B U S I N E S S
EvEn by thE pandEmic’s standards of Zoom
fatigue, the hours-long virtual meeting one Sunday
in March 2021 was draining. Around 2 a.m., the
board members of the global food giant Danone
finally wound down their fractious arguments, and
announced they had fired the company’s CEO and
chairman Emmanuel Faber—a stunningly swift
end to his 24 years at the company.
The ouster of an executive at a Paris-based
multinational might have been a passing, internal
disruption, but for one fact: Faber had become a
champion among environmentalists and climate
activists for having turned Danone into a company
that focused not only on making money and in-
creasing its share price, but also on trying to re-
make the agricultural business, an industry with
a far-reaching impact on the environment. Faber
had in 2020 declared Danone—maker of prod-
ucts like Activia and Actimel yogurts, and Evian
water—France’s first enterprise à mission, a pub-
lic company whose goals included targets aimed at
bettering the world, akin to an American B Corp.
Inserting climate change into Danone’s core strat-
egy, Faber introduced a so-called carbon-adjusted
earnings-per-share indicator, measuring the com-
pany’s value not only by its profits and revenues—
as virtually every business in the world does—but
by its environmental footprint too. The slogan he
devised: “One planet, one health.”
His firing was also one sucker punch, which
Faber says felt like being cast adrift, or “leaving
your family,” as he put it to TIME. The reasons
were complex, including the fact that the com-
pany’s share price on the stock markets—the fi-
nancial world’s key measure of success—had risen
a minuscule 2.7% in Faber’s six years in charge,
compared with the rocketing growth of Danone’s
competitors Unilever and Nestlé. Its revenues
plummeted during work-from-home lockdowns,
too, when items like bottled water were suddenly
less relevant. Even so, Faber’s departure provokeda deeper question, one that lingers nearly a year
later: Do CEOs risk a backlash from their investors
if they make a point of putting the planet’s health
above purely financial returns?Answering thAt question could hardly be
more urgent. An ever growing share of the global
economy is in the hands of private business. By
2021, businesses accounted for 72% of the eco-
nomic output in major industrial countries— triple
what they did 60 years before—and, of that, more
than one-third of the gross value comes from just
5,000 companies, like Danone, with revenues
topping $1 billion, according to a study by the
intergovernmental Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the
consultancy McKinsey. How those companiesIN THE
BALANCE
By Vivienne WaltExecutives see a new dynamic
in the contest between doing well
and doing goodILLUSTRATION BY ANNA PARINI FOR TIME