"CEOs Aren't as Powerful as Most People Think", 14 May 2015

As counterintuitive as it may seem, the CEO can be the most hamstrung employee of all, bearing the weight of the entire organization and living in the crosshairs of impatient investors, skeptical media, customers who talk sustainability but act on price, and middle management waiting for the next leadership transition...

Shortly after Indra Nooyi became Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo in 2006, she pledged to lead the company by an initiative she called Performance With Purpose, with plans to gradually shift Pepsi’s portfolio toward a healthier mix of products. But as she recently told a conference of corporate-sustainability professionals, some investors reacted poorly, asking why the company couldn’t just focus on tried-and-true products such as chips and soda...

Investors can constrain company leaders. Employees can also turn out to have opinions that differ from those of the CEO...Those debunking the myth of the omnipotent CEO also fault risk-averse boards, unenlightened regulators, and the inaction and fear of CEO peers for limiting what a company leader can do...

The world needs CEOs who are willing to speak up about the need for business to be more sustainable and back that up with action: Paul Polman, currently Unilever’s CEO, is the darling of the sustainability movement for doing just that...But as much as I admire Polman and am rooting for him to succeed, I will judge his legacy by how much of his sustainability program outlasts his tenure.

Because at the end of the day, what matters most is what happens on the ground, to the communities and environment in and around a company’s operations. And for that, the CEO’s office might be the last place to look.  One place that we should look to assess a company’s impacts on the world is in its supply chain. [Also refers to BP, Seventh Generation]