Paul Polman
Most companies still frame sustainability as a compliance cost. Boards hear sustainability commitments from one part of the business while lobbying teams fight the same policies elsewhere. The question senior leaders are asking privately is whether purpose-driven business models actually outperform, or whether this is a decade of misallocated capital.
When boards want to know whether sustainability and long-term strategy actually deliver financial returns, Paul Polman is the former Unilever CEO whose decade running the company proved they do, and who now helps executive teams build the commercial case.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Paul Polman
- A ten-year CEO run at Unilever with documented results. Shareholder returns rose 290 percent while the company held the top global sustainability ranking, ended quarterly earnings guidance on day one, and defeated Kraft Heinz’s 143 billion dollar hostile takeover bid in 2017.
- Ranked first in the world. In 2025 Thinkers50 placed Polman and Andrew Winston first in its biennial list of the most influential management thinkers, the field’s most authoritative ranking.
- Co-architect of the UN Sustainable Development Goals as one of 27 members of Ban Ki-moon’s High Level Panel. He helped build the framework boards now report against.
- A direct read on how long-term capital and global institutions weigh sustainability. Polman advises Temasek and the World Trade Organization and sits on the boards of the Rockefeller Foundation and the European Climate Foundation.
- Net Positive, his book with Andrew Winston, was named a Financial Times Business Book of the Year and won the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award.
Biography highlights
- CEO of Unilever, 2009 to 2019. Succeeded Patrick Cescau and was succeeded by Alan Jope.
- 27 years at Procter & Gamble, rising to Group President for Europe. Then Chief Financial Officer at Nestlé from 2006 and Head of the Americas from 2008.
- Member of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s High Level Panel that developed the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Continues as a UN SDG Advocate.
- Chair of The Valuable 500 and One Young World, co-chair of the Planetary Guardians, and co-founder and Chair Emeritus of IMAGINE. Board member of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation and the European Climate Foundation, and adviser to the World Trade Organization and Temasek. Former Chair of Oxford Saïd Business School (2019 to 2025) and former Vice-Chair of the UN Global Compact (to June 2024).
- Co-author of Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take (2021), a Financial Times Business Book of the Year and Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award winner.
- Ranked first in the 2025 Thinkers50 list with Andrew Winston. Recipient of a UK Knighthood, France’s Légion d’honneur and the UN’s highest environmental honour.
Biography
Between 2009 and 2019, Unilever delivered a 290 percent shareholder return while holding the top global sustainability ranking and the title of one of the world’s best places to work. The period included the defeat of a $143 billion hostile bid from Kraft Heinz in 2017. The decade is the empirical case sitting underneath everything Paul Polman argues about business today.
He wrote the case up with Andrew Winston. Net Positive, published in 2021, argues that companies should improve the wellbeing of everyone they affect, including the planet, and build financial strength in the process. The Financial Times named it a Business Book of the Year, and Thinkers50 gave it the Breakthrough Idea Award the same year.
Polman’s operator background predates Unilever. He spent 27 years at Procter & Gamble, rising to Group President for Europe, before joining Nestlé as Chief Financial Officer in 2006. That background matters to the argument. The book comes from someone who ran the P&L while making the sustainability case.
Today Polman advises CEOs, boards and investors on long-term value creation and systems change. He co-chairs the Planetary Guardians, chairs The Valuable 500, and sits on the boards of the Rockefeller Foundation and the European Climate Foundation. He advises the World Trade Organization and Temasek. In 2025, Thinkers50 placed him and Andrew Winston first in its biennial ranking of the world’s most influential management thinkers.
Key speaking topics
- Sustainable business and the Net Positive framework
- Purpose-driven leadership and long-term value creation
- Sustainability as commercial strategy
- Climate change and the role of business
- The UN Sustainable Development Goals
- Corporate governance and stakeholder capitalism
- Systems change and industry coalitions
Ideal for
- Boards and executive teams weighing whether to hardwire long-term and sustainability commitments into strategy as a commercial decision, not a reputational one.
- CEOs and strategy leads under pressure to deliver near-term growth while defending long-term investment and stakeholder trust.
- CFOs, investors and IR teams making the commercial case for long-term value creation against short-term capital-markets pressure.
- Governments, multilateral bodies and business coalitions working on public-private collaboration and systems change.
Audience outcomes
- The empirical case, with the Unilever numbers, for why purpose-driven models outperform shareholder-primacy ones over a decade.
- A sharper line between sustainability as compliance cost and sustainability as commercial strategy, and how boards tell the difference in practice.
- The Net Positive model: how a company profits by solving the world’s problems instead of creating them, and builds value for shareholders and society while doing it.
- A working reframe of the UN Sustainable Development Goals as commercial opportunity, grounded in the industry coalitions Polman has helped build.
- The operator’s view on defending long-term strategy to activist investors, drawn from the defeat of the Kraft Heinz takeover and the decision to end quarterly earnings guidance.