More on Qualitative Analysis

Chapter 3 Paul Polman: a Vision for Unilever

Unilever's Sustainable Living Plan is an extremely big and challenging project, extreme in terms of ambition as well as scope (impact), affecting billions of people.

It embodies a strong vision linked to strong leadership, combining human drive and motivation (ownership) with a striving for operational excellence. It involves everybody inside the company (ownership) and outside: governments, NGOs, stakeholders, and shareholders (environment). It is a highly complex project in the sense of execution because it also needs a societal "mindshift".

A proper concept is key in which all targets and sub-targets have been identified and defined (see Annex: The Owls Breakthrough Concept) and ownership is transferred to the workfloor and to the field of operations. Its success will lie in the performance of many small actions which, taken together, will make a big difference in the end. This can all be brought together by The Owls Breakthrough Method, finding the mechanism and process to develop a clear vision and a creative and powerful concept, followed by adequate planning and execution.

Key factors are: vision, innovative thinking, clear concept specifying all goals and subgoals, strong planning and execution power, iterative process, strong enabling leadership (human factor), and environmental factors and capabilities.

Note: the slightly lower scores for the generic factors concept and iterative process in the awareness analysis relate to the way in which the software measures specific topics that are intrinsically present but are not mentioned extrinsically. The organization does certainly act according to the results of the impact analysis by the assessment group.