How COVID Inspired A People, Planet and Profit 1 Billion BHAG

There is no way to sugar coat it - COVID has and continues to be a brutal silent enemy sweeping across our fragile planet. Both personally and professionally it has battered me, my family and my business. I’ve lost family members to COVID. I felt helpless, unsupportive and the distressed at not being there for the ones I loved. This pandemic took its toll. 

Our business has taken a hurricane-like battering too. We have survived at a huge cost. COVID has wiped out much of the future reserves our business was counting on to fuel future growth and expansion. And just when we thought that we were entering more of a manageable storm as vaccine breakthroughs echoed... the virus continues to play its game of cat and mouse and mutate faster than our resilience, business agility and covid vaccine supply chain and manufacturing can compete with.

I have faith we will combat this silent enemy but there are still challenges ahead. 

At times, COVID silently and steadily chipped away at my resilience and my natural and some may say an over-optimistic view of the world. At times COVID nearly defeated me. Not by infiltrating my body but infiltrating my mind. 

And then...something changed. I changed. 

I was looking through some old family photos when the lockdown was at its peak - there was little else to do. It transported me back to me as a young girl - specifically at the age of 9. It was 1978. A year when I was full of optimism, bullish dreams and as my father would say, a utopian and stubborn political view of the world. It was during that lovely summer of 1978 and I was having a conversation with an uncle. We had that recurring “what do you want to do when you grow up” conversation. Unfiltered and without skipping a beat my reply was “I’m going to change the world”. At that moment. Right there. I believed every word. I was brave, I was capable of anything. Changing the world was my calling.  

And then...something catastrophic happened. Another silent enemy took my mother. 

Losing my mother to cancer at the age of 10 shook my world, dismantled our happy safe family and changed my life’s trajectory forever. It chipped away at my “change the world” mantra. My world would never be the same. 

Over the course of the next ten years, I was somewhat always in the wings of the stage rather than being right there on the stage as I had been before my mothers passing. I eventually settled into a steady job took a path of business. Unlike the two generations before me, I would not go into nursing. The smell of hospital corridors held too many painful memories for me as I watched my mother slip from my tight and fearful grasp. 

At the age of 24 life took another sharp turn. I got divorced. Mainly, like many before me, I should never have gotten married in the first place. My reason for a far too early marriage was, on reflection, a yearning for that happy family feeling that I had at 9 years old. It didn’t go as planned. 

I licked my wounds for a year or so and then had an unexpected business trip to the Middle East...I started a love affair. This new love gave me back my sense of optimism, a sense that dreams can come true. I returned to the UK but very shortly afterwards, I jumped on a plane with a one-way ticket and no job back to Dubai. I checked into what was the Chicago Beach Hotel where the iconic Burj Al Arab now stands. I gave myself 10 days to get a job. Everyone thought I was mad. Maybe I was. But on day 9 I got that job and excluding a 4-year break in Europe from 2010 to 2014 I have pretty much been here every year for the last 25 years. That love affair still continues. The love affair was not some tall dark stranger, it was with a country that was slowly and magnificently rising from an arid desert to take on the world. The new love of my life was the UAE and the broader Middle East. It was a match made in heaven and on reflection, it spoke that girl of 9 who thought anything was possible. Because in the UAE they lived that mantra every day. 

I’ve been an entrepreneur for the majority of my time here. Running consulting businesses that focused on transformation and human capital. In some small way made an impact but I certainly didn't change the world. Like most entrepreneurs, the path has not always been smooth. I have made mistakes along the way and at many times wondered if nursing would have been a less stressful path than the entrepreneurial path I have chosen. 

Fast-forward to 2020 when COVID made me and the world pause. It was if we had all been sent to our room as mother nature shouted up the stairs “stay there and reflect on what you have done”. 

And then something changed….my old 9-year-old self came knocking. 

At first, it was a gentle tap on the shoulder, a quiet whisper. However, as the months of the new COVID reality rolled on it became an unrelenting thunderous roar. Would I silence it or embrace it? At first, I resisted. She was persistent. I finally embraced her and let her speak. 

Could it be that at the age of 51 this was my time? Time to be brave. Time to silence the fear of failure. Time to bring back my belief of a better, greener and more sustainable planet. Was this my time to transform me, my business and time to change the world? My 9-year old self and I had a conference and we said: “okay, let’s do this” and got to work. 

The result…Our business has just repositioned itself to a people planet and profit-focused business that dares to change the world. And I feel like that 9-year-old girl again. 

It’s scary and liberating in equal measure. We have set ourselves a few BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) to achieve in the next 5 years, more on some of those in future articles. One of the most ambitious BHAGs is to get the UAE and the region helping us to plant one billion trees globally by the end of 2025. It’s a bold target but if I know anything about the UAE, there is no better place on earth to launch it and make it happen. Our planet needs it. The next generation and future generations need it. Decarbonising our planet on our road to zero is going to take every ounce of innovation, collaboration and pivoting our generation has seen. 

This is where it gets exciting. There are lots of projects out there who are planting trees and we need trillions of them, so that’s a good thing. However, we wanted to do it differently, we wanted to deliver a billion trees and have long-term social impact. We wanted to help brands and companies with a purpose to do it with a people, planet and profit mindset. What if we could bring technology into the mix that really integrated transparent tree-planting into a business. That not only helped to demonstrate climates change action but a tree-planting project that delivered transparently against corporate sustainability and SDG targets. We needed a tree-planting project that could scale and also engage and connect staff, customers, supply chain and increase brand value. Could we deliver something that could and tap into the “companies doing good profit model”? Where companies can increase brand value while doing the right thing for our planet. I believe we now have that model in place. I and my 9-year old self are feeling very optimistic today.

We are also reshaping our people consulting practice to ensure we seek out and partner only with businesses that have a real sense of purpose. We need to hold true to our core value which is WE DARE. We want to support purpose-driven companies in embracing sustainability, creating corporate cultures where people can thrive and connect to a bigger purpose. Yes, we will continue to help clients to transform but that focus will be more towards helping them to compete in the new normal and embrace the ideas and opportunities of the circular economy.  One of the recurring themes that my COVID transformation journey has highlighted, is that this wildly held perception that sustainability and profitability can’t co-exist is totally flawed. Protecting our planet needs all of our efforts.

In the last decade, many economies have been in some self-imposed race to fuel accelerated growth. The imbalance of this strategy and its fragility has been forced under a microscope for all to see during the pandemic. We must now urgently reflect on the impact of this strategy on society and our planet. If we take healthcare as an example - have we been investing in the right things for the last 20 years? As we bear witness to the ravaging effects of COVID on millions of people with some of the biggest recurring health issues of the last 30 years, such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes. The big question we all need to ask is: If governments had tacked these issues more aggressively in the last decade and really addressed inequality and poverty (two of the major influences on health outcomes), would COVID have taken so many lives? These are fundamental questions that governments around the world now need to ponder. 

We are at a time in the history of our planet when we need to be brave and let go of the notions of how we thought business and economies should be shaped. I am not advocating this from some naive view, the facts speak for themselves. 

The move to a people, planet, profit model is now a non-negotiable. Companies that report better ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance) outcomes, produced higher returns than their peers. They are less likely to have large price declines and are less likely to go bankrupt. ESG driven companies are also winning in the talent war. Talent is now demanding that brands have a purpose and protect our planet. Large funds and investors are also no longer looking just at the balance sheet, they want concrete evidence that companies are balancing people, planet and profit and I can only see that trend intensify in the coming decade. 

There is no doubt the world still faces a challenging road ahead. Let’s hope that out of the devastation that COVID has caused it in some way forces every leader out there to reflect on what their people, planet and profit legacy will deliver. 

I’m grateful that my 9-year-old self-showed up during COVID and I’m optimistic that in the next decade we can all change the world. I hope you do too. 

Stay safe and let’s change the world together. 

Karen 

About The Storey Group

For purpose-driven organisations around our globe, The Storey Group is a change-maker that creates and delivers programmes that make our planet a better place. We believe that when strategic logic is blended with the magic that comes from curious creativity anything is possible. We believe when we all work together we can create a greener, cleaner and more sustainable world including our world of work.

And we're doing all we can to make this happen.

Want to get involved in The One Billion Tree-Planting Initiative OBTI - take a look at what we are doing to make this a reality here: https://www.thestoreygroup.com/obti-1-billion-trees