“Anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.” Ken Boulding.
The past CEO of the consumer goods company Unilever and a business economist, thinker and writer together address the wide-ranging ancient philosophical question of what the purpose of a business is in this tome.
There is a positive optimistic tone about the future in the Blow Up Boundaries chapter. No one should deny that the campaign by Lifeboy, the oldest of Unilever’s 130 personal care products, to teach half a billion people the importance of hand washing has been a net positive for humanity. The Embrace The Elephants chapter provides a lot of counterintuitive advice for business leaders about abandoning short-term goals and Friedman economics in favour of loftier sustainable goals that benefit the company and the broader society rather than just shareholders. The nine point Stockholm Planetary Boundaries model that Sir David Attenborough discussed in A Life on our Planet is again referenced. I must try harder to understand it.
There is also a lot of mushy psychobabble about purpose, taken from the personal to the corporate level. There are hundreds of acronyms that can be confusing to readers who are not fluent in business lingo. There is a slight whiff of hypocrisy in the final chapter’s advice to challenge the supremacy of consumption and growth, from the ardent advocates for consumerism and business growth; that is difficult to work around although they try and partially succeed. It is loaded with all the business jargon that could possibly be dreamt up.
I can imagine this book being used as a primer for any business school M.B.A. course on sustainability, using Unilever as a case study. Although there is no doubt that Unilever is a world leader when discussing ethical business practices, much of this writing reads like a book-length ad for the global behemoth.
Good food for thought, but dry and certainly not for everyone.
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Thanks, The Economist.
The Passionate Reader 