The Business Revolution Episode 9

In this ninth episode of The Business Revolution, we venture to Europe to explore the critical intersection of leadership, technology, and sustainability in a globalised world.

Join us for a thought-provoking discussion with Robin Weninger, Managing Director of the Global Institute of Leadership and Technology, and Alyssa Jade McDonald-Baertl, a professional board member working in the multilateralism space.

Audio version:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:16 — 39.8MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS

Tune into learn more about:

Redefining leadership and moving beyond traditional definitions to embrace the activation of groups towards a shared goal.
The role of technology and the implications on business models, organisational structures, and the future of work.
Long-termism vs. short-termism and balancing the need for immediate results with long-term vision and sustainable growth.
Embracing systems thinking and flexibility to navigate a constantly changing world and create adaptive pathways.
Fostering open dialogue and diverse perspectives to drive progress and collaboration.

Tune in to gain a global perspective on the evolving landscape of business and sustainability.

Alyssa Jade McDonald-Baertl bio

Alyssa is an entrepreneur at heart and a seasoned board member by experience. Alyssa has reimagined innovation frameworks and built bridges across global teams, navigating the intertwined paths of global governance, climate, conflict, and connectivity.

Alyssa is the founder of BLYSS Group. In 2009, BLYSS began as a seed of change planted in the diverse landscapes of Ecuador, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea. From these seeds grew a social enterprise that not only farms sustainable cacao but turns it into an award-winning premium chocolate – a delight so profound, it earned a stellar 93/100 from independent evaluators, gracing Europe with the most exquisite and priciest chocolate retailed at €30 per 50g.

Alyssa Jade doesn’t just lead BLYSS; she serves on various multilateral and multinational boards, tirelessly weaving sustainability and innovation into the fabric of our future.

Evidence-based sustainable business and science for investment and innovation: BLYSS GmbH

Current programme: Vaka Pasifika Fellowship, Fiji.

Current supervisory: Board Chair World Fish Malaysia & Supervisory Board Member, TAKKT AG Germany

Current paper:Science and Digitalization for a Better Future

Robin Weninger bio

Robin Weninger, Co-Founder and Managing Director of the executive education company Global Institute of Leadership and Technology (GILT), is committed to assisting organisations in addressing the multifaceted challenges of the 21st century. His series “Leadership In Times of Uncertainty” and his initiatives on “The Infinite Organisation” have positioned him as a sought-after speaker and educator in the domain of leadership and technology. Robin’s explorations into exponential technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Technologies, and Blockchain, has allowed him to share invaluable insights at many conferences, as well as offer immersive sessions and workshops that address the ever-changing business landscape.

Links

→ www.blyss.group

Home

→ www.robinweninger.com

ROBIN WENINGER

→ gilt.global

Episode 9 links

🎧 𝐓𝐁𝐑 notes and transcript: www.businessrevolution.earth/businessrevolution9

🎧 𝐓𝐁𝐑 episode 9 for download: audio

🎧 𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐲: open.spotify.com/episode

🎧 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐏𝐨𝐝𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐭: podcasts.apple.com

📺 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐛𝐞: video

Social media posts
→ Linkedin – Facebook – X – Instagram

Transcript – episode 9

Alan Taylor (00:00)

Welcome revolutionaries, my name is Alan.

Mik Aidt (00:03)

And I’m Mik.

Cherry Ward (00:05)

And I’m Cherry, together we are the three business musketeers who will guide you through the evolving landscape of business and sustainability.

Mik Aidt (00:15)

This podcast is made on the lands of the Boon Wurrung, the Yoghurt and Turabal and the Wadawurrung people to whom we pay our respects and acknowledgement. And in today’s episode, we are moving from Australia up to Europe.

Alan Taylor (00:32)

As businesses increasingly recognise that their success is intertwined with well-being of society and across the globe, businesses are not just local. Today we’ll explore how a business can create a more inclusive and equitable future across the world.

Cherry Ward (00:48)

So today we’ll explore global issues and multilateralism.

Mik Aidt (00:53)

And if this isn’t the first time that you’re listening to The Business Revolution podcast, then you know already that we are on a mission here. We are all about proving to the world that sustainability isn’t just good for the planet. It’s good for our health, our pockets, and for our businesses. For the economy.

Alan Taylor (01:12)

So whether you’re a business owner, a climate advocate, or simply curious about the future of our planet, you don’t wanna miss this episode of The Business Revolution.

Cherry Ward (01:22)

And that’s why we’re thrilled to have Robin and Alyssa with us today. Robin is the Managing Director of the Global Institute of Leadership and Technology, and Lyss is the Professional Board Member in the Multilateralism space. Welcome to The Business Revolution, Lyss and Robin. Can you start by telling us a little bit about what you’re currently working on?

Robin Weninger (01:44)

Great to be here. Thank you for the invitation and happy to discuss this wonderful topics that are lying in front of us here. So I mean, you pretty much summed it up from the title of the company. So we’re working on leadership development and technology implementation. And one big part of technology here is that it’s not just the techie part of it, but also the non-technical aspects. What can we gain from technology, how can we use it to create a better planet, whatever that might mean. We will explore this later.

Alyssa Jade McDonald-Baertl (02:16)

Excellent. What I’m currently working on is three things at the moment. Number one, as chair of the International Centre for Living Aquatic Marine Resources, we’re looking at how fish breeding and breeding of marine resources can be as sustainable as possible in the global context, as well as what role aquatic foods has either in terms of new materials, new goods, and its symbiotic relationship with fish. On the other side, as a board member of a large German corporation, we’re looking at our sustainability footprint in industrial plastics and classic product development in terms of how do we really move forward in this world with ensuring our value chain is fit, strong, representing our values, solid in the current and future geopolitical environment, which is today, September 24. We don’t know how we’ll be.

And the third thing I’m engaged with is the United Nations in the Pacific Island region, specifically looking at developing governance around transparency and accountability in public finance management, especially important in the Pacific Islands as they are facing a very existential threat regarding their safety, security, population and livelihoods. So what is the mechanism today that we can use to work together with civil service organisations, NGOs, science and the government about expenditure for these populations’ future developments.

Alan Taylor (03:39)

I’m particularly intrigued by that last point around the Pacific region. saw in today’s news how the Indonesian government has lost a court case for not actually creating strong enough targets from 2031 onwards. And so that’s the people fighting back in those countries. So it’s quite an interesting dynamic that will be changing there, I’m sure.

I’m going to start with this… we get into a very big minefield there – so I’m going to pull away at that point and actually go to Robin. And I’m curious coming from a tech background and you’ve talked about technology and sustainability and your business name being leadership and technology. Can you always define what that technology and leadership are in respect to sustainability?

Robin Weninger (04:33)

I love this question because it’s already a fire that we’re now putting here into this room because there’s like so many definitions out there. But I think it’s a really valuable question because in my perspective, the definition itself is not that important. It’s rather the understanding of each other what we mean when we’re actually using these kinds of words.

So my background is actually I’m a typical business school graduate, but I was always really frustrated with that aspect that in my whole life at business school, I’ve barely touched on any technology topics. I always found it like super, super cool what you can actually do with that. And I think, like, all these buzzwords that we have heard over the last years, be it digital transformation, be it industry 4.0, you name it, was always like driven from the business world, but actually nobody was talking about this in this whole context.

And that really got me onto this track of saying like, hey, why not combine leadership slash business education with technology and make it more accessible and built the bridge between those two disciplines because it turned out that a lot of those things that we’re referring to in traditional business education, also in traditional businesses called management is actually partly being replaced by technology. And we are seeing this is going on and on and on and on.

So more of those things that used to be done as managers are now being done or automated by technology. So I think it’s crucial that in this world, we need to understand technology and the implications of the technology. It’s not that everybody needs to understand all these algorithms and how these infrastructure technologies work, but the implications to understand on the business modules, on the roles, on the organisational setup, I think is really, really crucial.

And I think there’s a really big gap in traditional education and also in the ongoing development of executives and organisations. Then for the leadership part, I personally define it and within our organisation, we define it as the activation of a group towards a goal. And this is quite a neutral statement, but it has quite a lot of interesting things in there. So first of all, it’s the question of a goal.

That’s where many people already struggle. So what’s our goal? Why are we working on something particular? How do we break down this goal that it is actually something that we can work on?

You mentioned, Alan, the 2031 targets. I think that’s great… A great example. So defining something for the year 2031 is nice, but it doesn’t really help you if you can’t break it down to what we actually do today, tomorrow and the next week in an executable way that people can actually work on. And then the two other aspects, a group of people, that’s also the next challenge. So what’s the group? What are your stakeholders? What are your intersections? Whom do you need to take onto this journey? And then the last part is how do you activate these?

And activation is all about doing something. So you need three things for leadership. You need a goal. You need to break it down to a certain degree. That’s the first big challenge. You need a group of people. I mean, you can lead yourself to a goal. That’s OK. But you probably want to have a group of people around you that are contributing, that are aligned, and that are working towards that. And then you need the activation part. And all of this is neutral, because we’re never judging if your goal is good or bad, because we’re living in such a time where so much uncertainty and ambiguity is out there that I think it’s really hard to say like, Alan, your goals are great and Jerry, your goals are bad or vice versa.

I think we need to really come to this meaningful discussion and say like, okay, why have you chosen this particular goals and why are you working towards that? What are your assumptions for choosing that? And then we can have meaningful discussions. And I think that’s where we can start creating.

Alan Taylor (08:16)

What you’re referring to there is the binary thinking that we tend to have is right or wrong, left or right. And yeah, there’s lots of right, there’s lots of correct, there’s lots of ways we can go forward. And I think I love the point that we don’t want to go on our own. We might be able to get there on our own, but just like a, let’s say a sprinter or a long distance runner in the Olympics, they don’t get there on their own. They might be doing it on the day, but it’s a team effort. Yeah, that’s how I, I don’t know, that’s how it resonates with me. So thank you.

Cherry Ward (08:50)

Yeah, it really resonated what you were saying, Robin, with me around that activation. And the question for both of you is, you know, how can you help leaders activate and also both in public and private sectors so that they can accelerate their transition to a future worth living? You know, I think it’s beyond 2031. I know, 2031 is just around the corner. So looking further afield.

Alyssa Jade McDonald-Baertl (09:17)

I would say there’s three aspects for me that stand out. One is an element of long -termism, because in the end, activation, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. So long-termism, guess openness for adaptive pathways, as opposed to what Alan was saying before, the black and white, and I would say the collaboration.

So in terms of long -termism, when in a German corporation I was working at, when we had our sustainability goals as compliance oriented in terms of this amount of plastics and that supply chain transparency law and this national goal that according to our size of organisation, we have to report them.

When we were compliance oriented, it was a short term tick and flick kind of accounting oriented approach to sustainability. And we weren’t growing our business with that. We were submitting reports. From a long-termism perspective, when we sat down with the team and discussed, what is, how is our organisation going to grow? Is there anything in the sustainability field that will help us grow our business? It could be material science, it could be our supply chain, it could be our distribution strategy, it can be our waste management strategy.

Anyway, but basically, where’s the gold? Where’s the business we’re missing? Because we’re not looking for business within sustainability. That turned our product sales, percentage of sustainable product sales from 1 % to 19.8 % in one and a half years. And that’s for still just operating in the industrial countries, but that’s an industrial plastics organisation across solid 16 countries. And that was the difference between thinking compliance to thinking growth. So I think, and that’s an element of long-termism that’s in there.

And it went from being dry muesli, you have to chew, to a business to grow. And then we activated what naturally is amazing. The procurement team and sales team and product development team are trained to look for. We were encouraged to dig for the gold rather than a race to the bottom for compliance. So I think that’s one aspect. Another example I’d like to talk about is adaptive pathways, which is recognising a systems thinking perspective.

On the interconnected nature of things. have a solid history in agriculture. And if there’s anything I know from agriculture, which I would love the modern business environment to know, is everything is connected. The water we use, the soil, the seed, the machinery, the livelihoods of the people, is all interconnected. And sometimes we just focus on one idea, what agriculture did poorly in the last 50 years and create the green revolution which ended up in diabetes and health problems in many parts of the world. If we thought, productivity, let’s get a good seed and plant it everywhere all at once. And we’re boosting yields because we had this GDP productivity yield fetish, which was much more important than can the people who live in the region live from that?

Is it a good enough livelihood? So we’ve got the price of core products and staples still not reflecting their true cost. And also we’ve ruined vast amounts of land, water systems and livelihoods and nutritionally, the plates that we eat off are not representative of the biodiversity our human bodies need.

They are representative of the effectiveness and the productivity gains we’ve made in seed science and soil science. And so I think as we see, and I work on that in multilateral space, we’re doing massive rollbacks of monocropping, seed choice, crop rotation, using things like genetic editing with a climate sensitive focus.

There’s opportunity everywhere in here, but when we take that systems perspective and we think about the multiple scenarios that we could be living with, then we’re naturally creating solutions that are going to be more fit for the future as well as for today. And it’s not a whack-a-mole situation. There is never one indicator that will help us move forward in anything. There’s always many and there’s always positive and negative externalities.

And I would say the leaders of today, these are two things, the long -termism and then the adaptive pathways systems thinking that’s going to give you a type of decision insurance to offer a CEO, a board, a shareholder or a government regulator in trying to convince them about why the approach is going to be compelling. Do you experienced that? Like what do you feel in Australia, Cherry and Mik and Alan, what are you noticing there about these sorts of approaches?

Mik Aidt (13:50)

When we started the podcast, we played an interview with a professor here who has done some research and has interviewed CEOs around the world, including here in Australia. And what he said basically was that Australian CEOs are thinking about acquisitions and stakeholders. And that’s where their focus is. Not so much on what you’re talking about at all.

Alyssa Jade McDonald-Baertl (14:13)

Interesting point about the long-termism. From working with family officers, investment instruments, whether they’re public or private in terms of intergenerational wealth, I noticed the interest in thinking we’re making decisions today and we’re expecting it to yield in whatever, 20 years. The idea, certainly what I see in my world is the idea of a year and a half cycle on return is getting less interesting as a value proposition for either investments or solutions. The long term, like we are seeing instruments here, certainly all the public funding instruments, either from the European commission or German government, as well as I said, family offices and intergenerational wealth investors is like, we know it’s tough right now.

And we know that there’s a point of transition. So the maturity of understanding that there is transformation required now for yield and return in the future and that it is not a year and a half cycle is certainly very evident. Yet when I’ve had a really interesting experience where I had some European Union financial instrument funders in a room with classic private equity types, and we found that it almost got to a yelling perspective in terms of trying to understand each other, which was one was looking for that short term return and the other one was saying, but it’s going to have a long term cost. And it was great and harrowing to be in the room to see what those different natures of investments and returns were really looking for. Because if you were going to be some sort of an SME or a multinational that was looking to make a systemic change, it’s a really difficult environment.

And I empathise with the Australian CEOs that you speak right now because if on one side they’re being held accountable for short-termism, yet on the other side they know very full well that the only way that their employees and their product and their company is going to extend beyond the next 10 years is with a long -term focus. Those are mixed signals and we have to somehow do something about unravelling and having a strong hard look about what is this next 10 years will look like.

Mik Aidt (16:24)

What would your advice be then?

Alyssa Jade McDonald-Baertl (16:27)

Well, you know that long-termism is one of my attitudes. So I’m looking at a 10 to 15 year approach to investment. I also believe that the next generations that we have are strong and capable leaders who have a very good understanding of profit, growth and responsibility that I think us and our previous generations didn’t have so well. I see regulatory frameworks from ASEAN, from the European Union, from the African Union, consistently all looking at and starting to set in place frameworks that are going to force and shift the thinking. I also see exactly these intergenerational wealth offices, which have traditionally been the original PEs since serfdom. They are also changing their tunes because they’re seeing that that’s what intergenerational wealth is. It’s not a year and a half return. It is intergenerational for a reason.

So my advice then is having those honest conversations. And then they are with the shareholders saying, look, this is, this is what an investment program is. And I think it takes understanding that the role in the organisation, you as a person will be gone by the time the magic happens. So I think there’s got to be a little bit of a detangling the ego, not wanting to be the one that runs across the, the line with the middle in hand and recognising you are part of a greater set of decisions of which you can play a very mature role right now that moves the lever to greater growth in however you want to define that growth. And it doesn’t have to be you, the one that’s going to be reporting on pieces.

And I think there is, …who was that? I was just – I was reading about a mayor in a European city just last week who opened a new transport hub and they got the past four mayors to stand on stage with them. And their attitude was we’re only opening this multimodal transport hub today because Mayor X 20 years ago made the brave decision to conduct the feasibility here. Mayor Y 15 years ago made this decision. Mayor Z made this investment and it was just I think I get goosebumps when I think about it, but it’s that mature thinking that we are part of a lineage of decision makers and the sovereignty of the decision today is made in context of the past and the future. And so I think there’s an aspect in there to unravel. Like Robin, what do you see in the technology space?

Robin Weninger (18:57)

Yeah, there’s so many that we can start diving into. I think it’s a really good conversation that we’re starting here and there’s a lot to go into. I think we just go a little bit. Predicting the future is very easy and very hard at the same time, because it’s really easy to say something that sounds plausible, but it’s really hard to work towards that or validate that or see how this is unfolding then in reality.

And if we just like circling a little bit back to this activation part there, because I think that’s a good perspective that we can take here, is everything that Lyss just said, I totally agree on how we should approach that. And I think there’s like two more things that are probably relevant here. Like one is what are the personal skills that I have as an individual leading towards activation.

And activation itself is basically many, many skills. It’s like motivation, it’s inspiring, it’s educating, it’s teaching, it’s learning and so on and so forth. So you need to embrace quite a lot yourself. And then you also have this systematic environment around you that you’re in. So if you’re in an organisation, if you’re within a company set up, are dependent on certain systematic rules that are unfolding outside.

And one being… pretty simple space, capitalism. So, and you can break this really simple down. Everything that’s good for a bit will be done by default because it contributes to a capitalistic economy. And now it’s a question, is this good or bad? That’s for another podcast probably, but it’s a simple way of how the market works and how businesses ultimately will be also rewarded either by their shareholders or even their stakeholders in parts.

But that doesn’t necessarily lead to the best possible outcome an organisation can achieve. And then it’s like, where are you? Are you in a long -term game?

Then probably you’re playing this differently compared to if you are a turnaround CEO that just got appointed to bring this company into a different shape for the next quarter. Then you are on a completely different scheme of operations here. So I think we need to… to on the one hand embrace that there’s more nuances to that. And that’s really hard to say, like, what’s the right approach depending on where you start. But what I think is really important to embrace is that every business is somewhere else along this journey. And every business is started with the idea to exist. Nobody starts a company and says like, I’m doing this for five years and then off we go.

No, you might say, I’ve been doing this for five years and I’m selling this company because it can live there and then it can scale there or whatever. But nobody starts a company say I’ve been doing this for five years and then this company dies. At least I have never met someone like that. And if someone did that after four years, most people are falling in love with what they’re doing and then it changes. So by, by default, I would argue that most organisations are existing because they want to exist and existence has different kinds of reality… you might be in survival mode, right?

Might be, I need to, I need to make this earnings next quarter in order to pay all the salaries and continue the quarter after. Or it might be that you’re in a positive situation where you can say, I can now think about my 15 years, 20 years, 30 years plan with the same mindset at the same time.

Like, it might be that next quarter, will change it because something around me is happening and getting comfortable with this discomfort of permanent change in dynamic around an organisation I think is really really crucial and something that we don’t embrace in leadership and organisational development nowadays because what we are embracing is to give an absolute answer to a very simple question most of the time the questions by the way are also really bad but we are trained to give an answer like if you think about schools we ask like hey what’s one plus one is two we’re not asking why is it actually two could there be an also another answer there’s just my making something stupid up here. And the same applies in business.

Someone asked a question and we want to give an answer to that question rather than first of all saying, let me think about that. Let me also challenge if your question is good. And like one of the biggest questions that we probably ask all the time in companies is how, right? So how do we use artificial intelligence to be more productive? How do we use whatever? And the problem with that is then some leaders become smarter and say, how is this not the right question? Now we ask why.

Why are we using AI for whatever? But this is also like a really boring question because it’s annoying, right? If someone asks you all the time, why should we use this? Why should we use that? Why should we? We all like everybody that has children or deals with children right now said it can be really exhausting. And also like from cognitive science, we know that if you are ignoring all the whys that’s bad. And if you’re responding to all the whys, it’s also bad. The best results are actually achieved if you’re asking not why, but what if or, Why do you think this could be?

So it’s the activation part in the other direction. So I think we need to embrace business, not only asking, how do we use that? Why do we need to do that? What’s the purpose? But really like saying like, let’s anticipate the future and say like, what if scenario A happens? What happens if scenario B happens? I think if we go more into this anticipation of a potential future, knowing that we will divert along this route then we can really become much better as an organisation.

We can embrace our own weaknesses and connect the teams and have all these puzzle pieces. Because it might be that you have someone in your team that is a super motivator, but a total chaotic guy or whatever. So you probably want to say, like, OK, we need this motivational piece, but we need someone structured to bring this in line and into operations. So I think we really need this nuanced approach to that and really understanding.

What is the environment that we’re living in? What’s the system that has basically the operation scheme and how can we live in this system to actually exist as an organisation for as long as possible? And for some, there will be Abbott optimisation for the next four quarters and for the next one, will be sustained long-term. And in this decision, we need to figure out what we believe is the right thing to do. And this incentive I think is quite often missing.

Alan Alan Taylor (25:29)

I love that and I think there’s a way we would, I’d love to see more leaders doing that. What’s come to my mind while you’re sharing is that it sort of doubles back a bit on one thing that Lyss asked earlier, which was, you know, how our business is here in Australia. And where I, what came to mind for me is the energy company Woodside, which for a long time has been renowned as being the worst and the terrible list in all of Australia.

And then shockingly, their stakeholders, their shareholders in the last AGM a few months ago, kicked back and said, hey, this is all wrong. Now I’m playing this back into the context you’ve just been sharing there, Robin. This is one where there is that diversity of thought, just they’re not listening to each other. There is this idea that we need to adapt now because we need to, but we’re not ready to adapt. We weren’t expecting this to happen. And suddenly there’s this panic.

I’m wondering, and that’s quite prevalent in Australia’s very resource rich sort of landscape. I’m wondering what we can do or what can be done to foster that collaboration and alignment across the groups, which are sometimes not even heard like shareholders. Yeah, we’re doing this for the shareholders, but they don’t know that shareholders don’t like it. Which actually goes back to another point by the way that Lyss you mentioned is, no.

How do you get these chemical companies, the plastic companies? They might think that the shareholders don’t care, but maybe they do. How can we get that alignment and actually get people to start listening to the greater, what’s happening out there more than just what they think they want to hear?

Robin Weninger (27:12)

Yeah, I can start with a really brief answer on that because I think the answer to that is very difficult to realise, but very easy to start. And I think it’s really having these meaningful conversations with the people and just like talking about what one believes and what others are out there. I think we have way too many pleasing conversations out there. It’s not again, or it’s not about fighting. That’s about like having this conversation like, I disagree with you, without meaning, I don’t like you, right?

Many people connect this like, I disagree with you, I don’t like you. That’s not the point. It’s just like we have different kinds of ideas and then also have this willingness. If I disagree with you initially, and then we dance around this topic, having this meaningful conversation. And then I come to the point, Alan is actually right that I then have whatever word you want to use, yeah, brevity, say like, Alan was actually right. I was wrong.

And that’s why I changed my opinion now and went with something else. Or I agree to this part. And I think like we are way too often in the absolutes of our own thoughts without reflecting onto that, because I mean, there’s like so much out there that we can’t be aware of. It’s impossible. We are generating more knowledge every single day now than I don’t know. I don’t have the last numbers, but it’s significant.

And a lot of this is just like random opinion without any depth of, of, of a reference point. So people are just like saying something without saying, well, what’s, what’s the foundation for that? What’s the belief of that? Where does the data come from? So it’s a lot like this, this ambiguity in the information. And we’re just picking this up.

Let’s mention that insurance for, for decisions and being evidence-based. So I think that’s, that’s really one part. And we really need to get out of this, opinion against your opinion, but saying, my opinion against your opinion with the aim of figuring out what’s the best way forward. It’s not about who is right and who is wrong. It’s about figuring out what drives progress in our own belief.

And that’s a completely different way of thinking. It’s a completely different way of managing. And we have a systematic problem there. You’re not getting promoted for that. You’re getting promoted for being right. You’re getting promoted for dominating other people. And you’re getting promoted if you’re driving the KPIs that are the easiest to measure. Most things that are not easy to measure will never get promoted. And then we need the urgency behind that. I mean, we talk a little bit about climate change, but climate change, my grandmother already talked about. That’s nothing that is just like coming around the corner in the year 2024 saying, by the way, we also have climate change. No, this topic has been ongoing ever since.

But if there’s no urgency and if it’s not relevant right let someone else figure it out and down the road. Then we have a problem. So anticipating the future, taking the… seriously having more meaningful conversations all really hard discussions and hard topics to crack.

But I think it’s a starting point and it’s not about saying we’re going to solve it now. They stick with the plastics right now. We’re going for a plastic free world. That might be a good ambition. Well, let’s start small. Let’s probably think about first where it is not necessary to have this and where we can probably shift a little bit? Because not everything is just bad and good at the same. It’s, like, it’s progress.

You don’t need to be the most sustainable company, whatever that means today, but you need to demonstrate that you’re working towards that. And if it takes 50 years, so shall it be. But every single day you need to do something about that. And breaking this down to these micro ambitions, tiny little baby steps will ultimately drive progress because sooner or later you will have flywheels, will have spillover effects and people get activated.

Alyssa Jade McDonald-Baertl (31:03)

Wow, good one, Robin. I agree. To that, I would add also that sometimes the governance just sucks and it’s worth looking at that. So I sit on six, I’ve been now on 16 multilateral boards of large organisations with a lot of money, with a lot of scrutiny.

So often our governing instruments are outdated and the way the governance structures are working with the shareholders whether they’re private shareholders in a public environment or public funders in a multilateral environment. Sometimes that’s just wrong. And in my opinion, we don’t often enough.

This was, you know, I had an Australian CEO and a GM of a large public Australian company visit me last week. We had a holiday together and we spent a lot of our holiday. Actually, I was asking them how much that they as CEO and GMs are working with their boards within their governance to right size their governance which is then steering the organisation.

One thing, the Woodside example, shareholder activism is a really great one to look at, as well as, in Germany, we see sometimes employees protesting out the front of their own companies against obvious greenwashing and things. When the governance sucks, management is being held accountable to metrics and their performance management and things like that are measured on it. Yet the organisation, as you say, sometimes says other things to the shareholders.

Lining that up and having very honest conversations with the shareholders through the governing instruments will set the organisation on a very different track and it will give management a greater space to breathe the creativity and the solutionism that they need. It also will very quickly weed out the parts of the ecosystem that just don’t belong to that vision.

So I would honestly say the first thing to look at is the governing instruments and how they truly set up for what needs to happen, the willingness for the board and in the entire series of accountability chain to agree on what that is and then set the performance targets based on that. The moment that happens, everything changes because then I mean, Cherry, you’re an expert in this area about individuals contributions to organisational changes. Well, then it becomes quite simple and we have a lot of exceptional performance management, you know Australia is really great.

With OKRs and Agile leadership, I know we’ve got a lot of skills in those areas. And so therefore, I think it’s pretty hard if as a person, know, an individual somewhere within management or leadership, you know the direction is supposed to be going in, but your entire governance and accountability is set up in the wrong way. Well, boom, you’ll never ever, ever win.

And I think the willingness to sit down and yeah, that does mean I’ve been on changes where we’ve changed charters that require an act of parliament, which require giving back money, which require a lot of hard decisions, but the freedom that gives to an organisation to do what it needs to do is like, is worth it.

And so I would strongly push us, I mean, right now I’m kicking off a governance working group where we’re even just looking again, is our governance. Because I think so often in accountability, we’re looking at defending and overseeing and are looking at ourselves and where we’re right sizing, where those train tracks are set. So that is one very simple, but hard solution.

Alan Taylor (34:17)

It sounds like we need very brave leaders to make that bigger significant change. So we just got to find those or unlock their ability.

Alyssa Jade McDonald-Baertl (34:24)

Alan, may I politely disagree with you about braveness? I don’t think it’s a bravery thing. When we come to evidence-based decision-making, you don’t need courage for that. You just need honesty. And so I think what we have is we have a lot of numbers. We have a lot of metrics. We’re great at measuring things. Numbers don’t lie. There’s interpretation of numbers, which has something in it.

And what I feel is that we do a little bit too often as we take KPMG reports and EY reports and the big four, we take white papers from governance, but we’re not looking at the genuine evidence which exists in our organisations, empower our management and leadership to use their own data management skills and interpret our own data that tells us exactly where we are going. As a board member, I don’t accept a big four report as evidence.

That’s the last thing from evidence, in my opinion. The evidence that I will make a decision on and promise our shareholders the truth and I will guard the back of our management until the death is when I see the evidence. And so here is where I think we can work with it. And so I don’t think it’s bravery. I think it’s an effort.

It’s a bit boring because it’s been willing to not skim, read and put through GPT a big four report and try to right size it to our own mission, which I have seen far too often. But it’s looking at the very small data. It’s like from period X to period Y. These were exactly the numbers. And maybe our data sets are a bit small. Maybe they’re statistically not even significant yet, but it only happens when we take our own data and knowledge and we can’t compare ourselves in Australia to what Europe is doing.

What are we 20 something million and we’re comparing to a 500 million economy doesn’t work like that. What we have to do is come up with our own solutions and be right sizing with our own data. So I would disagree that it’s bravery, it’s logic and it’s evidence. And we’re just willing to put the effort in as my friends last week were saying, honestly, they’re saying, I don’t think our team has the intelligence or the skills to do that.

Boom, there you go, leader, in terms of what is the up -skilling to be doing with the team? Do we need to catch each other in trust falls, or do we need to spend a little bit of time learning how to actually read the numbers? That’s also okay.

Robin Weninger (36:47)

If I may add one comment onto that, because I absolutely love this aspect, but I want to point out one more thing from an organisational perspective.

Because I think this whole activity of making things valuable and not always taking the shortcut of outsourcing something or taking random or superficial information is such an important part. And I personally believe that in most organisations, you can cut 30, 40 % of work out without feeling any difference because we’re doing so much useless reporting, so much useless collection of data that just feels totally random. I just give you a really practical example as an organisation ourselves that is working with so many large companies in Europe or all around the world basically, like the biggest…

Like one of those things that I find really frustrating all the time is that you’re now getting like all these requests for reporting information, like, how many employees do you have? And all this kind of stuff. That’s fine. And I was like, how do you save energy in your business? How do you do whatever? And you fill them out and like every company has a different standard. You’re sending this all the time. I’m actually, I could probably hire someone just filling out these random reports where you know, exactly. They’re never going to appear anywhere for valuable decision-making, which is fine.

And you get exactly the same feedback from within the organisation, people saying, and you’re just asking, Hey, cool. I like, I like that you’re doing something with that. What are you going to do with that? Maybe I can enrich this even if it becomes valuable and people say, yeah, I’m putting this into a spreadsheet and then it goes into PowerPoint and then nobody will ever look into this. And I think we’ve, and this is frustrating for the people.

If your task is to improve your overall value chain and you know everything you’re doing just goes into a random piece of paper that nobody is really interested in, that nobody takes action on, then you’re not willing to do something. And that’s part of the activation as well. If you give value to that, then it’s great. But we’re losing so much value creation that could drive us positively forward by just reducing like the bullshit. Sorry for using this word here and really making it valuable and saying, this is the evidence we need for this particular decision, and that’s why we’re doing this. Fine. I will write as many pages as you need in order to achieve this goal. But if you are just asking me to fill out a spreadsheet that someone puts onto a cloud server and never looks at again, I’m not willing to do that because that doesn’t help anybody.

Alan Taylor (39:26)

I love where this conversation went from me making a statement, which got a very bold response, thank you, Lyss, but it’s brought the conversation and it exemplifies the point that we need to be able to voice the ideas and listen to them, hear one another and come out with whatever we understand. So thank you both for that.

Cherry Ward (39:45)

We have a segment called Rapid Fire Tip for Action and it’s an opportunity for you to provide actionable insights to our listeners to inspire them and for them to take action as well. So my first question for you Lyss is what’s the most impactful action someone can take to support a business revolution in their organisation?

Alyssa Jade McDonald-Baertl (40:06)

The first thing to do is to see things from a systems perspective. We often look at things in isolation. It’s this metric or it’s that product. And I would say, imagine you’re a photographer and you open the aperture on your lens. That is to give you a view. That’s how I am working in environmental science. That’s how we in global environmental science are working now. We never look at one seed, one topic, one water basin. We look at ecosystems. So it is… What is the ecosystem you’re in? And where would the proposed intervention bring value and damage and be willing to weigh out the outcomes of the two?

Cherry Ward (40:45)

And Robin, what’s one thing that everyone can do right now to contribute to a better world?

Robin Weninger (40:49)

I think the really best part everybody could do is just make sure they are contributing to that and really challenging what they are doing day in, day out and saying like, is this really contributing for what I believe in? Do I really need to attend another meeting?

We have a whole workforce that just does meetings and never works on these meetings before and after. So just like cutting out non-value drivers and replacing them with value drivers, I think it is really, important. And then probably the easiest one to start with is really starting with yourself and breaking it down and living also a lifestyle that supports that, like being healthy, doing exercise, sleeping well.

That leads to high performance. You can’t run a marathon with a stone in your shoe. And if you have a stone in your shoe, you need to take it out first.

Cherry Ward (41:39)

If you want to learn more and connect with Lyss and Robin, you can connect on LinkedIn and also check out their website, which will be in the show notes. And that’s a wrap for today’s episode of The Business Revolution. We hope you enjoy diving deep into the world of business and sustainability with us.

Mik Aidt (41:57)

And remember, the revolution doesn’t end here. It’s up to each and every one of us to take the knowledge and the inspiration that you hopefully got today from today’s episode and turn it into action.

Cherry Ward (42:10)

Whether it’s implementing sustainable practices in your own business or advocating for change in your community, every step counts towards building a better future.

Alan Taylor (42:21)

So don’t forget to visit our website at www.businessrevolution.earth for more resources, past episodes, and ways to actually get involved.

Mik Aidt (42:31)

And if you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t hold back with letting us know. can first of all, subscribe to the podcast, but you can also rate it and review it. And we’d love to hear from you. So your feedback always helps us, knowing, finding ideas for other topics that we should be talking about and, you know, reaching out to more listeners.

Cherry Ward (42:32)

Thank you for joining us on this journey of transformation. Together we can revolutionise the way we do business and create a world that’s sustainable for generations to come.

Alan Taylor (43:08)

Stay tuned for insights, inspiration and actionable ways to help reshape the way that we do business for a better tomorrow at all of our levels for all of us to be part of the solution.

Mik Aidt (43:19)

Until next time, keep innovating, keep inspiring and keep pushing for positive change for a brighter tomorrow. This is Mik.

Cherry Ward (43:28)

Cherry.

Alan (43:30)

And Alan, signing off. Don’t forget: the business revolution starts with you.