Net Positive

Paul Polman was chief executive of Unilever from 2009 to 2019 and wrote this with Andrew Winston as an argument that companies should return more to the world than they take from it. The book combines a case for the position with an account of what Polman did at Unilever.

The Unilever material is the substance. Polman stopped issuing quarterly earnings guidance in his first weeks, which he presents as a deliberate move to change the shareholder base toward longer-horizon holders. He introduced the Sustainable Living Plan with targets covering emissions, water, sourcing and health, and set them for 2020 at the outset. He describes defending the company against Kraft Heinz's takeover approach in 2017 and treats the episode as a test of whether the long-horizon position could survive.

The argument is that companies must take responsibility for effects outside their legal boundary, must work with competitors and governments on problems no single firm can solve, and must accept lower short-term returns where necessary. The weaknesses are the ones common to executive advocacy: the counterfactual is never tested, Unilever's financial performance during the period was adequate rather than exceptional, and the company missed several of the plan's own targets. Polman's successor scaled back the approach under investor pressure, and Terry Smith's public criticism that Unilever had lost focus on its business is part of the record. Read it as the strongest available statement of the position from someone who ran a large company on it.