and the next year.
If you look at the latest COP27,
the UNEP emissions gap report,
it clearly speaks of insufficient action,
a lot of eagerness to talk,
but perhaps less to do,
so to speak.
Should we require every company to have a
net zero part of their business strategy?
It might be necessary.
I'm generally not a huge fan of that,
if you will, that hammer.
I would love to see customers
be the
key driver, that customers just say,
I'm not buying,
unless you do tax.
I mean, obviously there's going to be,
there is for sure a role for government fiat.
But I'm, I guess my,
I've seen enough
government fiat with
massively unintended consequences
that saying we're going to solve this problem by government fiat
is to me the least best solution, typically.
Would I rather have
government saying to companies,
you can't do that thing,
or government saying to customers,
we will provide you this subsidy for
you to insist on this better thing.
I'll typically take the second over the,
over the first.
How can we future feed corporations to apply new models to
address sustainability and continued growth simultaneously?
I think it's creating a context where they're
rewarded for cleverness on that front,
because companies will be clever,
like necessity is the mother of invention,
as they,
as they say.
And I think,
I think if you create a situation in which
it's necessary for companies to be clever,
I think they'll get clever.
If you don't have to be,
right,
if it's a lazy industry that doesn't have much competition,
where you can make lots of money by doing the same old,
same old,
using the same models,
nothing particularly good is going to happen.
If we take it from a company's perspective and with its employees,
how can the assistant model be,
maybe first of all,
if you can put a few words to it,
what does it mean?
Sure.
And how can it be applied to empower people to actually take
decisions wherever they are and make choices in the organization?
So what I,
what I argue in the book is that the most
kind of traditional way of thinking about a big corporation,
let's say a corporation with a bunch of businesses
and businesses having a bunch of products,
is that the corporate level at the top
tells the businesses what to do and controls and organizes them.
And that goes on all down to the organization,
the next level of business,
it,
it controls and organizes and audits and the businesses below.
And I say it's that model that's gotten us so many breakups,
private equity going in and taking a piece out of a company
because that doesn't work.
The people on top know less
about what's happening at the,
at what I say,
the coal face,
you know,
where you're chipping coal at the coal face.
That's the,
that's the people at the bottom of the
company interfacing with customers.
And so instead,
I think it should be reversed to say,
in order for you to win,
you need to have the customer pick your product or service
against the competitors.
I think it is something that a lot of our
customers are today standing in front of.
All customer problems,
are they really worthwhile solving if it comes
with a negative impact on people and the planet?
I would love to hear your perspective on that because some of
our customers are fully aware that some of their cash cows,
they have negative impacts.
So how do you really kill a cash cow?
It's hard to kill cash cows.
I mean,
and it's like when BP way back 20 years ago said,
we're going to be beyond petroleum.
And then everybody just looked at their,
their capital investment accounts and right.
95% was still drilling for hydrocarbons
and 5% was on renewables.
Right.
And they weren't about to kill that cash cow.
And of course,
you know,
it all ended up being mocked as,
as just greenwashing, et cetera, et cetera.
So I think there are going to be really fundamental choices.
Regulation had a hard time forcing or just,
or just sort of having NGOs saying to companies,
you need to be more green.
When the customers say,
I'm,
I'm going to stop buying from you,
then you've got to figure out
a much better way of, of doing things.