Case Study: A Vision for Unilever
In 2009, the multinational company Unilever adopted a new strategic vision that integrated societal and environmental responsibilities. The company's Sustainable Living Plan was the center of this strategy. This plan aims to help more than a billion people improve their health and wellbeing, decouple Unilever's growth from its environmental impact, increase its social impact, and enhance the livelihoods of all those involved in its supply chain. Read this chapter to discover how Unilever merged sustainability with profitable growth.
What steps did Unilever take to re-engineer the company and implement the Sustainable Living Plan successfully? How did sustainable innovation play a role in helping Unilever achieve its goals? What were the results?
Culture
"We are trying to create a culture where everybody can rise to their full potential, where there is open discussion, where our job in the leadership team is really to make everybody else successful. I always say, even publicly, that as CEO: my finance manager knows more about finance, my category presidents know more about their categories, and people that run the country category business teams know more about their business in their countries. My job is to make other people successful.
That is what we very much like to do at the senior level, and then create a culture around our values, values of respect, integrity, pioneering, responsibility, which are very important to us, that we try to make come alive.
"Many companies restructure because they don't want to attack the harder rights versus the easier wrongs. They postpone the top issues for their successors. When time is short, the fundamental decisions on how we should run businesses and how we should contribute to society, are not being made.