Jack Sim: Building a community of impact through the World Toilet Organization

There is a paradox around going to the toilet. We use them all the time - more than two years of the average person’s entire existence is spent on them - and yet it’s almost a taboo subject to discuss.

On the one hand, the reason for this is obvious: it’s hardly a glamorous topic of conversation. But for Jack Sim, the first guest on the recently released third series of my Leadership 2050 podcast, the world’s refusal to talk “poo and pee” is partly what has enabled a situation where 1.7 billion people don’t have access to a toilet. Where 297,000 children a year die of diarrhoea because of poor sanitation, poor hygiene and unsafe drinking water. His point is that it’s difficult to address an issue that is never talked about in our day-to-day lives.

But Sim, through his non-profit World Toilet Organization (WTO, not to be mistaken with the World Trade Organization… see quote number two below), has almost single handedly - he only employs three people - started to transform this narrative over the past 22 years. In his words, it’s the “spread s*** model”.

Sim founded the WTO in 2001, when he was in his early 40s, after a lucrative career in which he ran 16 businesses. He said continuing to earn money he no longer needed would have been “squandering” the time he had remaining on earth. So he started shouting about toilets.

This was because he looked at the world and saw one of the biggest problems at the bottom of the pyramid was poo. He saw that if we can deal with poo properly, less people will get sick. Sim’s WTO therefore campaigns for a world where everyone can have access to a clean, safe toilet. It’s an advocacy group, so it doesn’t install toilets - it instead creates movements by lobbying people in power to install them while encouraging as many people as possible to join the conversation.

It has done this through schemes such as its annual World Toilet Summits, the most recent being in Nigeria, where 46 million people don’t have access to safe sanitation. On the podcast, Sim also told me about the 2004 summit in Beijing, after which 6,000 toilets were built in the city. It was something that paved the way for China’s “Toilet Revolution”, an ongoing project to upgrade facilities across the country. Meanwhile, the WTO’s annual “World Toilet Day” (on 19 November, the day it was founded in 2001) has been an official United Nations event since 2013.

Sim is a remarkable example of what can be achieved when you lead for impact and purpose. Using his words, here are eight learnings I took from our conversation.

1. Re-framing a vision for impact

“Today we say a billionaire is one that took a billion dollars from everybody else. We are incentivising selfishness. So I think that we need to define a billionaire based on this: a billionaire is one that improves the life of a billion people.”

2. Impact through unconventional means

“How do you solve a problem with no money, no status, no permission and no legitimacy? I went out there to make it a very funny subject. I called our organisation the WTO, and by calling ourselves the WTO, we got a lot of attention because people thought: ‘[What has the] World Trade Organization got to do with toilets?’ And I was hoping that the World Trade Organization would get really angry and sue me and then I’ll be very famous. They didn’t do that. And that also gave me the legitimacy to use the acronym WTO forever. So, either way, you sue me - I get famous. You don’t sue me - I also get famous. And this kind of guerrilla marketing strategy doesn’t require any money.”

3. Transforming the narrative

“So many people are suffering just because we refuse to talk about such a natural subject: that six to eight times a day, we go to the toilet. We spend an entire three years of our life, nonstop, in the toilet, and we can’t talk about it. That’s ridiculous. Once we start opening up the subject, people start to feel comfortable because if the media says so, then I can say too. And it starts to spread. I like to think about it as the ‘spread s***’ model.”

4. Incentivise the ecosystem

“The World Toilet Organization, over the last 20 years, effectively mobilised 1.2 billion people in developing countries to receive proper sanitation without actually building the toilets. All we have to do is to incentivise each of the stakeholders, the governments, the politicians, the corporates, the NGOs, the media and [academics] to give evidence to back up this importance of toilets and sanitation. And then suddenly the whole ecosystem has a life of its own and it works.”

5. Success and impact through others

“You can’t save the world all by yourself, but you can get everyone to save the world in their own names. If you are willing not to claim credit for the work done, amazing things happen. So, we hosted the World Toilet Summit, paid by the Beijing Tourism Bureau together with all the tourism boards of China, to make sure that Beijing city would have very, very clean toilets by 2008 [in time for the Olympics]. And true enough, they invested in total revolution, at least in Beijing city, building 6,000 public toilet blocks in hutongs and in tourism sites. And thereafter every tourism toilet in China has become cleaner and cleaner. And right now, President Xi Jinping has become the toilet champion of China, with his China ‘Toilet Revolution’.”

6. Moving from money to impact

“In the beginning you need money, so your time is less valuable than money. But the moment you don’t need money, you should stop making money because you cannot trade the most precious thing in your life, which is time, for something that you are not going to use.”

7. Spiritual leadership

“I believe there is energy out there, holding all these things together. And I’m a very spiritual person in the sense that this nature is actually so immense that we need to learn a lot about it. And philosophically, my backing is from Laozi, who was a Chinese philosopher, and he taught very feminine philosophy of natural law, following the forest, following the flow of things and not to be too hierarchical - not to be too hung up on dogmas like capitalism, democracy, socialism, communism. Those are [such a] stifling and limited kind of philosophy.”

8. Impact without credit

“Of course, the ego is still useful, but you have to use it in a way that actually unleashes the motivation of other people. And if you are able to use your person as a tool and a vehicle to solve problems, rather than as the protagonist, this is totally different. Then once you are able to facilitate everybody in the same way as your mother facilitates the family without claiming the credit, then you will see that success happens because people take ownership of issues [and] do it in their own name - and you are just happy that things get better because they did it.”

Sim shows how leaders don’t necessarily need a lot of people and resources in order to have an impact on the world. In some cases, they just have to figure out what issue they care about and how they can influence people.

I’ve never met anybody like him.

There is much more in the podcast than I have had the opportunity to communicate in this newsletter, so please listen to it if you want to know more. You can find the episode in the following places:

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/tn/podcast/jack-sim-world-toilet-organisation/id1587156278?i=1000601205991

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2dqDEaqeFGmEtdY8CdVZ6Y

Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/20e08961-df52-4410-ae7b-5a8b3c01483c/episodes/e063f597-d19b-40fe-8121-990ef04d8639/leadership-2050-jack-sim-world-toilet-organisation

A message from the author

Thank you for reading the 43rd edition of the Leadership 2050 newsletter. You may be interested to know why I am writing it. As a senior fellow of management practice at the University of Oxford’s Sa?d Business School, my research and teaching focuses on how leaders transcend 21st century challenges such as disruptive technology change, the climate crisis and creating diverse and inclusive environments… alongside the ongoing challenge of delivering profitable growth. At Sa?d, I direct the Oxford Advanced Management & Leadership Programme and, in this capacity, work with leaders from many geographies, industries and governments. All this has given me a deep understanding of how good leaders create value - and bad leaders destroy it. One could argue that never before has this topic been so important on a global stage, hence why I am undertaking this work.