FEARLESS LEADERSHIP
What we are learning about leadership in sustainability
This section aims to distill key learnings from the examples described in the handbook and from NELIS’s experience of building an ecosystem of ambitious, committed next generation leaders in the 4Revs program. Our collaboration with 240 people from 25 Japanese companies spans years of innovation research, inspirational talks and presentations, intrapreneurship courses, co-creative sessions, and many ‘Aha!’ moments.
In 2023, when asked to list challenges to sustainability in their organization, the community mentioned challenges such as:
The company has difficulty changing its mindset from economic value oriented management to environmental and social value oriented management.
Facing blockages to creating a business strategy that is not CSR, but leads to solutions to human survival issues
The difficulties of getting large corporations to be serious about social innovation
When asked to think of solutions to the challenges they identified, participants suggested:
Willingness to take environmental measures even at the cost of some losses
Share the long term vision with shareholders, and win their sympathy
The company's business transformation from economic value-oriented management to environmental and social value-oriented management
Building the skills of staff not engaged with sustainability issues
Notice how almost all of the challenges listed are complex issues, and all of the solutions point to the need to transform business as usual.
Social Intrapreneurs Journey: participants from three different companies, Toshiba, NEC and Nikken, are researching ways to support individuals in Japanese organizations to join a ‘Social Intrapreneurs Journey.’ This idea is similar to purpose driven leadership as described in the Bold Business chapter. This program aims to engender leaders with a high level of compassion and humanity. In a company, this can foster a sense of collective responsibility and shared commitment, create unity and innovation among employees and stakeholders, as well as contribute to societal and environmental betterment.
The examples in the book cover different innovations: from smaller initiatives with a broad scope (spreading sustainable cultivation of a lesser known tropical forest food - Jungle Project in Costa Rica), to large scale corporation efforts (NESTE switching from oil refining to producing renewable aviation fuel). Some examples are made possible by national policies (Nant de Drance in Switzerland), and other examples are the policy (the Belgian city of Ghent’s food policy). No matter their scale or context, learning from the stories means to learn from the people and communities which make change happen. This is a way to be well accompanied in your own path, as sustainability can be a long journey.
Takeaway 1: Sustainability is the business plan.
Business is central to the web of authority, power, wealth that governs our societies. Its levers for enacting change cannot be underestimated.
If the starting point for businesses is to meet shareholder profitability instead of, say, social gains, then we risk compromising the change that we want to achieve. That is because we are acting within the boundaries of the existing frame, the competitive growth economy. Instead, we should ask: how can we maximize social impact while staying within our shareholder commitments? If that is not possible, could we revisit and adjust our shareholder commitments? Unilever’s Paul Polman’s Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) shows that sometimes, radical ways are needed to shake the system around. He confronted the shareholders with the obvious truths and with an uncompromising vision. The chapter on Bold Business offers many exemplary guidelines for how business can be, at the core, radically beneficial for humans and the planet.
All the smaller companies we featured in this book have sustainability in their DNA, as a starting point. The Jungle Project is not just an operational business processing breadfruit, it is also training farmers to diversify crops and income, and working to create market demand. Their business model requires the team to build an entire tropical agroforestry ecosystem almost from scratch. In this way they can achieve their purpose to feed over 3.6 million people globally.
Being a small company doesn’t mean that you cannot take on big sustainability goals. Earlier in 2023 at Davos, Majik Water, a Kenyan female led startup, covered in 4Revs back in 2020, was chosen as one of the 10 Top Innovators from the UpLink Global Freshwater Challenge. They are now getting support to scale their water generating system which captures water moisture from the air. Another winner of this competition, also a 4Revs example, is Indra Water (India), a startup in its growth phase which has treated over 750 million liters of wastewater for reuse, using zero chemicals. Both startups are leading with a global mission: to help more than a billion people to cope with life threatening water security crises.
Are we merely instigating individual changes or influencing and inspiring collective action? Epic Cleantec’s circular water infrastructure, a leading example featured in Ways of Water, shows how leadership can shine. Their innovative water management solution is showcased in the tallest building in San Francisco (61 floors) and the largest commercial building in the US with an on-site water recycling system (Salesforce software company). Its water reuse system saves 113,000 liters of freshwater a day. This success story can go a long way to inspire others in the industry to make changes to their water infrastructure. In 2023, Epic Cleantec was ranked nr. 1 in the Small and Mighty: 10-100 Employees list by Fast Company, and also one of the winners of the Uplink Challenge.
Takeaway 2: To keep a business purpose-driven, fearless leaders push boundaries consistently.
Merely a third of the largest 2000 publicly listed companies have made commitments for zero emissions. While radical actions are needed to progress towards real change, we recognise that leaders today act within constraints. A 2022 survey on corporate sustainability found that “the more that leaders try to operationalize sustainability, the more they find their organizations are ill equipped for the task — out of alignment and lacking essential skills and metrics. The problems are internal.“ (source)
It doesn’t help that the voluntary carbon reduction schemes, the ESGs and the CSR framework are not well regulated. This enables a lot of greenwashing and risks fueling the same mechanisms for limitless extraction of wealth and resources at the expense of the environment and most people on Earth. Not only is systemic greenwashing not propelling us in the right direction, it actually hinders the potential for authentic sustainability. It captures resources, it masks gaps, it derails progress. Marjorie Kelly calls this “wealth supremacy” and argues just how pervasive these practices are.
Hence, we should be careful when we label something as sustainable. As leaders, to stay value-driven and not veer off course is difficult. Learning to spot the limits of mainstream solutions is a much needed skill. We need it in order to push any system to do better. Staying true to the course of sustainability requires constant adjustment. As one is attuned to monitor the stock market, or price signals of commodities, the sustainability leadership requires monitoring the latest in science and innovations, and how these factor into sustainability trajectories. For instance, before 2022 the category of ‘novel entities’ pertaining to planetary boundaries was not calculated. However, now we know this threshold is already severely transgressed, so we need immediate recalibration in the amount and types of chemicals that are produced and designed into products. “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better,” as National Poet Laureate of the US, Maya Angelou counseled.
NESTE shows that a company is never too old or too big to change course. Its transformation journey from an oil refiner to one of the world’s largest producers of renewable diesel shows that. NESTE is featured as a sustainability leadership example in Bio-based Materials. Another example of companies committed to their strategic impact in an industry are Riversimple (automobile industry) and Tony Chocoloney (chocolate industry), who “locked” their missions in order to recommit to their purpose. Taking extra steps to put sustainability at the center and protect it from drifting away (!) signals relentless fighting and is a feature of fearless leadership.
Takeaway 3: Fearless leadership is a quality of people, businesses and communities altogether. It is collaborative.
It is said that change starts from within each person, but as we have seen, making systemic change requires leaders to redesign the entire system around them. Like the GAIA example of the butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon, or the first follower to stand up to support the leader, is hard to model tipping points of bold individual actions, yet these changes reverberate and help to shift the system more broadly. When others join together in supporting these changes, we see from the examples in this book that most innovations are led by collectives.
The public policy and program Ghent En Garde mobilized an entire network of stakeholders to pursue a sustainable food system in Ghent, Belgium: food businesses, NGOs, citizen collectives, even cultural centers. Surely, there might have been an unsung public servant hero who acted as an enabler. After all, a city Food Council was set in place and mandated to lead. Perhaps they were the ones who had the vision, or perhaps they put the stamp allowing a high stakes action to proceed, or perhaps their leadership was simply to choose to not block an action (In so far as governments are concerned, this counts as fearlessness!). But ultimately, in this story, the fearless leader is collective, it is everyone in the city who participated in the consultations and who led an initiative. Contributing to an integrated approach, being a piece in the puzzle, can go a long way towards sustained impact.
How do we replace iron and steel with fossil free alternatives? These are technology breakthroughs that the whole world is waiting for. It is hardly a task for one company. As Hybrit’s case shows, the leadership is shared between three companies representing the value chain: an iron supplier, an electricity provider and a steel company. The Swedish state also plays a major role, investing massively in the development and aligning the R&D with policy, for example by phasing out of coal-based blast furnaces. The Volvo Group vehicle manufacturer is also collaborating to create fossil-free steel vehicles with Hybrit. This shows that the narrative of a green future needs to permeate at all levels of the value chain in order for its achievement to be possible. Everyone has a role to play as a leader.
Takeaway 4: For leaders to succeed, they need continuous support and validation.
“I want to become the first penguin to jump in the ocean.. then everyone will follow”, a 4Revs participant bravely confessed in a conversation. This penguin jump inspired American teacher Randy Pauch to offer a “First Penguin Award” to his student teams taking the biggest risk in their project. The message he was sending was that we need to support out-of-the-box thinking, despite the failure that comes with it. Like the first penguin jump, leadership in true sustainability is a gamble, and can fail. That “failure” is part of how true innovation works, and doesn’t make an initiative less inspiring.
Some businesses covered in 4Revs did not succeed, yet their leadership shines through. In Argentina, Agustina Ricanoldi was one of the first fashion store owners in Latin America who implemented vegan leathers in her collections. She started her company called Numero 52 in 2016, selling handmade bags made with traditional leather. But soon after she started a flourishing business that was doubling the monthly sales, she became aware of the climate crisis news and its connection to the meat industry and decided to change the materials she was using in her business and source vegan leather. In an interview in 2021 with 4Revs’s Christopher Brosse, Agustina confessed that she still wasn't sure if vegan leather was more sustainable than traditional leather, due to the environmental cost of shipping almost every material she uses, and the fact that it is less durable than traditional leather. She had to accept that: “We live in a transition from a linear to a circular economy, so it is normal to deal with some incoherences (...) when applying alternative materials.”
As of 2022, Numero 52 is closed. While there are many reasons why businesses and great ideas fail, the lack of a local supply network or partnerships might have contributed greatly to the fragility of the supply chain.
Conclusion
Fearless leadership rests on values like the ones that we describe in the 4Revs value compass. Whether we talk about purpose driven, regenerative business, or use other words to describe leadership in sustainability, what we mean is that we need to follow the path of authentic sustainability. Any commitment to progress and innovation needs to double up as a commitment to value all of Earth’s resources and beings in the process.
In practice, however, sustainability is a spectrum, and it is cumulative. Often, a company or product might not achieve 100% sustainability, yet a leader’s continuous journey to understand the intricacies of the system and live up to an unwavering commitment. Committing oneself to asking critical questions - like the ones in this handbook - go a long way. Once one question is answered, then start with another. The examples in this book highlight the importance of embracing change and continually striving for more responsible practices, even when faced with obstacles and uncertainty. The challenges not only give us better answers to the question of sustainability, but ultimately give us better businesses, too.
Whether you are articulating for yourself a commitment, or perhaps you are already well on your sustainability path, we aspire that this book has been able to shed some light on new innovations and perspectives for sustainability. Listening carefully, preserving critical judgment, having a value compass, and modeling fearless leadership are all ways to start. There are a multiplicity of ways to walk the path of sustainability, hopefully you are motivated to pick up your value compass and start where you are, in your home, business, and community. We have a responsibility to create a better world, and this starts now.
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