Daniella Foster:
Hi Simon. Thanks so much for having me. It’s good to see you.

Simon Mainwaring:
It’s good to see you too. You’ve got this fascinating job title, and you started your study, because I want to explore how you ended up where you did. You did an MA in social and public policy at Georgetown University, and then a BA in intercultural communications and business at Pepperdine before it. So what really led you to get into this field? Why get into social and public policy? What attracted you to it?

Daniella Foster:
Maybe I’ll start at my roots a bit. I grew up in Los Angeles, California. I would wake up every morning and see what when I was a kid thought was a big fog cloud, but actually turned out to be smog sitting right and resting in downtown Los Angeles. And for me, candidly, my parents were hippies a bit, and I early on was always thinking about how do you reuse things? How do you recycle things? How can you be sustainable? Don’t let everything go to waste. And I grew up in a really multicultural environment, so I spent a lot of time with different cultures trying to understand and people, lots of different cultural influences from my upbringing. And when I took a step back in college and said, “Hey, well, what do I want to be doing five to 10 years out?” I knew I wanted to be working on global issues. I knew I wanted to be working in areas where I saw the potential to make a difference to help drive change in a sustainable way.

Daniella Foster:
I knew I wanted to work on international and foreign affairs, and then I back pedaled into that and said, “Well, what does that look like? Where is that? Oh, well, that’s kind of on the east coast, that’s kind of in DC, that’s potentially in nonprofit management.” That was a bit of my early journey and it was funny because I remember when I wanted to study that, folks would say to me, “Well, but what is that? What kind of job do you get doing that?” And I said, they don’t really exist yet, but they will, and they’re going to be really critical. And so I think about it more as different skill sets that enable you to be a systems integrator.

Simon Mainwaring:
It is interesting because those jobs you end up on in hindsight, you see how you collected all those skills on the way, but you didn’t really know that when you started out. The next part of your journey, you actually looked to a nonprofit. And it’s a very interesting shift to make. I think it was the promoting piece through strength that was a nonprofit, the American Security Council. Why did you shift to the public sector and why that particular organization?

Daniella Foster:
It goes back to what I was talking a little bit about before. I looked and said, “All right, five to 10 years out, what do I want to be working on? Want to be working on international issues, want to be working with government, want to be working on policy,” and got the opportunity as a fellow with the American security council foundation and I was thrown deep into the depths of foreign policy. And that was actually around the time of the bird flu. So actually going back to health was working a lot on global health policy and what that would look like, what it meant for foreign policy, et cetera. And then after spending some time in DC doing that, I realized, I really want to work on nonprofit management. Mission-oriented work really spoke to me and that was part of the reason I wanted to come out to DC. And that all kind of got me grounded. And then from there, government was the next step.

Simon Mainwaring:
Right. The environment, the water you’re swimming shapes your career in some ways. And I know that you the end looked across to the state department, and this is fascinating to me because the big thesis of Lead With We is really, you need this cross-sector collaboration. None of us can do it alone. We need the public and the private sector working together. We need entrepreneurs, large corporations. So what did you do in the state department capacity? I know that your focus was public private partnership. Why that area?

Daniella Foster:
Look, I remember joining the state department and going, “Oh my goodness, I have my dream job. I’m working on international issues.” I actually started out working on Western Hemisphere Affairs and working specifically on people to people intercultural exchanges, which I was very passionate of about. And then from there ended up getting an opportunity to come up and work on issues with companies and specifically look at things like public private partnerships.

Daniella Foster:
So there, I had an amazing opportunity to help set up the first office of public private partnerships at a time when for government, working with tree and companies was not a norm. It was not a part of the way that they had done business. At that time, I was also going to Georgetown, looking at public and social policy. My thesis was on public private partnerships. And I said, “Well, actually I think this is going to be a new model for how we tackle global issues going forward.” I think we have to have that cross sector influence and partnership, especially for a lot of the wicked issues we were tackling at the time and still are. And that formed the basis for the first ever office of public private partnerships in the state department.

Simon Mainwaring:
I want to mind your insider knowledge a little bit, because I think to a layman out there, nonprofits, foundations, NGOs sometimes suffer, they’re resource poor. They don’t have the might that another sector might have. Then again on the government side or the state department side, maybe things move more slowly than you would want them to move, because that is a government process. Are there any observations you’d make about the different sectors? Because they’re all different levers of change and we need them all right now.

Daniella Foster:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I have an appreciation for each one of them for different reasons. When I think about government, what government does really well is policy on one hand, especially when they get it right. So the ability to set policy that can have some pretty wide sweeping implications, the ability to scale. So working with the US government on foreign affairs, I was working over 165 countries at one point. That was my portfolio. So when you contest and pilot something and then take it to scale, you have that ability to scale, which I think is one of the unique aspects of government, and you also have a lot of tremendous expertise. So real deep technical functional expertise, overlaid with diplomacy, overlaid with people who are really committed to the mission and quite passionate and have committed their careers to that. So I think all of that expertise, plus the convening power is a bit of what government brings to the table, plus the ability to implement policy, et cetera, diplomacy, those levers.

Daniella Foster:
And then the private sector has the ability, I would argue, to make things sustainable over time and to go to scale. And so when you bring these things together, you have a really beautiful mix for public private partnerships that can tackle issues, whether it’s HIV and aids with PEPFAR or some of the things we’re seeing on the climate front right now, now we look at public private partnerships and it’s just, it’s a norm for how we do business, but it wasn’t at one time.

Simon Mainwaring:
I think the way that you characterize that, I know it’s over simplifying, but there’s scale on the government side, you can sustain it on the private sector side and you’ve got the boots on the ground and the expertise and the nonprofit world. Do you feel like given the urgency of all the issues we’re solving for, is the tension is the frustration sometimes just in the integration of them all? Because they don’t speak to each other because of effectively the different sectors in their own. What would you say it might be?

Daniella Foster:
When I think about partnership, I think about it as a marriage or any relationship. You have to spend a lot of time investing in making it work. You have to have the right alignment of values, of priorities, you to have a clear understanding of where the other is coming from and also what they’re in it for. What’s their near midterm and long term goals. And then I think a really big piece of this is translation. It’s oftentimes the translation between the sectors that you either don’t see or where things get mixed up. So that translation component is pretty key.

Simon Mainwaring:
I don’t think there could be a more important component right now because I think everyone across all sectors is more aware to the urgency of the issues we’re solving for than ever before, but we’ve got to operate together more effectively in a condensed timeframe. And I think point is so important and it’s wonderful to talk to you because rarely do we get the insights as to why a company like Bayer would prioritize sustainability or any other large enterprise out there. What is the business case that large companies find so compelling? Because if you sit on the outside, you look at it and say, okay, we hear a lot more noise and a lot more by large corporations, but why now? Why has it taken a life its own inside large companies?

Daniella Foster:
When I look at this, I will always say that I think the future of good business has to be sustainable. Period. And I think even over the past four years, we’ve seen a shift. So if we were talking about this maybe a decade ago, we would say, look, you got to do it. It’s a really important part of corporate responsibility. It’s part of just being a good corporate citizen, all of those things. Now I would argue, it’s not just about that. It is about this being a material part of your business and your strategy and just like you would make a capital investment or an innovation investment, you have to be thinking about sustainability end to end and ESG in your business strategy. You have to have it integrated in not just from a risk perspective, but also from a growth, potential and innovation perspective.

Daniella Foster:
And that has been a really big shift. And we’ve seen this also really shift, I would say over the past three years and during the pandemic, even with investors. So now you have the opposite, before you had a bit of the push and now there’s definitely the pull because it’s becoming more normalized and it’s also becoming a core part of what investors expect, what pension funds expect. It’s also I think that the data out there is getting much better. You see some of the data that shows that look, companies that perform well across ESG metrics are performing up to 20% better than those that are not. So the data I think is also catching up with where some of the rhetoric may have been a decade ago.

Simon Mainwaring:
No, I couldn’t agree more. And I think the business case is there now and the strength of the data, but one of the questions I always ask myself and I hear other people ask is, why is this possible now? Why is it going to work now? Why is business going to show up differently? Because we’ve been talking about business, doing good for several decades. And I think it’s because that requisite coalition of stakeholders is finally at the table. It’s not just suppliers and leadership and employees and customers and consumers. But as you say, the investor classes there and these large funds, these pensions funds, these ESG funds, environmental, social, and governance. So it isn’t just risk mitigation. It is a growth strategy. It is an innovation strategy.

Simon Mainwaring:
And so I think we can all in these very challenging times, be optimistic because business in the private sector is really rising to the challenge and they see they’re going to be rewarded for it. Before we talk about Bayer, I just want to touch on one other area of expertise you have is you then move to Hilton. And I know that while during your tenure there, they were named to the DJSI index, which is the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, which was one of the many way is that companies, large complex enterprises can be recognized for those efforts. And that’s important. So what was that process like and why was it important to Hilton at the time?

Daniella Foster:
Look, I actually think that the rankings are quite important. I know there’s sometimes a lot of debate on that, but at the end of the day, these metrics are pretty clear. There’s a clear set of what are you doing across ESG? Are you measuring it? Is it quantitative and quantifiable? Can you measure progress over time? What are the boundaries? And when I think about Hilton, Hilton is fascinating because again, it’s a lovely brand, travel is something a lot of people are passionate about. And I remember coming in, the foundation and the fundamentals were there and at the same time, Hilton was about to turn a hundred years young. And so part of a milestone like that, I think requires a company to take a step back and say, “All right, who do we want to be over the next century? What does that look like, and what’s it going to take to get there?”

Daniella Foster:
And in the case of Hilton, it was pretty clear. We really wanted to champion sustainable travel and tourism, and also champion a whole movement behind that. And that required everything from 360 rethinking what we were doing internally, we were the first in the industry, for example, the set science based targets and go through that journey, first to really commit to doubling investment in social impact and looking at supply chains and how you can buy local, tackling things like human rights, et cetera.

Daniella Foster:
So I always say it does start a bit with that internal piece what’s material to your business. What can you uniquely change? What are the boundaries for that? How do you really codify that and commit to it and then stick with it? And that’s a big part of what we did and they ultimately became industry leader on that Dow Jones Sustainability Index, but more interesting, I think is the work that was done across the industry. So sustainable travel really became a movement and you had a lot of cross industry support, whether it was around science-based targets or on things like food waste or even on things like plastics and recycling. So that’s to me also one of the other benchmarks I look at is, how can industry start to come together collectively to drive action.

Simon Mainwaring:
For those who aren’t as familiar with corporate titles and so on, what does it mean to be like global head public affairs science and sustainability focused on consumer health? Could you unpack that a little bit?

Daniella Foster:
Yeah. Let me try here. I would say a couple of things. One, it’s really where … I think about it as future proofing our business, most simply. When I think about sustainability and I think about that link to the science-based work we’re doing, and also to where we’re going from a growth perspective in our business, I think about all of it as, as future proofing in its most basic sense. And on a day to day, it can look very different. So it’s everything from setting our strategy and where we want to go. And our 100 million commitments and our climate neutral goals on through to working up and down our entire value chain.

Daniella Foster:
I think what’s really interesting at Bayer is that sustainability isn’t a separate strategy off on the side. It’s part of our business strategy. It’s everything from working with our brands, to working with our product supply teams, to working with our R&D teams, on through to our commercial teams and go to market. It is the full end to end spectrum, which is how I firmly believe sustainability should be incorporated into business and into strategy. So that’s a bit of a snapshot.

Simon Mainwaring:
And I think one of the great challenges of leadership today is that not only do you have all that complexity just by virtue of the business, you are dealing with a context of multiple crises at once. You’ve got COVID, you’ve got the climate emergency, you’ve got the response to the Black Lives Matter movement out there. We’ve got obviously geopolitical issues that are playing out around the world in different ways. How do you think through what to prioritize and when, when there’s so much need across the brands, across the markets, across the issues, how do you think though through that?

Daniella Foster:
I think there’s probably three pieces to it and I’ll try to unpack and break this down. The first one is I always go back to strategy a bit and go back to, what are your north stars and what’s most material to your business? I think that’s critical. I spent a lot of time on this upfront when I came into Bayer, sitting down, listening, working across our business, where are we? What’s really unique in terms of what we can do and also what we can contribute to, what’s most material? Et cetera. Once you land on that, you come out of that process knowing, hey, these are the two north stars where if you get it right, you can have a big impact. And for us, that’s our climate neutrality goal and then our 100 million development challenges.

Daniella Foster:
So once you have that framework, you know this is the 80/20 of where you can have the biggest impact when you focus. So that’s piece. The second piece is then what I would call flexibility within that framework to adapt, to adapt to the realities of today, potentially the opportunities, if there’s new technology or innovation, whether it’s around plastic materials and recycling, whether it’s evolution around know policies that will help accelerate more sustainable business, et cetera. That’s the part where you want to have flexibility within the framework to get there.

Daniella Foster:
And then the third piece that I’ve in particular have been thinking a lot about in this what I hope as a post pandemic era is people. You can never underestimate the people C run of things. And I think really taking the time to understand where are people coming from? What are their challenges? What are they experiencing? What role do they play in where we need to get? I think that’s critical and that’s been one of my big takeaways from the pandemic is really empathy and meeting people where are, and especially when you’re talking about the social issues in ESG, I think that’s really critical.

Simon Mainwaring:
I think we’ve all been made so mindful of the very real day to day situation of people here in the United States and around the world, because COVID really touched all lives. I’m also, one of the things that keeps me up at night, Daniella is the global south, those that are underserved around the world. We’re not going to be able to solve for all of these larger issues if only the more affluent countries or companies participate, we’re really going to have to take a lot of other people with us so that we can provide a solution at scale that’s sustainable. So tell me a little bit about the $100 million commitment by what is the goal there? Where is it focus? What is the impact you’re hoping to achieve?

Daniella Foster:
I’m going to tell you about our 100 million people development challenge. And I’m going to like take this back a little bit to the beginning. Even if I think about our last conversation Simon, we were sitting in a coffee shop talking about business for good and what that can look like. And that was actually before at Bayer, we had set our 100 million challenges in our overall sustainability ambition. And even so some of our conversations, you may remember me talking about this early on and that is how access, access to healthcare access to everyday health, what that looks like for the underserved and the potential role we could play there. So all of that research and thinking led to our 100 million challenge, which is to expand access to everyday health for 100 million people in underserved communities. And it gets right at the heart of vulnerable communities and a lot of the communities we actually saw struggling quite extensively during COVID.

Daniella Foster:
And at the heart of this challenge is a couple of things. One it’s expanding access, so physical access. We see a lot of health deserts. You often hear about food deserts where there’s not nutritious food, but there’s also health deserts where people just do not have access to basic and essential health services. And what we found is that oftentimes, that means that self care and access to everyday health products is really their first and last health lifeline. And there’s a lot of data on this. There’s a lot of ethnography and things that we did to really understand underserved communities, understand the needs. And what came out of that is our 100 million challenge.

Daniella Foster:
And we think about it in different ways. One component is really health education and behavior change. The other is that physical access that I talked about. There’s also wraparound services and making sure you really understand the local communities and are working with local healthcare providers, NGOs, governments, et cetera. So these are some of the things that keep me up at night and if I think about, we launched that in 2019 pre-pandemic, and then we went right into the pandemic we’ve all been living in. And in many ways, that was a great moment to take a step back and say, “Okay, does our strategy still make sense? Is this still relevant?” And what we found is that it was more relevant than ever. And in many ways, we were able to accelerate our partnerships, really accelerate our understanding and listening and the ethnography work that we were doing with underserved communities, and start to really come out the other end of that with tailored solutions and partnerships that could make a difference at scale, particularly on things like micronutrients, for example.

Simon Mainwaring:
And I’d like to speak to market nutrients in a moment, but I just want to … for those of us who don’t understand the different ways that health challenges show up in underserved communities, it varies from market to market. Sometimes it might be pollution, it might be safety, it might be you’re time poor. And you can’t look after your health and wellbeing the way that you’d want, how do you deliver solutions? Is it through the lens of the individual brands or does Bayer … how do you operationalize it?

Daniella Foster:
I think there’s a couple of ways. One of the things that we became laser-focused and obsessed in a good way on was first understanding what are the needs? What are the needs and challenges for underserved communities? What does that look like by market, by impact market? Where are these pockets of communities where we think we could really have a difference? That’s one piece. And then the second is we did a series of ethnography. What is an actual day in the life look like? What are the challenges and barriers? Hearing from people, what are they facing? And they were similar. It’s things like being time poor. Convenience was really critical, just not having the time. Some of it was physical access and availability, just didn’t have access to either basic and essential health services or what was available was cost prohibitive, or was a bit too far away.

Daniella Foster:
We also heard about things like nutrition, micronutrient content, tho those kind of things came out. And then after understanding and really digging into those insights, also overlaying with that medical insights to understand, well, what are the most medically material challenges we see? And then a last key component is really embedding this sustainability perspective and also access and underserved perspective into our power brands from the DNA of those brands and how we think about brand purpose, on through to things like the way that we think about our innovation pipeline and development of products and health education, and literacy, the full end to end. And that’s a journey. It takes time

Simon Mainwaring:
It does, and

Daniella Foster:
… but it’s been fascinating.

Simon Mainwaring:
And I know your power brands are the big brands that we know like Claritin and aspirin and others for those that don’t know. And the literacy point you made is really critical. I think often, and I’d love to hear about the micronutrients, people don’t even know what they need in the first place. So what does a solution look like if you’re trying to provide something that can not only have the impact you want, but sustain that impact over time, do you start with education? Is that where it begins?

Daniella Foster:
Yeah, I think you do. And look, if I draw a parallel a bit to what we saw during the pandemic, I think you see this a bit clearly here. If I think about things as basic as hand washing, there was a lot of effort and time that went into hand washing public service campaigns, that whole health education wrap around, you even saw celebrities singing a song and washing their hands and it worked, and it was simple, effective. It raised awareness and it was a helpful tool and it worked. So this health education component, it’s oftentimes not as sexy as a new innovative technology, but it’s really critical when you’re talking about developing positive health behaviors and also behavior change, which is pretty key when you’re talking about preventative health.

Daniella Foster:
So if I think for example about the nutrient gap initiative, that’s one of the key programs we launched under our 100 million challenge we actually launched about a year ago. And this is really focused on helping expand access to vitamins and minerals for 50 million people worldwide, particularly in underserved communities. And we do this in partnership with local NGOs and with local governments. And this is critical because again, I go back to the data. Well, why micronutrients? Why is that important? Well, when we look at micronutrient deficiencies, it’s a massive public health problem and particularly in underserved communities, and it’s hitting women and children who are already particularly vulnerable. So if we just look at the numbers, 50% of young women and adolescent girls in low and middle income countries have inadequate vitamin and mineral intake. And then we also know that at least half of children worldwide under five are also suffering from this deficiency. So the challenge and the problem is there.

Daniella Foster:
We also know that deficiencies worsen over time, and then that results in a series of health consequences, and then it exacerbates the cycle of poverty that we see. So this is one of the key areas we want to tackle. We do this, like I said, with NGOs, a key, key, key piece of this is health education and really understanding particularly for pregnant women, the importance of the first 1000 days of life and the importance of nutrition during those first 100 days. So there’s some amazing work happening here in over 20 countries with local healthcare providers to try to do the full wraparound, to tackle the challenge, to meet people where they are, bring in that health education and literacy, work with local governments to improve anti-natal care guidelines in communities, and also provide access and supplementation to things like prenatals.

Simon Mainwaring:
And what does that look like on the ground? Where you see mothers who weren’t even aware of the deficiency and they get access to what they need and they realize that there’s a great opportunity there. What does that look like? The human face on those efforts? Is there a market or a story that particularly stands out?

Daniella Foster:
Yeah. Look, it’s game changing. And I guess a couple of maybe examples that I would offer one, if I think of about Guatemala, particularly rural communities in Guatemala where they may be so remote, they have zero access to basic and essential health services. So we’ve done everything from working with NGOs to provide mobile clinics and access on through to working directly with Vitamin Angels and other and other NGOs who know the communities who can meet them where they are to provide health, education, and literacy and help them understand, hey, these are the importance of the first 1000 days, and then also ultimately to provide them with 180 day intervention.

Daniella Foster:
They get 180 day intervention with micronutrients that really help set them up for the best starting life, both themselves, if you’re talking about a pregnant woman and their soon to be born child. So it’s sort of a 360 intervention, and then that is typically done in collaboration with a local government that’s actually looking at that in terms of how they can bring that into the healthcare system. What works, what do they need to change in terms of their policies, in terms of even their guidelines for care and for nutrition. So it really is a full 360 approach.

Simon Mainwaring:
Right. And I can only imagine you’re just launching this program then COVID hits. And on one hand you might say, oh, wow, is this the wrong strategy right now we need to course correct, or do you double down because it’s going to be more necessary than ever. How do you navigate that? And what was the solution you chose?

Daniella Foster:
I always think it’s really important to meet people where they are. And there’s a couple of key pieces to this. One is adapting to the realities on the ground. How are people taking in their information? How are they managing to get access? We found that the vulnerable became even more vulnerable in the midst of the pandemic for all of the reasons that we know in terms of just not being able to either go out and get access or things starting to close down or services ramping down. So we definitely kept that in mind. In some cases, we were able to employ digital solutions, and others, it was about really being mindful of phasing and timing and which communities you’re working with when? Are they even capable of sort of handling it?

Daniella Foster:
But I will say one thing that came through in all of that that has been an interesting learning and it brings reality and tech together is the potential for basic things like SMS and QR codes. SMS and QR codes particularly for underserved communities and populations. For us, we might go, okay, I would say that the SMS and QR codes have been the heroes in some ways for these communities because it’s enabled us to still reach people, to hear, hey, what are their challenges? What do you need? Okay, great. Sync that up with local community, healthcare workers and governments. And then on the digital front, the QR codes have been really great delivery for health education, for also looking at, how do we just more simply get things to people? And the uptake on those has been really good. So there are some really basic, sometimes unsexy things that you learn when you’re testing and get really practical on the ground.

Simon Mainwaring:
And how do you do that storytelling? Is it a point of sale? Do you use packaging, obviously everyone, a large proportion of people even in the global south have phones. These are such big opportunities if they use the right way.

Daniella Foster:
I think there’s a couple of pieces to this. One, we’ve been really focused heads down on, let’s have an impact. Let’s really understand the communities, let’s test and learn, let’s partner with NGOs and governments so we get it right and we don’t make assumptions. That’s been really critical. And then the second piece you’re talking about is really, how do you, how do you raise awareness and create a bit of interest and also I think humanize these stories a bit? One of the pieces that’s interesting that gets more to the brand side, which is different, but it is interrelated a bit is if I think about our Elevate brand.

Daniella Foster:
So the Elevate brand, fantastic prenatal brand, most research prenatal out there. And the fundamental purpose of this brand is to give every baby the best start in life. And it’s through and through just anyone who works on this brand, anyone who comes in contact with this will feel it. And that’s where they create created every beginning, which is really about humanizing the motherhood stories and those first 1000 days of life and that journey and what that looks like, and really creating a community around it, a community for mothers, mothers to be, mothers who have just given birth, a community across cultures, and also a community to give back where that’s relevant. And if I think about the partnership with vitamin angels, there’s a huge link there. So creating the community and the 360 has also been a part of what we’re thinking about through the brands.

Simon Mainwaring:
A 360 solution and human storytelling, two incredibly critical components of what successful impact looks like. And we’ve been talking a little bit about the people impact, but obviously every large enterprise needs to be accountable in terms of the planet now, for all the reasons we know the climate emergency and so on. I know that you’ve announced commitments to being climate neutral by 2030 and net zero by 2050. When you’ve got a massive global footprint, a wide portfolio, thousands and thousands of employees during a pandemic, how do you even start to think about rolling that out? Obviously, as you’ve got to integrate sustainability into the business, because it is core to the business, but actually executing against that, what does that look like?

Daniella Foster:
If I look at the environmental side, there’s a lot, that’s also moved on this front over the past, I would say even six months. I’m going to kind of, I guess, break this into two pieces. The first one, if I think about the climate neutrality goal, there for me, the roadmaps are pretty straightforward. It’s based on science based targets, you set the boundaries, you set your baseline and you work like day in and day out towards reductions. And if you’re looking at your own operations, for example, it’s efficiency measures, it’s baking it into your capital expenditures and those types of projects that you’re working on. So it’s really the fundamentals of how you operate your business. And we were pretty systematic and incorporating sustainability into our overall not only strategic plans, but into our operational plans. So we’re tracking it regularly, we’re tying different measures and even incentives to that and that I think is really critical.

Daniella Foster:
The other thing is we’re also looking at renewables, where can we purchase more renewables? Where do we need to be thinking about solar investment? I would say on that front it’s pretty well thought out, and the blueprints are pretty clear. I think in many ways, climate while it’s really challenging, you know a lot of the work that you need to do at least in your own operations initially to reduce emissions. A second piece of this though going beyond that is when I think about things like plastic waste. We for example, announced a commitment in Q4 at the end of last year to transition to 100% recyclable, reusable, or compostable packaging by 2030. That a very long undertaking. No doubt about it. A lot of smart brains thinking about this and working towards it, but it does mean really a shift in how you think about your materials. It’s a shift in how you might even think about use.

Daniella Foster:
So on this front, we backed that with £100 million investment in more sustainable products and packaging. So I’m really excited about that. And I will say on this front, this is area where the ambition is out there and I think companies get it, but the available material, the solutions and the innovations have not yet caught up. So this is a really good opportunity for collective action, which you may hear me talk a lot about. And one of the things I’m particularly excited about that also kicked off off at the end of last year is the first ever consumer health industry-wide environmental charter, tackling a few key areas, one of them being plastics and packaging and another being carbon emissions specifically scope three in the supply chain. So that, super excited about that. First time and it’s happened, and we bear made a pledge towards that, a number of other companies in the industry did as well, and that collective action piece to come together across competitive lines and look for solutions, that’s really powerful. So I’m pretty optimistic and energized about that.

Simon Mainwaring:
I think bringing all your internal stakeholders together, cross pollinating learnings across your brand portfolio, working with competitors in this way, working cross sector, this is what it means to lead with we. It’s really about the future of collaborative leadership because we’ve all got to solve for these issues because they all affect our businesses. And it’s not just risk mitigation. I’d say it is a competitive advantage to make these shifts. Would you go agree?

Daniella Foster:
I would, and I would even go beyond the competitive advantage piece, because when I think specifically about environmental issues that we’re trying to tackle, I really believe in open source. I think the solution should be open source. I think the blueprint should be open source. I think the collective action and drive should be there. No one owns this space of environment and climate change and no one individual, no one company, no one entity is going to solve of it. We have to work together. It’s inherent in the challenge.

Daniella Foster:
That’s the opportunity and the things that I get really excited about. What is that new innovative solution that does not yet exist that by all of us coming together collectively, we can get closer to that? Or we could at least test and learn what are those opportunities to work with suppliers to say, “Hey, all right, well, what really our biggest challenge is a climate zoning issue in terms of being able to get products out there in their stability.” I like to dig into what are those very tangible challenges that we can work on together? And I see that being very true in this space.

Simon Mainwaring:
And I want to push in one more curly question in this area, which is, the need is self-evident, the urgency increases every day, but this isn’t happening in a vacuum. There are legacy industries or forces out there that don’t want things to change. There are a lot of people in different markets around the world that want to … their seat at the table of business or capitalism as it was practiced in the past, because they haven’t yet enjoyed the spoils, shall we say, the same way that other countries have. And then there’s a growing tragically, a majority of people that live on dollars a day trying to fix the world or do things differently is a luxury they can’t even contemplate. So how do we, on one hand calibrate between these forces of collaboration that are moving in the right direction with the inertia of these other forces? Any ideas, because I think you’ve seen it from all these different lenses.

Daniella Foster:
Yeah. And look, those different things, especially the latter one where you say, look, some of these issues are a luxury. These are the things that keep me up at night. Well, one thing, I’ll start at the end, perhaps. To your point on, how do you make these things relevant to communities who say, “Look, I’m just trying to survive. I’m just trying to put on the table for my family. I’m just trying to do the basics of getting by.” I think it’s really critical. Anytime we talk about ESG, anytime we talk about climate, we also have to talk about human health and put the people in this equation first. That whole space around the prosperity and tackling poverty, UNSDG number one is really critical because I also think, unless we get to the heart of some of those challenges, talking about things like climate is going to be a luxury.

Daniella Foster:
And in many ways it’s been siloed off as well, yeah, that’s a nice to developed world conversation to have, but for many people, it’s not their reality. When we know, if you look at the IPCC report, you see really clearly that the impacts of climate change are also affecting those who are already most vulnerable. And it’s just compounding whether it’s extreme weather events or droughts or floods and the role that also has in disease and a whole other suite of things. So we see that clearly. I think that whole space has to be clearly acknowledged and tackled because I think until you solve that equation, there’s only going to be so far that you can get. That space keeps me up at night. That’s why you’ll hear me talk a lot about, access, the 100 million challenge. What are the core areas where you can have the biggest material impact?

Daniella Foster:
And then to the second piece, or really the first piece, I guess of your question, which is the, where do we go? And everyone has a different set of entrenched interests and what does that look like? You might not like the answer, but I think that’s about time. I think it’s about time. If the past decade or two decades, which are very, very short in the span of time have really illuminated anything. It’s that sometimes you have to wait for a moment and things do change. And I think sometimes the reason the world may feel so polarized right now is you’re seeing that shift happen before our eyes, just from a generational perspective.

Daniella Foster:
When I was at the state department, I was writing a lot about things like millennials and xennials and equity crowdfunding and where they were going to put their money and how they were going to invest. If you just look at this even from a financial and investment perspective of where capital flows are going, is going towards more ESG, social impact, et cetera, focused funds. And that, it’s going to be a generational shift, but it’s already here. You can already start to see it. And I think over time, that’s going to create a different cycle for business.

Simon Mainwaring:
I agree. I think the first 15% in that shift is the hardest because it’s building that momentum that takes on a life of its own and the market forces start to reward companies that are showing up in new ways. I’ve got one other thing that keeps me up at night. It sounds like you and I are both up at night at the same time, so here we go. At the same time that the capital is going in the right direction and businesses showing up differently and all stakeholders in our future are aware of the challenges we face, there’s so much grave news out there. The IPCC report, the most recent one said that delay is death. It’s almost like we’re becoming desensitized or that language is becoming normalized. How do we break through almost this … the water is boiling around us and we’re frogs in the water and we’re just complacent about the urgency. How do we break through that so that people do show up differently, they will do work together in new ways?

Daniella Foster:
I think about this a lot too, and I’ve been thinking, especially in the midst of the pandemic, you can get to a point where you’re efficiently making progress on things, and then you take a step back and say, “Well, but the hardest issues are not just about progress or efficiency.” And this is where I would go back to the empathy piece and putting people at the heart of the conversation. I think oftentimes, especially when we’re talking about climate, the science is really good, and it is really clear, yet what oftentimes gets lost in that whole conversation and in that equation is the impact this has on human health. We need to be talking about climate and completely reframing it to, this is one of the largest challenges in detriment to our human health and really the survival of our species if you want to get even more pointed about it. That’s not the conversation we’re having today.

Daniella Foster:
And so I think injecting a bit of that humanity, a bit of that heart, also a bit of the empathy component to realize, hey, in some of these communities, we really need to meet people where they are, because they’re just trying to get by. They can’t even think about the climate aspects yet. That’s where the people piece of this is critical. I think empathy is critical. I think the conversation that we all have around this does need to shift and change, and I think we also need to start to see real tangible models for progress and even progress down at the individual level. What can you as an individual do? Because I think oftentimes with climate, it feels so big that it’s like, oh, okay, well, governments are going to tackle that. Or, well, maybe NGOs are going to tackle that, or maybe companies are going to tackle that. But even with all of them tackling that, we still have big gaps to fill. So I do think the way that something even as basic as how we communicate and engage around it needs to evolve.

Simon Mainwaring:
And why are you optimistic, Daniella? Tell me that.

Daniella Foster:
I just, I’m what I call an optimistic pragmatist. I am optimistic because if I look at even just what we’ve done at Bayer in a two and a half, three year span, since I joined the organization, what we’ve done already I thought would take five years on a good day. But the momentum, the passion from employees, the linking of it into business, the tying it to incentives and the overall, I would say, professionalization of ESG and more people talking about it and really baking it into their business, those are pragmatic things, but those pragmatic things are where I’m seeing some phenomenal progress. And that keeps me optimistic and more companies, organizations are doing that and in a more authentic way, that’s also tied to their business and to how they’re investing and growing in the future. And that keeps me optimistic among other things.

Simon Mainwaring:
Well, thank you so much, Daniella. Thank you for all the different perspectives you shared today and the insights. Really appreciate it.

Daniella Foster:
Happy to, and it was great to see you Simon and great to join you today.

Simon Mainwaring:
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Lead With We. You can find out more information about today’s guest, Daniella Foster, in the description below. And if you enjoyed the show, make sure you hit the Like button below and subscribe to this channel. Lead With We is produced by Goal 17 Media, and you can also listen to all of our episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere good podcasts are heard. If you’re looking to dive even deeper into the world of purposeful business, check out my new book, Lead With We, which is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Google Books. See you on the next episode. And until then, let’s all lead with we.