E11 Cashing in on Climate Change
In this interview, climate change guru Andrew Winston shares how his career path intersected with environmental issues, the state of the climate today, and how businesses are adopting sustainable practices and attracting climate-conscious consumers in the process. Andrew also discusses how small and mid-sized businesses can use sustainability to be more competitive while attracting top talent to work for them.
Andrew studied Economics at Princeton, later earning an MBA from Columbia and a MA of Environmental Management from Yale. He began his career advising companies in strategy and marketing before turning to his passion for the environment. An author of three books including Green Recovery, Green to Gold, and The Big Pivot, Andrew is an expert on how we all can do our part to save the environment and still prosper.
Andrew Winston:
So, you're seeing what the insurance companies call a 100-year storm or a 200-year storm happening every couple years, and we have to adjust our thinking. So, it's already happening. So, there's going to be extreme weather everywhere. Everywhere there's hurricanes. Everywhere there's droughts and floods. And those are just going to keep getting worse for now. I think that the biggest impact that we're going to have to deal with, as this moves forward, are going to be at the coastal areas. The sea level's going to keep rising, and will for quite a while. We're seeing big parts of the ice in the world melt, and we're going to lose coastal areas. So, it isn't just low-lying nations, it's low-lying cities.
Don MacPherson:
If you have ever wondered what separates top performers from everyone else, you probably discovered it is just a couple differentiators that determine wild success from average results. My name is Don MacPherson, and for two decades, I've been working with executives to help them optimize performance at the individual, team, and organization levels. Now I interview exceptional people from all walks of life so we can all learn from them. Welcome to 12 Geniuses.
In season one of 12 Geniuses, each of the episodes has been centered around the theme of change. There is very little doubt that one of the biggest changes that humanity will have to deal with over the next century is climate change. And that is what we are going to be discussing with today's guest, Andrew Winston. Andrew researches, writes, and speaks about how companies can flourish while turning to environmentally responsible practices. In the first part of the conversation, Andrew will explain the current situation in the climate crisis and the threats to the United States, as well as other countries around the world. In the second part of the interview, Andrew breaks down how some companies are pivoting their business models to lessen their impact on the environment while attracting a more environmentally conscious customer.
Andrew, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Andrew Winston:
Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Don MacPherson:
You spend your time speaking on the topic of climate change and working with organizations to create value through sustainability. Can you describe how you got into this work?
Andrew Winston:
Sure. I joke, but it's true. It came out of a time of unemployment and figuring out where I wanted to be in the world. I spent my first part of my career out of school in consulting. I worked for the Boston Consulting Group. And then I was in business. I was in New York city doing strategy, marketing biz dev stuff. And then I went to a dotcom. And for those of us of a certain age in the Gen X world, we remember what 1999, 2000 looked like, and everything went under, including my firm, which was incredibly educational, but left me free and thinking what I wanted to do next. I realized I didn't want to go back to what I'd been doing before, and analyzed it and figured out it just didn't meet my values. And started to figure out that I cared about the environment, but it was in a really practical kind of way.
Like, how much stuff does the world have? Are we operating in a way we can forever? And read some good stuff on this thing called sustainability, and said, “Okay, this is what I got to be doing with my life.” So, I went back to school to get another degree, I had an MBA already, and got a degree in environmental management, and then went from there. Wrote a book with a professor at Yale and then the book did really well. Then people started asking for my opinion and then they started paying me for my opinion, and I built a career on it.
Don MacPherson:
The rest is history.
Andrew Winston:
Yeah, there it is.
Don MacPherson:
Was that book Green to Gold?
Andrew Winston:
Yeah, that was the first book. Came out 12 and a half years ago, 2006 was the first edition.
Don MacPherson:
So, big question for you, what's the current state of the earth’s climate?
Andrew Winston:
The current state is not good. I think it's not good right now already, but it's clearly where we're headed that's even more disturbing. Look, the world is warmed by 1 degree Celsius. That's the way the international community talks about it. It never sounds as scary as Fahrenheit, which is 1.6 °F. And even that, to people, sometimes sounds maybe not scary, but it's really better to think about the climate as your kind of body temperature. Not, do I walk outside and it's 60 or 61, it's my core body temperature. And you know, when you get about a degree, you start to feel kind of crappy, right?
And then you get to two or three and you really feel bad. And you get to four or five and you worry about going to the hospital. That's the same kind of level of change that we're seeing. And the world's already at one degree. And the extreme weather we're seeing from that is already pretty bad.
Don MacPherson:
What's making this warm-up different than ones that the planet has experienced over time?
Andrew Winston:
Well, it's really simple. Certainly, there's been these waves of temperature changes, ice seasons or ice ages that go in these multi-century and millennia cycles. There's cycles of 22,000 years or something that have to do with the pivot of the earth. There's all sorts of long-term cycles. The difference is us. We have, since the Industrial Revolution, have pumped an amazing amount of carbon into the atmosphere. And the science of it is actually really basic. I'm not a scientist, but it doesn't take a lot to understand carbon in the atmosphere keeps heat in. and without the amount of carbon we already had in the atmosphere, the world wouldn't have been inhabitable by us.
But we're now increasing it, so much that it we're moving ourselves out of the range of the temperatures that we, as a species, evolved into and created society into. And that's the part that I think people should be scared about. We're moving it out of the range since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. Once it's out of that range, I don't know if we know how to live in that, in that temperature.
Don MacPherson:
A big report came out from the scientific community about climate change in October.
Andrew Winston:
Yeah.
Don MacPherson:
What was it and what did it say about our future?
Andrew Winston:
The shorthand name is the 1.5-degree report. And this takes a little bit of explaining on why this is so important. And I believe it's probably the most important scientific study in modern times. And it's something everybody should have a basic handle on. Because what happened is the world leaders and countries got together, starting 30 years ago, regularly to talk about this. But in 2009, agreed with President Obama and the Chinese premier and others, agreed that the world should hold warming to two degrees, that we were clearly getting close to one degree at that point. And two degrees seemed like, okay, let's try to stop it there. It's going to require a big change in our economy, but let's do it. What happened was, in 2015, when we got to the Paris climate meeting, it became clear in that intervening six, seven years, and the science got better.
That two degrees wasn't going to really be good enough for our safety and, frankly, for low-lying areas. So, there's countries, like island countries, where the people came to the 2015 meeting and said, “You realize at two degrees, our countries don't exist. So, we need to stop it at 1.5 degrees.” So, that was the policy background. And then what happened was the UN said to the scientific community, intergovernmental panel on climate change, “Tell us what it looks like for us to hold to 1.5 degrees versus 2. Can we still do it? What would it take? What might it cost and what's the difference?”
The short version is the difference is bad. That the difference between 1 degree and 1.5, or 1.5 and 2, they're not linear changes. They're exponential really, that we're talking about such fundamental changes in the system underlying our planet, and our society, and our economy, that we really don't want to get to 2. And we're close to locked into that at this point actually. The report said, we can hold it to 1.5, but what it means is between now and 2030, so now 11 years to go, we have to cut carbon in the global economy in half. That's going to be really, really difficult. In 2018, emissions went up 3%. So, we're still going in the wrong direction. We need to cut it in half.
Don MacPherson:
You've talked about island nations and what could happen to them, but what happens to other communities around the world?
Andrew Winston:
We're no longer talking about these models and where we're going to be in 2050, it's already happening. So, you don't have to think too hard about what it looks like right now in the last couple weeks, Nebraska, Iowa. Nebraska's facing what I think the governor said was the worst environmental devastation they've ever faced. And that's saying a lot. Floods just wiping out years of crops. Mozambique, on the east coast of Africa, a city of 500,000 just got basically wiped out by a cyclone. We don't get as much attention on these things in the press for lots of reasons like, there's a constant buzz out of DC, and what the president tweets, and there's so much tension.
But it's also because the extreme weather's happening so much more that these aren't that unusual. So, you're seeing what the insurance companies call a 100-year storm or a 200-year storm happening every couple years, and we have to adjust our thinking. So, it's already happening. So, there's going to be extreme weather everywhere. Everywhere there's hurricanes. Everywhere there's droughts and floods. And those are just going to keep getting worse for now. I think that the biggest impact that we're going to have to deal with, as this moves forward, are going to be at the coastal areas. The sea level's going to keep rising, and will for quite a while. We're seeing big parts of the ice in the world melt. And we're going to lose coastal areas.
So, it isn't just low-lying nations, it's low-lying cities. For example, I grew up in south Florida. I think when you talk to the scientists and you ask them the hard questions, the odds that Miami is livable within our lifetime is low. I mean, I think we're going to lose some very big areas and we're going to have to move people. People are going to be moving inland by like the millions. This is something we don't really know how to handle. We're not handling refugees very well in the world today, let alone how many more there's going to be.
Don MacPherson:
You referenced the Paris agreement already. Can you describe what that is and why it's important?
Andrew Winston:
The Paris Accord has been countries committing publicly to national commitments. At the national level, we're going to cut carbon by this much by this year. The thing that might be confusing to people is, while there's been a stated commitment to hold the world at two degrees, the Paris Accord doesn't actually accomplish that. Let me just step back and say the countries that have committed and have signed on to say, “We are committed to the Paris Accord, we're going to cut carbon, we're going to change our energy systems,” that is now literally every country in the world, except for the United States.
And technically, the United States is still in the agreement. The president has said we're out. He said that in the last couple years, but technically, you can't remove yourself from the treaty until like, it's coincidental, but it's a week after the 2020 election, is when we actually could pull out. What countries have agreed to is cut carbon. They've set goals. And all of that combined would probably keep us at like 3 degrees warming, which is potentially not livable. What's happening, each year, when they meet is they're talking about how to make the goals more aggressive. So, they committed to a certain level and every country signed on, and that alone was the first time in human history. That was a big deal.
Don MacPherson:
You wrote, I think, a blog in 2017, right after the president had declared that we were pulling out. And you talked about all of the communities, the states, the businesses that said, “Well, we may be pulling out as a country, but we are still committing.” Can you talk a little bit about some of those organizations and states?
Andrew Winston:
Oh yeah, that’s been kind of the good news or the reaction to it. The president was clear he was going to announce this. They weren't really hiding it. So, the day he did it, actually a group of states, including California, and New York, and Washington State, and Oregon, representing something like 40% of the population, 40% of the GDP actually, and not quite half the population, all said to the world, “We're still going to keep going. We're going to cut emissions to the level that the U.S. has committed.” Then that same day also, 30 big brands, like Coca-Cola, big companies put an ad in The Wall Street Journal, full-page ad saying, “We would like to stay in the Paris Climate Accord.” And so, within days, dozens and dozens, and now hundreds of large companies signed a statement at something called wearestillin.com.
Don MacPherson:
How are countries doing on meeting their commitments?
Andrew Winston:
Not so great. I mean, I think it's still early, right? A lot the commitments were like, by 2030, we'll do X, Y, Z. And so, there's still a lot of to do. It's still kind of coming. Some countries have been moving much quicker. Germany and a bunch of countries in Europe have moved to renewable energy, very, very fast. China's doing far more than people realize. They didn't commit to the same pace of cuts because they're still on such an up ramp of their bringing people out of poverty, getting richer, same with India. But actually, in the last year or two in particular, the pace of change towards the clean economy, which we can talk about, has been shocking and kind of amazing. India's building an amazing amount of solar right now. China's invested just tens and tens of billions a year, I think hundreds of billions now in the clean economy.
Don MacPherson:
In our current situation and with the technology that exists right now, is it possible to avert a climate change catastrophe that uproots millions of people and potentially puts millions more in life-threatening situations?
Andrew Winston:
A lot of people I know in this field and many scientists would say that we can't really avoid. And what I said before is true. There's much that's already locked in. There is climate catastrophe coming for certain areas, but does that mean it's for our entire species? No, I don't think we're doomed has this species yet. I think what these reports have told us is we've got to get moving very quickly, and I think we can. But like I said, there's certain things that have locked in. I don't think some coastal cities are going to make it.
Don MacPherson:
Our guest today is eco-business guru, Andrew Winston. When we come back from this short break, Andrew will give us advice on how you can stabilize our climate while remaining financially responsible for your organization and personal life.
This is the best time in human history to be alive. People are living longer, healthier lives, millions of people are escaping abject poverty every year, and diseases that used to be a death sentence are on the ropes. But the world is changing quickly, too. Artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, 3D printing, the internet of things, and a host of other technologies will change the way we live and work. Is your organization ready for it? 12 geniuses isn't just a podcast. We're an organization that educates leaders about the changing world of work, so you can harness new technologies, demographic changes, and innovative business models. To learn how 12 Geniuses can help prepare your leadership team to take advantage of the changes that will shape the next decade, check us out at 12geniuses.com.
We are talking with Andrew Winston about how the climate crisis will change the way we live and work. In this part of the interview, we are going to focus on ways in which established businesses are shifting their focus in order to address climate change. We will also discuss ways new businesses are taking their shots at solving the problems caused by climate change. Andrew, you wrote a book called The Big Pivot. Before we get into what businesses are doing to address sustainability and climate change, could you explain the components of The Big Pivot.
Andrew Winston:
The mega trends that I spend my time and energy on that I think are consistently at the top of the kinds of studies you see on this, and what are the biggest things that are changing the world, they fall into a few big buckets. The ones I spend the most time on and work with companies on are climate change, the clean economy, kind of partly reaction to climate change, but just the economics of what's happening with renewables and efficiency, the pressure on resources, just in general, including metals like copper and zinc and everything. Just how much harder it is to get more stuff and things like water, in particular, or the kind of pressure on resources and how there is probably not enough for us to have 8, 9 billion people in the world, living at the quality of life that the best of us or the ones that are lucky enough have.
Then there's a generational shift. The Millennials and Gen Z and their views of the world and the pressure they put on companies, which is pretty profound actually. And then the kind of transparency that technology brings. And that's a lot of different technologies, but now you can add in blockchain, and AI, and big data, and how much pressure that allows, both consumers, but really businesses to put on other businesses. All of that adds up to a real change in what it means to be a company today and the role of business in society. We're in the midst of a really big change on that. That's part of the big pivot. And then the pivot itself is really about the strategies and tools and tactics that I believe companies need to embrace, and many are, to help them navigate that world with those kinds of changes and the pressures and expectations.
We can dig into some of those, but those fall into a few big buckets. There's a change in kind of vision. The goals we set; the short-term versus long-term perspective that you have to fight The Wall Street pressure, frankly, and the way we innovate in a really deep way, what I call heretical innovation. That's all kind of vision. There's also a change in valuation, like how we put numbers on things, how we make investment decisions. Then there's a big pivot in partnering, how we collaborate with our peers, with competitors, with the government, with our customers, just different kinds of collaboration now. All of that together is how you build a resilient organization in a really volatile world.
Don MacPherson:
You talked about transparency, and this is really interesting. The information seems to be out there, but people have to seek it out. Is that accurate?
Andrew Winston:
Yes and no. I think what's happening in again, kind of business-to-business, the pressure that business has put on their own suppliers is moving pretty quickly. And so, they are seeking it out really directly. We've moved in a pretty broad way, over the last 10, 15 years, where there was a desire to know about a company's footprint. Somewhat companies were saying, “How much energy do we use? What's our carbon footprint? How much water?
Very few had really done it effectively or had all the data. That's changed. So, most big companies now have sustainability reports they put out. Not most, but pretty much all of the world's largest companies put out these reports. They set goals. So, they measure. They know how much carbon they emit. They know how much they emit in their own operations, in the grid energy they use, and in what they call scope 3 emissions, which is their distribution and the customers use, and the supply chain, kind of outside of their control.
So, their customers are asking for this. It gets a little less developed in the consumer realm, right? Like we can go into a store and there are definitely apps and there's tools, and there's things you can scan barcodes with certain apps to try to get data, but it's not quite that easy yet. Right? You don't walk into a store and go, “Does this bottle of water, what's its carbon footprint? That's all coming.
Don MacPherson:
It will. Okay. That's-
Andrew Winston:
I think it will, because again, the data needed to be there first. And now that you've got companies, increasingly, very quickly, able to tell their customers, like business customers, here's how much of our footprint we would ascribe to you. It's kind of a version of cost accounting that's been around in accounting for decades and decades. It's carbon accounting. It's saying, “We produce 1% of our productions for you customer A, so 1% of our missions, you could count as your own.” The same thing's going to start coming to individual products.
Don MacPherson:
We've talked about the big pivot and the components of the big pivot. Can you talk about some organizations that are putting that into practice?
Andrew Winston:
Well, there's a lot of companies that have pivoted certain aspects of their business. Just the shift in, like I said, renewable energy or clean economy has been dramatic. In just the last five years, we've gone from maybe five to 10 big companies saying they want to have 100% renewable energy to a couple hundred now. We've signed up with something called the RE100, which I'm on the advisory board for. And these are all really big companies. Apple now gets about 100% of their energy, their electricity from renewables. Walmart, for 12, 13 years, has been increasing their renewable energy, pushing their suppliers to reduce their footprint. And there's kind of a short list of typical companies that have been on the forefront of this stuff. Unilever is a company that I've worked with off and on for years.
And they're always rated really, at very clearly at the top of global rankings of big companies. There's smaller or mid-size companies that have had an easier time saying, “We're going to be focused in a different way than most companies,” like a Patagonia that people love. And they love it for good reason. That company thinks through almost everything about their products and thinks, where does it come from? What's it made from? Can we use renewables? Is this fiber from something that makes sense? Can we use organic cotton? Can we recycle the product? And more importantly, like a Patagonia, they just make things that last a really long time, which is, by far, the most important thing you can do, right? Is, if you buy a jacket, use it forever rather than turning it over.
And there's companies like Interface that makes carpet and flooring and a bunch of European companies, like now a Danone, or Danone here, has gotten very aggressive about their business and thinking more broadly about their purpose. And are we just about shareholders and profit or are we helping the world in a broader way?
Don MacPherson:
So, let's talk about turning the green into gold and talk about the results that some of these organizations are achieving. Are they achieving financial results because of marketing? Is it because of their offsetting costs that they would've incurred from energy uses? Where are they achieving these results?
Andrew Winston:
Well, this kind of goes back to my first book, Green to Gold, and we laid out a grid, a two-by-two framework that was pretty basic, that just says, companies create value in four main ways. They reduce cost, they reduce risk, which helps them reduce cost over time. They drive more revenues, they sell more stuff because of things they're doing, or they build their brand. There's those four. Companies are creating value around sustainability or through an environmental lens with all of those. For years and years, people really paid attention to the cost side. And that's easy to measure. There's companies like a 3M, or Dow, DuPont, or Pepsi, whatever, you could name tons that have saved literally billions of dollars by just changing light bulbs, being much more efficient in their routing of products, just in their manufacturing, just being much more efficient. Billions.
Companies have also managed their risk really aggressively, thought about their supply chain and the risk to… In the food industry in particular, like General Mills or Kellogg’s have worked with their farmers to make sure they're more stable, to reduce their footprint, reduce their water use, to improve yields. That's controlling risk in their value chain. And then there's companies selling more stuff that are green, like Tesla is kind of an obvious like pure play, but there's Ikea that has a very good pitch about their products. There's Patagonia, there's chemical companies like BASF that have looked at their products and said, “These are more sustainable. These help the world more, let's sell more of those.”
And then there's tons of examples of brand value that come from, partly from marketing, but actually the most measurable kind of brand value or intangible value improvement comes from your employees. And companies that know that, because of their sustainability efforts, their turnover is lower, they can measure that, and say, “This is worth hundreds of millions.” Unilever's done that. PwC, the consulting firm's done that. SAP, the software firm, they've put numbers on it, and said, “This is worth millions to us that our people don't leave. And we retain the best people.”
Don MacPherson:
In which ways does working for a sustainable organization matter to employees?
Andrew Winston:
This is the, I think, the most important driver. When I mentioned before the big mega trends, and I said that the Millennials and Gen Z were one of the five kind of big trends. When I talk to executives, yeah, climate change, they're worried about resource constraints, all of that. They actually seem more fearful about Millennials and employees and the shift in what people expect from companies. There's very clear data on this, in particular, Millennials who are about to become half the workforce. They are now half the workforce. They're starting to move into the upper ranks as the boomers retire. And when I talk to executives, and I've talked to CEOs about this, they believe, and the data shows that the Millennials and Gen Z have a very different view of business.
And they want to work for a company that shares their values. When Unilever talks about the decade work they've done on their products and making their products more sustainable, the thing they talk about is what it's done for engagement and attraction of talent. Attraction and retention of talent has been like their biggest, clear benefit. And they get great people. They get more applications per slot. Patagonia gets more applications per slot than any company I've ever heard of, thousands and thousands literally.
Don MacPherson:
You've talked about the clean economy a couple times, you've mentioned that. What is it and how do businesses get into the clean economy?
Andrew Winston:
There’s a group that I know well called the Advanced Energy Economy that does some great data gathering. And they define it pretty broadly. I mean, again, as I said before, when a company says clean, they mean like solar and wind, but you can include a lot of things in the clean economy; energy efficiency, jobs, right? Anybody that's retrofitting buildings, that's putting in new lighting, that's putting in insulation, water efficiency, software building, and data systems. Some would include nuclear, right? Some might include some versions of natural gas, but electric vehicles, all these new technologies.
The Advanced Energy economy, they've done this study every year, and they kind of look at how many jobs. I think there's this idea because it becomes such a political football that there's this incredible number of like coal miners and coal jobs. And it's actually a pretty small part of our economy from a job perspective. There's something like 50,000 people that go underground and really mine. And there's maybe another 30,000 in the industry that work above ground. There's maybe 150,000 people in all of coal, natural gas, oil, like in exploration, everything.
There's three, four times that just doing solar right now. Putting solar up on roofs, developing solar technologies. There's tens of thousands of people working in energy storage, working in electric vehicles. So, the clean economy or the advanced energy economy is literally millions of jobs just in the U.S. Again, two to three times the old economy. And actually, the FTSE Index in Europe, the guys who do the big index, FTSE Russell, they did a study that said, basically, if you take all the market cap of clean energy-related and efficiency and water companies, it's now basically the same size or bigger than the old industry. It is now winning. It is now the bigger part of the economy and growing.
And that doesn't mean that the traditional energy economy is small. It's still the most powerful industry in the world. They've got all the money. And they're fighting. They're fighting this politically, they're fighting the move, but it's happening. And it's happening much quicker than people realize.
Don MacPherson:
How does everything you've been talking about so far, and a lot of the companies that you've mentioned are really big companies, how does this apply to smaller and mid-size companies?
Andrew Winston:
Yeah, it's a question I get a lot. I work with really big companies. I work with multinationals. It's a little bit of my thinking is… It's the old joke about, why do you rob the banks? That's where the money is. This is where the footprint is. This is where the impact is and their leverage is enormous. So, I will continue to do that. But I think what I've noticed over the years is that most of what we're talking about the ways you can create value, you can save money by being more efficient, you can reduce a risk, you can create products that sell more, those are all open to small and medium enterprises. There's nothing, particularly about those strategies, that requires size. And, if anything, I'd say the opportunity for really being creative, or asking what I said before, heretical tough questions, changing technologies, the smaller guys are generally better at that.
You need the big guys to accelerate the technology, but I see this across a lot of different companies, where they've come up with something to really change the way they operate. There's usually a smaller company that came up with some technology, there's something they bought, or they brought into their business. I think the smaller and medium guys have a chance to be really innovative. There's one big area that they can't keep up on, and that's this pressure on the supply chain, this thinking about the whole value chain and a business. You don't have the scale for that as a small and medium. That's what Walmart does, right?
But I think you can draft along with that, like if there's movement in your industry to make something in your supply chain more sustainable, you have that ability to buy it too, because Walmart or whoever made that happen at scale. Yes, I think it's more difficult being a small and medium business. I think one thing that the small and medium guys have to be careful of is just what's happening with climate change, extreme weather. And I've spoken to small and medium enterprise organizations lately. And they shared with me some data from FEMA that about 40 to 50% of small businesses, when hit by a big storm or something, a natural disaster, don't come back.
Don MacPherson:
What advice do you have for professionals or other employees looking to make their companies or influence their companies to be more environmentally friendly?
Andrew Winston:
Look, as I said before, when I talk to top executives, they're hearing it from their employees. So, part of it is, I just tell, especially the young people, not that you have to tell Millennials to speak out, but to keep speaking and to be blunt. I talked to one CEO once, I said, “You seem convinced that Millennials in your business care about this stuff. How do you know?” He says, “They tell me.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” He's like, “I go to different facilities and a 25-year-old walks up to me and tells me.” I think keeping that open, keeping the pressure on people. But in most big companies, there is a sustainability officer. There's someone with that in their job. If you're not in that job, and there's only a few people who are, go find those people and say, “In the job I do, I want to help. I want to help us reach our goals. I want to know what we're doing.
And usually, the sustainability people will be thrilled because their job is to matrix and try to get the organization moving without a lot of resources. So, go find the people who are doing this work, and think about what you can do in your job. It's going to be a lot more than double-sided copying and changing the water bottles in the cafeteria. That stuff is fun, but it's really more like, what do you do in your job? Are you in procurement? What are you buying? What's the leverage point you have? Are you in sales? Are you in marketing? What's the pitch you're telling? Can you tell your customers about the sustainability work you're doing and tell a better story? Think about it through the lens of your job. And there's usually incredible opportunities to bring this in and create more value for your company.
Don MacPherson:
We've talked about consumer demand. We've talked about employees and them raising their voice to put some pressure on their organizations. Talk about what investors are doing. How are they putting pressure on organizations?
Andrew Winston:
The institutional investment community, and that's like the big asset owners, like a Fidelity or a Vanguard that we put our money into. There's a group called BlackRock. That's the largest asset owner in the world. They have $6 trillion. Well, their CEO, because they have a very long-term view. They own a piece of every large company. Their CEO has been sending out a letter to the S&P 500 CEOs every year, every January for four or five years. And that letter has been about long-term thinking, sustainability. He talks about purpose in business, what's called environmental, social, and governance investing. All about sustainable investing and how companies have to think long-term.
So, the pressure's been building from these longer-term investors. What's still lagging somewhat is kind of the analyst, The Wall Street guys. They just want to see a quarterly return, and so there's this weird divide happening. But I'm seeing pressure building from the long-term guys and from like private wealth families. One of the weird, I think, upsides, I guess, of the vast inequality growth in the world is that there's fewer and fewer people with all the money, and those families have a lot of leverage. They have leverage over the banks that they invest with. And there's a generational shift.
That same thing with Millennials, the stories I'm hearing and what I'm seeing is these families with wealth, there may be a patriarch or someone who's like earned it all, and then there's a grandkid who's in their 20s going, “What are we doing with all this money?” And they're investing in what's called impact investing. And that's starting to push companies to want those dollars. It's starting to create a more virtuous circle, but we have a long way to go.
Don MacPherson:
That seems like it would fill you with a sense of optimism and maybe it should fill our audience with a sense of optimism as well. What else fills you with a sense of optimism when it comes to the environment, sustainability, and climate change?
Andrew Winston:
Yeah. Well, look, I've said that the news is bad. I think we have to be really honest with ourselves. It's like getting a cancer diagnosis for yourself or your family. You can't go, “Well, that's all BS.” Or, “People have had cancer before.” That's not useful. We got to deal with what we're facing. We have some real important changes to make. But what I describe with the clean economy is real, it's happening unbelievably fast. The vast majority of new energy being put on the grid globally is renewables. The renewables have won. They're now cheaper, basically, than old fossil fuel energy. That gives me optimism. The pace of change in storage so you can put more on the grid and storage in batteries for cars. So, electric vehicles are growing much faster than people realize. China's investing an awful lot and putting tens of thousands of electric buses on the road constantly.
That gives me hope. And then the youth movement has been just an incredible inspiration. Again, because the news is so distracted with Washington and everything, last week, we're recording this when we are.
Don MacPherson:
March 25th.
Andrew Winston:
Right. So, on March 15th, there was a global strike from schools. There's a young girl, she's 16 named Greta Thunberg, who's from Sweden. And her story, and I just ask everyone to go Google her, because she inspires me. She started last August, just sitting outside her school with a sign saying, “I'm striking. Why am I going to school in a world that only has like 11 years left to figure this out? What's the point of me studying for a future that might not exist?” And within a few months, she's at the global climate meeting and she's at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland speaking to the Secretary General of the UN and the Head of the World Economic Forum, and telling them off. And telling them, “You haven't done anything, your generation's done nothing. We're going to have to deal with it.”
And then saying, “Hey, kids, you should all strike and show you’re serious.” And so, on March 15th, there were like 2 million kids around the world, giant protests in hundreds of cities, every continent. I saw pictures from Uganda, pictures from Sydney, pictures from Europe. I mean, everywhere. And they're not letting it go. I've had some people be skeptical like, “Who cares about kids marching?” I've heard that. I'm like, well, every social movement in history has kind of started with kids marching. Like, the boomers were not senior citizens when they marched against the Vietnam War and Civil Rights. They were kids. So, I'm inspired by that.
I have an article coming out in Harvard Business Review in the next couple days about this value shift that we're seeing. When value shifts happen, companies better beware, because they happen kind of quickly once they happen, right? The comfort with and expectations of how we treat gay partners in business changed really fast after decades of work. But then it changed in business really, really quickly, and in laws, right? Norms change, and then laws change, and business changes. And we're seeing that in topics like LGBT rights and race relations and immigration, and we're seeing it on climate finally.
Don MacPherson:
I'm sure lots of people are gonna be very interested in learning more about you. Where can people find you online?
Andrew Winston:
It's very simple. My name's Andrew Winston. I'm at andrewwinston.com. I have a kind of dated website that I keep meaning to update, which I'm getting to this year because I got the work to do. But it tells the basics, knows… You can find me, you can find my books, and ask me about speeches and where I'm going to be. And I do a lot of writing. Look for me on a Harvard Business Review. And if you sign up for my blog on my site, I repost everything I write elsewhere. I write for MIT Sloan Review and for HBR and other places. And I repost it all on my blog. So, sign up and get my writings.
Don MacPherson:
Fantastic. Andrew Winston, thank you for being a genius.
Andrew Winston:
Thank you.
Don MacPherson:
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