David L Cooperrider - The Business of Building a Better World: The Leadership Revolution That Is Changing Everything

Jesper Brodin (CEO, Ikea) and Halla Tmasdttir (CEO, the B Team)

FOR ALL THAT HUMANITY HAS lost and endured in the recent past, climate change remains the biggest challenge of our time. It threatens our way of life, our resilience, and our safety. And while words can inspire, it is action that sparks change and creates hope for the future. Seeing as this book is already in your hands, you just might feel the same.

We are in a critical decade, maybe the most important one for humankind. History will remember us for the actions we take or fail to take.

The question to ask yourself: How will I choose to lead during this decade?

We choose to lead with purpose and values. Our values animate our core humanity. They compel us to take a stand for people, to take responsibility for a more green and just world, to protect and sustain the planeta home we all share, the only home we havefor our families, communities, and generations to come. Our values guide us as individuals and as business leaders, for there is no business beyond our planetary boundaries and only fading opportunity in a world with a broken social contract.

Values-based leadership is needed now more than ever as climate change has accelerated and converged with multiple global crises: a once-in-a-century pandemic, widespread economic turmoil, a reckoning on race, democratic backsliding, mass migration, the crisis of social media, and rising inequality alongside diminishing trust in public institutions.

But a crisis of conformity still plagues boardrooms and leadership ranks around the world. Nearly 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are white men. Only two are Black women. Globally, women occupy a mere one in five seats in the boardroom. With rare exception, senior leadership in business and government falls far short of fairly reflecting the diversity of our workforces and customers, of our communities and constituencies. The COVID-19 pandemic has made matters worse, disproportionately imperiling the economic security of people of color and setting back gender equality 25 years. The crisis of conformity also extends to leaders, irrespective of their gender, race, ethnicity, orientation, or ability, who continue values-deficient incentive structures, often through inaction. When we change who is in leadership, we change how we do business.

To be sure, well-intentioned leaders in business, government, and civil society are creating opportunities and impacting positive change every day. We are humbled to know and work with so many of them. But when we take a big step back and focus our gaze at the systems level, we see an economic model that is truly broken. Ours is a system ill-prepared to mitigateand surely not built to solvetodays interdependent crises. Indeed, the view is commonly held that our economic model bears meaningful responsibility for the inequality and despair tearing at our social contract.

Along with staggering hardship and human loss, the COVID-19 pandemic brought us a narrow window of opportunity to reimagine and redesign the systems in which we live, prosper, and pursue our purpose. This moment demands an ambitious reset of our economy. It calls for bold leadership and radical collaboration across industries and sectors. Lets create a new economic paradigm, with humanity as its beating heart. Lets right the rules in time to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and deliver on our promise to the Paris Climate Agreement.

With much on our minds, forgive us for burying our introduction. In 2013, Richard Branson and Jochen Zeitz cofounded the B Team to work across business and government and help solve some of the worlds most intractable challenges. Today, as a global collective of CEOs and civil society leaders, we have a clearer sense of what future generations need from us. We are advocates for a better way of doing business, with a focus on bringing the global economy in line with Earths boundaries, cultivating equitable representation in leadership and achieving transparency in corporate governance. Our agenda ladders up to one overarching goal: to build, by 2030, an inclusive economy that works for all people and communities while safeguarding our natural environment.

In our pursuits, we convene leaders across business, labor, civil society, and government. We collaborate deeply with partners and across our networks. We amplify the stories of mission-aligned leaders around the world, and we reflect with candor on our struggles and setbacks. We are transparent in our ambition: engaging in public and corporate policy-making processes and driving adoption of new norms and incentives that can orient business toward a broader bottom line. Mindful of our privilege while embracing the benefits of our platform, we strive to uplift tomorrows leaders as vigorously as we catalyze change today.