paul polman

• Net Positive: Thriving by Giving More Than You Take
  Polman's signature argument is that doing "less bad" is no longer enough — the companies that win will be those that are restorative, regenerative, and reparative. He shows leaders how purpose-driven models outperform, drawing on his decade transforming Unilever.
• The SDGs as the Business Opportunity of a Generation
  As a co-architect of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Polman explains why addressing the world's biggest challenges represents the largest commercial opportunity in history — and how to translate global goals into concrete strategic choices.
• Courageous, Purpose-Driven Leadership
  Polman makes the case that the defining challenge for leaders is the courage to act on long-term thinking in a world organized around short-term metrics — and shares how he scrapped quarterly guidance to build a more resilient company.
• Sustainable Finance and Systems Change
  Drawing on his board and coalition work, Polman explores how to move capital toward solutions and build the cross-sector partnerships — business, government, civil society — needed to fix systems no single company can fix alone.

speaker Bio: 

Paul Polman is one of the most credible voices in global business on the relationship between corporate purpose and long-term performance. As CEO of Unilever from 2009 to 2019, he transformed one of the world's largest consumer-goods companies into a widely studied model for responsible capitalism: shareholder returns rose 290% over his tenure, while the company consistently ranked first globally for sustainability and among the world's best employers. The Financial Times called him "a standout CEO of the past decade."

A co-architect of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Polman is the co-author of the bestselling Net Positive, named a top business book of the year by the Financial Times and Thinkers50, and in 2025 was ranked the top-ranked management thinker by Thinkers50. He spent 27 years at Procter & Gamble and led Nestlé's Americas operations before Unilever, and today chairs Oxford's Saïd Business School, One Young World, and The Valuable 500, while serving on boards including the Rockefeller Foundation, Temasek, and the World Trade Organization. He co-founded IMAGINE to mobilize CEO-led coalitions on climate and inequality. What sets him apart from most voices in sustainability is that his arguments are grounded in operational results at real scale.

Summary (Signature Idea — Net Positive):

Polman's defining conviction is captured in a single reframing: the goal is not sustainability but a net-positive contribution — to leave the world better than you found it, and to profit by solving problems rather than creating them. He argues that "less bad" is a failing standard; the businesses that endure will be restorative and regenerative, taking responsibility for their total impact, leading with transparency, and collaborating across sectors because no single company can fix systemic problems alone. What makes him uniquely persuasive is that this is not idealism untested by the market — he ran the experiment at Unilever for a decade and delivered superior returns while doing it. He speaks the language of values and backs it with hard numbers on growth, margins, and returns, making him equally compelling to activists and analysts, employees and shareholders.

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