Agency.

The limits of what a person can change.

On his first day running Unilever, in 2009, in the teeth of the financial crisis, Paul Polman told the people who owned the company to stop asking him how the next three months would go. No more quarterly guidance, no more forecasts of the profits to come and no more measuring the company each quarter against whether it had hit its own number. The investors who cared only about the short term, he said, were welcome to take their money elsewhere.

This was a man running soap and stock cubes and shampoo and tea, the unglamorous, indispensable stuff of ordinary life, used by something like two billion people a day across a hundred and ninety countries. He picked a fight with the City, and it cost him: the share price, which had risen when his appointment was announced, fell as soon as it was clear he would not play the quarterly game.

He did not seem to mind. The people selling, he thought, were exactly the people he did not want deciding Unilever’s future — speculators shifting money on every small flutter of expectation rather than owners interested in what the company might build over years. And he had chosen his moment. He made the announcement on day one, he said later, on the reasoning that the board was unlikely to sack him on the morning it had hired him.

It was the sort of move that gets a chief executive either removed within the year or written about for a decade. Polman was written about for a decade and more.

The decision was not as unique or novel as it is often described. Coca-Cola had dropped quarterly guidance years before, Google had never given it, and others had been letting the practice go; in the financial crisis surrounding his appointment, plenty of companies were suspending forecasts anyway, because the future had become impossible to read. Polman had not invented the idea.

But that was never really the point. Its importance lay in what he meant to do with the room it bought him.

Unilever, when he arrived, was not the successful giant its size suggested. Turnover had been sliding for years, brands and businesses had been sold off, and there was recurring talk of breaking the whole thing up. Polman’s diagnosis was that the company had been captured by the short term, feeding the immediate demands of the market while starving the things its future depended on. It had been, in his phrase, chasing its own tail.

He did not believe the people inside Unilever were incapable of seeing what needed doing. The trouble was that the boundaries drawn around them kept rewarding the wrong choices.

Because a quarterly target does not stay in the chief executive’s office. It travels. A promise made to investors becomes pressure on a division, which becomes a demand on a brand, a budget, a particular person, and somewhere down the line an investment gets postponed because its payoff would land after the quarter on which someone’s appraisal depends. A choice that looks sensible for the next three months can often cost the company something it will need in three years.

Ending guidance was simply an effort to interrupt that traffic. Unilever also rebuilt executive pay around the longer term, and Polman set about getting the company to invest in its brands again and to take on problems that couldn’t be solved inside the next quarter: cleaner energy, less waste, sustainable farming, better conditions down the supply chain. Scrapping the quarterly ritual was not, by his own account, the thing that turned Unilever around. What it did was change what a sensible decision looked like. It “allowed people,” he said, “to make the right decisions.”

That is a rather different story from the usual one about the heroic chief executive. Polman was not simply using his own agency. He was using the authority of his office to widen the space in which everyone else could use theirs.

A year after Polman arrived, Unilever made the room he had created considerably less comfortable.

The Sustainable Living Plan promised that the company would double in size while halving the environmental footprint of making and using its products. It would help more than a billion people improve their health and wellbeing and improve the livelihoods of millions of people across its supply chain. The commitments reached into almost every part of the business: the crops it bought, the factories it ran, the packaging it used, the nutrition of its food and the way consumers washed their clothes or cleaned their homes.

Unilever did not yet know how to achieve much of this. That was partly the point.

Polman could have waited until the company had worked out what was possible and then announced whatever remained safely within reach. Instead, he made the promises public. Once they belonged to the outside world, they could no longer be reduced quietly when a budget tightened or a business unit found them inconvenient. People inside Unilever would have to begin finding answers that did not yet exist.

This changed more than the company’s list of targets. It altered which questions could reasonably be asked in an investment meeting, what counted as a cost, and how far into the future a decision was expected to look. A manager arguing for sustainable farming or different packaging was no longer making a personal appeal from the margins of the business. They could point to a commitment made by the company itself.

Polman had used his authority to make room. The public promise gave other people something with which to occupy it.

There were early signs that they were doing so. After years of participating in roundtables on sustainable agriculture, palm oil and fisheries, only about a tenth of Unilever’s agricultural materials were sustainably sourced. A year after the targets were introduced, Polman put the figure at nearly a quarter. The public commitment had begun to change private decisions.

Polman did not regard this as philanthropy, or as a concession made at the expense of the business. Climate shocks, water shortages and fragile supply chains were already imposing costs, whether or not they appeared in an environmental report; Unilever estimated that extreme weather alone had added hundreds of millions of euros to its costs in a single year. His argument was that a company might protect and grow its business by taking more of the world into account, rather than treating everything beyond the shareholder return as someone else’s problem.

And it worked. For the best part of a decade, Polman proved his point. Unilever grew, its sustainably positioned brands contributed an increasing share of that growth, and over his tenure the company returned close to 300 per cent to its shareholders. The company missed plenty of its own targets, and the results did not settle every criticism of the Plan, but they removed the easiest objection. This was not a worthy experiment underwritten by investors willing to accept a poorer return. The investors had done handsomely.

It is hard to imagine a stronger case for the significance of individual agency.

People, this says, are not simply prisoners of the systems they inherit. They can see the thing differently, choose differently, and use whatever authority they have to turn an organisation onto another road. They can pick at conventions that had come to look like laws of nature, redraw the boundaries around other people’s choices, and open possibilities that did not exist until somebody acted.

Polman did all of it from the one place in an organisation where a single person’s agency is greatest. He had the formal authority, the conviction, the time, the commercial credibility, and in the end the results. He took a company being pulled towards one version of its future and turned it towards another.

There is real reason to find hope in that.

It is also, more or less, the hope this book has been working towards. Almost every trouble we have looked at comes with the same remedy attached: give the people closer to the work more room to see, to say what they see, and to act on it. They are usually the first to notice when the plan no longer fits, when the pressure is beginning to distort judgement, or when the official account has drifted away from what is actually happening. An organisation that cannot make use of that knowledge eventually loses touch with itself.

There is a human reason for this too. People need some room to use their own judgement, not only because the work is better when they do, but because being required to ignore what you can see is wearing. Most of us know the feeling: the plan no longer fits, the instruction makes little sense, the problem is obvious, and still the job is to carry on as though none of that were true.

That is why agency offers such a hopeful answer to the problems in this book. People are not simply carried along by the organisation around them. They speak up, work around bad decisions, protect one another, correct mistakes and make sensible choices without waiting to be told. In a reasonably healthy organisation, a great deal is held together in exactly this way.

But even Polman’s authority, wide as it was, had edges.

Polman understood them while the experiment was still working. Two years into the Plan, talking to Harvard Business Review, he was confident about what had changed but candid about the work required to hold the coalition together. Unilever spent, in his words, a disproportionate amount of its time on its shareholders: explaining the strategy, courting investors who shared its horizon and discouraging those who did not. He knew the company’s freedom to continue rested, in part, on continuing to deliver. A bad patch of any length would bring the critics straight back, however good the larger argument sounded.

That was not evidence that he lacked agency. It showed how much work was required to keep exercising it.

He could tell short-term investors that Unilever was not the company for them. He could not make investors cease to matter, nor could he guarantee that those who held the shares in future would accept the same account of what the company was for.

How exposed that left him became plain in February 2017.

Kraft Heinz approached Unilever with an offer worth about $143 billion, an 18 per cent premium on the previous day’s share price. It was one of the largest takeover proposals ever made. Unilever rejected it immediately, saying that it fundamentally undervalued the company and offered no financial or strategic merit. Kraft Heinz responded publicly that it still expected to reach an agreement.

For a few days, the future of Unilever was no longer Polman’s to describe on his own.

The offer placed a large and immediate number beside everything he had spent eight years arguing could only be valued over time. Shareholders who believed in Unilever’s long-term model now had to compare that belief with the money available for selling it. Polman could argue that Kraft Heinz represented a radically narrower version of the company — one built around aggressive cost reduction and returns to its backers — but he could not prevent the owners of Unilever from finding the premium attractive.

The pressure was real. Unilever’s shares rose sharply when the approach became public. The market was not merely watching the argument between two models of business; it was pricing it.

Polman and the board resisted fiercely. They made clear that they had no appetite for a deal and were prepared to use every available defence. Within the weekend, Kraft Heinz withdrew.

It looked like a decisive victory. Unilever had seen off a bid from a company representing almost the opposite of what Polman had spent his tenure building. But the escape did not return him to the position he had occupied before the approach.

The offer had shown that commercial success and committed shareholders had not taken Unilever beyond reach. A sufficiently attractive price could reopen the question of what the company was for, however convincingly Polman believed it had already been answered.

And the defence had its price. In the months that followed, Unilever promised faster improvements in margins, billions more returned to shareholders and a review of its structure. Polman later acknowledged that the bid had forced compromises. To protect the wider model, he had been required to move some distance towards the demands of the narrower one.

He could refuse Kraft Heinz. He could not ignore what the bid revealed: the people whose support allowed him to keep exercising his agency were also capable of bringing it to an end.

Polman retired at the end of 2018. Most accounts of his time stop there, which makes sense if the story is about leadership: the protagonist finishes his run, the company has changed, and the results are available for judgement.

For a story about agency, though, the more revealing part may begin after he leaves.

His successor, Alan Jope, was not a man set on repudiating what had gone before. He was a Unilever lifer who had backed the sustainability agenda; the Plan continued, and it would be untrue to suggest that the company snapped back to its old shape the day Polman walked out. But the argument about what Unilever was for, and whom it was there to serve, had not been settled. Polman had held one answer in place.

Soon enough, the contest returned. Performance weakened, then a failed attempt to buy GlaxoSmithKline’s consumer-health business drew fire. Investors questioned the strategy, and in 2022 the activist Nelson Peltz took a seat on the board. Jope announced that he was leaving, and Hein Schumacher arrived with a mandate to sharpen the focus and improve returns.

Under Schumacher, the company pared back or delayed some of its social and environmental targets and spoke more plainly about margins and growth. This was presented not as a retreat from sustainability but as a move towards fewer, more credible promises, and that distinction is fair as far as it goes. Some of the old targets had proved difficult to meet. But credibility can also become the language through which ambition is made smaller.

Either way, the ambition had narrowed. Sustainability remained, but it was no longer the organising principle of the company in quite the same way.

Schumacher lasted less than eighteen months before he too was pushed out, this time for moving too slowly, and Fernando Fernandez, another long-serving insider, took the chair.

It is tempting to read all this as a procession of personalities: Polman the believer, Jope the inheritor, Schumacher the disciplinarian, Fernandez the next throw of the dice. Leadership stories train us to search the person in charge for the explanation of what a company becomes. But what the procession really reveals is how much Polman’s idea of Unilever had continued to depend on Polman being there to support it.

He had changed the company materially. He had shifted its priorities, restored investment and shown that a business of that size could operate for years around a broader idea of value. Some of that outlived him. Some of it influenced other companies too. A decade is not insignificant.

But the story is more complicated than either success or failure. Under Polman, Unilever was attempting something larger and more ambitious than most companies of its kind. After he left, investor pressure returned, successors faced different constraints, and parts of what he had established were gradually narrowed or allowed to fall away.

That does not mean the company should have been bound for ever by one chief executive’s judgement. Circumstances change, ambitions need revising and those who follow must have room to make decisions of their own. But it does mean that Polman’s wider idea of Unilever had never become independent of his continuing authority. Once he was gone, it became negotiable again.

I recognise that pattern because I lived inside it for years, as the founder of a company whose purpose was to help organisations see and act on what they already knew.

By now, Harkn will be familiar: it gave people somewhere to place their observations alongside one another, so they could tell when a private experience was widely shared, notice patterns before those patterns reached formal reports, and offer leaders a picture of the organisation that had not been filtered on its way up. Anonymity made that possible by allowing people to contribute without rank or career risk deciding in advance what could be said.

Not everything that surfaced was true or helpful. People could misread what they were seeing, draw conclusions too quickly or speak without having to carry the consequences of the decision. Seeing a problem did not settle what should be done about it. But those limitations did not make the wider picture meaningless. The people who could see what Harkn offered, and believed in what it was helping them to do, were using their own agency to improve the way the organisation functioned: making better sense of what was happening, helping colleagues through difficult moments and bringing attention to things the ordinary channels had missed.

What Harkn enabled could unsettle the way an organisation was accustomed to operating. It assembled experiences that formal channels had left dispersed and gave greater weight to voices that carried little through those channels. However useful that proved, it remained dependent on protection from above: on a leader or sponsor with enough authority to keep the space open. The people using it could strengthen the organisation from within, but their agency was not enough to preserve the conditions that allowed them to do so. A shift in priorities or a change of personnel could close the space again.

I felt that dependence as a founder in a way that anyone who has tried to change what an organisation does, or what it stands for, will recognise. The established order seldom has to defeat the new thing outright; often it only has to outlast whoever is protecting it. Polman encountered that from the top, with more authority than almost anyone is given. I encountered it from outside, dependent on sponsors within, knowing that the work might end not because it had failed but because the protection around it had moved.

The sequence is often much the same. A person with authority gives an idea legitimacy. Resources follow, objections recede and people begin doing work that had previously struggled to find support. Then that person moves on, and attention turns to whoever has replaced them. What will they continue? What will they question? What will now be rewarded, tolerated or allowed to fade?

Experiences like these inevitably shape how people use their own agency. Those who committed themselves to the change learn to be more careful next time. They watch the sponsor, wait to see whether the new direction will hold and hesitate before spending too much credibility on something that may disappear when the person in authority changes. They have not become passive. They have learned that permission is not the same as permanence, and that work undertaken with conviction can still be undone by someone whose choices carry further than their own.

This is what gets lost when agency is offered too easily as the answer to the problems of organisational life. People throughout an organisation see what is happening, form judgements about it and make choices every day. But they do not make those choices from equal positions.

A chief executive can rip up a strategy, close a business or discard commitments made over years and expect the organisation to move behind the decision. Someone further down may believe the change is harmful, even disastrous, but opposing it carries a different kind of risk. They may lose influence, opportunity, reputation or the job on which their family depends. Their agency is real, but the further they sit from authority, the more it may cost to use and the less likely it is to alter the outcome.

Perhaps that is why organisations so rarely revolt, even when many of the people inside them believe their leaders are doing real harm. Silence is not always agreement, and compliance is not always belief. People may simply understand how unequally their choices will count.

That does not remove responsibility. People still speak, challenge, refuse, organise and leave, and sometimes those actions change everything. But it should make us slower to ask why they did not rise up, and quicker to ask what the organisation has taught them about the likely consequences of trying.

Agency matters because nothing changes unless people see and act differently. Polman had about as much of it as the modern corporation gives to one person, and he used it boldly: he changed what thousands of others were able to do and held open a wider idea of Unilever for the best part of a decade. What happened after him shows the limits of even that much agency. The conditions around agency do not merely determine whether people can act; they determine how much acting will cost, how far it will travel and whether its effects will endure.

If someone with his authority, freedom and record could not make that wider idea the settled basis from which Unilever would continue to operate, who — or what — can?