Paul Polman Quotes

#1. If we achieve our sustainability targets and no one else follows, we will have failed.

Paul Polman

#2. It is unacceptable that more than 1 billion people are hungry every day while another billion are obese.

Paul Polman

#3. We put a gender lens on our whole value chain.

Paul Polman

#4. The world we want is an enormous responsibility.

Paul Polman

#5. Imagine all the food mankind has produced over the past 8,000 years. Now consider that we need to produce that same amount again - but in just the next 40 years if we are to feed our growing and hungry world.

Paul Polman

#6. I don't have any frustrations. It sounds a little silly, but life is too short for me. I don't worry about all the things that happen, I just think about what to do with them. I work a lot with blind people in my spare time and I count my blessings every day.

Paul Polman

#7. What is success? I think the most important thing is to achieve what you set out to achieve. Just being a CEO in itself is not success. I would not relate success to a title or a position. My career has had a level of serendipity all along. I've never planned anything out more than a few years.

Paul Polman

#8. Provocative and challenging The Social License makes a compelling case for why companies must look to increase their positive social impact as an integral part of their core business strategies.

Paul Polman

#9. My biggest fear is that I become useless or less useful by not being up to date - be it with technology, changing consumers, changing global situations. You continuously have to have a little level of paranoia that forces you to set the bar higher every day.

Paul Polman

#10. We cannot choose between [economic] growth and sustainability - we must have both

Paul Polman

#11. My fear is a fear of being obsolete. This is a world that changes very fast, and one of the main human desires is to belong to, to be part of something. It's probably one of our greatest needs next to oxygen.

Paul Polman

#12. Unless we change direction, models show that the profit of the entire consumer goods sector could be wiped out by 2050

Paul Polman

#13. This world is changing enormously. In any position in a company you need to work very hard on learning new skills every day, but you also need to unlearn some of the old skills from the past.

Paul Polman

#14. When I interview people, I look at their values. I always say that the best chance of success is if the individual's values are aligned with the corporate values.

Paul Polman