Season 4, Episode 146 : John Grant

Will Richardson 00:05
Welcome to the Green Element Podcast, where we meet business leaders and innovators, transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable, and in the process help you on your journey of sustainability. I'm your host Will Richardson. Today we are speaking to John Grant, a marketing and innovation consultant, as well as an author of several successful books. John's first book, the New Marketing Manifesto was named one of the top 10 best business books in 1999. And his most recent book, Greener Marketing, is shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2021. John is a communication strategist and has worked with an extensive list of high profile organisations including the BBC, Cafe Direct, Ecotricity, Lego, IKEA, as well as the British and Swedish governments. He is also a fellow at the Royal Society of Arts. John, welcome.

John Grant 01:00
Thank you, lovely introduction, I hope I can live up to it. [laughs]

Will Richardson 01:06
It's so exciting to have you on here. And the reason being, we interviewed John from Don't Cry Wolf a few weeks ago and discussed the proliferation of greenwashing in marketing, comms and the PR industry, and how this is increasing in the run up to COP 26. So there's a lot for us to talk about. So before we get started, though, can I ask you about how you went from writing a very successful book, New Marketing Manifesto, to focusing more on sustainability? And what brought you into the sector?

John Grant 01:35
Yes, very good question. So in the 90s, me and a group of friends had an ad agency and digital agency and all kinds of things agency called St. Luke's. We were a radical workplace democracy, where we have equal shares, and we were publishing back then about what we call 'company's role in society'. And we have clients including Anita Roddick, back when she was running The Body Shop, and she forced us to do a sustainability audit and so I had my sort of nose pressed to the glass of sustainability and how it met with marketing about the same time as we were all getting our head around the digital revolution and other things. And actually new ways of working, we had one of the first sorts of beanbags and hot desking offices in the world and so forth. So we were [an] innovative little hop shop and I wrote the new marketing manifesto to express a desire for a more human, more authentic, less clingfilm wrapped style of marketing, which we've been pioneering, and to sort of present my calling card as a consultant going to the world. And since then, I've written eight books, actually, three of them have been directly on the topic of sustainability. One other one was post Arab Spring, I wandered around that region and interviewed people there about how culture was changing. I wrote a book mostly based on lifelong learning, and the way that we're becoming self-taught and I tend to pick up, I am a marketeer and you know [a] communications consultant, but I tend to pick up on what I think are the most important trends that my clients large and small are trying to digest and sustainability has been on that agenda for 20 years. Literally how I got into it was Jonathan Porac grabbed me almost exactly 20 years ago and some other people in marketing and there were two, like bookend problems between sustainability and marketing. He was quite early and the forum for the future journey there of working with big clients like Unilever to hit two problems. One was sort of greenwash and he was constantly worried that he was just giving big bad corporations license to operate by giving them a nice sort of fig leaf. And the other end was this complete indifference and incomprehension, he would work with a team at Unilever on sustainable pea farming for vendors. So they started the Marine Stewardship Council, he then gets the marketing department then somebody would say, now we've researched this last year, people won't pay more for this. It's not relevant to mainstream mums, you know, like, great, we'll put on the back of the pack, that sort of thing. And he was really struggling to engage marketers and saw actually a lot of the evils of the world being, you know, driven by overconsumption. And you know, there's some of the negative that like the shadow of this sort of very designed and marketed world. So he got a group of us together in around 2001 that I was also working then with, for instance, IKEA had just done their first sustainability report and was starting to try and work out how to integrate this. One of my clients was a very senior at IKEA brought me in as a copywriter into help with the creative aspects and communicating sustainability. By about 2006 half the clients I met every week were stuck on it. We have the Al Gore movie, loads of eco hype, GE spends 100 million on a campaign called Eco imagination, and greenwashing was a huge issue back then. And so I sort of wrote the first book that I wrote on sustainability. It was the result of I was doing a workshop with some consultants for Nike and Nike women and Nike had been in the doghouse because there was that picture of the kid in Pakistan stitching one of their footballs, they'd been attacked by Naomi Klein. And they were known as one of the sorts of evil corporations, and they were trying to get back into this space, which they've been very prominent in over the last 15 years. And me and the other consultant who ran a small sustainability agency disagreed on almost every point of what we were bringing to the workshop. And, for instance, her view was they need to keep their head down, we're just gonna do a bit of stakeholder influencing, and sort of buddy up and sort of earning the right to be in the conversation, I walked in with a big board that said, women, run the world. And really just thought that with the power of a brand like that, we should try and do some social goods and engage people and excite a new generation and talk about women and development. And you'll know that with the actually, the empowerment of women and girls is one of the key climate solutions apart from anything else. So and I kind of said, well, there must be that we wanted to take a sort of a 360 view of what's happening at the moment. And, you know, what's working? What isn't working? What's greenwash? Who's been doing well, and take that to the workshop, and I wrote a paper and I was chatting to my publisher at the time about a new book. And I said, Well, what about this? And I said the paper said, Oh, yes, please. And so I wrote it as a sort of, I mean, the core insight was, it's sort of like digital marketing, it kind of depends, it's different. If you're innocent drinks, or a local vegan cafe or HSBC, there isn't one digital marketing. And if you do the wrong sort, you can look to corporate, or to flimsy, or so forth. So the center of the first book was a great big grid that said, It depends, it depends if you're trying to improve your reputation, launch innovative products that people aren't familiar with, you know, change behavior. And it actually depends if you're really out there leading on green, or you're just trying to do a solid job catching up, and so forth. And you know, be honest about that. So, it was a kind of trying to burst the bubble of all the eco hype and say it's strategy. There are some different ways that you know, and I've worked with everybody, as I say, from Innocent or Cisco to NGOs, to governments, and they all have different green marketing needs. And the latest book was really in many ways an update so much had changed. I think companies at the moment [are] tying themselves in knots, for instance, trying to define the purpose and things like that there's a new topic to cover.

Will Richardson 07:54
This is so difficult listening to you then and thinking back to my early days with advertising agencies, in the early 2000s. And behind the scenes, working with their facilities, reducing their footprint, massively converting them to renewables, getting them to stop using taxes, getting them to fly less, absolutely bringing their stationery procurement down, bringing all of their operational energy and etc, down. But none of them wanted to talk about it at all, because they're worried about greenwashing. And it's still, it's still the same to this day. And it was a real shame because I do think that there was that fine line wasn't there? There were companies that were willing to shout about it. And I had a very senior, I think he was the CEO of one of the largest ad agencies - and I'm not going to say which one - was talking to another one of my clients, and they had this open forum. And he openly said, I mean, this was back in 2006/2007, greenwashing is okay because it gets people on the right journey. And I was like, that's the problem with that there is a huge debate. Right. So one of the earliest cases of greenwashing that was challenged was Chevron made some commercials. And one of them featured a butterfly sanctuary. Another was a bear conservation scheme. And it was somebody, you know, a critical journalist who calculated that the average scheme featured in a TV commercial was spent of about $5,000. And they spent 5 million on the, you know, per commercial on the media spend. So that was a disproportion, the butterfly sanctuary turned out to be in a bay where they'd devastated nature with an oil spill some years earlier. And you know, there were all kinds of egregious things about it. But the thing about that campaign is before it was challenged, it had already won and in ad industry effectiveness award. One of the reasons people greenwash is that If you're allowed to get away with it; making yourself look greener than you are, leaves all kinds of positive associations. So for instance, if you're a food company, and I've done some work this year with PepsiCo, and they've got a lot of stuff about regenerative farming as to Unilever, and so forth, and they've got whole scheme about, for instance, supporting women farmers, as soon as you put that in the frame that looks like advertising, it makes your crisps look more, appetising, and so forth. It has all positive associations; [it] makes you feel less processed, and more farm to fork. And, you know, they have been blessed, and also moving the direction of, you know, slightly healthier options and cereal bars and all sorts of other things. But the reason people greenwash is if it's not challenged, it kind of works, because, you know, you like to buy from this lovely, friendly, American oil company that's helping the bees and the butterflies. There's a huge role to be played in this by the spikey NGO critic who is basically the traffic wardens of egregious marketing. But the reason people do is if they're allowed to get away with it, it works. And in some cases, it's so ridiculous that it doesn't work. I mean, the cases are covered, [for example] my recent book includes the Palm Oil Council of Malaysia who made a whole commercial about how the plants on their farms were absorbing carbon and supporting birds and other stuff and ignoring the fact that they're in a region with the highest deforestation for the last 10 years, and that they've been driving it, you know, plantation farming, as well as logging. So that was flat out banned, but they made a commercial saying enjoy our beautiful palm oil made by nature, and etc, etc. If you go back far enough, oil was made by trees in the Jurassic period. And I was once invited on - I did I turn it down but there was - a Canadian TV show on the eve of the next day when the EU were about to ban shale oil imports and Canada felt that this was just like, turning down some of their beautiful exports and benefits their economy, and they had an equivalence and news night had to debate with some experts on that I was speaking to the researcher, and she said, "Well, we think it's a marketing and positioning thing that people call it tar sands, and you see images of seals being covered, you know, the other things that actually, it's what we need to do, and it's just part of the oil industry". And I said, "so are you saying you need somebody to come up with an idea like beach oil because people have like positive associations?" She said: "that's exactly what we want to talk about the show!" And that, again, that sort of greenwashing is very strategic, which is people are trying to defend their industries, and there's a sort of corporates and businesses have the equivalent of the human ego, where it's really hard to believe that you're the bad one. I mean, I worked for years in advertising and there's often meeting critics of advertising and I have a less rosy-eyed view of it. But we still believed in what we did. And we were at the nice fringe end of it. But it's, most people start with the premise that they're okay. And you know, that their chocolate company is largely speaking, not bound up in slave labor and all kinds of other things that, you know, maybe that they haven't fully uncovered, and that they're perfectly nice company. And they just need to sort of promoting themselves a bit better. And whatever they're doing, that they report on sustainability is the best in the world and so forth.

Will Richardson 13:29
Yeah, I mean, you could say that maybe by putting people into the limelight, then the critics will actually focus on them more. So it could be I'm not advocating greenwashing. But you know, what I mean? [laughs]

John Grant 13:45
There's a sort of mix because I think the, it's been really like, I've got a book by an anthropologist written in the 70s or 80s about one of her main case examples is why environmentalists and business people will never understand each other. I think there is a genuine understanding now and there was a really mature debate and you know, the equivalent this podcast the blogosphere, when Walmart, committed to sustainability around 2006 and started making some really significant moves to move their supply chain, and you know, for the first time, really trying to create the data set and the transparency so that they could track sustainable progress. And this was really difficult for people to take in. But most people said, well suck it and see because if something that size is moving in the right direction, we should support it and there is that license, but you're absolutely right. For instance, when KitKat brought out the Fairtrade KitKats in the UK, then Greenpeace went all out for them and made a viral video about somebody's biting into a KitKat bar and it was an orangutangs finger. Very, very distasteful, but they attacked them because they've been fighting them for years on the deforestation policies. Yeah. To be fair, Nestle would say it was more Cargill's problem than theirs. But you know, obviously, they were selling the brands.

Will Richardson 15:12
Well, yeah. One of the main problems in marketing today when talking about sustainability and what our organisation's doing, and what should they be doing?

John Grant 15:21
Well, my overwhelming hope for any client I work with is to innovate and educate. So to actually genuinely take a lead, so that you're pushing things forward, and you know, for the good of the species and the planet, you're actually progressing. And then that can throw that should throw up education needs, because if you innovate enough, you have to teach people to adopt electric bikes, rather than a petrol car, and so forth. And the summary conclusion in my first book is, it's not about making normal things look green, which is greenwash, it's about making green things normal. So you know, pioneering plant-based diets, different travel patterns, ways of doing work conversations, like we're doing now, but actually marketing as in the great consumer lifestyle adoption years from the, you know, the 50s, to the 70s, when a lot of things were new, marketing was genuinely teaching people to use and get their heads around new devices, and new lifestyles. And that, for instance, used to be Sony's company vision was to create the new lifestyles, and we're - I think when marketing's forward like that, and when you're trying to get people to have more plant protein in their diet, and so forth, you're on a really sure footing, and then you've just got to bring the market with you. But if you're the pioneer in that new sector, then you will take a disproportion you'll be the first move and take market share. So that's kind of my favorites, confluence of sustainability and strategy. I'm less of a fan of we've made all of these investments in our water schemes and other stuff, and now we need to make ourselves look good because you know, that feels a little bit less progressive, but there's a lot of differences still between the companies that are really trying and some of their competitors, and it is worth trying to bake it in and get a competitive advantage. And then it depends if you're in food, there's a set of issues, if you're in packaging, there's another set of issues if you're in transportation, there's another set of issues, we all of us need to transition to a sane and livable donut economics zone. And that transition is hitting almost every industry that I've met really hard as people are realising that they have to shift a very long way. And also there are big opportunities in the direction of where we're shifting if they get there first. But it is, you know, my answer is usually it depends. I'm working, for instance, at the moment with or have been working with two, again, almost bookends in the food industry, one of whom is making protein with the help of microbes, you can read an article in The Guardian about them, they're called Solar foods and they're basically now just starting to bring consumer food products to market which are synthesized for bacteria. So whereas the Impossible Burger gets its unique taste from the cooperation of biotech and yeast, making a particular flavor that you get a meat called heme, now they're going to be making the actual bulk of the protein that way. And then at the other end of the scale, I've been working with one of the biggest food processing companies in the world, looking at actually, their vision and how their world is shifting that in future, they can be less making less of the ingredients that go into bulk foods, and fast foods and processed foods and so forth. And in the future making biomaterials like replacements for plastic. And also, pretty much a lot of the natural materials in the economy and foods will be synthesized in the future using something that looks a bit like fermentation. And that's going to need an enormous input of things like sugars, which you know, from home brewing beer, you need to put some dextrose in at the start. And so they're really, totally different companies in terms of their size profile, but they're sort of both looking at the roadmap. Like the there's a, there's a think tank report that said by 2013, most of the protein will we eat will come from these sources and the reason is that it will be 10 times cheaper than meat protein or anything we can derive and things like soy.

Will Richardson 19:35
And interestingly, although they're coming from two opposite ends, they're coming to the same space

John Grant 19:41
They all come to the same space. I'm trying to get them - some of them know each other already - but trying to get them in a room because one of them is bringing the keys to an entirely new kind of [food]. Like a combination of the farm and the factory and a new way of synthesizing food and the other has 100 years of experience of how to scale stuff and get it to global markets and make it safe. And in that, they have very different marketing questions. One, the question was: how can we make, you know, what, what should we make? You know, there's a lot of plant-based burgers out there, should we make tofu? What should we actually be making with these new proteins to start getting people on board and test the concept. And at the other end, they're really trying to work out how to, you know, with anything large in transition, you have to work out these different horizons, so that you're not betting it all on the future that isn't here yet. It's like the internet companies that were designed for broadband by new media and had 56k modems, but you have to sort of stage it and move this stately, large thing.

Will Richardson 20:50
And I mentioned in your introduction, that you've worked for some high-profile organisations and governments, could you share some insights into their concerns and questions about sustainability and marketing?

John Grant 21:02
I mean, what the government wants is different. The work I did with the British government was for a campaign called act on CO2. And we work trying to figure out how, you know, I had colleagues in that project, obviously, people from in policy, the bit that I looked on was looking particularly at transportation. We had colleagues from something called the Nudge Unit who were looking at behavioral economics, but we were trying to figure something out, we're all still trying to figure out, which is how to find accessible ways that are effective at moving people's behavior. And for instance, in transportation, we've seen a combination of various things, the sort of, the lockdown is probably done more than anything else. But you know, there was a growing flight chain movement, that was a very rapid movement towards, you know, for January and more plants in diets and mainstream diets, not just hardcore vegans and vegetarians and so there were some things shifting. We were trying to find the places, I think, in these complex cultural ecosystems, what doesn't work very well is that sort of old-style marketing of you know, it's almost like an all over body massage, what you need to find is these acupuncture points, where if you press really hard here, everything can start moving in a certain direction. So I ended up doing about 30 focus groups around the country, talking to people about climate change, the stern reports, their grandchildren, their habits. And then one of the things we found, one of the things that people miss is, it's kind of like dieting, what you need is a moderate long term concern. And, for instance, if you and I are to meet are part of the Paris obligations, we have to make a four, just under 4% reduction per year. And in a compound term, so it's not like you have to try and chop 40% out of your footprint this year, great if you can if you've got you know when I was first writing a book on sustainability, I realised that trying to cross-sell, most of the international conferences that I spoke to, with the idea that I would appear on video would do more to affect my footprint, but almost anything else. And you know, by all means, make a more radical change. And then the difficulty like dieting is once you've done the low hanging fruit and the easy things, then you come on to every year, we get slightly harder to find another 4% for us out of the blue. So for instance, one of our strategies, and a very common sense way that came out that was asking people to drive five less miles a week. And the reaction in the focus groups was "thank God for that I thought you will tell me to give up my car, I have to get kids to school, and I have to get to the call center where I work. And it's just like, you know, it's alright for you guys who live in a big city, but you know where I am, you know, I can't hitch it to work". But if you say five less miles, we could go well, there's that time where we drive the kids to the park to get some exercise, and maybe we could cycle that people can find - so if you can find a space like that, which is achievable, and I'm sure this is true of - I met actually a world expert on why people are getting diabetes. He studied blood chemistry and early onset diabetes at Oxford University and I said so what can people do is to just cut a biscuit a day. He said about you know, it's that drip drip drip of calories over 20 years onto your midriff which will cause that cardiovascular disease and other stuff and no crash diet is going to get you to where you need to be. Obviously exercise and other stuff we said, you know, for most people, most people are having so few extra calories than they need if they cause a biscuit a day they could about do it. And it's sort of quite hard space for marketing to work working because you want something really heroic like run a marathon. You just know that no people, almost no people are going to make it.

Will Richardson 24:55
Yeah, it's that trying to promote the boring

John Grant 25:00
Yeah, well, there is. I mean, if you look at marketing, it was a familiar syndrome because I worked with some of the pioneers of the digital world like Napster when they were in Supreme Court. And there was this fundamental opposition between capitalism, which is based on closing and owning some assets, traditionally some lands, but later some IP. So, you know, most successful high growth businesses are surrounded by thickets of lawyers protecting their IP, but digital came out and just said, Well, you know, like Napster, we just want people to share stuff. And you know, if you can copy it, you can share it. And we want this to be like Wikipedia, that's the sort of implicit design or digital things and actually finding a mid-space where capitalism could coexist with a system that was fundamentally was built by hippies in California in the 60s and 70s. That generational hate of Microsoft, because as one of them said, it's like setting people the washing instructions separate from the clothes, it was always a bit like Linux where people just shared operating systems that worked at the back end and sort of helped each other but it was never like a commercial thing, it was more voluntary. So it was like an enclosure of the commons. So there were things to work out between digital and that there were still big complex and huge debates over the effect of Facebook and so forth. And whether you're a product or an audience, and you know, your rights within that, this is a similar fundamental split between something in sustainability, which, you know, the simple thing people say as well, sustainability and environmentalist want people to buy less, and marketers want people to buy more. But actually, within that there is a, you'll know working with companies on sustainability, there's like a huge long checklist. I went to meetings with IKEA about, you know, one, there was a volume of reporting that was about how do we know that we've got a fire extinguisher in every factory and some other safety things in places. And they said at HSBC, if they ever printed off their sustainability reporting, it would fill two rooms. So it was a big please don't print on that. Marketing is just trying to find that one brilliant thing. It's sort of like a cheeky personality or tone of voice but you know, Italian sports cars are sexy. Don't worry so much about the reliability. German cars are reliable and dependable and solid. And you know, when the door clunks it's like a safe. And marketing is not only the science of hyperbole and exaggeration, but they understood you know, from the 60s, that was the single unique selling proposition. Actually, one of the things that I've been doing a lot with clients recently is running their sustainability through that - I call it the unique sustainability proposition - and saying, "look, there's probably 20 things that you're doing that are nice to do with farming, packaging, water, the way you treat employees and other stuff. But what's the one thing that you really want to drive and be known for?" Like for Anita Roddick, that was against animal testing.

Will Richardson 28:01
Yeah,

John Grant 28:01
And she did like a ton of other things but you knew there was some driving impetus at the heart of it. But generally speaking, sustainability comes with a huge, long, you know, you get sheets and sheets of pages. And you just need to find like a really singular program, a point of focus at the heart of this if you're going to communicate it well because it's like if I tell you 20 things about me, you won't remember any of them if I just say, you know, there's this one thing like my hobbies, photography or something like that, then you have like a very particular image of who I am.

Will Richardson 28:37
Yeah, that's actually a really good way to put it actually. And we could certainly learn off that Green Element with working for clients and rather than saying to them, oh, you're doing this, this, this, and this, we should be marketing that [and] actually focusing in on and I think our listeners listening to it is not think about everything that you're doing. Just look at that one thing that you're doing really well that sets you aside from other people within your industry.

John Grant 29:06
It's a matter of sifting because it's not, you know, don't stop doing all of those things like that. PepsiCo did it like, they were going through and reviewing their brands and they called it Swords and Shields which I assume they got from a consultant like me, but there's a bunch of stuff where we need to be at a good standard and that's a shield. So shields means that we won't be criticized for you know, for instance, in their industry, Coca Cola has been criticized over things like labor rights and trade union birders, you know, the sharp end of labor rights and depleting water [in] Africa and areas of water stress in India and so forth. You need to in order to be a credible player and pushing your sustainability and actually marketing sustainability, you need to be pretty good on everything. But you need to be outstanding on something and something that really resonates with people. And you know, I went through a project earlier this year with Telco and I was like look, it's like off the charts impressive that you're going to be carbon net zero by 2025. I can't believe how you can do that even people like Unilever are looking 10 years later. And it's brilliant and you've had to shift and lots of infrastructure funds and storage and renewable energy to achieve that. Brilliant hats off to you. However, yes, as your surveys are saying this isn't resonating much with customers, and you're not getting more people coming to you than Vodafone just because of this commitment. And we need to find a space in between that people really love so one of the things we're exploring was people's love of greens spaces, and I had a big phrase in the presentation saying people nod climate, but they love nature. So if you can bring this down to everywhere. And the other thing was just from a marketing point of view that we're spending all of their money, actually, the previous year on big crowd participation events, whether they were sports or music, or they own a famous music and event arena. And so they had a marketing budget sitting there that they couldn't spend and like where, you know, where is the side posts? Where are people going this year? It's to the local park. And if you can start doing apps with Gruffalo walks and tree climbing with your kids, if you can start doing stuff to actually support all the counselors that are crying out for more resources because their actual infrastructure is creaking for so many people are using it, and they need investment. But you need to find that the phrase or the word I've been using is cusp. And the two things one is we're on the cusp of change and you need to find a tipping point, you can't be credible, just going actually you don't want your strategy to be - we're aiming for the 4%, you want to be outstanding. And, and you know the times call for that. But the USP is your new, unique sustainability proposition and the C is compelling. But cokes Coca Cola's most - according to one report I read - their most successful consumer promotion in history was the one where they put the polar bears on the can and gave the money to WWF and Arctic conservation.

Will Richardson 31:59
Oh interesting.

John Grant 31:59
I don't know if we have that here. They had that in the States. And it was just mums and kids in America, love polar bears. And every kid was coming home from school saying mom what we're doing to help the polar bears? And it was just a whatever else you think of the Coca-cola for cooperation, they more or less invented consumer marketing, and they really know how to move hearts and minds. And you know, low and behold, why can and you know, genuinely money going to something that people would support. But it's finding that finding, you know, what marketing people are really good at is what Sully from Sutera calls, finding the sizzle.

Will Richardson 32:35
Interesting. I asked John from Don't Cry Wolf a similar question when I interviewed him. What marketing trends? Have you noticed the run-up to COP 26 in relation to sustainability?

John Grant 32:47
I think, actually, that started a few years prior with the climate strikes. The food company that I'm working with I first met the CEO two years ago, and I really big question, which is, you know, why is he meeting this guy with a beard and cardigan where he works for, you know, a stock market listed company. And he said I've got to Greta's living at home. And my daughters asked me every day what we're doing on this, and we're doing a lot, but I feel that we should be doing more and I want that to be part of what we're driving here and we're a great company. And if we go after this agenda, we can be great at this too. So I think, a world in which there were climate strikes by our children in 2000 cities across the world, and [from] 2019 it's hard to remember after the time we've been through since, but it was the year of street protests, from Latin American spring, Catalan independence, Hong Kong, etc. It was all kicking off. And I think that and the employee side of that, like companies like Amazon came to the table because an employee Climate Action Group brought them to the table and said, "it's just disgusting that we're such a leading company, and all these other tech companies like Microsoft are doing so much and we don't seem to be doing much". And Bezos was more or less shamed, it seems internally, into doing this. And the same at Google, people were really pushing for progress more on social sustainability, hashtag MeToo, and the quality and so forth. So I think those pressures were already there. And most significant companies I know [of], like the large companies, were starting this year, like one of my clients said their CEO gave an all staff address over video. And he said I want you to focus on - they are a global travel company - I want you to focus on our two key priorities for the year and I would have expected that to be you know, rebuilding after lockdown. You know, we're a travel company, and he said, its sustainability and diversity, if we get those right every time you're sitting down to write a piece of code, think how are we moving forward to take the lead on sustainability and diversity? So I think, you know, you'll know that 1000s now of companies are committed to science-based targets and some have taken, for instance, the Amazon 10 years early pledge, which is one of the things that came out positively when they did come to this agenda. And I think there is a long queue of companies that committed to this, that will want to use the platform, just like anybody in sport would want to use the platform of the Olympics. A lot of people want to use the platform of the public interest that time to socialise what they're doing, bring their stakeholders to it, and so forth, but I've seen that I mean, really, I think climate concerns in the boardroom, between about 2009 and 2017, looks a bit more shaky. But there's been a fundamental reengagement and also driven by the great triad of investors, everybody from Black Rocks to the millennials with their inherited wealth wanting to get sustainability at the heart of what they invest in. Employees and consumers increasingly going "d'you know what, I don't want that yogurt in a plastic part, you're gonna have to sort something out, because I just don't want to see all this trash". And yes, no documentary. And finally, one last question about I noticed on LinkedIn that you, you, amongst others, put up the picture of the G7 people watching the air show. And the comments that Greta Thunberg talked about of really? They've got an air show at a climate change [event], you know, I mean, it is absolutely ridiculous. And we've talked a lot about business and what businesses are doing in order to reduce climate change or mitigate climate change. And you have worked in government, what are your thoughts around that? Is it business that's leading the way? Yes, definitely businesses leading the way. I think there are really progressive voices and examples emerging in business and they've got freedom of movement, which they haven't had, I think things like the renewed American commitment to something like the Green New Deal, a massive green economy, infrastructure investment in Europe and America will make a huge difference. So the government has to drive that and can also, you know, the government of California has sort of driven everything from emission standards and cars to recycle content and paid for by certain regulations and companies go well, California is such a big company, we might as well - it's such a big region - we might as well take their standards, and then like market everything to the world based on those standards. So not the government's don't have a strong role to play. Listen, you've got like amazing political leaders in this generation, like her and in New Zealand. So you know, there are really strong positive leaders. And, you know, let's see where Biden gets to with the political situation in America, and they clearly got a role to play. But I think, in a way, it's simply an innovation challenge. And it's an old kind of innovation challenge because we could get more or less get there with existing technology. If we stopped R&D, we've got enough solutions, nature-based solutions, and other solutions to get there with what we have. But it's still a challenge, which requires a galvanizing of effort behind an initiative. I really loved the speech, which - what's his name - Sam, the CEO of Walmart gave in 2006 when they were setting out on this agenda, and he talked about his experience and his country's experience, his company's experience of Hurricane Katrina. And he said I saw how we could be as a company, serving our communities, sheltering people, getting emergency supplies, keeping people safe. And it was such a wonderful role to take in those communities where we live. And I want us to be that kind of company every day, every week, and every year and he said, "look, climate change is", his phrase, "just a slow Katrina". If we, as Greta says, realise that our house is on fire, then you can respond and what business can do both large business and entrepreneurial businesses bring that sort of galvanized energetic impact play a force to shifting things fast? Because most of the models, you know, better than me say that we can make it but it's almost technically, technically we can make it but we'd have to make an extraordinary shift compared to business as usual.

Will Richardson 39:26
Yeah. Thank you so much for being on today. It's been an absolute pleasure.

John Grant 39:31
Oh, you're welcome. BBC Radio, Jehovah's Witnesses calls it. [laughs]

Will Richardson 39:37
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