Paul Polman, the chief executive of Unilever (150m customers a day, products available in 170 countries), likes to quote Viktor Frankl, the famous psychiatrist and survivor of the Holocaust. In Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, he says of the development of the West: ‘I recommend that the Statue of Liberty [on the east coast] be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast.’

Unilever

Mr Polman, formerly of Procter & Gamble and Nestlé, is a man on something of a mission. Sitting in an open-necked shirt in his office overlooking the Thames in London, the Unilever chief executive ranges widely – from criticisms of short-term speculators in the commodity markets, to the need to tackle rampant food inflation; from proposing that climate change is one of the major challenges facing global businesses to revealing that he wouldn’t mind being a cow on the Ben and Jerry’s ‘caring dairy’ programme.

‘Those animals have massage and scrubbing machines,’ he says. ‘Man, I wish I was a cow.’ Unilever owns Ben and Jerry’s.

At its most basic, he argues, consumer-facing businesses need to rip up their business models and start again – working in partnership with local producers, NGOs and governments in ways that […]