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FUTURE OF XYZ is a bi-weekly interview series that explores big questions about where we are as a world and where we’re going. Through candid conversations with international experts, visionary leaders and courageous changemakers- we provoke new thinking about what's coming down the pipeline on matters related to art & design, science & innovation, culture & creativity.
Future of XYZ is presented by iF Design, a respected member of the international design community and host of the prestigious iF DESIGN AWARD since 1953. The show is also a proud member of the SURROUND Podcast Network. For more information, visit ifdesign.com/XYZ.
00:00:04:00 - 00:00:25:13
Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to this special edition of Future of XYZ. We are going to be talking today, which is May 1st, which is Labor Day in Europe, about the future of value creation with Tensie Whelan. Thank you so much, Tensie, for joining us on Future of XYZ.
00:00:25:15 - 00:00:29:00
Speaker 2
It's a great pleasure to be with you, Lisa. Looking forward to our conversation.
00:00:29:02 - 00:00:58:18
Speaker 1
Well, me too. You are the distinguished professor of Practice for Business and Society at the New York University NYU’s Stern School of Business. You also are the founding director of the Stern Center for Sustainable Business. Your career is really distinguished both on the nonprofit business and academic side. And we're going to pull all of this together, I think, in today's conversation about value creation.
00:00:58:20 - 00:01:12:05
Speaker 1
One of the things I want to start with, as we always do, because this is a huge topic, but in the context of your experience and this conversation, can we define first and foremost what is value creation?
00:01:12:07 - 00:01:34:13
Speaker 2
Absolutely. And so I think of value creation in the context of sustainability. No big surprise. But for me, what I'm learning, what I saw when I was running Rainforest Alliance, for example, what I see in the last ten years of working with business is that when you embed sustainability core to business strategy, you drive value creation through operational efficiencies, innovation and growth.
00:01:34:15 - 00:02:01:20
Speaker 2
Sales and marketing benefits. Employee retention and engagement. Reduction of risk. Supplier resiliency and so on and so forth. So ultimately, for me, sustainably linked to value creation is actually good management for companies in ways that protect the resources upon which they depend, the people upon which they depend, and create a better future while at the same time creating financial value for the company.
00:02:01:22 - 00:02:27:12
Speaker 1
It's a fantastic expansion, I think, of what typically business schools teach as value creation. I myself went to INSEAD and we were taught, you know, create shareholder value. Cash is king. These are kind of the founding principles of capitalism, Milton Glaser, etc.. And I think one of the things that's really interesting to me, Milton Friedman, sorry. Glaser is a designer, I'm in that space these days a lot too.
00:02:27:13 - 00:02:53:10
Speaker 1
It's really interesting to me is value creation through the lens of sustainability is similar to my background in brand or what we talk about at iF Design a lot is design, which is kind of the intangible brand value of an enterprise, right? And you see companies in S&P, for instance, outperform their non-branded non designed peers, you know, at rates that are 2 to 300 times sometimes.
00:02:54:16 - 00:03:05:22
Speaker 1
I don't think that we yet have that level of evidence of value creation at the enterprise level through sustainability. But it’s not that far off, is it?
00:03:05:24 - 00:03:30:10
Speaker 2
No, I think we're learning more and more, right, because you can reduce costs through operational efficiency, you can drive growth through innovation, you can drive sales and marketing and customer loyal benefits through offering sustainable products, whether it be to B, to B to C, So a whole series of ways in which we're starting to see this and we're doing a lot of work with private equity, which is beginning to look at sort of impact on exit multiples in terms of valuation as well.
00:03:30:12 - 00:03:36:22
Speaker 1
I mean, when you can start convincing the money guys, that's where the that's that's where value creation really happens when they buy it, right?
00:03:36:23 - 00:03:38:06
Speaker 2
Yeah, exactly.
00:03:38:08 - 00:03:59:04
Speaker 1
I mean, it's interesting when you think about the traditional definition of value creation, which is, of course, increasing the overall worth of a product or service, something that someone buys. In many ways, it's kind of the foundation of capitalism coming back to what business schools teach. And what I'm really interested about is you teach at one of these leading business schools in the world.
00:03:59:08 - 00:04:31:22
Speaker 1
You have more than 25 years of experience working on local, national and international sustainability issues and specifically how the private sector can adopt these practices and mainstream innovation related to environmental and social impact, if you will. I always am curious, though, like because I think that we're still not there, even though I've been asking the question for 25 years, what is the definition of sustainability in 2025 as relates to value creation in business?
00:04:31:24 - 00:04:51:09
Speaker 2
I think the definition of sustainability in 2025, if you're aiming to use it towards value creation, is what are the material environmental, social governance issues for your particular sector? Are you putting in place the right strategies to tackle the both the risks and the upsides of those issues? And then are you ensuring that you understand the value drivers?
00:04:51:09 - 00:05:34:00
Speaker 2
So let me give you an example. If you're looking at automotive, for example, and right now we're looking at tariffs and all kinds of challenging things for automotive. Automotive has a number of strategies ranging from waste management to decarbonization to employee health and safety to new products like electric vehicles and so on. Our work with with companies looking at the financial returns associated with sustainability strategies have found things like one company generating $235 million net contributions, EBIT annually as a result of their waste management strategies which meant things like they're now recycling paint and solvent.
00:05:34:00 - 00:06:01:13
Speaker 2
When you recycle, paint and solvent, you no longer buy the virgin stuff. You no longer pay the waste disposal costs. They actually had some extra solvent to sell, so they had some revenue. Another really interesting point, which I'm going to bring back to tariffs is for another company. We looked at the impact financially of their circularity programs, so they were reusing 2.5% of used car components, putting them into new cars, recycling 10%.
00:06:01:13 - 00:06:22:03
Speaker 2
This is in Europe, recycling 10%. And then they were paying to dispose of what was leftover. That was netting them $100 million, which, by the way, they didn't know because companies do not track these things, the financial returns. All right. Let's think about this for a minute. Renault now is putting 45% of used car components back into new cars.
00:06:22:05 - 00:06:53:18
Speaker 2
They're designing their cars to be 85 or 95% recoverable. Their goal is to get to 85% used car components into new cars. Even at 45%, what does that tell you about tariffs? That's all happening in a country. 45% of the vehicle is no longer dependent on sourcing from other countries. And never mind the tariffs. When I was on the board of Aston Martin, when we couldn't get one car component, we couldn't build the car, right, from some like challenging area where something happened.
00:06:53:20 - 00:07:15:05
Speaker 2
So really fascinating benefits of really digging into sustainability. And that's just in automotive. In every single sector we find value creation comes from really understanding what's material from my sector, how do I design strategies that are upside and downside oriented? How do I put in place the ways to actually track those financial returns and think about this strategically.
00:07:15:07 - 00:07:39:01
Speaker 1
I, I mean, okay, there's many things in there I want to pull apart. The first is Aston Martin and then the sly drop of when I was on the board of Aston Martin. I have to say two episodes ago, we did the future of car design. Aston Martin was brought up there too. So nod to past episode, appreciate it. But strategy, everything you're saying is just fundamental good business.
00:07:39:01 - 00:08:02:21
Speaker 1
That's what I'm hearing. And what's always shocked me in corporate entities that I've been participant in, including some of the big management consulting firms as well, is it seems like there is very short term thinking for what returns look like and what you're talking about is longer term strategic planning and realizing short and mid and obviously long term gains that are not only good for the bottom line, but also for people and planet.
00:08:02:23 - 00:08:12:00
Speaker 1
If that's true value creation, do you use terms that are common like triple bottom line or do you think how do you think about that?
00:08:12:02 - 00:08:34:18
Speaker 2
I think people have moved beyond triple bottom line to talk about enterprise value creation through sustainability or just sustainability linked value creation, because triple bottom line has a kind of soft just sort of fuzzy focus. It shouldn't, but it has that kind of focus. So I think we're we're evolving to more even closer kind of business alignment language.
00:08:34:20 - 00:08:57:23
Speaker 2
Yeah, But, you know, ultimately, as you point out, the key issue is strategy, but also how you're looking at your accounting. So a big whole you mentioned intangibles before. There's a series of challenges regardless separate from size sustainability around how we do our accounting. One is accounting was developed when a company's valuation was based on real assets. Today, 90% of their valuation is based on intangibles.
00:08:58:02 - 00:09:22:06
Speaker 2
Accounting doesn't do a very good job of figuring out that. Quite a lot of sustainability, risk mitigation, employee engagement or retention, etc. are intangible benefits, reputation and so on. So that's one challenge. Another challenge is that finance corporate finance does not track avoided cost. Doesn't matter with sustainability. It's just not at all. In those examples I gave you most of that hundreds of millions of dollars are in avoided cost.
00:09:22:06 - 00:09:39:13
Speaker 2
If you're not tracking it, you do not understand some of the benefits. Give you another example. Pulp and paper company we worked with in the southeast of the United States uses an enormous amount of water. Water is more or less free there, the CSO said, we need to tackle water. The mill managers are like, why it doesn’t cost us anything?
00:09:39:15 - 00:10:04:13
Speaker 2
The CSO went in, looked at this and basically the amount of energy required to move around heat and cool that water and the waste disposal costs of that large volume of wastewater was costing each mill $1.5 million per year for quote unquote free water. Right? So you have all of this sort of operational inefficiencies, sort of challenges around lack of innovation that people are not accounting for.
00:10:04:18 - 00:10:21:09
Speaker 2
The one other thing I'd like to say something about the social side, if I can have that here. Yeah. So I've been looking a bit at some of these sort of questions around how we take care of our people and again, how accounting screws up, how we take care of our people. So let's just take Domino's.
00:10:21:11 - 00:10:24:07
Speaker 1
Domino's pizza chain.
00:10:24:09 - 00:10:36:11
Speaker 2
Thank you. Domino's pays their people as little as possible, right? They have a turnover rate of between 150 and 185% annually. They're having to I mean,
00:10:36:13 - 00:10:38:10
Speaker 1
They’re putting in two employees for every one.
00:10:38:12 - 00:10:59:05
Speaker 2
They have to hire 180,000 people annually to get to 134,000 positions they need to have. It takes them a month to train the person to be able to do the pizzas, blah, blah, blah. Then after a month, the person leaves. Customers say, the lowest customer satisfaction in the industry. So they have a whole program. I'll give you a free pizza.
00:10:59:09 - 00:11:25:17
Speaker 2
If you're mad about your local, you know you're problematic customer support. So what are they looking at when they announce to investors, etc., how they're doing? Look at how little we're paying our people. Are they looking at how much it costs to hire 180,000 people a year, how much it costs for them to give all those free pizzas, how much it costs to have really angry employees and customers in terms of their reputation right now?
00:11:25:17 - 00:11:47:05
Speaker 2
No. So one relevant like where you can look at this and how it plays out in real time is Costco, right. Costco pays the best of all of their competitors, not only the actual pay but the pension, you know, the retirement match, the health benefits they had the lowest theft rate in the industry. It's like 0.01% versus 1.6% of the industry.
00:11:47:07 - 00:12:09:23
Speaker 2
They have the highest the best retention rate. I think it's like six or 8% versus like 36, 40% in the rest of the industry. They have the highest productivity per salesperson in the industry, Right. Massive amount of money that they're making because they're investing in their people and they've stood up on DEI because that's a big part of what they're doing.
00:12:10:00 - 00:12:18:09
Speaker 2
They're sales went up 9%. Yep. Their sales went up 9%. Target has stepped away from it. Their sales dropped 3%.
00:12:18:11 - 00:12:39:08
Speaker 1
This is such a great case study in what consumers actually care about. Yeah, it's a really nice segue because you and your team just released I don't even know in the last couple of days, an updated body of research called the Sustainable Market Share Index. It's consumer products. I think you've been doing it since 2013 or 2015. So over ten years.
00:12:39:10 - 00:13:01:13
Speaker 1
But this year, for the first year of ‘24 data, you've added not only to the U.S., you've added UK and German data, which is very germane to the team that I'm on at iF, which is German headquartered and a PR firm who's in the U.K. So I like both of these. I want to ask a few questions about value creation in the context of this research because it's really interesting.
00:13:01:13 - 00:13:21:03
Speaker 1
You guys get your you and your team gave me a sneak peek. And as a former consultant and the former CPG person, I find all of this very interesting because I've been banging this drum for a long time. I mean, the first question I see is that, you know, you're seeing a trend upwards in so-called sustainable consumer products.
00:13:21:05 - 00:13:24:15
Speaker 1
I want to talk a little bit about that and why you think that is.
00:13:24:17 - 00:13:42:20
Speaker 2
Yeah. So first of all, we look at every single CPG product sold in this country from mom and pop to bricks and mortar to e-commerce with data that they give to us pro bono. And as you said, we've been looking at this for over ten years. We what we see is that every single day we look at 36 CPG categories.
00:13:42:20 - 00:14:02:13
Speaker 2
Every single category has been moving up. So initially when we started to look at this, I think there are about 14 or so categories in the -5%, a handful in the plus 20%, the rest the middle. Today we have more like eighteen in the plus 20%, that's over a tipping point. We only have five in the less than 5%.
00:14:02:15 - 00:14:29:19
Speaker 2
This is not a momentary flash in the pan. This is, you know, continuing. So when you look at the actual CAGR, right, for sustainably marketed products, it's 2.3 times higher than conventionally marketed products. At a let me say, a 26% premium. Okay. And also, during this inflationary period, the last couple of years, we've been looking at what's been happening to market share.
00:14:29:21 - 00:14:53:06
Speaker 2
And so you might think that during an inflationary period with that kind of premium, the growth would slow. But no. What have we seen? Private label which is cheaper, that market share has increased but sustainably marketed products, their market share has increased even more. Who has lost market share? Conventional brands, right. Who like cost of inaction, are like not getting on the bandwagon here.
00:14:53:06 - 00:15:16:19
Speaker 2
Right. So really fascinating. And again, over and over and over again, we see this continued growth. I think it's happening because people and we've done some research with adult men looking at kind of what environmental messaging works. And I think people are concerned about the environmental health impacts of that, the products that they eat and put in around them, which is what CPG is.
00:15:16:21 - 00:15:38:14
Speaker 2
They're also looking for sort of pocketbook benefits. So cold water, laundry detergent, save some money right there. Look, they do care about what sort of their personal world, local farmers, animal welfare. And they increasingly very much care about sustainable sourcing. So when companies are actually putting authentic programs into place, they will drive market share growth.
00:15:38:16 - 00:16:11:00
Speaker 1
It's amazing. I mean, I love all of this. It's about time. I have so many things that we can talk about offline examples, but we'll we'll we'll keep moving in this conversation. But you've mentioned two things in there. One is about the growth of the portfolio. CPG being consumer packaged goods used to be fast moving consumer goods, whatever you want, call it the stuff that you buy at the grocery store or the drugstore or your local convenience mart, whatever, or the big box stores, depending which markets you're in.
00:16:11:02 - 00:16:34:20
Speaker 1
What's interesting to me is that the U.S., based on this data we're showing how little actually the trend not matters. That's not true. How how little a percentage of the market we still have in the U.S. of sustainable products versus the other two markets you looked at last year being the UK and Germany. Can you talk about that a little bit?
00:16:34:22 - 00:16:35:16
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely.
00:16:35:16 - 00:17:04:11
Speaker 2
So we are not by again, just to say this has grown substantially since when we first looked at it. So in the U.S., basically one out of every $4 spent in CPG is for a sustainably marketed product. Okay, so 23.8%, however, which, yay us, but as you said in the U.K., it's more than one out of every $3. Right. So in the U.K., it's 36.7%.
00:17:04:13 - 00:17:27:02
Speaker 2
And in Germany, it's almost a little bit under one out of every $2 is spent on a sustainable product at 42.1%. So absolutely, those markets are way ahead of us. When I ran Rainforest Alliance and worked with companies to convert their sustainable source, their sourcing to be sustainable, they always wanted to go to the European markets first, right?
00:17:27:02 - 00:17:57:15
Speaker 2
Because the demand has been there for a long time and growing. But what this tells me is, is, yes, we're behind. But what it tells me is that's where we're going. And they're going even farther, you know, and this is what I think a lot of companies do not understand. They still have in their mind, I don't know, a gap like the over what do you call that, a hangover from the 1980s and nineties when like, sustainable products were seen as hippie granola, didn't really function or taste all that good.
00:17:57:17 - 00:18:15:12
Speaker 2
And so they, you know, right now sustainability is becoming intertwined with quality, right? It is becoming intertwined with loyalty. It is like the innovation play in CPG. And so I you know, those who don't get it will die.
00:18:15:14 - 00:18:50:09
Speaker 1
I want to talk about the price premium, but I have one other question on kind of the market, because you just mentioned something that's important, which is the trend is up is is a good one, right? Globally, it's moving and people care. I'm curious about like the demographics. I mean, you teach in a you know, in a in a university that has both undergrad you're at the graduate level, but nonetheless in New York's a young city and you know so you're surrounded all that all the time but like I mean was you know I guess what is it about the demographic differences that you're seeing and are they across countries or is it U.S. specific?
00:18:50:09 - 00:18:57:15
Speaker 1
Is it younger people who are fueling this growth who are so much more health conscious, socially conscious, environmentally conscious, but also price conscious.
00:18:57:17 - 00:19:44:12
Speaker 2
Yeah. So so we just have the demographic data in the U.S. So I cannot speak to Europe. Fascinating. So we did it last year and we did it five years prior. Five years prior, as you might expect, there was, you know, pretty distinctive differences. We looked at age, income, education and geographic, you know, rural, suburban, urban. And you know, you saw over indexing amongst millennials and a bit Generation X, baby boomers, okay, retires and senior seniors the least on education over indexing and post-graduate and graduate you know the least and less than high school income which by the way the the numbers are like high income as just 70,000 plus low income is less
00:19:44:12 - 00:20:21:16
Speaker 2
than 30,000. Okay. So we're not talking about millionaires here. But again, over indexed, as you might expect, on the higher income and then over indexed on urban. Now five years later, the over indexing and under indexing has dissipated. Not completely. Those trends are still there, but they’re a lot lighter. So what we're seeing is actually mainstreaming across all demographics where everybody let's say, for example, yogurt is being sold at 70% or so
00:20:21:21 - 00:20:38:08
Speaker 2
market share sustainable. Every single demographic is sourcing that, whether they're rural, low education, low income or senior retiree. Right? So the more it becomes available, and we did a little regression analysis around this too, the more it becomes available, the more people buy it.
00:20:38:08 - 00:20:39:06
Speaker 1
Yeah.
00:20:39:08 - 00:21:05:19
Speaker 2
Yeah. Also as the the price point is problematic, but again, people making less than $30,000 buying that yogurt at three, I think it's on an average like a 35% premium. Certain products like dairy and yogurt I believe are are indexing really high at high premiums because every mom, no matter what her income or political affiliation, wants their kid to have healthy fit.
00:21:05:21 - 00:21:28:11
Speaker 2
And this is yeah this is part of like this is in the mindset now right. So again, this is not going away. This is across demographics, growing, becoming mainstream. And yes, as long as you have high premiums, it'll be slightly over index for people who have more money. As long as it's not available in rural areas, it'll be over indexed in urban areas.
00:21:28:13 - 00:21:30:04
Speaker 2
But it's mainstreaming.
00:21:30:06 - 00:21:51:10
Speaker 1
I mean, you see it because the private label, which is of course like a store brand, also offers now better for you, better for the planet alternatives. I'm I'm resisting talking about dairy and yogurt as the former vice president of branded innovation at Chobani. So I'm going to just like really hold on tight right now. Do not say anything.
00:21:51:12 - 00:22:19:03
Speaker 1
But your observation is, of course, correct. And we saw it there. And how do you label on pack to inform? And all those things are interesting. I want to talk about price before we leave this consumer model for a minute. It's really bothered me for a very long time how we can justify and I say we in the business community can justify charging a premium and it, according to this study, is 26.6% more than conventional products.
00:22:19:05 - 00:22:47:09
Speaker 1
How we can justify that when in fact, in my humble opinion, this is driving pure economic value for companies. It's not necessarily more to produce, oftentimes. If you have a green cleaning solution and a traditional green and conventional green cleaning solution, it's not necessarily more expensive for the company to produce in any way the green, but we're going to charge 27% more, which to me feels like a barrier to broad scale adoption.
00:22:47:15 - 00:23:00:08
Speaker 1
It's it basically prioritizes economic value creation versus human values. How is this starting to change as you think about enterprise value in tracking and accounting correctly for all of the other opportunities?
00:23:00:10 - 00:23:18:03
Speaker 2
Yeah. So philosophically, I agree with you. You know, in my work with CPG, you know, in some cases they may be paying a couple percentage points more because honestly, we've been socialized into paying too little for food in particular. So to do it sustainably, pay the people well, protect the environment, it actually does need to be a little bit more expensive.
00:23:18:07 - 00:23:50:15
Speaker 2
It does not need to be 27% more expensive. So a couple of things. When we first started looking at premium back in 2018, it was 38%. It has begun to reduce, even though it's stayed pretty stable over the last two years. There's a couple things happening related to that premium. One is that oftentimes as a category shifts and changes to become more sustainable, the first entrants are smaller companies that don't have the ability there.
00:23:50:19 - 00:24:12:18
Speaker 2
The price point is just more expensive. They do not have the scale that the larger companies have and they actually they have to charge a higher price point. But what we're starting to see is that a lot of legacy brands are coming in with their version, you know, the brand extension around sustainability, and they are bringing it in at a lower price point.
00:24:12:20 - 00:24:36:21
Speaker 2
They're not bringing it in at a lower at a low enough price point, though, because the fact is they can charge this because it's very clear that people will pay it. The other challenge that is beginning to shift is that prior to this inflationary period, supermarkets had required, as you probably know, the brands to keep their prices super low for their conventional products.
00:24:36:23 - 00:24:59:22
Speaker 2
So the only place they could actually take price increases were in the new products and sustainable. Yeah. So the other thing that we've been seeing as that inflationary period has allowed them, the retailers have allowed them to increase their conventional product prices, is the gap between the Delta between the two has begun begun to slow. As I mentioned on food.
00:24:59:22 - 00:25:26:18
Speaker 2
I do think that some products I mean I know pork producers who produce in a in a factory farm horrible way who and they are right cannot produce that differently if we are going to insist upon paying the very low price we pay for pork. Okay. So there is absolutely an imperative to recognize that food in particular does cost more than we're willing to pay at that kind of low, low price.
00:25:26:18 - 00:25:45:09
Speaker 2
Right. But at the same time, 26%. No. And 26% across everything. But by the way, it ranges from 180 something percent for some categories to discount and others, it's just around 30%. Is the average. So that varies across categories.
00:25:45:11 - 00:26:30:03
Speaker 1
It leads to an interesting kind of question. We've talked about tariffs. We've talked about like, you know, margin taking and giving within the industry. You've talked about how food expectations, a lot of that's come out of subsidies right, in the current political chaos slash economic uncertainty, slash etc., of especially American driven chaos right now. Do you think that this is a catalyst to either catalyze foster positive adoption of sustainable principles for value creation, or do you see this as being a barrier or an excuse for sliding backwards, both at the corporate investor and individual level?
00:26:30:03 - 00:26:33:10
Speaker 1
I know it's a big question.
00:26:33:12 - 00:27:00:18
Speaker 2
Both. So I am already seeing a certain group of companies who honestly didn't really get it, weren't all that excited about it in the first place. Yay, don't have to do this anymore. Other companies who had either were well along way or had begun to see that there actually is value creation here. Stepping back from certain types of communications, looking at their narrative.
00:27:00:18 - 00:27:28:04
Speaker 2
But then more importantly, actually, in order to combat the attacks, to build it more into the business case and value creation, because even though we know that the real reasons are other the the the arguments that the red state attorney general's use against talking this stuff, talking Costco or whatever, is it it's wokeism and doesn't have anything and is antithetical to fiduciary duty and the bottom line.
00:27:28:09 - 00:27:53:15
Speaker 2
Right. So what we have to what these companies need to do is just put their heads down and really invest in it as part of their business strategy and demonstrate the value creation, whether it's a corporate or an investor. By the way, hip investor has done studies that show that the pensions in the the blue states outperform the pensions and the red states that have anti ESG requirements.
00:27:53:17 - 00:27:58:24
Speaker 1
Same as when you see, DEI slash women and people of color on boards of companies, they tend to outperform.
00:27:59:03 - 00:28:25:01
Speaker 2
Right? Exactly. So but we need to be able to really demonstrate that. So I think that those companies for me, the one tiny silver lining is for a certain class of companies and their competitors, when they see them win with this, will start to copy them, are now instead of just saying, well, we don't really know, we're just doing because the right thing, you know, blah, blah, blah, they'll start to actually make it part of their business strategy and track the financials and be able to defend that.
00:28:25:03 - 00:28:50:02
Speaker 1
It's good. It kind of takes it out of being a moral imperative, although it should be that, although it should be corporate charitable, you know, CSR, as it was called for a while. Right. And really puts it towards the bottom line and material business operations. Yeah, we're coming on time, which really bums me out, but I want to ask two final questions that I always ask our guests.
00:28:50:04 - 00:29:12:01
Speaker 1
The this the second to last question. I'm going to add one other in between. But like, are there one or two iconic references that you think people listening or viewing this episode who want to learn more about value creation should check out? Is there a is there a book? Is there a podcast? Is there an article like something that really summarizes your thinking on this?
00:29:12:03 - 00:29:40:02
Speaker 2
Well, first of all, they can go to the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business website. We have a return on sustainability investment microsite there that has all open source, all of our frameworks, learnings, tools, etc. If they want a quick look, I wrote a piece for HBR called How to Talk to Your CFO that summarizes it. And there's lots of podcasts and things out there with me and others on the topic.
00:29:40:04 - 00:29:48:09
Speaker 2
I also wrote an HBR an article with Randy, one of my colleagues around the research, the consumer research work as well.
00:29:48:11 - 00:30:09:21
Speaker 1
That's awesome. HBR for anyone out of the country or not in business, is Harvard Business Review, where I believe you're an advisor to the Future Economy Project as well as a general contributor. Pretty impressive. So before I ask the last question, Tensie, is there anything that I didn't ask you about this subject that you want to add before we close?
00:30:09:23 - 00:30:14:06
Speaker 2
I think I mean, there's lots of other things we could talk about, as you said, but I think we covered it well.
00:30:14:09 - 00:30:41:06
Speaker 1
Cool. So the last and final question I always ask all guests in 25 years, 2050, let's call it as you look to your students who you work with and teach to your companies who you advise to your fellow academics, to the policy world, like all of it combined worldwide, like what's your greatest hope for the future of value creation?
00:30:41:08 - 00:31:18:13
Speaker 2
My greatest hope is that everybody understands that value creation by companies is dependent on creating value for all stakeholders, which includes our environment, our employees, our customers, our vendors, our suppliers, etc.. Right. Our communities. And that creating value for all those stakeholders is actually results in significant value for you as a business and that we have learned how to tackle.
00:31:18:13 - 00:31:58:19
Speaker 2
For example, the challenge that we are using 1.7 planet Earths. We each year only recycle, reuse or upcycle 90 sorry, 7% of all the materials we consume. All of those things actually create business opportunity is if you start to think about circularity, for example, decarbonization, take care of your people. The opportunity to transform how we think about business, accounting, marketing, our people, the environment through a value creation lens is to make for an innovation which I love.
00:31:58:19 - 00:32:15:01
Speaker 2
Like this all is an innovation and change and transformation opportunity. It's really exciting. So that's what I hope in 25 years people have really embedded. That doesn't mean they know everything, but it's really part of how they go about their business and their lives.
00:32:15:03 - 00:32:29:23
Speaker 1
For anyone listening, I have the biggest, silliest grin on my face because I love this vision. I pray for this vision every day. Professor Tensie Whelan, and thank you so much for joining us on Future of XYZ this May Day.
00:32:30:00 - 00:32:33:22
Speaker 2
It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Lisa.
00:32:33:24 - 00:33:02:12
Speaker 1
For everyone watching and listening, make sure you visit the site that Tensie mentioned at Stern. It's incredible resource for anyone looking to learn more about sustainable value creation. If you don't know what May Day is because you're not in Europe, totally look it up. It's a pretty fascinating equivalent of our Labor Day. And for anything else, make sure you leave us a five star review wherever you get your favorite podcasts and we will see you again in two weeks time.
00:33:02:18 - 00:33:03:14
Speaker 1
Thanks again, Tensie.
00:33:03:14 - 00:33:05:19
Speaker 2
Thank you.