Right now, as business leaders, we are facing a myriad of crises — the war in Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis in most Western nations, the so called ‘great resignation,’ the inequality crisis and, in my view the biggest of them all, the climate crisis.
The climate crisis cannot be addressed without a lead from governments across the globe, but businesses have a crucial role to play too. There are two approaches business leaders can take. We can either wait and see what the government mandates us to do, or be on the front foot and act now, giving our businesses a big competitive advantage.
I believe that if businesses embraced the heart-centred approach, it would transform how we deal with this huge challenge and dramatically speed up progress — for one simple reason: if a leader approaches life with an open heart, I do not believe it is possible to be complicit with continuing to trash the planet.
So what does being heart-centred mean? It means running a business so that everyone in the organisation can be authentically themselves, feels safe to share their feelings/emotions and are willing to work together in pursuit of a noble purpose. Last year I sold Thornton’s Budgens, my heart-centred supermarket business in London — our purpose was that ‘we are the community supermarket that really cares about people and planet,’ and we had developed a manifesto of how we were going to deliver on that purpose.
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As you can imagine with this purpose, we were very focused on playing our part in addressing the climate crisis. Our proudest achievement was in the area of single-use plastic, a huge issue for the climate both in terms of carbon use and pollution, especially in oceans.
Early in 2018, we were very aware of this issue and tracked down A Plastic Planet (APP), a social enterprise whose purpose is ‘to help turn off the plastic tap’. Together we watched the film a Plastic Ocean. The most memorable part was the scene of an unmanned submarine going to the deepest ocean on the planet (too deep for man to go) and finding the ocean bottom lined with plastic soft drink bottles.
With our purpose, we knew that we had to act — we felt we had no choice, it was our duty to do something. All our heart work meant that the team worked together very well, felt very safe together and were fully committed to making our contribution to this challenge. We had been inspired by EkoPlaza in the Netherlands launching the world’s first plastic-free aisle and we felt we could take this to the next level; we set ourselves the challenge to offer our customers the chance to do a full shop in our store without having to take home any plastic. We would do that by launching 1,500 plastic-free lines, in 26 different zones in the store, and we planned to do it in 10 weeks — as there is no time like the present!
And while this was going to be great for our customers, if I am honest, even if we cut our plastic usage down by 20% or 30%, it wasn’t going to make much of a difference to the global challenge. The big prize was our ability to influence others. With our clear purpose, throughout the previous 11 years, we had a reputation for environmental innovation and bigger players took us seriously, as did APP. They were prepared to dedicate the resources we needed to do this, as we knew we could not do this on our own.
On November 8, 2018, we ended up launching 1,800 plastic-free lines to huge global PR — our customers loved it (and became more loyal) and our total store sales went up 4% (which in the world of brick-and-mortar grocery retailing is a huge number). And thanks to the amazing PR that APP helped us get, every single major grocer from the UK came to visit us, as did many of the major suppliers and grocery retailers from the U.S., Canada, all over Europe, Asia and Australia.
Tesco, the largest UK retailer (with thousands of stores) asked us (as an independent single store retailer) to become their trial store for packaging reduction, and I was told afterwards by a number of CEOs from around the world that we changed the relationship between supermarkets and plastic globally!
That is the power of a heart-centred, purpose-driven organisation; I have no doubt that even with our powerful purpose, it was the heart work that made the difference; without it, we would not have been able to climb all the hurdles that were put in our way to achieve this in such a short time period — we had the full commitment from all 75 of our team members for delivering this.
Being heart-centred is all about being authentic, and to make a difference a purpose has to be authentic and lived. I believe that customers and employees can sense when it’s fake. When we launched our plastic free campaign, many of our customers said they loved the fact we were acting and acting now — and said that they found the pledges made by the major supermarkets inauthentic and ‘greenwashing.’ Yet in the 15 years I owned Thornton’s Budgens, we were never once accused of greenwashing due to our authenticity. When I see some of the major oil companies making claims about ’creating a green future together,’ I am sorry, it just does not connect!
Looking to the global scene, Patagonia is in my view, one of the most purposeful companies in the world. Founded in 1973 by Yvon Chouinard, their mission is ‘to build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to address issues related to the environment and social justice.’
Even in 1973, he saw the need to address the climate crisis. Everything they do is lined up behind and defined by this purpose — and it’s truly authentic. If you visit their stores or read press adverts/their website, it all lines up – they mean what they say, and you can feel that their heart is in it. That’s the difference and that’s how heart-centred organizations can save the planet!
Andrew Thornton is Co-author, with Eudora Pascall, of Putting the Heart Back into Business: How to place people, planet and purpose at the core of what you do, and Co-founder of Heart in Business.
