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wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HPR Idea cast. I'm Ade Ignatius, editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review.

Paul Pullman took the helm of CEO of Unilever in 2009, and since then has been shaking things

up. He eliminated earnings guidance and quarterly reporting and

last year launched a business plan to double Unilever's revenue while cutting its

environmental impact in half. Recently I sat down with Pullman to talk about the complexities of pursuing a

socially driven mission while keeping an eye on the bottom line.

Paul you're trying to double revenue yet still have a positive

environmental impact. What motivated you to

launch such a plan and can you tell us what's working and what's proving tougher

than you'd expect it? We think that increasingly businesses that are responsible and actually make a

contribution to society in its positive sense, make it part of their overall

business model will be very successful. So for us it's an accelerator of our

business now and we define that very broadly

we define it as one billion people getting access to nutrition and well-being

we define it as having our overall use of materials or making all of our

agriculturally based materials agriculturally sustainable for example so those are clear goals that we said around that.

Because it's social and sustainable, we include things in our total supply chain, for example, like providing jobs for smallhold farmers

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