Halla Tómasdóttir leads The B Team, a group of about thirty business and civil society leaders convened to change what counts as good leadership. She describes the work as shifting leadership norms, resetting the definition of success, and rewriting the rules of the economy so that what matters is what gets measured.
Her method is personal before it is institutional. She argues that no leader can navigate this transition without first writing down a compass of purpose and principles. Her own run for the presidency of Iceland is the experience she says forced her to finish hers.
Key findings
- Tómasdóttir opens by correcting her own introduction downward on three counts, which sets the tone for a conversation in which she repeatedly refuses flattering framings.
- She treats a written compass as a resilience tool rather than a branding exercise, and dates her own first version to roughly age thirty, with version sixteen written during the 2016 campaign.
- Her diagnosis of why change is slow locates the blockage in the boardroom rather than in the workforce or, increasingly, the investor base.
- The most concrete development she reports is the arrival of accounting bodies as an unexpected engine of change, filling a gap left by governments.
- The coming global baseline standard will not be ambitious enough, she says, and the ESG movement as it stands is too investor focused to tell companies what to track.
- Nobody has the answers to interdependent problems, so the boldness she asks for only works alongside humility, and the fix she reaches for is changing who sits in the room.
A future where we love where we live
Tómasdóttir gives The B Team a destination rather than a target: a future where we can love where we live. She picked it against the language she inherited, saying net zero by 2050 does not motivate anyone. The group was founded in 2013, after the 2008 financial crisis, on a proposition she says was novel then and is close to consensus now.
Her reading of the present is one interlocking problem rather than a list: planetary boundaries threatened, a social fabric weak if not broken, trust at its lowest, inequality accelerating. Climate, she argues, will accelerate inequality further. That is why the membership of about thirty mixes chief executives with labor and civil society leaders.
Leaving at thirty, and what the nineties did not talk about
Tómasdóttir states her purpose in one line, to unlock leadership in service of a better world, then admits the clarity is retrospective. She left corporate America in the nineties as she turned thirty, enjoying the work but not its point. Pushing more sugared water was not a life, and purpose was not a word the decade used.
Her comparison of two former employers is about ownership, not intent. Mars was privately held and ran on five principles that guided decisions before anyone used the vocabulary. PepsiCo was listed, and she says the capital markets sometimes ruled the culture more than what was right long term. Back in Iceland she helped found a new university.
One percent, forty five days out
Running for office, she says, made the compass clearest, because nothing else forces that conversation with your own heart. Everybody has an opinion on what you should say and how you should behave, and on a woman’s dress and hair. Forty five days out she polled one percent, and everyone asked whether she would quit.
Her answer came from the compass, not the polls: she had not run to role model quitting, but because she cared about the future her children inherit. That took her to nearly thirty percent in forty five days. She corrects the host’s thirty two percent down to twenty eight, and says anybody could do what she did.
Herding lions, and the compass written at the Ohana table
The unofficial title is her own. She calls herself a lion herder, and co-founder Jochen Zeitz reminds her the group has lionesses and that she is one. She has never felt worthy of the roles she has taken, and says Richard Branson told a room the same had been true of his whole life.
The problem she inherited was alignment across thirty large personalities whose collective voice, she believed, could move mountains. Her first act in 2018 was to have them write a leadership compass around Marc Benioff’s Ohana table at the Salesforce building. It sets a purpose of serving humanity’s future and three principles: sustainability, equality and accountability.
For a divided group she looks first for commonalities, which sit in the heart rather than the head. People argue about routes, she says, not about clean air or a bright future for their children. She arrived with two words, courage and accountability, asked for five times bolder, and now says ten.
Leadership is not only for those in power
Asked what the organization offers leaders below the top, Tómasdóttir starts with the individual compass, then the leadership playbook published the previous fall. It carries transformation stories from member companies, podcast interviews, and nine questions every board and leadership team should ask itself. Her second instruction is to stop being knowers and start being learners.
The blockage, in her diagnosis, is a crisis of conformity that sits in the boardroom, where she sees little boldness. Change arrives from below instead, because the organizations she has watched move were moved by their talent. Leadership, she tells the audience, is not given to those in power alone.
The three levers she names belong to individuals: voice as employees, votes as citizens, wallets as buyers. Amazon’s climate pledge followed nine thousand employees demanding it, and Google acted on gender when staff said enough. Her recommended questions are about identity: who are you choosing to be, and do you lead as someone with the answers or someone who learns what causes the resistance.
For the marketers in the audience she makes a specific case. They listen for a living, inside the company as well as outside, and can carry what they hear upward. Chief executives are ninety percent white men, she says, and most boardrooms do not even see the issues that put people on the streets.
The force field around the chief executive
De Swaan Arons sets out the field: investors moving hard, a boardroom even less diverse than the chief executive pool, and a large leadership group below. Tómasdóttir agrees the investors are moving forcefully on ESG and disclosure, but says many are not there yet. Those remain stuck in a shareholder primacy era that measures only short term profit for the shareholder.
The transition is dangerous because it is half finished: the destination is a stakeholder economy, but the rules are still set for shareholder primacy. Brave chief executives fall victim to that gap. Where they survive, she says, it is because they got active in changing and resetting their own board, which is about sustaining profits rather than sacrificing them.
Her worked example is Paul Polman at Unilever, who arrived in 2009 and told investors he would not report quarterly. She calls that brave for the year, and he still had to fight off a takeover attempt by Kraft. It was not an easy fight, she says.
The harder part, she says, was melting the permafrost inside the company as well as in the boardroom. People throughout it were still incentivized to deliver short term profit alone. Business schools, she adds, teach an outdated model rather than the skills the job now needs.
Accountants, of all people
Asked about transparency and measurement, Tómasdóttir hedges her expertise and then names the previous year’s surprise: accountants have become the change catalyst, filling the gap governments left. The IFRS took a hundred years to produce common financial standards. It is now expected to set a global baseline for sustainability disclosure, possibly as early as 2023.
Leading that work is Emmanuel Faber, former chief executive of Danone, a company she calls one of the bravest and where he spent thirty years. One or two percent of his investors questioned his transformation plan, and that was enough to end his term, to the devastation of his employees.
The standard would replace a jungle of metrics and measures that exhausts chief executives and anyone in leadership. Her priority within it is the S and the G rather than the E, which she considers comparatively developed. She is blunt that the result will not be ambitious enough, and that ESG as it stands is too investor focused.
De Swaan Arons raises the gap between external commitments and internal bonus dashboards still stuck in the Friedman era. Salesforce had announced days earlier that all executives would be measured and incentivized on ESG metrics. Allianz, Europe’s largest asset manager, brings the children of its directors in each year to ask hard questions.
Allianz and PensionDanmark then convened a global collective of pension funds and asset owners aligning portfolios with a net zero future. Asset managers need those owners, and the owners are the ones demanding tougher disclosure. None of these efforts, she adds, is good enough yet.
The bar keeps moving: sector, lobbying, and the era of accountability
Tómasdóttir sets a threshold and then raises it. If personal and planetary sustainability is not embedded in your purpose, strategy and brand, you will be left behind. Leading on that is still not enough, because you are expected to bring your sector with you: food companies pulling the food sector along, consumer goods firms solving plastics together.
Her sharpest test is the gap between the public commitment and the trade association. Claiming a carbon neutral future while belonging to organizations that lobby against regulation in Washington or Brussels is not credible, and she says it will hit companies in the face. Leaders whose brand messaging does not match what they do will lose their jobs.
When a nonprofit called out IKEA and Unilever that week, she liked the reply: IKEA thanked them for holding it to account and said it was clearly not doing enough. Humility is a foundational leadership skill right now, she says, and arrogance in meeting criticism hits you hard on the head.
Her caveat is about everyone still on the sidelines. If perfection becomes the enemy of progress, leaders who have not moved will decide that sitting still is cheaper than risking a job. She calls the habit the cancer of otherness. The substance in this case is scope 3 emissions, most of them out in the supply chain, where nobody has a roadmap yet.
Bold, brave, and why humility is not softness
De Swaan Arons puts the objection: Branson and Polman are not the first names that come to mind when someone says humble. Tómasdóttir separates the words her compass actually uses, which are bold and brave. Bold means courage at ten times the current level, and brave means serving something bigger than yourself, which takes humility.
Her justification for humility is epistemic rather than moral. Nobody has the answers to interdependent problems, and nobody is waiting for a leader who claims to have them already. That is why the phrase inside the organization is changing who in order to change how.
Put an elderly person at the table if you sell to the elderly, and expect no progress on gender or racial equity from rooms that are neither balanced nor diverse. Sameness gives more of the same outcomes, and arrogance is the enemy of leadership because it builds no bridges.
The same humility applies to business as a class. Eighty one percent of people see businesses and brands as an essential part of the solution, she says, and her own members like to argue that business must be the answer because governments are broken. She hates the sentence and tells them so.
Her objection is arithmetic rather than ideological. Governments spend 1.8 trillion dollars a year on environmentally harmful subsidies, 550 billion of it on fossil fuels, which she calls investing in our demise. What she wants is tri-sectoral: business leading bravely and humanely, governments setting the rules, civil society holding both to account.
Rooms that do not usually meet
De Swaan Arons contrasts a Copenhagen hotel where the owner, his managers and the tradespeople share a lunch table with places where that distance is unbridgeable. He asks how leaders get closer to the people who really have the answers.
Tómasdóttir starts with the trust deficit: on social cohesion the United States is at breaking point and the social contract is broken. The economic system has become so interwoven with the political one that no one trusts anyone, media included. Leading from the elite alone, a group she says she represents, is no longer possible.
Her first example is a 2019 dialogue that put fifteen global chief executives and fifteen young climate activists in an IKEA store. Neither group trusted the other on arrival. Trust built through games and conversation, and IKEA now has more than twenty youth activists on a sustainability advisory. She calls it brave and hard, and says nobody really knows how to do it.
Her second example is Harley-Davidson in Wisconsin, where Jochen Zeitz is a conservationist running a company tied to the fossil fuel industry. The community is divided along racial and economic lines, with a food desert and hard politics. This is Harley’s home, she says, and Zeitz is passionate about shared prosperity on a healthy planet.
Last year they brought his full stakeholder system together for three days of appreciative inquiry, from high school students to boardroom directors to workers on the floor. People across those divides, she reports, agreed far more than anyone expected. Neighborhood activists, other businesses and public servants were in the room as well.
Greenwashing, on ramps, and the question a daughter asked
An audience question asks what to do when your employer starts saying things that do not ring true, and how to call it out without resigning. Tómasdóttir concedes greenwashing is real, that she comes across a lot of it, and that she finds it difficult to handle. Her answer is to build on ramps rather than burn bridges, because burning them takes everyone backwards.
In the peer convenings she runs, member leaders talk to their peers about nature, scope 3 emissions, gender balance and racial equity. Leaders are more vulnerable right now than people expect, she says. Her job is to move them off the reasons they cannot go faster: the data, the investors, the boardroom.
The lever she uses is the family conversation. She asks leaders what their children are thinking of doing and whether they have been out protesting, and notes that one in five Americans took part in protests last year. That is a social revolution already under way, and the question is whether to lead it or be left behind.
Only deep care makes real boldness possible, she says, and box ticking produces greenwashing. Her closing story is a fossil fuel chief executive whose daughter asked whether he would be responsible for the greatest intergenerational crime in history. He is still in the job, still fighting his investors, still not moving at the speed she wants.
She does not offer him as a success, only as someone now moving for the right reason. Her advice to the audience is to go to the heart, unlock the humanity, and ask hard questions. This is not the time for the sidelines, she says in closing.
Asked who the series should hear from next, she nominates Jesper Brodin of Ingka Group, the parent of the IKEA stores and the B Team’s new chair after Paul Polman. Its vision to be people and planet positive by 2030 is the boldest out there, from a brand serving the many rather than the one percent. Brodin has been scrutinized for not doing enough.
Scope and limitations
This is one executive’s account of her own organization, recorded in a live IRG seminar in 2022, and transcribed from automatic captions that garble several proper names in the source. The figures are Tómasdóttir’s own claims rather than reported results. That includes the 28 percent she received, the 1 percent she polled 45 days out, and the 90 percent of chief executives she describes as white men. It also includes the 81 percent public figure and the one in five Americans she says protested in the previous year. The subsidy figures, 1.8 trillion dollars a year in environmentally harmful subsidies and 550 billion in fossil fuels, are hers as well. None of them are sourced in the conversation. She hedges her own expertise on the accounting standards, and volunteers that she does not expect the resulting standard to be ambitious enough. Her account of her own candidacy is included. Passing remarks about political conditions in several countries have been left out, and no assessment of any named politician appears here.
Source
This page summarises HGS #41: Halla Tómasdóttir (CEO, The B-Team) about purpose driven and principled leadership, by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2022-02-22.