Olly has spent 20 years helping major global brands figure out how to make sustainable choices genuinely desirable, not as a moral duty, but as something people actually want. The closer sustainability gets to the real reason someone buys something, the more powerful it becomes. Nobody buys a perfume for the recycled packaging. But if the sustainably sourced vanilla makes it smell more complex, more unique, more seductive? 

We dig into why terms like "net zero" and "degrowth" leave people cold, what the fossil fuel industry understands about communications that the sustainability movement still doesn't, and why the pendulum will eventually have to swing back, because none of the fundamental problems have gone away.

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His argument is straightforward but radical. The neoclassical economics that dominates our institutions, business schools and financial markets was built before much of what we now know about the biosphere and planetary boundaries. Ecological economics offers a different framework, one where the economy exists within nature, not alongside it.

A central theme in the conversation is the concept of multi-capital, the idea that wealth cannot be reduced to financial capital alone. Social capital, natural capital and community are not soft add-ons but fundamental components of a functioning and sustainable economy. The episode also digs into what a post-growth pension system might look like in practice. Steve makes the case that pension funds are not just a financial instrument but a political one, and potentially a powerful lever for change. Pensioners sit on boards of trustees. They are also voters. That combination, he argues, is deeply underestimated.

The episode does not offer easy answers, but it reframes the question in a way that feels both urgent and, oddly, hopeful.

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The future won't wait. Neither should you.

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At the heart of the conversation is the idea of regenerative business, moving beyond ESG checklists and "doing less harm" toward business models that actively restore ecological, social, and economic systems. We look at real companies already doing this: from flooring to offshore wind to space-based Earth observation. We also discuss the potential of more accurate and precise metrics for impact and fewer but sharper KPI's for business transformation.

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Over time this view shifted. A famous turning point came in 1919 when the Dodge brothers sued Henry Ford after he chose to reinvest profits in higher wages and community development rather than maximizing dividends. The court ruled that a corporation should be run primarily for the profit of its shareholders. Decades later this idea became deeply influential through the work of Milton Friedman.

But as globalization expanded and environmental and social challenges became more visible, alternative ideas began to re-emerge. In 2006, Michael E. Porter introduced the concept of Creating Shared Value: the idea that companies can strengthen their competitiveness by understanding and expanding the value they create for society.

Nearly twenty years later, however, the practical challenge remains. Many companies say sustainability is integrated into their strategy, yet in practice it often sits in a silo. Financial performance and sustainability metrics are reported side by side, but rarely is there a serious attempt to understand how they actually influence one another.

If sustainable business development is to become possible, companies need better ways to connect impact with financial performance.

To explore how this can be done in practice, we invited Marc Pfitzer, a global strategy advisor since 30 + years, with several articles on todays subject published in the Harvard Business Review and he also lecture at the Stockholm School of Economics. 

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The conversation explores what increasingly appears to be a paradigm shift within social compliance. Traditional audit systems are being questioned for their limited effectiveness and fragmented nature, while new regulatory requirements and rising business risks are pushing sustainability from a voluntary initiative toward a core strategic concern. Both guests argue that meaningful change requires more than control mechanisms. It demands transparency about risks, but also investments in people, knowledge, and organizational learning.

We discuss how responsibility for sustainability is gradually moving beyond specialized sustainability teams and becoming integrated into core business functions, how regulation and market expectations are reshaping corporate incentives, and why leading companies often act as experimental laboratories whose practices spread across industries through shared standards and network effects.

The episode paints a picture of a field in transition, moving from compliance toward impact, from verification toward improvement, and from isolated interventions toward systemic change. Rather than asking whether supply chains can be monitored more efficiently, the discussion turns to a deeper question: how can global production systems be redesigned so that respect for labour rights becomes embedded in how business is actually done?

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And yet, the prevailing sense is that workers’ rights are in retreat rather than advancing. One clear example is Tesla’s global anti-union policies. In Sweden, Tesla has refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement, a stance that is highly unusual for companies operating in the country, including American ones. As a result, IF Metall has been in conflict with Tesla since October 2023, making it the longest strike in Sweden in over 100 years.

For this second session on labour rights, we have invited Aleksandar Zuza from IF Metall to help us unpack and better understand the conflict with Tesla.

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Our first guest is Sarosh Kuruvilla, Professor at Cornell University and perhaps the world’s leading researcher on labour conditions in global supply chains. The picture he paints is undeniably bleak. Despite more than thirty years of codes of conduct and compliance systems, very little has actually improved on the factory floor. Brands, governments of producing countries, and even traditional trade unions all come under scrutiny. But Sarosh also offers a concrete way forward for brands that genuinely want to drive change, along with a new and potentially revolutionary tool: Risk-Based Outcome Metrics.

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What did we learn from placing these perspectives side by side? Where do they fundamentally disagree, and where do they unexpectedly overlap? What actually needs to grow, what needs to shrink, and what does a credible path forward look like in a world facing ecological limits, social fragmentation, and political headwinds?

This episode is less about definitive answers and more about sharpening the questions. If growth can no longer be treated as a neutral or self-evident goal, what replaces it? And how do we move from critique to action?

What is to be done?

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Greenpeace International has recently articulated a new strategic direction, one that looks beyond single-issue campaigns and asks much bigger questions: How do we redesign our economies around wellbeing and sufficiency rather than growth? What alternatives are already emerging? And what kinds of alliances, political strategies, and forms of activism might actually get us there?

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In the first part of the trilogy, we meet Sam Tidswell, a venture capitalist focusing on cutting-edge technologies, from seaweed-planting robots to biomining and building materials engineered from atoms rather than mined from the earth. Sam not only believes that a regenerative capitalism and infinite growth on a finite planet is possible, he believes it’s something we’re likely to see in the near future.

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