Our thinking

Podcast: Doing it on purpose

12 July, 2023

Our CEO and Founder, Giles Gibbons, recently sat down with Matthew Gwyther, former editor of Management Today and host of the Doing It On Purpose podcast, to chew the fat on where the world of sustainability is now.

Matthew starts by recalling the landscape shift over the past three decades as we moved from CSR to corporate responsibility to sustainability to ESG and back again, with a bit of purpose shoe-horned in. The resulting question being: where are we now and where do we go next?

A large part of Giles’s answer was to explain the rationale that led to the launch of our new product –  Act Two, which is designed to help businesses take on the harder actions which the next era of the sustainability movement must deliver, if it is to remain viable. He talks about the progress that has been made over the past twenty odd years, but also the challenges that lie ahead, as businesses reach a tipping point in their journeys towards delivering against the sustainability ambitions they have set.

But their conversation also covered many other issues – what non-financial audit is likely to mean for corporates in the next few years, what Giles thinks about the ever-increasing squadrons of ESG consultants selling their wares, why Good Business has remained relatively small and what he makes of the Bud Lite Trans blow up.