Dow Chemical’s CEO on Running an Environmentally Friendly Multinational

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2017

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Andrew Liveris, the CEO of Dow Chemical, discusses the 120-year-old company’s ambitious sustainability agenda. He says an environmentally driven business model is good for the earth—and the bottom line. Liveris is one of the CEOs contributing to Harvard Business Review’s Future Economy Project, in which leaders detail their company’s efforts to adapt to and mitigate climate change.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Closer Podcast brings you the inside story of deals changing the world, told by the people who know how it all went down.
0:09.0	Understand the human motivations behind groundbreaking business decisions with host Amy Keene.
0:14.6	Listen to The Closer, wherever you get your podcasts. And welcome to the HBR IDEA cast from Harvard Business Review.
0:32.9	I'm Sarah Green Kermichael.
0:35.4	This month, 13 U.S. federal agencies came out with a climate change report based on science.
0:41.0	The conclusion, humans are to blame for the rise in global temperatures. The
0:45.0	Trump administration largely rejects that conclusion, not however many leaving CEOs.
0:51.0	Dow is no longer the company, I can be egregious with my next statement, the company that gave
0:56.9	you Napalm back at the Vietnam War.
0:59.7	Today we're going to hear from Dow Chemical Chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris.
1:04.7	HBR editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius asked him about how the chemical company is trying
1:09.3	to transform itself through environmental initiatives and a commitment to sustainability.
1:15.0	Dow has a more complicated story even now because you know you're making plastics, you're making
1:19.9	petrol derivative products which rely on fossil fuels is the point that you're
1:25.1	transitioning away from these products or that that's not the way to think about
1:29.2	it? Well Petrochemical Dow and the boom era of substituting natural products with plastic products without due regard to the environment in the 70s and 80s, is now being replaced by full life cycle analysis of minimizing the
1:46.6	footprint of the plastics in the environment but humanity still wants those
1:51.0	plastics and so a big chunk of the responsibility on you being in plastics now is companies like our have the resources to work on it, which is use less input, produce less waste through the process, and then the product
2:08.9	that goes out there is lighter and recyclable and then be part of the answer in recycling it and then be part of the
2:18.3	answer in replacing it with renewables.
2:22.4	The Dow we've put in place today is a nimble R&D company
2:26.0	because we're much more willing to cannibalize ourselves in innovation cycles
	...

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