Harish Manwani: Every successful business must aim to make the world a better place.

At this point in his career, Manwani understands that profit isn’t enough to sustain a business. Every organization, he says in his talk, needs to make a difference in the world. It’s up to organizational leadership to ensure that this happens.

Manwani is the COO of Unilever, and when he started there as a management trainee in the 1970s, he didn’t quite get this notion of changing people’s lives while making money. Today, he helps lead Unilever’s program on hygiene and health that reaches half a billion people across the globe.

“You need businesses that can actually define their role in society in terms of a much larger purpose than the products and brands that they sell,” he says. “Values and purpose are going to be the two drivers of software that are going to create the companies of tomorrow.”


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