The Secrets of Purpose-Driven Companies, Leaders

Welcome to another episode of E+E Leader: Sustainability Unveiled. In this encore presentation from the 2023 Solutions Summit, we explore the true essence of purpose-driven companies, distinguishing them from those merely engaging in "purpose talk." The sustainability landscape is evolving, and it's crucial to discern organizations that authentically prioritize environmental and social concerns.

Our guest, Dev Patnaik, CEO of Jump Associates, takes center stage as he unravels the five key characteristics that set apart purpose-driven companies today. From cultural attributes to leadership traits, we delve into the defining features that go beyond rhetoric and truly make a difference.

Discover how companies with an activated purpose, stakeholder-centric focus, and a culture aligned with core beliefs engage customers, employees, management, and shareholders at a deeper level. Dev shares insights on how purpose-driven businesses understand the interconnectedness of all stakeholders, fostering creativity and commitment.

Join us as we explore how purpose isn't just a buzzword—it's a driving force that shapes organizational culture, fosters innovation, and ensures long-term success. Gain practical insights that can transform sustainability rhetoric into purposeful action, creating a positive impact on the world and securing a meaningful place in the hearts of those they serve. Stay tuned for an engaging conversation that unveils the true power of purpose in sustainability.

Slide Deck Video

Dev Patnaik LinkedIn
Jump Associates LinkedIn

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Welcome everyone to this insightful session where we delve into the essence of purpose-driven companies and distinguish them from those merely engaging in purpose talk. In an era where environmental and social concerns are at the forefront of corporate conversations, it's crucial to discern the authentic torchbearers of purpose from those merely paying lip service. Today, we are privileged to have Dave Petnayek, the CEO of Jump Associates, guide us through the intricate landscape of purpose-driven organizations. Dave will unravel the distinctive characteristics that set apart companies truly committed to making a difference. From cultural attributes to leadership traits, we will explore the hallmarks of organizations that not only advocate for change but embody it in their ethos.

Speaker 1: 1:00

On this episode of E&A Leader Sustainability Unveiled, we look at purpose that extends beyond profit. A stakeholder-centric approach, a culture aligned with core beliefs and behaviors, and leaders capable of navigating uncertainty while planning for the future these are the elements that distinguish purpose-driven companies. Dave will shed light on how such organizations activate their purpose, fostering higher engagement among customers, employees, management and shareholders. The ripple effect of this engagement sparks creativity and commitment, creating a symbiotic relationship between the company and its stakeholders. Join us on May's journey as we learn from Dave Petnayek about the pivotal role purpose plays in shaping organizational culture, driving innovation and fostering long-term success. Let's explore the practical insights that can transform mere rhetoric into purposeful action, creating a positive impact on the world and securing a meaningful place in the hearts of those they serve.

Speaker 2: 2:11

I want to spend some time this morning talking about what does it mean to be a purpose-driven company? Because I think it's a good context for every conversation that we're going to have. As we think about sustainability, as we think about impact on the world around us. There's been a lot that's been happening in the world. When we think about what it means to be a purpose-driven company, for about 20 years the number one beer in America has been Bud Light by a wide margin. That makes sense. There's a lot of good reasons why light beers are on the forefront as opposed to what people used to drink in terms of full calorie beers. That continued for two decades until a couple months back. At that point, bud Light fell from being number one to number two, behind Modelo in imported beer from Mexico but, more importantly, a full calorie beer. You look at that precipitous fall and you say how did that happen? It came down to a boycott that happened from a core group of Bud Light consumers who were upset by a single ad that got put out or a single campaign that they did with an influencer who happened to be trans. This was a huge shift which had massive financial impacts for Bud Light's manufacturers. Aba in bed.

Speaker 2: 3:36

At the same time, we're seeing this same kind of action in other companies with, say, as much drama but not as much financial impact. Take, for example, what we're seeing going on with Disney, as they're standing up for LGBT rights in Florida, yet it doesn't seem to have the same impact on them. Then, thirdly, we have other companies, like Patagonia, who are actually taking a stance in other ways to support their values and to support their purpose, for example, when Patagonia said just a couple of years ago that they will no longer sell corporate logo fleeces to companies that they felt were not taking a positive stance on the environment. What's the difference between these companies and what's happening around us? It seems like the world is turning into a bit of a food fight about people's values. It's changing how we all need to show up as business leaders in ways that are both good and potentially perilous. The biggest challenge that we have is that we're not just employees inside of companies, we're not just students, we're not just individuals. We actually have a role to play in big challenges that the world is facing right now. When I mean big challenges, I mean more than any company's market share or their stock price. That's one kind of scoreboard to say, okay, we're the number one beer versus the number two beer company. I would challenge us to think as you go forward through the rest of our time today to think about what are the bigger challenges that we're all on the hook for. The scoreboard that my colleagues and I jump look at is this one right here. This is kind of our impact scoreboard when we look at some of the challenges that the world is facing.

Speaker 2: 5:25

This is what we call the countdown, and this goes from eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. There's some of the things that you want to pay attention to. Eight stands for eight billion people. That's how many people we have on planet Earth at this time. It's growing at a continuous rate. The way we keep eight billion people on planet Earth is that we give most of those resources to just one or two billion people, and the rest of those folks we tell them to go pound sand.

Speaker 2: 5:57

Seven is the number of countries on planet Earth that actually have gender parity in their parliaments. If you want to look at what are the kind of laws that we're making, one of the things that would be a good indicator is to say how many countries in the world have about 50% male and 50% female folks in their Congress or in their parliament or in their Senate. There's only seven of them folks. That's a parasitically small number. Six is one in six. One in six is a fraction of people in America who face food insecurity. One in six is a share of people in the United States who, every night, without support or in danger of going to bed hungry. Half of those folks are kids. That's not in the Sudan, that's not in Ethiopia. That's in the United States of America. One in six folks face insecurity. Five is 5,000 out of every million people in the United States are incarcerated. 5,000 out of every million people are in jail. The reason they're in jail is through things like mandatory no strikes laws and politicians who want to make sure that we're being tough on crime. As a result of that, we have a higher percentage of our population in prison in the United States than any apex civilization in the history of humankind. We have a higher percentage of our population in jail than the Soviet Union did under Stalin.

Speaker 2: 7:27

Four. Four is 40 percent and 40 percent is the number of folks who have access to clean water in much of the developed world, leaving aside folks that are in developing economies. Three this ratio here really troubles me. Three to one is the ratio of suicides to homicides on planet Earth. Three times as many people take their own life as have it taken from them. When we say homicides, we include war. So take everybody who got killed yesterday in Ukraine, take everybody who died yesterday in Yemen, take everyone who got shot in Chicago, add them all up, and three times as many people decide to go gently into the night. What does that tell you, folks? It means that we have a crisis, not just of safety and security in the world. We have a crisis of meaning and joy.

Speaker 2: 8:21

Now, what's two? Two is two degrees. Two degrees is what we think is as far as we can tolerate as a human species in terms of climate change and global warming, before we reach a point of no return, which we shouldn't pass. A few years back, we thought that we passed that line by 2,100, and now we're talking about 2050 or maybe even 2030. Then there's one. What's one For most of us and I say most of us one is the number of lives that will lead. One is our chance to actually have impact in the world. I say most of us, because I'm a Hindu, my people believe reincarnation. I'm coming back, baby, but for the rest of y'all, this is your one shot to think about how the work that you do every day affects the impacts you have on the world, not just for yourself, but for your kids and for your grandkids. Now, faced with these challenges, you can stop and say, wow, that's a lot. That may be too much for me to think about. That's too many problems. Here's the good news you don't need to think about all of these things. You do need to think about what is your share about what you're passionate about? What's your piece of the puzzle? How do you move forward and have impact on that?

Speaker 2: 9:39

Stepping into that breach are a number of companies who decided that they actually want to change things. They want to do something about that. These are companies from all around the world who have decided that they want to have a sense of purpose beyond just making money. These are companies who have decided they want to both do good and do well. In fact, it is possible to both do good and do well at the same time. That's, in fact, what we mean by saying that these are purpose-driven companies.

Speaker 2: 10:12

A friend of mine, john Mackie at Whole Foods, pushed for this idea of this starting about 10, 15 years ago. We've seen, and a few of our colleagues have noticed, is that ESG is a great thing. But, folks, esg isn't enough. There has to be something bigger out there, more than just saying, well, let's pollute the land a little bit less or damage the earth a little bit more. What can we do to take active steps in that direction? John and a few of our friends actually came together a number of years ago to start an organization called Conscious Capitalism. Conscious Capitalism is really more than just an organization. It's a movement of companies who believe that they can do good and do well at the same time.

Speaker 2: 11:02

Looking at that, when we looked in the world, we said it's too easy to say let's just keep our head down and focus on making money. That was the lesson that some people took away from what happened to Bud Light just a couple of months ago, which is like maybe we just need to focus on beer and that's it. Maybe we should just keep our head down, because it's just getting more and more controversial every day. The unfortunate or fortunate truth of it is that you can't do that anymore because people want to know what your values are. People want to know what your impact is. People aren't just buying things, they're buying into things.

Speaker 2: 11:44

A recent study showed that over 70% of American consumers want companies to know, to state clearly, what their values are and what they believe in, so that they can, in turn, make smart decisions and vote with their pocketbook and decide that, okay, this is a company that I want to do business with and this is a company I don't want to do business with. That's just on the consumer side. It's even more so with employees because now more than ever post COVID, people have choices about where they want to work and how they want to spend their time, and so if you want consumers to come to you, if you want employees to stay with you, you have to think about what is that greater role that you play in society, and it's true not just for consumers and for employees, it's true for investors as well. My colleagues and I have a study that we'll be releasing later this year that actually looks at the results of the financial return of purpose-driven companies compared to the rest of the folks that are out there, and what we're seeing, without getting into all the details right now is just outsized growth and outsized return for investors of companies that are truly purpose-driven.

Speaker 2: 12:57

Now what do I mean by truly purpose-driven? Because it's very easy for companies to say, yeah, we're purpose-driven, sure we are. We are too, and what we see in the world is, broadly speaking, kind of three different classes of companies. And here's where I'm going to get controversial. I'm going to name some names. There are some companies that are more purpose-driven than others. There are some companies that I would argue are very good, well-managed companies, but they are what we would call purpose-indifferent. It's not really something that they feel that they need to pay attention to. And then there's other companies who are certainly talking about purpose and they're certainly advertising about purpose and have ideas around it. And then there's an entirely different group of companies who we see are truly purpose-driven in a way that the others aren't hot, and those are the companies that are having outsized returns on the market, are actually engaging consumers in a different way or attracting employees in a different way. Those are folks that we actually see are truly purpose-driven.

Speaker 2: 13:58

Now, what do we mean by purpose-driven? What does that even look like? How do you know whether you're a company with a purpose or a purpose-driven company. Over the last few years, we've done a significant amount of research with these firms to see what makes them different and, as best as we can surmise, being a purpose-driven company looks different in five different ways. These are kind of like five broad factors that we see in the world. One is do you have an activated purpose? Do you have a clear reason to exist beyond just making money? Two, do you have an aligned culture? Do you have a set of values and behaviors that we can all count on you folks to align to and adhere to, even when the going gets tough? Thirdly, do you have a sense of stakeholder centricity? Are you all just about shareholders or have you moved on to notions of things like customer centricity, or are you really trying to do right by all of your stakeholders Team members and customers and investors and suppliers and partners on a win-win-win-win basis?

Speaker 2: 15:06

Fourthly is next level leadership, and this is one that folks are starting to discover more and more, which is the idea of saying that if I'm going to do all these other things, I need to have leaders who can make really smart decisions. That means I need to grow leaders who are at that next level of understanding about what leadership means, and by that we mean that if I join your company when I'm 22, do I have a higher likelihood of being a CEO or a senator or a spiritual leader when I'm 52? Because you built an engine for growth to develop folks as leaders. And finally, there's this idea of future focus, which is are you managing day to day or quarter to quarter, or do you actually have robust planning systems, not just for now, but for looking three, five, even seven years out? And what we see is for truly purpose driven companies? They're lighting up the board on all five of these different factors and there's all sorts of details we can get into in every aspect of this and how we rate this, but it's too early in the morning for me in California to get into all of that, so I'll just start with a few different stories on each of these, because I think each of them are things that you will intuitively understand.

Speaker 2: 16:20

The first is activated purpose. Do you have a cause beyond just making money? I've had the chance to spend time with some of the world's most admired companies and help them with their most pressing growth challenges, and if you ever want an example of a company that has that sense of purpose. It's Starbucks, starbucks purpose and you can see it when you walk in. They have written on the walls and all sorts of places in their stores and in their central service center their purpose is to nurture and inspire the human spirit, and it comes through everything that they do. They truly believe that. That's why they're put on planet Earth as an experiment. After this event, together, go into a Starbucks tomorrow or day after. Go into a Starbucks and just talk. See if you can talk to the store manager. Here's what you'll notice when you talk to them.

Speaker 2: 17:15

More often than not, many of the folks who work at Starbucks, if you ask them about their story, about where they come from, a lot of them grew up poor. A lot of them grew up in a family with just a single parent. A lot of them were the eldest child and this is a recurring story that you hear over and over at Starbucks, which is this was someone who grew up in very limited means and maybe their parent was working two jobs and she was working one job and then she'd come home and she'd make dinner for her kids and then, on her way out to her next job, she'd tell their kids. Hey, I'm going out now to work. Take care of your little brother, take care of your little sister. That story is one that we heard over and over and over at Starbucks.

Speaker 2: 18:05

So, to this day is grownups as adults. That's why, more than anything, they believe that they're put on planet Earth to nurture and inspire the human spirit, and Starbucks didn't teach them that. Life taught them that and that's why they work at Starbucks, which is, I think, part of why it's been so hard for the folks who've worked there for a long time to see all of the acrimony that's been going on with their own partners, with the folks who work in their stores in the last couple of years, because it's so much for them personally, a violation of who they are. It's what brought Howard Schultz back out of retirement to say we have to do something different. I got a new CEO like Lexman Narasimhan to come in and say we have to restore that sense of purpose. We've lost our way. So, yeah, one part of it is activated purpose, but then how does it show up every day? You have to have an aligned culture, and the aligned culture isn't about command and control in 2023.

Speaker 2: 19:02

You can't just write out a script and have everybody do it. You really have to infuse it into the fabric of the place. If you want any experience of what that's like, just take a flight on Southwest Airlines. Southwest just feels different than most other airlines. If you flown them, you know what that's like. You get on the plane and, as they're doing a safety announcement, the flight attendant will tell a few jokes and crack you know whys, about all the different aspects of how to put your seat belt on. Nowhere is there a script that tells Southwest flight attendants. Here's how you need to talk about that. What they spend their time on instead is making sure that everyone is clear on their values. Everybody is clear on how they're supposed to show up and they stay true to that and then allow people to improvise along the way. So, yeah, but they're very clear on how they should show up and they try to extend that, not just through your flight experience you and I see that but in how they interact with their partners and what they do in their back end systems as well.

Speaker 2: 20:07

The third aspect is stakeholder centricity. To say that are we doing right by our employees? Are we doing right by our investors? Are we doing right by partners. Are we doing right by the planet? And that's incredibly hard for folks to do, but some of the most robust companies that we see that have methodologies for stakeholder centricity do internal reporting to make sure they do that, to put out a report every year in terms of their impact on the planet. Whole Foods is a great example of this, ben and Jerry's is a great example of this, and we're seeing in the entire flight of new companies that are entering the mix and defining themselves as B Corps. And what's a B Corp? A B Corp is really a measure of your stakeholder centricity. How right are you doing by all of your stakeholders?

Speaker 2: 20:55

The fourth one is next level leadership, and I said before do you have robust systems for developing leaders? Now, there's all sorts of different ways to do that, and when we go into an organization we spend time looking at what's going on with them. One of the things we look at is do your leaders even have a sense, do they even have a clue, that there are other levels of leadership beyond command and control, beyond just kind of like laying down the hammer. That in fact, influencing and acting and navigating through nuance and ambiguity is important. One of the places. I find that was most interesting in terms of how they do it is Netflix. Netflix is a culture that really lives and dies by the development of its leaders. There are, if I count back, a cat has nine lives. Netflix has at least 10 or 12 at this point, 10 or 12 times where that company should have been out of business or just crushed by a competitor or by a strategic misstep. And the way they do it is through developing their leaders.

Speaker 2: 21:57

Reid Hastings, the founder, had a practice that he would do on a regular basis to develop his leaders, and I found it quite impressive that he had a few hundred folks who were vice presidents at Netflix and Reid would make sure that he would spend an hour with each of those VPs individually every quarter. Each of those VPs, a few hundred of them every quarter. I mean, just think about it, that's a few hundred hours every quarter. And then he has a whole bunch of people, close to a thousand folks at the director level and he would make sure that he spent a half an hour individually with each of them twice a year. And when asked how do you do that? How do you fit in that time? What are you spending your time talking about, so I spend the entire time talking about leadership. I spend the entire time talking about our values, and if I do that with them and then leave them to it, I don't need to be in all the other meetings where they would normally be driving decisions up to me. Yeah, they are in the business of streaming video, but more than that, they're in the business of developing leaders.

Speaker 2: 23:12

And if you have a program for developing that next level of leadership folks who can manage through complexity, ambiguity, volatility, uncertainty if you have a methodology for that, then you don't need to check every decision. And part of the challenge for many companies right now is that when you look at what happened with Bud Light, you say, oh my goodness, that might happen in our company as well. We are just one stupid tweet, just one bad campaign away from getting canceled, and it's like you know you are. You can't stay on top of every single decision, so you need to make sure you're developing your leaders so they can make better decisions for themselves. And finally, the last factor to pay attention to is the future focus that you have. Are you managing day-to-day or quarter-to-quarter, or are you actually thinking about five or seven years out, do you have robust systems for planning and for development?

Speaker 2: 24:12

And probably one of the best examples of this has been Google, where, when it comes to everything from autonomous vehicles to AI, google spends a lot of time thinking about the future and planning beyond just where they are today or where they are this quarter, and that can be incredibly hard for folks. The CEO and co-founder of Google, larry Page, talked about this. He said that, you know, a few years back, when I was running Google, I would spend every Friday afternoon working on this 80-bit adventure, this acquisition we had made. It was a mobile operating system called Android. And he said, you know, I felt so guilty doing that every week because I thought, you know, we run based on, you know, ad-funded search. And here I am messing around with this little operating system for, you know, like 10% of my week, but I did it every week because I had an idea that it was going to be the future of the company, even though I felt so guilty because, you know, part of you thinks like you're taking your eye off the ball, and I think that's a really good rule of thumb for all of us, which is that if you don't feel guilty about how much time you're spending on the future, you're probably not doing it. And, more importantly, if you don't have robot systems so that your whole company is thinking about the future in that way, it is next to impossible to not get distracted inside sweat by what's going on today. There's just too many things coming at us.

Speaker 2: 25:42

So activated purpose, aligned culture, stakeholder centricity, next level leadership and future focus these are the factors that we see that actually determine whether a company is truly purpose driven or not.

Speaker 2: 25:55

And when you are purpose driven in that way, what we notice is customers stick with you because they believe in what you're doing. Even when you have a misstep, employees come to you and want to be a part of your team because they see that you're part of something bigger, and the outsized performance from the market is something that's transformative as well. So these are just a few provocative thoughts as we move forward. When you think about issues like sustainability, when you think about the impact that you're having on the planet, one way to think about it is to say like okay, these are just numbers that we've got to hit, but what we're finding is that's really not enough. That's just one piece. The planet is one stakeholder and to ensure that we're doing right by that stakeholder, we have to ensure we're doing right by everyone else as well, and we see no path to that over the next five or 10 years. That doesn't go straight through the growth into becoming a purpose driven company.

Speaker 3: 26:52

Looking a little bit about, an article that you wrote for Forbes. You noted in this article that nearly four years ago, that nearly 40% of CEOs across industries confessed that their current business model might not be viable in a decade Right. So, my question to you is what's going to make that number improve, or what's going to make that number better. What do you think? And then what do you think in 10 years, that percentage is going to be?

Speaker 2: 27:24

Yeah, they're not wrong. By the way, if you look back over the history, go back and look at the companies that were in the Dow Jones 100 years ago and go look at how many of them are still around not even in the Dow Jones, just still around today. It's a very small fraction of companies that are there. This is the difficult issue about it. It doesn't just come down to actions that you can take. It actually comes down to your brain wiring, because here's what we know, here's what the neuroscience tells us, and there's studies that have been done on this and research that some of my colleagues have done about this. At job.

Speaker 2: 27:57

We talk about that one factor, about being future focused. About 16 percent of human beings are future focused. 16 percent of us look at the world and say, yeah, you're at, the world's changing, we got to get going, we ought to do something about it. There's another 13, 14 percent of us who are totally past focused In our wiring, that we look at it and say, well, this is the way the world was over the last 100 years. That's going to continue in the world. We can set aside those people for a second. We can ignore them. It's the people in the middle.

Speaker 2: 28:26

70 percent of human beings are not future focused and they're not past focused. They're present focused. When you tell them that the world is changing, they inevitably have the same reaction. They say Jessica, you're right, the world is changing, but we need to focus on this quarter. That's a death sentence. That's the worst of all three why the future focused guys are going, the past focused guys are stuck. The present focused people are talking like the future focused people and acting like the past focused people. It's like they have accepted your premise and they're driving over the cliff anyway. Now here's the last thing I'll say about that. Neoplastics city is a beautiful thing. You can rewire how you think, you can change your outlook. You're thinking about life three years out, five years out, seven years out, but it takes concerted effort to think about how am I spending my time every day so that I can shift my thinking?

Speaker 3: 29:23

Which I really could listen to. You talk about this all day. I wish I could go back to school and be one of the students in your class, which brings me to the next question before I jump into questions from the audience. We talked a little bit about this, about who my ideal person would be to talk to during the next couple of days. I mentioned students, so creating the next generation of purpose driven leaders. For years, you've been teaching your courses at Stanford on need finding, so how are you able to connect with today's aspiring leaders and really get them to embrace this notion of need finding?

Speaker 2: 30:06

Yeah, students nowadays are a very different group, by and large, than where they were 20 years ago. They're coming in with a sense that the world is not in a good place, not always in a healthy place. It's why so many of our students are plagued by anxiety and depression right now. It's very hard to. From the very time that you're born and you're growing up and you pay attention to the world, they told you that the planet's dying To live with that every single day.

Speaker 2: 30:33

For those of us who learn facts about climate change in our 20s or our 30s, it's hard to have empathy for what that's like when it's entirely part of your worldview.

Speaker 2: 30:45

So the biggest thing we can do is to give them structures and habits for thinking. I say it's not completely hopeless. We face these challenges in other times in the past. You remember some of us are old enough to remember when we discovered there was a hole in the ozone layer that we were all going to die because of that. We did something about that. We actually changed the course of our planet's history, but we actually were able to heal that horrible hole that was actually going to destroy life if it continued down that path. So, yeah, things are horrible, but there's still hope out there and there's still so much that we can do. I think, whether you're talking about climate change, whether you're talking about social fragmentation in our society, these things can shift. For me personally, jessica, I truly believe that because of things like climate change, artificial intelligence, social fragmentation, the next 10 years are going to determine how happy people are going to be for the next 1000 years.

Speaker 3: 31:47

Wow, that's a pretty powerful statement. That is a pretty powerful statement. Well, again, I appreciate it. Did you want to say something before I move, John? No, it's a powerful statement.

Speaker 2: 31:59

The minute I said it I kind of want to throw up a little in my mouth. It's the most overdramatic thing I've ever heard. I just keep looking at all the facts. I cannot conclude otherwise. It sounds ridiculous to me even as I'm saying it, but I think it's true.

Speaker 3: 32:14

I'm not going to disagree with you there, not at all. Let's talk a little bit about engagement. So what is the best way to get engagement on these ways of driving impact from external companies that are focused on driving down costs and expenses in general?

Speaker 2: 32:31

Right Now. Here's the good thing that a lot of companies found, which is that better treatment of your wastewater actually lowers costs. Managing effluent actually lowers costs. There's all sorts of things that fall within the category of better environmental and energy management that are actually cost reduction, because a lot of that equates to waste.

Speaker 2: 32:57

What we're also finding now, though, is that it can also lead to upside, because, as we saw with some of those companies that truly are purpose-driven, pat Igo dee gets to charge more for its fleece, because it's not just about the vest. You're not buying the vest, you're buying into an idea, and so there's not just a downside, there's an upside to be had too. And oh, by the way, it's not just about revenue and expenses, it's about share price if you're a publicly traded company, and so if you are one of those folks who part of your kids' college fund is in your company's stock, then you all want to be paying attention to that too, because driving that share price will have direct impact positively on your kids' college fund, and that can come by actually saying how do we embrace our role on the planet?

Speaker 3: 33:53

My question, follow up to that, is what if you are dealing with those high level stakeholders who are still taking a backseat to what's going on in the world today, and how do you not push too much but, at the same time, get them to really buy into this is what's going to be best from this company, and giving them data points?

Speaker 2: 34:16

Yeah, and so here's the thing again. I'll go back to the psychology around this, right, I think that a lot of us, when we're trying to make that pitch, we think about, you know, like long-term opportunity. If we do long-term upside, if we do this, here's all the good things that could happen, right, and that's because so many of us and so many of us that are here today, are very future focused people, right, but on some level we're preaching to the converted here this morning. But here's the thing you got to keep in mind most people are present focus and they don't care about long-term upside, they care about short-term downside. Here's how I'm going to get killed today. Many people once thinking about all this purpose stuff until Bud Light happened, right, that was not a long-term thing, that was two months and suddenly your sales were in decline. So, rather than talking about long-term pleasure, think about short-term pain, right? And how do you avoid that today? Now, that's not going to be fun for you, that's not appealing to you, but it is how to reach your stakeholders.

Speaker 3: 35:19

So Bud Light, what would you have done? What advice would you have given them?

Speaker 2: 35:23

Right. I mean, here's the biggest challenge with Bud Light, right, independent of what your politics are, personally, for me and this is just my worldview I have no problem whether you are straight or queer or trans. That's perfectly fine, right. But for Bud Light it was strategically it seemed like a random thing, right, it seemed completely out of step. That's very different. When Patagonia says like no, we're not going to sell fleeces to people who are polluting the environment, you kind of say, yeah, I get that because you're Patagonia, because it's aligned with a greater purpose. In the case of Bud Light, it was kind of like a random marketing campaign created by one executive inside the company, in a company that thought they could keep their heads down and not state their values, not state their purpose. And in fact you hear the CEO and he's like, well, can we just get back to selling beer? Those days are gone.

Speaker 2: 36:21

Well thank you.

Speaker 3: 36:23

So I know we are running short on time right now, but this question came in from an attendee who really wants to know more about how Whole Foods can hold stakes holder centricity and maintain a purpose after being acquired by a purpose quote neutral company being Amazon.

Speaker 2: 36:42

Yeah, and here's the thing, full disclosure. I'm an Amazon Prime member. That doesn't oh, by the way, a majority of Americans are, but I use it Amazon on a fairly regular basis. Does Amazon reflect my values? Not at all. It's a useful tool for me to have right.

Speaker 2: 37:02

And when Whole Foods was acquired by Amazon, it was like the clock started on an interesting experiment. Will Whole Foods stay a Whole Foods? Will Amazon be able to grow Whole Foods to make it more like itself, more like Whole Foods, or will it slowly crush it and erode it and make it more like Amazon over time? And full disclosure. I don't know the answer to that. I'm kind of worried, right, I know everybody who's loved Whole Foods for a long time is worried. There are examples of companies who have done better not perfect, but better. With that, unilever has done a better job in its governance than Ben and Jerry's over the last couple of decades since the acquisition. We're waiting to see what happens with Amazon over time. John Mackey, the founder and CEO, left at the end of last year, so the clock is ticking. We'll see what happens.

Speaker 3: 37:58

How much time do we give them?

Speaker 2: 38:00

That's a really good question.

Speaker 3: 38:04

I guess there really is no answer to that one, and I think yeah.

Speaker 2: 38:08

It's a great opportunity for another company who wants to start a grocery store. Who's aligned with your values, though, isn't it?

Speaker 3: 38:16

Always opportunities out there, definitely. I know we're coming up. We have about five more minutes with Dave this morning. I wish we had a little bit longer to talk with him, but hopefully we'll get to do this again. So is it possible to change current driven people to future focus, and, in your experience, how long does that typically take and what methods have worked best?

Speaker 2: 38:40

Yeah. The short answer is it's much easier to change yourself than it is to change other people. So start with yourself and just check in with that and say, okay, look, how much of my time am I spending thinking about the future. An exercise that I give some of the execs that I advise is to start counting your time and see Meaning, like take your Outlook calendar or your Google calendar and at the end of every day just go through and market and say, okay, did I spend time on the future in this meeting here? Okay, I'll label it green. It wasn't about the past. I'll label it blue. Was this managing for the present? I'll label it red. Right, you can just color code your time at the end of the day, every day. Like, why do you do that?

Speaker 2: 39:28

If you want to lose weight, a lot of people say one of the first things you can do is start logging what you eat. Right, start noticing your habits. Well, the same thing is true for thinking about the problems that you're solving. Just start logging your time and start saying was this building the future? Was this about managing the present? Was this about defending the past? And every day, do that.

Speaker 3: 39:50

So what's an ideal percentage then?

Speaker 2: 39:53

You know? Here's the thing. I don't know that we have a strict number, because it depends on what your role is in a community or in a business. I would say just look for. Do you have any sort of parity there? What you'll find when we do this exercise is it's less than 5% of your time is spent on the future. For most of us, right. A lot of your time is spent on the present, and by present I mean if you're at a retailer and you're thinking about the holiday promotions that you're gonna do in December and it's July, that's basically the present, right. Anything under the next year and a half or two years is present.

Speaker 3: 40:31

Is the present and great advice to give our audience today. Great advice, anything. I'm gonna give you the floor for the last couple of minutes If you give us the biggest key takeaways from you. What do you want our attendees to leave with? I think they should go and do a homework assignment to write down what they're doing in their outlook. I'm gonna do the same thing.

Speaker 2: 40:55

Yeah right.

Speaker 2: 40:56

I would tell you it's too easy right now to descend into these are good companies and these are evil companies and what we find is they're just companies out there and they're just on different stages of development. It's too easily to kind of descend into capes, right, and to me that violates a core value of mine, which is compassion. Right, and realize most of us are just trying to get through the day. Right, on the issue of sustainability, we're just trying to get a little bit better every day. If you could actually start from a place of compassion rather than recrimination and say, okay, how do we move the needle forward in a little way, what's something small that I can do, that my team can do, that my company can do? Maybe it just starts by logging my time right. How do I do that first, rather than sitting there and saying, oh, this is all horrible, but progress over perfection is, I think, how you move forward.

Speaker 3: 41:51

That is the same advice that I give my kids progress over perfection. We do not expect you to be perfect, but we expect you to show progress, and if not, we can have those discussions.

Speaker 1: 42:02

Thank you for being on with us today. In the next 60 seconds, ask yourself how can I contribute to a brighter, more sustainable future? Let's embark on this journey together and shape the landscape of sustainable, purpose-driven leadership for tomorrow. Take the first step now and make a commitment to lead with sustainability in mind. Connect with Dave on LinkedIn to continue the conversation, share your thoughts and explore potential collaborations. That's all for this episode of Sustainability Unveiled. Join us next time as we continue exploring the forefront of environmental and ethical practices. Until then, stay informed, stay sustainable.