I was a guest on a podcast recently and the host asked me, “How do you convince a CEO to take their company in a more impactful direction?”
“We don’t”, was my answer.
Because for now most of our energy is simply going into finding the CEOs who already want to be more Sustainable and more Impactful, but who either don’t know the best way forward or don’t know how to convince their stakeholders to go along. We do have some long term initiatives aimed at convincing people, but in general our approach is geared towards simply helping the willing, and if we can help enough people move in the right direction, others will get off the fence and follow, and once we (and everybody else working on this) get enough people off the fence, we can simply drive the dinosaur hold-outs into extinction.
So if I had one message to the CEOs who still think their only duty is to themselves and their shareholders, it would be, “Please don’t change. Please keep doing things exactly the way you always have because we need examples like your company to point to highlight how bad the old way of doing things really is.”
This type of un-evolved CEO is almost an asset in some ways, the real threat is the CEO who is clever enough to realize their time is coming to an end, and who engages in greenwashing and tokenism to try to disguise their true identity. Those are the ones we must sooner or later expose. But for now, please send us an email if you are a CEO or know a CEO who is looking for answers on how to evolve.
