All right. I wanted to show you some examples of some of these companies that have integrated the some you will recognise right away,
some you will have never heard of. Okay. And there are of all types, and I think it's worth sort of looking at some of these.
And so I'll start. And they're from everywhere. By the way, the biggest contingent of big corporations is called Sistema B in Latin America.
They are the today the largest growing regional group of big corporations in Latin America.
It seems that you know, that others you know, I am in December,
I'm due to go to Singapore because Singapore is [INAUDIBLE] bent on setting up big corporations in Singapore.
So that will be really interesting. But again, you know, I don't want to give you the impression that this is it's a movement, but it's just starting.
And if you're going to be future proofing your business, you've got to be thinking about what's coming down the pike.
What is it that's going to really make me strong in terms of not just financial bottom line, but other aspects of what it is I am doing.
It doesn't mean that you, you know, have to go out and hug trees and do stuff that, you know, you naturally wouldn't do.
But but it does mean that whatever business, whether you're in technology, whether you're in agriculture, where any business,
you've got to be thinking about some of the aspects to do with workers and some of the aspects to do with,
you know, community, some of the aspects to do with environment that are so much this.
This is a Canadian company. Hi, my name is Andy Sinclair and I'm the CEO of SIM Inc.
A Task B, which is looking in children's ears or adults ears with an OTA scope,
is one of the worst acquired medical skills, a typical medical student and hence a general practitioner.
A paediatrician will have about 50% accuracy in diagnosing ear problems.
What autism does is that it acts as a bridge. First, you need to understand the problem.
Normally, a doctor will learn by hands on experience.
In the case of an infected ear, you're not going to be able to call a bunch of residents over to poke in a small child's ear and have a look.
So what happens is they learn from a book and then they're thrown into the clinic.
Autism acts as a learning bridge between that book, Learning or PowerPoint Learning and the actual hands on clinic.
Well, I think business always has the same role, and that role is to meet a societal need and turn a profit.
Making money is important, but it's not our objective.
At the same time, I started to hear about big corporations and I looked at one of my co-workers and I said, I guess we're a B Corp.
What being a B corp means to me is that a primary objective is to do good.
Making money is something we have to do to allow that primary objective to be that.
So that's the first one. This one you will all recognise.
But this is really interesting to see what they've done and how they do it so that if you buy an ice cream.
All right, make ways that injuries, as you know, has a three part mission statement product, social and economic, and especially the social mission.
Part of it is probably why I stayed with the company as long as I had like that.
Our approach to social mission is to actually work our way from inside the paint out.
So where we want to start is with the dairy.
And so we made a stand on making sure that we support all the family farmers from which we saw dairy so that they can have more sustainable,
profitable family farms. And we work our way through the point to the ingredients like sugar, cocoa, banana, coffee, vanilla.
Those five core ingredients are all Fairtrade certified as we get all the way to the packaging, how can this packaging be environmentally sustainable?
So we get Forest Stewardship Council certified paperboard.
As we prosper, they prosper. We want to use our business and our business model of linked prosperity.
To show that the communities where we're sourcing our ingredients from,
where we're selling our products and where we manufacture our products are a part of the prosperity of our growing business.
And Ben and Jerry's, in the spirit of transparency and really trying to be a better company,
decided to issue a social report and an environmental report like that.
The role of my team in Link Prosperity is helping bring that visual identity to life, to use this company to create positive change in the world.
That's what I'm hired to do. So. I don't even know why.
Like, I don't. I don't know why. It just feels like the right thing to do.
There are a lot of places you could work and spend your day wondering if you've made a difference.
Sometimes we succeed at the end. Sometimes we don't.
But we're not faking it. Everyone in the world gets a positive feeling and gets a happiness when they contribute,
when they have a purpose, when they make a difference in their community.
You know, we speak to the aspiring activist inside all of us.
There are little kind of flowers blooming around prosperity within within the company right now.
And it feels really, really good. It's an important part of our mission that gives us, at least in my mind, the credibility to be challenging others.
And again, it's not something that we're trying to hold for ourselves or something that we're trying to invite the whole world to join us.
That three free pints a day that either. This next one is probably one of the most visionary banks.
It's existed over 25 years.
It's Dutch based, but it has branches throughout Europe and it's not promoting itself in this video and you'll see it at the very end.
But it has such an interesting way of looking at how it does its business.
It is also a retail bank, so if you invest in it, your returns are actually market based,
but they're actually going to help fund some of the things that they're going to talk about.
So it's not this do gooder bank. It's actually a full fledged bank and it's called Triodos Bank.
It's the talk of the town. Growth only growing enough.
And do we actually need to grow? At the moment, we're fixated on numbers.
But what does the numbers say about us? Are we suddenly 0.1% happier and the next minute point 1% unhappier?
Or is growth really only about buying more stuff and selling more?
You can also look at growth another way, and then you'll see that we're actually doing pretty well.
Yes, we're building fewer new offices and shopping centres, but we're also improving the schools, hospitals and nursing homes we already have.
By making them more energy efficient. We save money which can pay for more teachers and carers.
Now that's growth. And yes, fewer cars are being sold, yet we are more mobile than ever.
Cars are becoming much easier to share, just like music and houses and all kinds of other stuff.
So what's bad for the economy is actually good for society.
We grow by sharing and sometimes by doing nothing.
More and more gardeners are fighting garden pests with ladybirds, not pesticides.
So sometimes doing something small is the best way to achieve something big.
There are families who are starting their own energy companies, butchers who make meat from plants.
Entrepreneurs who are busy inventing things today that will make the world a little better tomorrow.
More and more people and businesses are taking things into their own hands and are helping us grow like never before.
A type of growth is about more than just numbers. It's really quite simple.
Everything you give attention to grows. What do you want to grow?
Follow your heart. Use your head. Triodos bank.
If anybody wants to work for a really fantastic financial institution, that's the one to go to.
And, you know, I have to say that one of the things that's interesting throughout,
you know, my 66 years of life now has been that earlier years when I was about your age,
I guess, and working at the World Bank started out as a young professional there,
and I was convinced that the World Bank was going to change the world.
Obviously, the World Bank. And and so I joined with, you know, just these huge expectations.
And what I found was I would be assigned to go and look at the feasibility of a project, multi-million dollar project and some growth market.
They didn't even call them. They call them, you know, developing countries.
And my entire week that I was there,
I would spend between the fancy hotel that they put me up in and the and the Ministry of Finance, and it would go back and forth.
Now, mind you, this was 20 that this was 30 years ago.
So the bank has hopefully changed somewhat.
I think it certainly has changed its rhetoric. But they would come back and they would say, well, what do you think?
Is this a worthwhile investment? And I would say, I have no idea.
I have no idea. I never went to see where this is going to be developed.
And all I saw were numbers. I never talked to people who were actually in these communities where they were.
And, you know, we know the results of these kinds of, you know, situations where they ignored what we're trying to now incorporate into.
So it's not just about building a business.
It's about building a mindset of what it is and how you engage the people that you are going to actually sell to your clients.
The bank didn't have a client mentality. It was like, Oh, these poor people, they don't know what they want.
We do, and oftentimes entrepreneurs do the same thing.
Oftentimes entrepreneurs will go, I've got such a great idea who isn't going to buy this one?
And then they go down into their cave and they pull out this incredible business plan, which has nothing to do with reality.
And then they go, Gee, I wonder why this isn't working.
And it is amazing to see how many times that actually happens where nobody has consulted the people that they're supposed to be actually selling to.
So that is a big, big thing that you keep when you build your business.
Don't go about it. Remember that there's a great book that you must read.
It's called Getting to Plan B by Randy Commissar and John Mullins.
It basically is very focussed on how do you build a business from scratch and that your plan A may well
turn out to be well will turn out hopefully to be not where you go and you may well get to plan J,
you know, all the way down to Plan Z before you actually have something that's worth doing.
And I think that that is a really interesting sort of take away fight in terms of where you're going.
So don't expect your first idea or whatever to be it.
It really is going to take many permutations. And now I'm going to show you one final clip, which I find fascinating, and this one is inspiring.
This man, Dave Steiner, was working at a major publicly listed company in the United States called Waste Management Inc,
which probably had one of the worst reputations in terms of waste management in the United States.
And he came in and talk about pivot, pivot, an entire multibillion dollar company around.
And he's going to tell you just this is an hour long.
I have cut it down to like 8 minutes so that you can hear the major highlights of how now he doesn't get into how, because in 8 minutes he can't.
But what has happened in terms of this major waste company and how they have done this?
And as I said, this is a publicly listed company.
So it goes all the way from the guy with the, you know, medical thing in the ear and everything else all the way up to the top.
And let's see how that that works. I love this guy.
He's just talk about an inspiration. I want to get him here.
We're the largest recycler in the United States, probably the largest recycler in the world.
Five years ago, we did about 6 million tons of recyclables.
That's enough to fill the Transamerica building, I think, 50 times over.
So as the largest recycler, we said, you know, we have a goal to try to become even bigger, try to become even better.
And so our goal was to recycle 20 million tons of recyclables by 2020.
How have we done so far? In the last four years, we've doubled the amount of recyclables from about 6 million tonnes to about 12 million tonnes now.
And we'll talk a little bit later about what we can do to drive that goal from 12 million tons to 20 million tons by 2020.
And actually keep try to drive it over the long term even further than that.
The second is to double the amount of waste based energy that we produce.
You know, folks don't realise this about waste management, but we at the core are a waste company.
But one of the things that we actually are is an energy company now.
You know, when you think about renewable energy, you don't generally think about garbage.
You think about things like solar or wind power. An interesting fact for you.
Waste management. Just one company. Waste management.
We actually create more electricity from waste than the entire solar industry in the United States.
The entire solar industry. And it's not even close.
We produce about 2 to 3 times more power than the entire solar industry in the United States, just out of waste.
Our third goal is to reduce the emissions out of our fleet by 15% by 2020.
Now, the good news here is that we've actually achieve this goal way ahead of Target this year.
We've reduced emissions out of our fleet by 20%. So as a CEO, what do you do when you meet your goal?
Do you have a party and say, we're done? Yeah, you you have a party, but you never say you're done.
And so we said we're going to said we're going to make a new goal. Right.
And I think by 2020, we can reduce the emissions in our fleet by over 50%.
I'd love to see us reduce the emissions in our fleet by over 75%.
And that's what we're going to be shooting for by 2020 to at least get 50% less emissions out of our fleet every year.
And then the final goal that we have is a goal of turning all of the sites that we have throughout the United States.
You know, for for years and years and years, we've been picking up waste and disposing of them in sanitary, safe landfills.
Now, you know, those landfills can't be used for development, but what can they be used for?
They can be used for a lot of different things. We chose to make them into wildlife refuge.
And so we've got our goal was to have 100 of our sites, about 1 to 25000 acres turned into wildlife refuges.
I'm glad to say that we've also exceeded that goal early 134 of our sites, about 28,000 acres have been certified as wildlife refuges.
But, you know, we don't want to stop there.
We certainly don't want to take those goals and say we've now achieved and we're not going to do any more.
We're going to continue to do more and we're going to continue to add to those goals.
And, you know, obviously those goals are laudable, but I recognise that when we look at the goals that we set at Waste Management,
we look at them through the waste management lens. Right.
When you think about sustainability and you think about the networks developed around sustainability,
we all look at the world through a particular lens and there's really nothing we can do about that.
But what we can do is to say, okay, I recognise that Waste Management looks at the world through our lens and what is in our land.
You know, we're a for profit company, obviously. We're a company that's built to serve our communities.
We have the different lenses that we look through that the waste management lenses.
But I realise that the other networks that we interact with don't look at the world through the same lens.
And so you can do one of two things. You can say, Well, okay, they look at the world through a different lens.
Let's forget about that and look at the world through our land.
Or you can say, How do we work with those networks to try to see the world through their lens?
Because if you don't, that's where you get into the dangerous things that happen, whether it's at a company, at a government or within a network.
When you stop looking outside of your network to understand how people outside of your network view you and what you do,
that's when you start to stagnate. So what we've committed to doing is not only interacting with networks,
but helping to build networks so that we can learn more about what the lens that other folks look at our business is.
And we can then take that and shape it into what we look at for the strategy for waste management going forward.
And so, you know, that's all very well and good, but what do we ultimately do with this?
I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that we've done, looking at the world through the lens of other networks.
And talk a little bit about what waste management done has done to to change itself to meet the needs of those networks.
Let's start out with. General Motors. You know, we all know General Motors.
Very big manufacturer. And General Motors has a number of manufacturing plants throughout the United States.
Well, General Motors came to us and they said, look, we would love for you to take our plants and turn them into zero waste manufacturing facilities.
Now, when the name of your company is Waste Management and someone comes to you and says, we want to turn something into zero waste.
That sounds like a pretty big threat to your business model.
And we looked at that and we said, you know, that is a that is a threat to our business model.
But there's also an opportunity in there. Right.
So in other words, we could have looked at it and said, we're going to look at this through the waste management lens.
And I will tell you, there are plenty of people in our industry that look at it at that lens and say what we're going to do when someone
talks about zero waste is we are going to fight that tooth and nail and we're going to say that that can never happen.
Let's fight it. Let's just make sure that doesn't happen. And waste management, we said, you know what, let's find the opportunity in zero waste.
And General Motors is a perfect example of how we did that. We took General Motors and we did just that.
We brought them down to zero waste. Now, you might say zero waste for waste management means zero profitability.
Right. So how are you meeting the needs of waste management, even though you're meeting the needs of General Motors?
Well, it's pretty simple. The way we got them to zero waste is not by doing different things with their waste.
The way we got them to zero waste was not looking at their waste as waste.
Right. We looked at their waste as materials. Materials that you could do different things with to extract value out of them.
So whether it's reusing them, recycling them, or creating energy out of them,
we found things that we could do with those materials that actually created a revenue stream that
allowed waste management to make more profit and allow General Motors to lower their overall cost.
I'll stop here. I think you get the point. And this is this is something that's really important.
And there are some great books out there. One is called The Medici Effect, and it's by Franz Johansson, published by Harvard Business Press.
And what he basically says is that true disruptive innovation happens at the intersection.
There is basically, you know, what we would call iterative innovation or innovation that builds and builds and builds on itself.
And then there is completely disruptive innovation.
And that if you really today the the the the big challenges of the world are partly being met by this progressive innovation.
But to really meet the challenges, we have to begin to look at intersections and one intersections.
What he's talking about is different disciplines.
That's why as much as I love MBAs, MBAs are not going to change the world unless you're working with engineers, political scientists, philosophers.
Diversity, diversity. Diversity.
In terms of your networks and as you build your business is incredibly important for you not to get stuck in what Dave is talking about,
which is only validating through your own lenses and through your own networks, because that will simply not do.
I mean, I don't know if many of you have been down to the Eden Project in Cornwall,
but it was started by a fantastic entrepreneur named Tim Smith and he fortunately is a very good friend and often comes to Oxford.
And when he does, I thoroughly. You will. You will. Totally fall in love with this man.
He's one of the funniest people on the planet. And one of the things he says is, I only accept every third invitation.
Now he gets asked to speak everywhere. He's a very popular speaker.
Why would he say, I only accept every third invitation?
He says his PR threatened to resign when she heard this.
What would be the reason for that? Imagine if you only accepted every third invitation.
The reason being, he says, if you only go to the folks you usually hang out with.
You don't meet people that you would never meet. In other words, he said, I've met, you know, wild orchid growers and.
And he says and they always turn out to be absolutely fascinating people that end up
being somehow enhancing my perspective and somehow enhancing the work that we do at Eden.
And and and why that has been so important.
And the other thing that he says, which I will leave you with a parting thought,
which I find I've just so often thought about this and it's kind of cruel, but it's true.
Kill all the negative people. The times when you were building your business and you will be told it cannot be done.
You're insane. Your own family, your own friends, your mom, your dad, everything else.
Oh, my God. Get a normal job, for God's sakes, you know?
I mean, you know, the weird thing is, I found myself doing the same thing, so, you know, don't.
But I can tell you that this is one of the most difficult things for entrepreneurs.
And when you're building your business,
especially if you have a disruptive idea or even one that's not so disruptive, I want to go and build this business.
They're like, Why? Why don't you go and work in an investment bank where you have a steady salary and monthly, you know,
and vacations and you can sort of, you know, marry the woman of our dreams or hopefully yours and you know why.
So you're going to really if you're serious about building a business, you're going to find a lot of opposition.
So this is a paradox. Listen.
But don't listen. Okay. And you will find a lot of people wanting to kill your idea.
But a lot of people will start wanting to help you get a different perspective.
So knowing when to take what is what's going to be the biggest challenge.
Thank you.