Paul is the former CEO of Unilever (2009-2019), the co-author of Net Positive, and the co-Chair of Imagine. In this episode, we discuss how to build a business that services all of its constituents—and merits their trust. For Paul, this requires putting sustainability at the core of the company strategy, and creating a more empowering organization.
Episode Links:
Net Positive
Imagine
The Net Positive Manifesto (Harvard Business Review)
Unilever’s Sustainability Report
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Frances is the J.W. McConnell chair of social innovation at Canada’s University of Waterloo and co-author of Getting to Maybe. In this episode, we discuss what it takes to be a successful system-level activist.
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Zeynep is a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of The Good Jobs Solution.
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Eric is the bestselling author of the "Lean Startup” and the founder of the Long Term Stock Exchange. In this episode, we discuss the challenge of turning established companies intro entrepreneurial hotbeds.
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For the past 4 years, Bill Anderson, CEO of Roche Pharmaceutical has been leading a crusade to “smash” bureaucracy. In this blunt and provocative conversation, Bill talks with Gary about what it takes to vanquish bureaucracy.
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Why is management research so poorly funded? Would anyone notice if b-school researchers took a 10-year holiday? These are the questions Gary Hamel addresses in his wide-ranging and provocative take on the state of management research.
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Every organization on the planet has been engineered for efficiency, but few have been engineered for innovation.
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Management was invented by engineers and accountants, and it shows. Too many organizations view human beings as mere “resources”. Until this changes our organizations will be less energetic, less creative and less resilient than the people within them.
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For a hundred years bureaucrats have tried to turn human beings into semi-programmable robots. Now that we have real robots, we need to let human beings do what they do best: dream, imagine and create.
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At its core, virtually every large organization is a bureaucracy. That’s a problem, because bureaucracies are poorly suited to a world of head-snapping change, unconventional competitors and omnipotent customers. Few of us, though, can imagine an alternative to bureaucracy, but we must try.
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Success has never been more fleeting, and denial, arrogance and nostalgia, never more dangerous. Here’s how excellence expires and how to guard against it.
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Whilst Silicon Valley is great for the US economy, its impact on productivity and growth is modest. What’s needed is not an entrepreneurial enclave, but an economy filled with organizations that have unleashed the entrepreneurial energy of all those at work.
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In the creative economy, ingenuity counts for more than size, and agility trumps scale. Instead of bulking up, big companies need to learn how to do more with less.
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In our personal lives, we are masters of paradox, but at work we are often not trusted to balance competing objectives. This must change. We need organizations where freedom and control coexist and where employees have the information and skills to dynamically manage competing priorities.
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In a world of head-snapping change, planning is near impossible. To stay relevant, organizations must learn a lesson from biological evolution: experiment relentlessly and let the best ideas win.
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By the time a problem is big enough to capture the CEO’s scarce attention, an organization is already on the back foot. We need organizations where change is everyone’s job, not just the responsibility of those at the top, whose emotional equity is often invested in the past.
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Most change programs are belated, convulsive and ineffective. The solution: change programs that are built from the bottom up, give everyone a voice, and are emergent rather than engineered.
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Over the last 50 years, the New York Stock Exchange has outperformed all of its constituent companies. To beat this performance, companies will have to build internal markets for resource allocation.
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We all understand that innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance, the only way to outperform a mature industry, the only protection you have from commoditization and the only way to ensure long-term customer loyalty.
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A MIX Mashup special guest shares the surprising story of what happenend when the people in a Midwestern health sytem started bringing their hearts to work.
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If an organization is going to thrive in the Digital Age, its management model must be rebuilt from the ground up around the principles of the social Web. Here's a blueprint for accelerating this vital and long over-due transformation.
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A conversation with Terri Kelly, president and CEO of W.L. Gore on the celebrated company's long-running experiment in natural leadership and managing without managers.
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New workplace realities are changing the structures, compensation, and decision making of organizations. What can we do in our organizations to enlarge the leadership franchise?
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How can you make innovation an everyday, everywhere capability? Here are three critical questions you can use to test the depth of your organization’s innovation competence.
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Introducing my latest book, What Matters Now – How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation.
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In this fast-paced, idea-packed, 15-minute video essay, get a vivid picture of what it means to build organizations that are fundamentally fit for the future—and genuinely fit for human beings. It's time to radically rethink how we mobilize people and organize resources to productive ends.