Business Plus Sustainability - Nitin Paranjpe HUL CEO

This post is in continuation with the previous one on the talk given Nitin Paranjpe, CEO of HUL . He spoke at length on the issue of how businesses of tomorrow will have to strive to achieve a balance between business goals, sustainability and customer value. He said the currently there are very few examples which could take care of the all the three concerns, and shared the effort by HUL on that front,

The first example he shared was the example of Surf Excel, where a technology improvment was helping users reduce the water needed for rinsing by half. This took care of all the three stakeholders, consumers and the environment gained because of the reduction in the consumption of water and the sales of the product would also improve because of the value being delivered to the consumer.

The second example was of Pureit, a water purifier which addressed the critical issue of clean drinking water without running water and power, combined with low cost. Contribution to the society was in helping check diseases which spread through water and the product was targeted at the huge untapped market for clean drinking water.

The third example was that of lifebuoy soap, where they promoted the concept of washing hands in villages through the use of a visual aid and in the process addressed many diseases which would spread because of unclean hands. HUL being the market leader would gain the most by the increase in the usage of soaps and in the process also improve health.

He said that there were the very few examples that he currently had and even these had come up in the last few years and the need to come up with more of these innovations was critical and how do you push the organization and managers towards these goals was going to be critical...