Former Unilever CEO and sustainability leader delivers inspirational talk at UWL public lecture

Dr Suresh Gamlath, Professor Peter John CBE and Paul Polman standing together

Former Unilever CEO and sustainability leader delivers inspirational talk at UWL public lecture

22 February 2024

Paul Polman, former Unilever CEO, respected business leader, climate and equality campaigner, recently gave a captivating public lecture tied to bestselling book "Net Positive, How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More than They Take" at UWL’s Ealing site.

The free event was organised by UWL as part of the University’s annual Public Lecture series. It was attended by a mix of UWL academics, students, Ealing residents, local businesses and sustainability professionals. The event coincided with UWL winning Corporate of the Year for Sustainability at the West London Business Awards.

Paul was one of the key architects of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (USDGs), seven world development goals created in 2015 with the aim of delivering "peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.” USDGs are globally recognised as one of the most effective ways to run a responsible organisation.

Members of the audience at Paul Polman's event at UWL.

The campaigner started his lecture saying,

It’s apt that Queen singer Freddie Mercury attended the University when it was called Ealing College because my talk today, like one of his songs, is all about being ‘under pressure’.”

He continued,

We are still at the point in history where we are creating problems at a faster pace than we are applying solutions. This world is around 4.5 billion years old, and it is estimated that it has another 4.5 billion years to go. Some people may think, ‘Don’t worry because you won’t be here.’ But we are at a mid-life crisis. If we scale this time frame to 45 years, human beings have only been here for 4 hours. The industrial revolution only started one minute ago. Yet in that one minute we lost 50 percent of the world’s forests. In the last 50 years we have lost 68 percent of the world’s species. And as I speak, about two million more are being made extinct. It is incomprehensible what we are doing.”

Audience members at the Paul Polman event held at UWL.

Paul believes that positive change can only happen if the private sector works with civil society and governments. Education also has a vital role to play:

We need leaders. We need a different kind of leadership from the past. We can solve a lot of problems with a higher level of thinking.”

Commenting on the lecture, UWL Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Peter John CBE said,

It was a pleasure to welcome Paul Polman to UWL. We all learnt so much from such an authentic changemaker and business leader. Here at UWL we are committed to embedding sustainability in our curriculum as well as creating leaders with a greater level of expertise on such an essential subject.”

One UWL student who attended the lecture was very impressed, saying to Paul,

I look up to you so much. You have so many positive things to say about leadership, it has been a very insightful lecture.”

Paul was Chief Executive of Unilever from 2009 to 2019. During his tenure, he decoupled business growth from the company's overall environmental footprint and increased the company’s positive social impact through sustainability. In this period Unilever’s shares outperformed the FTSE 100 index, rising about 150 per cent.