, is survivability of the planet and our species. These are no small, small rationales for being involved. But I think if we look back at the history of sustainable development before corporate sustainability, it really was born in 1987 with the Brundtland Report of Our Common Future, a UN commission, and that term was coined then and at that moment there was lots of environmental awareness, lots of work on international development, but it hadn't been formalized until that moment. I think in many ways, and in that early first decade or so that was very governmental oriented. The Rio Earth Summit in 1992, that led to a very dramatic growth in environmental strategies and plans at country level. There were lots of engagement from civil society and then business was beginning to get involved, but it really didn't get involved more deeply, I think, until about a decade later.
03:00
I started in this field around the late 90s and around that time there was a growing sense of what's the role of business, what are the parameters, why, what's corporate responsibility really look like. At GlobeScan in 1999, we launched a global public opinion poll called the Millennium Poll on Corporate Social Responsibility, which is a very long, strange title, but it was meant to try and understand what are the expectations of society for business. So that's how new this really is. It's a couple of decades fully of what are corporate, what's the role of companies in creating a sustainable future. That evolution from work that we've been doing with expert stakeholders and their perspectives on how they view leadership and what they expect of companies has been quite dynamic. And in the late 90s where I like to joke when life was simpler and music was better, the sustainable development experts that we've been surveying twice a year since 94 actually, they pointed to companies like BP, Shell, Dow Chemical, DuPont, 3M and the Body Shop were viewed by expert stakeholders across the world as embodying corporate leadership. So that's extraordinary, right Senthil, back then, people like yourself, other experts in the NGO, academic, governmental, corporate space would say who's the leading company? Oh, Shell. Oh, it's Dow Chemical. And even in 1997, Monsanto was viewed legitimately, for a very short period of time, as a leading sustainability player, and that moment was the best idea we had collectively was that companies should identify their impacts, their negative externalities, and find ways to reduce them. So we call that the do no harm era, where the best idea we had was incremental improvement over time to reduce material impacts and footprints of these companies. It evolved from there to another time, about a decade later, where all of a sudden stakeholders were pointing to companies like Walmart and GE and Nike and the Unilever comes on the agenda from a leadership perspective from these stakeholders, and that moment moved from a very risk-oriented perspective to something that was much more. Maybe there's some upside to this whole thing. Maybe it's not just about avoiding more regulatory pressure or NGO activism. Maybe there's something here that we can leverage and create more value, and to do that we had to create more integrated enterprise-wide strategies on sustainability. So what does this mean for HR, if we think there's a value proposition for employees? What does it mean for brand equity? Well, we have to talk to marketing and engage them. What does it mean for R&D and innovating different sort of services and products for our customers? Well, we have to involve the R&D and procurement folks.
06:09
So all these things led to a moment where grand sustainability strategies like Marks and Spencer's Plan A in 2007 were launched, like Walmart's 360 Sustainability Plan, which was launched in 2005, and Unilever's grand sustainable living plan in 2010. And so that strategic integration era of leadership was quite different than the previous one, and yet it also evolved a decade later to something we call the purpose-driven era, where the intention and the best idea was to try and find ways to engage more stakeholders inside organizations and outside. So that required simplification, creation of values-oriented approaches to business and signalling to people that yeah, we get it. We understand there's an environmental crisis, we understand there's an inequality crisis and we are on the right side of history and we're responsible and trying to do the best we can. And so that purpose driven era of focusing more closely on purpose and the simplicity of that rather than the more technical sustainability strategies.
07:19
And I think we're on the cusp at the beginning of a very new era right now, which we call the regeneration era, because the best and most important idea we collectively have is how do we catch up in this very delicate, crucial time and how do we find ways for big global companies with massive supply chains, massive employee bases and huge external networks of stakeholders. How do they not only get to zero impact or get to neutrality, but how do they catch up? How do we find net positive approaches environmentally, socially, economically and this is now part of the purview of companies like Unilever still, like Ikea, like Patagonia, but also like Nestle and Suzano and Microsoft and other companies that have been starting to play with this idea and create business models that actually can regenerate and do net positive. So, we're not just, we're going beyond catch up, given the challenges we face and the clock that ticks relentlessly behind us around certain things like the climate crisis.
Senthil 08:26
How confident are you with the current progress in corporate sustainability leadership? Is it a long-term transition or is it a passing fad? You talked about Unilever and Body Shop. In the case of Unilever, there are criticisms that the organization is scaling down their sustainability ambitions. The Body Shop, one of the UK's pioneering retailers in ethical trading, recently entered administration.
Chris 08:54
Yeah, it is a very different time and so that history that we just talked about of corporate sustainability leadership we can see the dynamism in that and the dynamics related to those trends and the transitions, and it's very much an adaptive approach. So it's very Darwinian. Certain companies do things because they believe in it and they're built for it and they drive things forward and those companies will do the thing that they believe is right, regardless of the external context, because that's how they're built. The vast majority of quote unquote normal companies are only moved when they have to. It's an adaptive response to the external context and the competitive context. So, there's a dynamism that's inherent. So, we should continue to expect leadership to evolve and manifest differently as things change.
09:50
We've been in a very different and, I think, challenging phase for corporate sustainability teams at this moment. We're in a deep operationalization of sustainability now. We've sort of understood the sketches of what's required and now we're in the process of implementing. Partly because of the imperative, so the net zero decarbonization agenda. I think it's fair to say that most companies are seeing this being even more difficult than they thought. This is a massive transition. The low-hanging fruit is either gone or being picked right now and getting to the heart of how do we actually do this massive energy transition, is extremely difficult. The other big moment that we've experienced in the last little bit, the external pressure has been from a disclosure perspective. So the regulatory environments, especially in Europe, but also parts of North America, parts of Asia and actually it's quite ubiquitous now in different jurisdictions of the need, in different ways, in different levels of expectation, scope three in Europe, not from the SEC in the US, just scope one and two, for instance, but still this idea of needing to disclose your actual footprint and impacts on some of these environmental and social criteria are making companies spend a lot of time on the reporting agenda and the transparency agenda.
11:24
That, I think, has been that, together with a net zero imperative, have sucked most of the oxygen and creativity out of sustainability teams in most companies. They remain under-resourced, I believe, and we did a study with Salesforce earlier this year called Sustainable Value Creation, where we saw that there was a massive gap in many companies for the amount of capitalization they have to get the sustainability job done that's required. So, we are collectively underfunding and under-resourcing sustainability to do that job and the implication of this is that we don't have a huge amount of innovation going on when it comes to business model, you know changes and approaches and so I think we're the moment we're in right now is one of reality hitting the road, rubber hitting the road like wow, this is really tough and difficult and maybe we collectively did signal that we could do more than we could in a certain time period.
12:26
So, I think there was, if not there has been, greenwashing, but there has been some green inflation. I think to a degree where a bit of optimism around what was possible. So, this is now dawning us now that we have to focus and understand this more deeply but it's also a time where I think we are not spending collectively enough amount of effort and attention and resources on the innovation side of sustainability. It's been very compliance-oriented, very disclosure-oriented and we're missing the examples of really dramatic different approaches to sustainable business. That has been a characteristic, I think, of the history of corporate sustainability.
Senthil 13:10
One of the work you are known for is the GlobeScan Sustainability Leader Survey. What are some of the common traits of organizations that consistently top your Sustainability Leader Survey?
Chris 13:22
There are three big characteristics of current recognized leaders in sustainability, and that leadership board does look like Patagonia, Unilever, Ikea, Natura &Co, Google, Microsoft, Nestle there's a very good, diverse range of companies that are being referenced and in that cadre there's three things. One is the actual performance. What is the company doing in particular? What does it do around innovation and commercializing sustainability? What does it do around ambitious goals and target setting? And what does it do related to its overall commitment to the agenda, a second piece of it is the systemic change, conversation, what is it doing beyond its four walls, in the broader ecosystem of change, which we all know this has to happen.
14:17
We can only go so far as individual organizations unless we have different rules, policies, approaches, norms, cultural shifts that lead to collective, aggregated change. And that relates to collaboration, and I think we're at a moment in advocacy as well for those changes, both societal-wide but also at a policy level. And in that context, we need to sharpen, I think, what really good partnership and collaboration looks like. That's much more catalytic than typical ones, because there's all kinds of variations of that and the same with advocacy, how do we be really effective in shifting some of these policies, but also cultural changes that do change societal preferences and lead to different demand sides of things. And then the third part is how do we engage effectively and can we communicate, can we have sharp narratives, can we mobilize, can we grab attention, and so all of those things are the attributes of leadership, and they're not that complicated, they sound very straightforward, but it's very hard to execute all three of those things at the same time, I think.
Senthil 15:26
I was reading your sustainable value creation report, and it says that only half of the businesses allocate the required capital to meet sustainability goals. Why do businesses shy away from investing?
Chris 15:40
I think it's the old chestnut of short-term shareholder return, and the pressures related to it, and I think, as you sort of referenced, that there's been a pullback, or a perceived pullback, in the market around sustainability. There's no question that this anti-ESG, negative populism has, especially in the US, but also bled into other places like the UK and Brazil historically, and a few other countries we can see now in Europe too. It has not, from our research, really been that relevant in Asia or Africa, thankfully so far, but the political risk related to this agenda has raised the profile, or raised the spectre of going too far, too quickly and being isolated and then being vulnerable to the backlash that that has manifested a little bit. I think that's a fever that will break eventually, because the science shows us that there's only one way for us to actually survive and that is to get our house in order collectively. So, I think there's something that's at this moment, right now, a pause in many companies to overinvest and to be seen as overinvesting in sustainability. The pressure from short-term investors in particular remains a real bête noire, I think, to this agenda. We know that from our leaderboard of companies that are viewed so Patagonia is owned by the foundation. Ikea is owned by a foundation protected for the market. Unilever is a leader. They've worked to cultivate longer-term investors who believe in a longer game, but still under extreme pressure from short-term investors, and then after that there's a drop in normal companies that need to be very responsive to the market in the short-term, and so we still have that issue to address.
17:48
And to get to the right amount of capital requires a whole bunch of things to happen right. We need internally the board and C-suite to understand this is there's no question, this is our direction, and we believe it, and this is the right way to create long-term value for our shareholders and for our customers. That's easier said than done historically, the business case is quite strong. We also need the policy environment to cultivate and create incentives for the companies to do that sort of investment and then we need investors to find different ways of evaluation that actually lead to this and I think the whole ESG conversation in the last five or six years was another example of how we need to continue innovating on the sustainability agenda broadly.
18:41
When I started in this field, I remember one of the most important or repetitive phrases that people would say if we just get capital to go to the right places and connect sustainability into investment and corporate valuations, everything will change. There'll be a massive transition and that'll close the loop and we'll finally have the rewards and incentives for sustainable business. ESG mainstreamed. It became a big deal as part of this purpose-driven era where I think it became an important conversation broadly. But we can see the limitations of this ESG. Maybe it's 2.0. The first one was much more socially responsible investing, kind of niche cottage industry. Then we got to a mainstream with the likes of Larry Fink of BlackRock talking about it and saying this is important and while those evaluations continue, I think in many financial firms and asset managers it has not been catalytic as the promise historically.
19:43
We're not seeing massive shifts in capital flows to companies based on true sustainability performance.
19:52
It often is, companies that are exposed to fossil fuels sometimes get less and big tech companies especially were viewed as darling ESG performers, mostly because they have a very little impact or footprint in fossil fuels overall. So, we're still at a place where the investor piece of the puzzle has moved a little bit, but not far enough to allow for companies to properly capitalize, I think, and have a long-term vision and point of view. Having said that, this whole sustainable value creation report was meant to show we cannot get to those places that really prove the sustainable business case if we don't have full integration across the enterprise in ways that create more value or at least reduce risk more dramatically. And we need to find ways to visibly commercialize sustainability going forward so that people can, and investors in particular can see, oh, there's actually growth and there's growth to this business and we have a level of maturity that we haven't cracked through yet, which I think is the next generation of interesting, innovative sustainability leadership coming.
Senthil 21:02
Right, let's move a bit to the consumer side, which I see you as a thought leader. It seems increasingly clear that businesses need consumer buy-in to achieve their sustainability goals. How are businesses doing to communicate their sustainability efforts to consumers?
Chris 21:21
I mean I think to be fair and not to be provocative, but badly. I think we're collectively very poor historically at communicating what sustainability is, how it's valuable to them, how it fits into the product or service in a way that's meaningful and relevant. And I think there's a massive gap between the sustainability practitioner, even other parts of companies and different functions, the civil society, academic conversation and even the regulatory one, where that's a very sophisticated, fast-moving, broadening agenda, sometimes back and forth, as we see, with a bit of the backlash, but really a very rich, technically sophisticated conversation that's happening versus the consumer, which has sort of maintained a slight increase over time, but not dramatic, and part of that is we have not engaged consumers consistently or effectively and both of those are important. Right One, the effective side of marketing consumer engagement. That's obvious. You really need that to actually break through and create that market and that demand and that has not happened. It's been lots of different approaches here and there and I think a limited integration of marketing functions and sustainability functions working really closely together for an extended period of time. It's starting to happen. We see this integration moving, but it's rare that that has been embedded closely for a significant amount of time. But then the consistency is also really important. When we talk to consumers, and especially in focus groups, we're all very sophisticated. If we see a company or a brand communicating to us about sustainability one out of six times or one out of eight times of a message, we make the calculation that company cares about sustainability, you know, a sixth or an eighth of their overall attention span. So, it's an easy calibration for consumers to make when, oh, this company cares about it once in a while versus all the time. So that defines how I should also approach this to a degree.
23:39
So, we've done, I think, a broadly poor job, systemically poor job, of engaging consumers in ways that are meaningful, relevant and actually catalytic. There has been a huge amount of that right Supply chain engagement and changes. You know well that has moved dramatically in the last couple of decades. We do see all kinds of approaches to finding ways to reduce our carbon footprint now to try and address our impacts on nature. I mean there's been really important changes we've made collectively. But the demand side broadly has been sort of weak and we've done a poor job.
24:15
There's two different pieces of the puzzle that are important.
24:19
One is a micro conversation, and the other is a macro conversation and in the micro I think we spent 90% of our time to try and differentiate marginally on some elements that are kind of peripheral to the core of the branding or the advertising. I think what we've missed out is the other part of this demand equation, which is the inevitability. How do we, at a macro level, create the conditions for a sense to consumers that this new product, this new behavior, this new approach to consumption is the future? And that is where you get this powerful shift of sometimes 40%, and you can see it very clearly in the EV market and the EV conversation. On one hand, the irresistibility of an EV compared to a typical car is it's a different performing vehicle, it feels different, it's cooler, it's sharper. It's a better incarnation of the automobile. On the right hand, on the other side of it, on the inevitability side of it, we also are beginning, when done well, countries like Norway, you can see the dramatic changes, but also places like China, where there's a critical threshold of signals from multiple actors that gives the sense to the consumer of the inevitability of the future of mobility will be electric.
Senthil 25:43
Interesting, but do societies trust businesses? How do businesses fare compared to governments, media and not-for-profits?
Chris 25:52
Yeah.
25:53
So, we've done a global public opinion study for 23 years now asking the world you know 30,000 people across 30 countries their level of trust in various institutions to operate in the best interest of society.
26:09
So, we view that as less of a transactional conversation on trust and more of a thick trust construct where you want a company not just to do that narrow interaction but also to deliver something bigger and in that, historically and consistently, we see businesses being down the leaderboard on trust.
26:32
We've heard these expressions in meetings many times, in conferences and Davos and COPS that, oh, business is the most trusted institution, not by a long shot anywhere. Scientific, academic institutions extraordinarily trusted across the world, even in places where there has been this negative populism that's arisen, like in the US, still very high levels of trust in science and academia plus 69, I think, at the global level of net trust ratings. NGOs are highly trusted across the world, in almost every single country, much more than business a plus 42 rating globally, which has increased over the years. And then business you know other intermediate organizations like the UN are pretty trusted and others, but business is trusted more than government, which is absolutely consistent over the years too. There's been a plus 11 trust rating for global business right now and that's substantively ahead of trusted government.
Senthil 27:34
Let's talk a bit about climate change, Chris. Communities across the world are encountering extreme weather events. It's not restricted to this country or that. How is climate change affecting consumer behavior?
Chris 27:48
It’s a great way to frame it, Senthil. I think that climate change is the underlying driver for the opportunity to engage consumers more effectively from a brand or from an NGO, or from a public sector perspective as well. We've seen great variability over the last couple of decades in our consumer research on views and concerns of environmental issues like climate change. What's interesting about that is the last three years have been the highest levels in 22 years of tracking of concerns for climate change across the world, and what's unique about that is that that is in spite or despite the fact that we have other massive global issues that usually, historically, have dampened environmental concern. So, when 9-11 happened, for example, the environmental agenda dropped dramatically. When the Great Recession happened a decade or so ago, there was also a very dramatic decline in concern for environmental issues.
28:52
We have gone through COVID. You know once in a century level challenge and crisis. We have this acute inflationary issue. That has been once in half a century level, and then we've had this war in Ukraine, which has also had you know, had a very rare level of that industrial military challenge, especially in the continent of Europe, in over almost nearly a century as well. So, we have all those things.
29:27
Despite those things, the concern and engagement for climate change continues to grow and the differentiator now around that is that people are feeling the impacts of climate change for the first time.
29:37
So over four in 10 people across the world now say they've been personally greatly affected by climate change, and that's up 20 points in the last four years, and we can see it growing over time as well.
29:51
Once it becomes much more immediate, then this idea of future discounting degrades, and people are more invested. And the question now is, as we're at that tipping point of half of the world feeling the impacts of climate change to a significant degree, what are the opportunities to engage them and mobilize them as consumers, as citizens, and what kind of responses will consumers have as we proceed down this climate crisis, with the planet giving us these important feedback loops, and what's the opportunity to shift our behavior, to accelerate our societal transition in how we move, work, eat, play, clothe ourselves? And this is why that back to that conversation on how have we marketed or how have we engaged consumers or communicated consumers and that stuff. We haven’t done it well but we now have, I think, enough experience collectively to really do it well and understand the integration of all these different elements, from R&D and innovation to marketing and sustainability impacts.
Senthil 31:01
That sounds a bit different from what I read on your Healthy and Sustainable Living report, which says that most people feel that there is nothing more they can do to address climate change or environmental issues. Why do people feel that way when they say that we are facing the effects of climate change?
Chris 31:20
So, it's good to point out there's lots of contradictions in all of us and how we approach things. You're right that there's the level of agency individuals have on doing something. They feel like they're doing all they can, that they're maxed out. However, when we ask people, you know where do they think their biggest impacts can be? It doesn't align with what science says exactly. So, we know there's, for example, when people feel most empowered around is recycling. We know that that is vital for the circular economy to try and get off the ground. We also know that it's single digits in many commodities that are actually reclaimed and recycled over time globally. So, we're very we're collectively not very good at this recycling, but yet things that we know are most impactful, like eating a more plant-based diet, like trying to find ways to move and mobility being electrified, either as vehicles or as public transit, reducing long, short-haul flights All of these things are the biggest hitters when it comes to carbon footprint in particular, consumers don't think that those are important or valuable. So, there's a gap in information, in engagement, in knowledge. So, I get back to the idea of inevitability. We need to create the signals to everybody that this is what we're all doing, all the brands that I buy and shop from and the retailers I go to are telling me this story because this is important and exciting and the future of sustainable consumption, and governments are having a consistent signal and NGOs are aligned and driving this forward and academic institutions and educational institutions across the board are doing it. So, we have very rare moments where that comes together.
Senthil 33:15
Chris, people are facing cost of living pressures in many parts of the world. What is its impact on consumers' behavior, particularly around sustainable consumption? In my interactions with business leaders, I often hear that consumers prefer sustainable products, but they are not willing to pay more.
Chris 33:33
Yeah, and they are willing to pay more is such a terrible trap, because that I don't think is the right framing. I mean, it's good when we track a question. It's an attitudinal sense of do people see value in sustainability? But, as we know, it doesn't translate to market.
33:52
However, there's a great piece of work done by the Center for Sustainable Business at the Stern School in New York, New York University, called the Sustainable Market Share Index. It's just in the US, so it's just a view of what's happening in the US. And they look at over 200,000 products that represent a significant proportion of discretionary consumer spend, like over 35%, I think of what American consumers buy. And when they look at all the different products across the different SKUs, they're measuring does this product brand itself or market or give information on sustainability? It could be an environmental certification or an ethical certification, like the Fair Trade, for example, as a label. It could be some other brand, it could be greenwashy a little bit, it doesn't matter, but it's a binary choice. Does this can of soup have a message around sustainability or not.
34:44
And when they do all the calculation, it's 18% of products that Americans buy have some sort of visible signal around sustainability, which means 82% of what Americans buy don't have any or at that point of purchase, there's nothing there. So that tells us, importantly, we're early in this curve, like we have not saturated the marketing of sustainability by any stretch of the imagination, and sometimes we think we've been doing this for a long time and oh, we tried one thing and it didn't work. It's not true. The other part of that study that's so important is that they look at the prices between the sustainability marketed product versus the traditional and there's a premium, I think on average 28% premium. So, consumers do see that there is actually a cost differential in the marketplace and they do think that to live sustainably, to buy sustainable products, is more expensive.
35:41
And this is one of the biggest barriers that they identify, even before the inflation crisis, but it's accelerated now. So, we do have a challenge, because the opportunity for margins for brands is if you can find a way to demonstrate and market this as a sustainable product, there is a margin opportunity here for you. But we know we need to make this accessible, affordable, scalable. So, it has to be much more mainstreamed, which companies like IKEA have really worked hard at trying to make all of this affordable, that there is one approach and it's accessible to everyone.
Senthil 36:22
I'd like to ask four personal questions to draw lessons from your life and international career. How do you handle conflicting views or differences of opinion?
ChrisGuest36:32
I think there's great power in simple things like listening. So, can we truly listen and hear people's perspectives and point of view? I think, the more we can create the conditions for that and to hear each other out, I think you almost always can find not a perfect consensus, but definitely a progress on that issue. But I think there's two things that are against us. One is that we it's not just, I think, in the context of sustainability now, it's not just two actors that need to have that conversation. There's many actors because it's a systemic challenge we have, so we need to hear and listen from many different voices and perspectives.
Senthil 37:18
Have you had failures? How do you manage them?
Chris 37:23
Oh, daily. I don't know how you manage them. I think you recognize that there's always an opportunity for failure. There's an opportunity to learn from those failures. And then I think back to your earlier question around consensus building or dealing with conflict. I think that humility also means that you get better over time of listening to other perspectives, to questioning instincts or your ideas or a certain idea, and that's a very valuable progression, I think.
Senthil 37:56
Can you recommend a book or two on business or sustainability to our listeners?
Chris 38:01
Yeah, I just finished Higher Ground by Alison Taylor, which is a great piece of academic and business practitioner literature. She really captures much of the sustainability agenda and I think what she has done a great service to is to bring ethics back into that conversation, which I think was, you know, when we talked earlier, the early part of corporate responsibility and the governance. The G of ESG, took a while for us to get there. It took a lot of scandals in the early 2000s Enron, Royal Ahold in Europe, Tyco, Parmalat. There were a bunch of corporate scandals that did require oh wow, the ethics are really important in governance and we've kind of sort of glossed over it. We haven't lost it, but we haven't seen how important ethics are. So, she does a great service to us all by reminding us and showing us the importance of being ethical in our approach to business.
Senthil 39:03
Finally, what are one or two essential skills that professionals working at the intersection of business and society must have?
Chris 39:10
I spent some time with a bunch of corporate sustainability officers in a retreat and what was really interesting from their vantage point and these were quite seasoned professionals, doing this for 15 or 20 years and their view of the skill sets because we talked about this quite a bit was that you have to really understand human psychology and to understand what motivates and drives us so that we can better tap into that and mobilize people. So, I thought that was interesting. And the second very connected part of that is how do we be multilingual in our work and not literally multilingual, but multi-mindset in many ways? How do we translate, listen, translate, transfer information, knowledge, business cases, rationale, all those things across all the different parts of a business that requires?
40:07
So, when you're talking to a supply chain person, what are their language? What's important to them? How do you understand it? How do you bring sustainability into that conversation? When you're talking to an investor, how does that work? When you're talking to a customer, how does it work? So, all of these and you can multiply that by probably 10 quite easily multilingual, multi-mindset things that have to happen for a sustainability, an effective sustainability leader, to really drive change. So, it's part diplomacy, part interpretation, part psychologist to do it well, I think.
Senthil 40:37
Great. Thanks. So much, Chris, for joining me and sharing your valuable perspectives. It was a delight hearing you today.
Chris 40:43
Well, thank you, Senthil, thank you for having me and thanks for all your important work in Australia and New Zealand with Fairtrade. It's one of those very catalytic ways for consumers to actually live with their values and behavior, having a label that's trusted, understood and meaningful. We shouldn't underestimate that.
Senthil 41:02
Thank you, Chris. If you like this conversation, please subscribe to the Business and Society podcast on your favorite podcasting platform. As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions at bsbwithsn@gmail.com.
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