Leading in Business for Sustainability in the 2020s

There are some people that make their work just another thing they have to do, and there are those that make their work something that they want to do. Welcome to Working on Purpose with your host Elise Cortez. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration from those people who have found deeper meaning and personal connection to their work life. It's beyond nine to five. It's working on Purpose. Now Here is your host, Elise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working on a Purpose Show. Thanks for tuning in again this week. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez, joining you line from Dallas, Texas, which is home base for me. If you've been tuning in for a while, you know this program as an inspirational thought leadership platform that advances the conversation on living and working with passion, inspiration, and purpose. I'm committed to helping create a world where business and capitalism are a force for good, constantly working to address the immense number of problems society faces, serving all stakeholders, certainly it's employees among them. The Gallup Organization reports that eighty five percent of the global workforce does not want to go to work on Monday or whenever. The shift starts. Let's change that together and instead make work and enriching part of life that ignites passion and expresses meaningful contribution through inspired leadership that elevates business. Each tweaking these conversations, I hope you walk away with something that changes the way you think, whether you can I merely put to use. Much of the content we discuss in this program is a reflection on the work I do. So as you listen, if you catch a glimpse of anything I can do to help, go to my website at least Cortez dot com and use the contact me feature to message me at any rate. I'm glad we're connected, and thanks for listening. Now on to this week's program. With us today is David Grayson, Emeritus Professor of Corporate Responsibility at Cranfield's School of Management, and from two thousand seven two seventeen it was the founder director of the Dougherty Center and Professor of Corporate Responsibility. David is the author of seven books and has contributed to a further ten. His most recent book is All in the Future of Business Leadership. With Chris Coulter and Mark Lee, we'll be talking about sustainability in the future a business leadership. You joint to today from central London where there's eleven pm past his bedtime. David, welcome to working on Purpose. Thank you very much for having me. You're so welcome and as I said, you sound so spry considering you should be well into your zs, so thank you. The light send to be parts of the conversation. Well, I know a fair amount about you, David, because I've been on your website, seeing some of your blogs, of course read your book, but our listeners don't know you quite the way that I do. So let's start this way. Since I'm an identity and meaning researcher, I want to start with how you introduce yourself on your website, which is David Grayson dot net. It's a great website, by the way, it's so Chris, but you list yourself as a writer, speaker, advisor, educator, chairman, campaigner, human. What a lovely way to summarize yourself. So would you just chime in and just share what it is that you're up to today in presence for yourself for our listeners. Well, first, well, who like the website And one of the things that I'm personally very passionate about is getting better recognition and help for the millions of people who are looking after a family member or a friend. In my country, we think that there's now almost nine million writtens who at any one time are caring for a loved one. That might be an elderly parent, as I was looking after my mum before she died for a number of years. It may be a partner with a long term condition. It may be a disabled son or daughter or sibling or whatever. In America it's well over forty million people who at any one time are caring, and particularly right now during the coronavirus pandemic, the pressures on those family and friends who are caring for a loved one are even greater, perhaps because they're normal kind of care workers who support them can't come because they themselves are sick or self isolating, etc. So I'm share of a UK charity called care as UK. It's part of my volunteering and so one of the things right now that I'm particularly trying to do is to raise the profile through social media supporting the work of our charity staff. He doing a fantastic job trying to keep information and advice getting out to the millions of UK cares. What a beautiful way to start the program, David, And thank you for your sensitivity about just where we are in the world during this pandemic and sheltering in place. And speaking with my friend and colleague Paul Skinner yesterday, he told me that they're in the UK that they're only allowing people at one time a day for exercise, and there's a there's just a lot of restriction happening. And then when you add in the element of caring for someone else and all of this beyond what you need for yourself, it's another level of strain and being a human. As you say, so, thank you for starting the show with such a such a presence and empathy. So maybe related to that is one of the things that you care about the most, or maybe some of the things you care about the most. But I want to talk about today, of course, is is your keen eye for sustainability David. So first it's helpful to understand why is this topic so important to you? What is it about this that so grabs your attention when that mind of yours could go many other places. So I think one of the most important challenges for our world is how will nine to ten billion people be able to live at least reasonably well within the constraints of one planet by the middle of our century, Because that's ultimately what we're talking about when we talk about ideas of sustainability and sustainable development. And I'm passionate about the positive contribution that businesses large and small can make as businesses to tackling the issues where those are environmental or social or economic challenges. And I've been working on these topics for many, many years, and I'm really keen to get more people in business to see the potential to do good business and also to contribute to sustainability. Steven, you probably don't know about me, because I don't know we spoke about it in our introductory call. But I want to presence a couple of things so that you understand that that I also appreciate very much your your your your topic. One. I'm from Oregon here in the United States, which is known to be much more of an environmentally friendly state. So I grew up, you know, hugging trees and eating granola and loving every moment of it. And then when I moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in nineteen ninety one, I found myself sitting in and among the Rio Earth's summits. So I found there were there were people from all over the world that came to Rio and nineteen ninety one, and they were focused on what do we do about about the environment, how do we handle this? Such that I then was motivated to focus my master's thesis on the social, economic, and political impacts that might be affecting the Amazonian deforestation. So I just want to presence that, So you do recognize that I do have a keen interest in this as well, and beyond what it's doing, how we've been able to raise our awareness in this pandemic. This has been a part of my focus for years too, although not to the same level and focus as yours. Right right, It's just interesting. So okay, so your book, and again, what I appreciate about your book since I'm writing my own, is it's very crisp. There's a lot of information in there, it's very well organized, and it's easy to read. I think you say somewhere on your website, David, that you have a pensiant toward non academic and non difficult to get through pros is that right? Absolutely? So I'm not an academic by background. I was headhunted relatively late in live I was fifty two when I was approached to go to Cranfield, one of our leading business schools, and was asked to set up a center for corporate responsibility. Most of my career has been very much as a practitioner, as a campaigner for the idea of responsible business and corporate sustainability, and so I've very much come to all of these issues from how can we help people in business to understand these issues, how can we equip them better to be able to do something positive about it in ways that will be good for the business as well as for society. So I have no time for really obtuse academic articles which you have to keep going to the dictionary to work out what the heck do they mean? That I think is the complete opposite of what good communications should be about. Indeed, and beyond that too. Aside from staying in the academic realm here you also are quite focused on the timeline. So one of the things I found quite compelling about your book, David, is that it focuses on how we address the sustainable senability problems now through twenty thirty. And that's the data that I learned in your book that aligns with major global environmental goals, including the Paris Agreements and the UN Sustainability goals. So help us understand how they're connected to those goals, how this data is connected to those goals. Well, the Nine Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the global goals that were set in twenty fifteen, were in fact developed with close collaboration from lots of businesses around the world. And I'm one of those people who believe very strongly that we only will achieve the fulfillment or anywhere close to the fulfillment of these crucial goals around good health, around good education, around clean energy and so on, with the really strong involvement of business. So many of us think that the twenty twenties, even before the current coronavirus pandemic and all of the challenges that is going to create going forward, even before that, the twenty twenties are going to be a really stretched decade in terms of how business needs to step up to the plate, if you like, in terms of the sustainable development goals, and of course, part of a crucial part of those those goals is making programss on on the crucial question of the climate emergency. I couldn't agree more with your with your statement that businesses is well positioned to really carry that torch. And I do make mention of that too in my book as well, and I see so much conversation around that here in the United States. There's a lot of conversation David through organizations like Conscious Capitalism and just Impact, there are also very much elevating that message. So it's I feel like there's a tremendous momentum that's been raised around all of this business business being unleashed to really help solve societal problems. I think that's right. And if you take a perspective not just for the last two or five years, but look back over the last ten or twenty years, then I think the recognition of what is business Therefore, Yes, of course business has to profitably provide goods and services that people want and need. But the ways it goes about doing that, the ways that it treats its employees, how it deals with it its suppliers, how it impacts on the environment. The economists have this language about how you internalize the externalities. In other words, the polluter must pay. We have to get across the idea that business must be part of the solution to these really big challenges. Otherwise I think I don't wish to sound to doom laden, but otherwise we are going to face some really really sticky future. Well, in addition to yes, I completely agree with what you're saying that the polluter must pay. And the great thing about it, and this is me channeling doctor Rochasdia, who is the co founder of the Conscious Capitalism Global movement, who was on earlier this month. You know, business is extremely well positioned to be able to do that because of its vast ability to harness its resources in terms of humans as well as economic resources. And so why not absolutely, And the exciting thing is that there is a twelve trillion dollar business opportunity if businesses across the world can contribute to the achievement of the sustainable development goals. So this is not just the right thing to do. This can with a profitable thing to do as well. And I think increasingly a lot of employees recognize that and want to work for companies that are taking these issues seriously and there finding profitable ways of doing so. Absolutely, and again we're very much locked up here on this, David. Now, going back to your book, one of the things that I thought was quite interesting as a researcher myself is that you say the book was inspired by collective wisdom and also through the respondence to the Globe Scan Sustainability Leaders Survey, which i'm MBSL because you've been it sounds like if I heard this writer or read this right, you've been able to have access to this since nineteen ninety seven, Is that right? Absolutely? And in a field which is barely twenty years old, having twenty years worth of longitudinal data is very very valuable. Low Scan and Sustainability came together back in nineteen ninety seven to start doing a survey of global experts in corporate sustainability, so people inside businesses, people in the media, in civil society, and regulators in academia and salt and ever since nineteen ninety seven, every year these two organizations have asked a series of questions to several thousand experts across the world in global corporate stainability, asked them about who they think are the leading companies and what is fascinating is the way in which the different companies were regarded as being leaders at different points through that twenty year time horizons. So at the end of the nineteen nineties when the survey began, you had some companies like at three a M. And actually some of the big oil companies like Shallon BP who were regarded then as being leaders because they were amongst the early companies identifying systematically the material impacts that they had. Over time, of course that shifted as we've got a better understanding of what we really mean by by sustainable business. But we have this incredibly valuable resource of the Globe Scan Stability Leaders survey as the starting point by two co authors Chris and Mark that you referenced earlier. They run respectively, Globe Scan and Sustainability. So that's the connection. Wonderful and what you said there, So this is an ongoing stream of information or survey response you're getting from them, Yes, okay, it is. So the twenty twenty survey goes into the field next month, and who answer is this? Who did you said earlier about the people who answer this are people working in corporate sustainability in large companies across the world, but also people who are teaching these issues in universities and business schools, people who are working in NGOs, in civil society across the world, as well as some regulators, people in the public sector, and also in the media covering business and society. So it's a real wisdom of the crowd, but the informed crowd quite like the company you keep. And on that note, let's grab our first break. I'm your host, doctor Earlis Cortez. We're on the air with David Grayson, who is the Emeritus Professor of Corporate Responsibility at Cranfield School of Management. He's the co author of All in the Future of Business Leadership. He joined it today from Central London. We've been talking a bit about how he got interested in sustainability. After the break, we're going to dive a little bit deeper here and get you more into the concept itself and how you can get involved. Stay with us, we'll be right back. Elise Cortez is a speaker and engagement and development catalyst. She designs and delivers professional development, leadership and engagement workshops and can bring her expertise to your organization. She will help ignite meaningful development within your workforce that will increase employee engagement, performance and retention. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at www dot Elise Cortez dot com. She would welcome the opportunity to help get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with Elise Cortez. To reach our program today, send an email to Elise ali Se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on purpose if you're just joining us. My guest is David Greeson. He's the emeritus Professor of Corporate Responsibility at Cranfield School of Management, and from twenty seven to twenty seventeen he was the founder director of the Dohui Center and Professor of Corporate Responsibility. He's the author of seven books and has contributed to a further ten. His most recent book is All in the Future of Business Leadership. I'm your host Alice Cortez. So, David, before we get further in, now that we've had a chance to presence a little bit of conversation about sustainability, I think about this time we should actually talk about what do we mean by corporate sustainability? So you say in the book a company's delivery of long term value and financial, environmental, social, and ethical terms, which you say, I think aligns with the definition of the United Nations Global Compact. But is there a simpler way to describe this term. So essentially, it is about minimizing the negative social and environmental and economic impacts that the business has and also looking to maximize the positive social and environmental and economic impacts of the business. So this is very much about value equation. It is about profits through the way in which you find solutions to the problems of people and planet. Now that is I like that better, David. Let's go with that. Okay, I just like that. And before we go onto the next one, let me just grab a quick question from Darlas. She's inquiry minds want to know. She's in the chat room. She wants to know, David, how did you find the time to write so many books? And how long does it take to write a book? Anyway? Oh gosh, well, each one was different. I've had some supercre authors on most of the books, including particularly Chris and a Mark on all In, And I mean I think Now if you if you see that this is a way of spreading ideas, spreading the word, then it is something which is is important to try and do. M I agree. That's why I'm working on mine too, and it is I hope it gets easier as time goes on in but that's all I have to say. As first one feels it does I think, and the crucial things are to establish as with any other activity, So what's the purpose of what you're doing? So what is the objective that you have with this book? Who's the target audience? And critically, what do you want them to think and feel and above all do as a result of reading the book. If you can sort all that out, then obviously there's the hard slog doing all the research, pulling everything to get and then writing it and rewriting it. And did I mentioned rewriting. It's what I'm doing on we all in the writing phase actually scarily only took six weeks, but that was incredibly intense, and every chapter went through at least seven redrafts during that time. But that was possible because we've done so much discussion and research amongst ourselves and with a whole variety of company people beforehand. Well, that certainly helps me. I hope it does you too, Darla, So thank you for asking the question. Okay, so let's go back one of the things that you've see in your book that's also quite compelling. This is only, as you say, a twenty year industry. So you describe three errors in the book relative to sustainability. Will you describe them for us? Yes? Indeed, so we think the first few years it was really about harm reduction, about companies looking to see how can we reduce our negative social and environmental and economic impacts. And then around two thousand and four two thousand and five you started to have some companies looking much more strategically, how do we integrate with our core business strategy, not just in terms of risk mitigation and reduction, but also looking for new business opportunities. So how we start to see more of an alignment with the business strategy. And most recently, we think that companies are now starting to think, at least the leading ones, much more fundamentally about purpose and we see this as therefore the purpose driven era. Okay, Now, then there's the regenerator error, which is what we're coming into now. Yes, so we think that potentially in the next decade or so, that if what we are saying is right about the ways in which businesses will have to adapt to the external forces that are out there, So the challenges of the systemic risks to the financial system and to business from climate change and biodiversity loss, the systemic risks to business and the financial system from hyper global inequalities, then we do believe that we may well see and this is our kind of working shorthand shorthand at the moment, I was on a call with my two co authors only yesterday where we were exploring what we were going to do next in terms of starting to flesh out more of our understanding of what the next era might look like. But to be very clear, we're only at the foothills in terms of a relative a small number of companies yet really rethinking and defining what is our core purpose when you talk about regenerative really quick. I don't want to take too much time on this because I have so much more to cover. But what I think about, David, is what seems to be happening right now in the smack dab middle of this pandemic is since we aren't going We're not doing business the way that we normally do. The factories aren't necessarily working the way that they were in the past. I'm hearing reports about being able to see fish and the Venice Canals, that the pollution level in Los Angeles and China is such that the air is actually very vastly different in how it looks, behaves, and is breathed. Do you know anything about this? I've been seeing those reports too, at least, But it seems to me the challenge is how do we get those kind of positive things without all of the negativity associated with the global shutdown? Right, So, the regenerative approach has to be so much more creative than this absolute kind of lockdown that so much of the world is currently experiencing. But what it does show us is when we recognize a really intense, extreme crisis, then humankind can move at incredible speed and scale. So I guess the question that many of us are already thinking about, in the context of building back better after the pandemic, what are the things that we will need to be doing differently in order to achieve Yes, that better air quality, that better quality of water, and so on, but without the kind of lockdown that we've had to have for this pandemic, right absolutely, and to that in Maybe this will help us learn more here because I know Kyle's aren't in the chat room. He wants to hear more about how we can find the right solutions. And I think we can address that as we go on with some other planned content. But I want to know personally more about the circular economy and the closed look to business. I don't I don't know. I've heard those terms, but I don't really know what they mean. Okay, so many people describe the kind of the current economic model as being a linear model. In other words, you take, you take out of the ground, you make, you manufacture things, so take make, and then you use and then you simply throw away. And that's the kind of the linear economy that we have been in in many parts of the world for the last few decades. The circular economy, by contrast, is where there is much more reutilization of products, much more re using of parts, in in in manufactured goods and so on, so much less waste. So how do you How does say, a major retailer reduce its food waste? How does a manufacturer reduced its waste to landfill. Those are the kind of the practical elements of circle common. Of course, it's it's much more creative. It's much more exciting than that, because it's about how you redesign products from stretch, how you work with your supply chain to come up with very very different ways of making things. So, if we take a company that's not too far away from from from where you are in in in in Texas, you have a company which is a great American success story called Interface, the floor coverings business started by the late great Ray Anderson back in in the nineteen seventies in the state of Georgia. He built a billion dollar business and then twenty years into the business, realized that in fact, the way he was doing business was simply not sustainable, and literally, almost overnight, having read a book and realizing there was a different way of business, he committed Interface to a different business strategy, a different business model that would be much more regenerative and thinking much more about about how to to be much more sustainable. So there are interesting examples already there, including in in the US, which show how the circle economy can work in practice. That is so exciting to me to hear that, David, that's so exciting and that might get us to our next thing, which maybe can help car with his question. I wanted you to share briefly. I mean, your book is treated is very very very distinctly, but I want to talk about the five attributes that you say underpinned the current best practices and leading companies and represent the essential qualities for corporate sustainability and leadership now through twenty thirty and you list them as purpose, plan, culture, collaboration, and advocacy. Will you share a little bit about each one of those for us, presence them for us? Yes. Indeed. So, in addition to having the twenty years worth of the Globe Scan Sutainability Leaders Survey as the basic foundation for all in, we went to interview people who were running the companies that were regarded as leaders in sustainability at the time that they were regarded as the leaders. So we didn't just interview all current CEOs or all current chief finance offices or company chairman or chief sustainability officers today, but people who were running those businesses when they were regarded as leaders. So we had the privilege of talking to some fifty business leaders in different parts of the world, and we drew on also their insights, their expertise, not just what they had done, but what they thought was now needed as well. And from all of all of that, from the experience that my co authors and I've had with many different companies around the world, we pulled together what we think are these five critical attributes. So you will be pleased to know at least that it starts with purpose. I am, what is the purpose of the business. One of the companies that we looked at in some detail Unilever, the g fast moving consumer goods company. And what's particularly interesting about Unilever is the way that they took their original purpose from the eighteen eighties, which was to make cleanliness commonplace, and they brought that up to date into the twenty first century and said their purpose now is to make sustainable living commonplace, so brilliantly echoing back to their very strong heritage and their founding purpose. So we think that the foundation attribute for going all in is having a purpose which is authentic. So people inside and outside the business have to be able to see that what they experience of that business corresponds to the purpose as defied. So it has to be authentic, it needs to be inspiring because otherwise why on earth do you have it? And it has to be practical, actionable. So it needs to help companies and particularly company boards and management teams to take the really tough decisions. And I think what what is interesting now is the way in which you have, say the companies which are going for B corps status, the b LAB movement, where those companies are looking very particularly at having a purpose which addresses the interests and the needs of different stakeholders. So that's the foundation attribute around purpose. The second thing, of course, it's no good at having a great purpose if that doesn't then translate into what the company actually does. So is there a really comprehensive sustainability plan or strategy that covers not just the core business itself, but also extends into its supply chain and we think in the future increasing and will also extend the other part of the value chain in terms of engaging customers as well. So if you want some interesting examples of really comprehensive plans around sustainability, in my country, the retailer Marks and Spencer with their Plan A for sustainability, because there is no plan b when it comes to sustainability or cutners in the States, like like Walmart with the way in which they've set some really ambitious targets around their Project Gigaton around carbon strategy. Those are practical examples of these kind of comprehensive plans, and increasingly the effective plans or strategies are those which correspond to the overall corporate strategy. So it's not a matter of having the sustainability plan or strategy on the one hand, but in fact the core business strategy being something very different. Again, to take the unilevera example, it's taking them ten years from when they first launched the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan back in twenty ten that this year they now are saying that they are bringing them the course strategy of Unilever and that Sutainable Living Plan into a single overall strategy. So inspiring. David, if I can stop you for just a second, I want to treat the other three, but we do need to grab our last break, So hold that spot for just a moment if we can. I'm your host, Alice Cortez. We don't hear with David Grayson, who is the emeritus Professor of Corporate Responsibility at Cranford School of Management. He's the co author of All in the Future of Business Leadership. He joined it a day from Central London after the Rake. We'll talk more about those three of their attributes that he started speaking about. Stay with us, we'll be right back. Elise Cortez is a speaker and engagement and development catalyst. She designs and delivers professional development, leadership and engagement workshops and can bring her expertise to your organization. She will help ignite meaningful development within your workforce that will increase employee engagement, performance and retention. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at www dot Elise Cortez dot com. She would welcome the opportunity to help get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with Elise Cortez. To reach our program today, send an email to Elise ali Se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thanks for sting with us and welcome back to working on purpose. If you're just tuning in, my guess is David Grayson, the Emeritus Professor of Corporate Responsibility at Cranfield School of Management. Also, from two thousand seven twenty seventeen he was the co founder director of the Dohi Center of Professor of Corporate Responsibility. David is the author of seven books and has contributed to another ten. His most recent book is All in the Future of Business Leadership. I'm your host, Elise Cortez. So before the break, David, you helped us understand purpose and plan of the five attributes that underpinned current best practices and leading companies. Talk to us next about culture, which you please, Well, before I do that, I'm just looking in the break at last at some of the questions coming in now and just picking up both the questions that come from Kyle and from Todd. Todd, Yes, because I think these are very relevant to understanding how a sustainability plan or strategy really works in practice. Because if you are a mining company, then your impacts are going to look very different to the impacts of a big bank or to a big high tech company. So the crucial thing is to do the really tough work to identify what are the most material social, environmental and economic impacts that our business has. And similarly, the impacts may look very very different if you are doing business in a low income company country in say Africa or Asia, versus doing business primarily in a high income country like Northern Europe or North America. So that's a very important path of getting an effective plan or strategy for stability. But going on to culture, I realized in fact that culture is not something that in my kind of world of corporate stenability and responsible business are given enough attention to in the past, and that was clearly a real mistake on my part. And I think culture the way we do business around here is so critically important again for really successfully embedding sustainability. And we think and the way we describe it in all in is that there are four really important dimensions of having a sustainable culture. It starts, as companies like Night have shown with the idea that innovation is sustainability. Sustainability equals innovation. It's a fundamental stage gate for all of the innovation of the organization. A second critical dimension of a sustainable culture is that it is genuinely engaging and empowering. So not only do employees have the training and the sense of permission to take the initiative to come forward with their own ideas and suggestions and projects around sustainability, but they know that they will encouraged to do that. So it's it's a combination of the top down leadership from board and senior management team in terms of setting a strategic direction linked back to the business purpose, but it is also a company a culture where there is genuine bottom up engagement and enthusiasm to bring forward ideas. Other aspects of a successful sustainability culture are that there is a very strong sense of ethics and responsibility. People are inculcated, so it becomes very natural to understand how the organization expects and wants them to behave so that there's a clarity about what are the kind of a north style the values of of the organization that's reinforced time and time again. And the other aspect we think of a sustainability culture is that it is open and accountable and transparent, not just in terms of sharing information about where its sources from, where it supplies factories are, and what are the conditions that they expect in those factories and song, but also it's open in the sense of being humble enough to understand that even a giant, multinational globable business doesn't have all of the answers around sustainable developments, and it needs to work in collaboration and partnership with lots of others, both inside and outside the company. So those are the kind of what we think of the crucial dimensions of a sustainable culture. And then what really surprised us, And it wasn't part of the interview schedules when we're interviewing all of these CEOs and company chairmen and chief finance officers, chief sustainability officers. But I don't think we did any interview for all in where the people were interviewed didn't talk about the importance of being able to work in collaboration with other businesses, sometimes with first competitors, with other parts of society, with NGOs, with social enterprises, sometimes with academia and so on, to work very often through industry associations to come up with solutions around sustainability. So the importance of collaboration, of working in partnership. I know many of us grew up and did MBA's and so on with this idea of porter's competitive advantage and so on. But I think in the twenty first century, and you had Paul Skinner another Brita on your program a while ago, talking about his book Collaborative Advantage. Indeed I did, and that's how I found you unfair. Thank you. Alongside confessional advantage, there is the importance of this collaborative advantage and having a both a skill set and a mindset that looks for where we could work together, whether that's something like the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, for instance, between a lot of the the big companies working in the fashion industry and the footwear industry and so on, or whether it's the Sustainable Shipping Initiative, or whether it's the Sustainable Tire Initiative, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Well, my earlier books was actually on the evolution of corporate responsibility coalitions around the world with a good friend, Jane Nelson, who's at the County School of Government in Harvard. And what we said in that book was that we thought the future was going to be much more around issue specific coalitions and set to specific coalitions. And my goodness, in the last decade, hasn't that happened in space And the last thing that we identified, and it's probably the newest of these attributes, is what we called advocacy speaking out and speaking up for sustainable development and social justice. And we think this is different to old fashioned business lobbying, which might be quite short term, quite immediately self interested. We think this advocacy is taking a longer term perspective. So it's a kind of focus on capitalism for the long term, if you like. And it is in fact recognizing what are the kind of changes in public policy, in public behaviors which are needed in order to get more sustainable development. And whereas in the past a company could be a leader if it was making progress on one, maybe two of those attributes, what is now required is for a company to work on all five of those attributes because they reinforce each other and you can't really make much progress on one without having those other attributes in play as well. Very very nicely shared, David, Thank you that essentially, listeners, what he's done for your your your delight is he's gone through the bulk of that book by sharing what he just shared. So a real treat, David, thank you for treating it the way that you did. So we're getting very close to running at a time. I want to hit one more question from you, because I know it's important to you, and that is you. I know you're very much interested in where the link between purpose and ethics are. And I saw that you posted an article on your blog about doing business ethically in the Coronavirus Times. Why why this particular crossover being so important to you? Well, I did, and you can you can read the blog on David Grayson dot net, but you can also find it on the website of the Institute of Business Ethics, which is an organization that's been going now for nearly forty years and champions the idea of doing business ethically. And another of my volunteering activities is that I'm the volunteer chair of the board of that organizations as well, and we're trying to get businesses to understand and to implement good ethics as a core of the of their organizational culture. So I think that culture and and and and purpose and ethical culture and purpose aren't two parallel tracks, that absolutely interrelated and the one that helps to reinforce the other. M hmm. I completely agree with that, David. And to that end, I want to also back to alignment. As you know, I have an interest in helping individuals align with the organizational purpose, and I think you have a fascination interest in that as well. What is your take on that? So I think the really successful organizations, And funny enough, I was doing my homework as well, at least because I was looking at some of your recent talks and things, and I so agree with you about the importance of really being able to inspire people to feel that they want to go to work rather than oh my goodness, it's it's it's the start of another working week, etc. So we are completely in agreement on the importance of that, and I think great leadership helps people to see how what they are contributing can make a positive difference. And if you go back to some of that, they're really interesting ways in which people understand what made debates those people like Daniel Pink with his book Drive, where he talks about the importance of mastery and autonomy, but crucially also feeling it's for a purpose and having that kind of link between what is this company trying to do and why this matters to the individual. That's why I'm so excited about the power of social entrepreneurs, people inside large organizations who are creating value for the business but also having a positive impact on society, taking the initiative, coming up with new products and services, new business models, job crafting to do that. I think that is part particularly of what many younger people in business want, but I think it's also something that those of us who've got a few more years on the plot also think matters as well. Yeah. Well, and I stand for helping to create a world where we get to do that. So I'm so thrilled we're alive and here we are toward the end. David already want to give you the last word, saying about thirty seconds, what would you like to leave a listeners with today? I think the really important thing is to understand what is your own purpose, and so I'm a great fan of the Japanese model of Ikey Guy. How do you go about identifying what is your personal purpose or purposes? And then how can you find a way of aligning that purpose with the purpose of your employer. I think that is really my kind of cowork to to all the listeners, if I may be sell bold as to as to suggest what might be a follow up from from this program. Fantastic David. In fact, we did cover Youka Guy a few few months ago with Justin Barnes from the UK. So like minded, still so David, thank you very much for joining us with that wicked, smart mind of yours and your heart committed to making the world sustainable. Thank you so much for that mind. Pleasure all the best. If you want to learn more about David Grayson, the work he does on sustainability and ethics, or his seven books, visit his website. It's David Grayson dot net. That's David g r a YSN dot net. Last week, if you missed the live show, you can always catch your recorded podcast. We are on the o JP licour of Brand Foundations and the New York City Chair of Conscious Capitalism. We were talking about the silver lining we both see in the COVID nineteen pandemic. Next week we'll be on the air with Linda Crompton, who's president and CEO of Leadership Women. Will be talking about what she and organization are doing in response to the COVID pandemic to change how they offer programs to their members and stay relevant and useful during this change, and how they do their business. See you there. Remember that work is at least one third of our lives, so let's Work on Purpose. You hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune in to Working on Purpose, featuring your host, Alice Cortez, each week on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. This week, find your life's purpose at work