Learn with Leena - Lessons in plastic

In this week's Learn With Leena we're talking plastic!

I sat down with Niall Dunne, Chief Executive Officer of Polymateria, who is developing a new standard in biodegradable and compostable plastics to help nature deal with plastic pollution. 

You can listen to our discussion here:

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Our conversation wasn't all plastic polymers – Niall also had some brilliant business advice to share.

Niall Dunne on How to Build a Truly Purposeful Company:

• Integrity is the foundation of everything you do. You have to have integrity - in your science and in your culture.
• Speaking truth to power has to be the norm, you have to hold each other to account, you have to know that your lab technician can speak up if she sees the CEO coming into the lab with a coffee or if she sees a report that isn’t making the grade.  
• Your partners need integrity too. Work hard to find partners that share your values and purpose. 
• Ensuring your teams are diverse in every way possible (from education and area of expertise to country and cultural upbringing) helps to ensure you’re stronger than the sum of your parts. 
• Constantly ask yourselves “where are we weak?” and hire into those weaknesses and you’ll end up with robust teams that are greater than the sum of their parts. 
• If you are driven by a clear mission that everyone buys into, you’ll build a culture, no matter what your skillset and background. 
• You can foster empathy and symbiotic understanding in your teams by ensuring everyone spends time in different parts of the business. Take people out of the lab and make sure they spend time in the field and vice versa. 
• Create an organisation that’s a natural coalition builder. Building a network around you creates a better business. For example, open sourcing your research, sharing your IP, crowdsourcing innovation to solve the big problems and move faster. That way you can punch way above your weight.
• Disrupt the root to market. When you’re selling a product into an industry that moves incredibly slowly, you need to work with every department at once. Traditionally, you’d convince R&D your product worked, they’d run some tests and then get you to speak to the commercial team and then the legal team and finally marketing - both b2b and b2c before speaking to external partners. Now when Niall and his team are selling they insist on doing all their due dilligence at the same time, getting all the questions out of the way all at once.

At Unilever we have big goals for our plastic waste, not least building a circular economy that closes the loop on our plastic production. By 2030 our goal is to halve the environmental footprint of the making and use of our products as we grow our business.

We’re working on a refill-reuse revolution to cut plastic waste. Take a look at some of the innovations we’ve been trialling in the US, UK, Chile, the Philippines and Vietnam:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B45BE07DY1J/

We also discussed Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms's book New Power. I spoke to Jeremy for Learn With Leena earlier this year.