The New Nature of Business

Chapter 9The New Nature of Leadership

“Let me dive right in,” Anne-Fleur Goll said, kicking off her graduation speech at one of France's most famous business schools, HEC Paris, in June 2022.¹ “After a few months of carefree campus life, I felt deeply upset, realizing that the careers it was leading me to, were the main cause of [the planet's] environmental collapse. I learned both about marketing and the negative impacts of overconsumption and greenwashing. I saw the same companies at career fairs, and in polluters' rankings.” The crowd, made up of hundreds of fellow graduates, burst into spontaneous applause.

This was not an education or career trajectory Anne-Fleur wanted to be part of, she continued. She didn't want to be a cog in the wheel of an unsustainable economic system. So, during her studies, she had made a choice about her career, she told her captive audience. Together with many other of her fellow students and recent graduates, she had become part of the “Movement for an Ecological Awakening.”² The group demanded that “companies should be prepared to place the ecological perspective at the heart of their organization and their activities.”

More than anything, the group made a pledge about themselves: “As citizens, as consumers, as workers,” they wrote in a manifesto, “we affirm we are determined to change an economic system in which we no longer believe. We know that this will imply changing our way of life … [But] we are prepared to make [ourselves] available ...