Paul Polman

Paul Polman ran a Fortune 500 company on the argument most executives treat as a slogan, and the reason he is worth booking is that the numbers came out the other side.

As chief executive of Unilever from 2008 to 2019 he did something that reads as reckless in isolation: he stopped issuing quarterly earnings guidance in his first week, on the grounds that a business cannot make decade-long commitments while being judged every ninety days. Over his tenure shareholder returns rose by around 290% and the company was repeatedly rated the most sustainable business in the world. Those two facts sitting together are the whole argument, and they are why a skeptical board will listen to him when it will not listen to a consultant.

Net Positive, written with Andrew Winston and published in 2021, sets out the standard he is now known for: that the bar is not reducing harm but leaving the world measurably better than you found it, and that a company should be willing to be judged on whether it profits from fixing problems rather than from creating them. It is a demanding position and he is direct about where it costs money in the short term.

He chairs and advises widely, including as a chair at the UN Global Compact, and Thinkers50 ranked him its top management thinker in 2025.

He suits ESG summits, board and executive strategy sessions, annual meetings and any leadership group deciding how far its sustainability commitments should actually go. The value for that room is not inspiration, it is that he has already made the trade-offs they are debating and can say which ones held. He is based in the United Kingdom and speaks internationally.