1st European Henley Alumni TOP Event
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The Voice of the Alumnus: Stefan Heimes, Henley Alumnus (Graduation 1999), Manager at Daimler AG, explained how Daimler has adopted requirements of sustainability in its everyday business decisions and actions in logistics. He pointed out that criteria of sustainability need to be applied beyond company and even industry or geographic boundaries. Sustainability, this is clearly shown by Daimler's success, needs to be part of the DNA of a company. The pressure that big players feel increasingly confronted with - from customers, emloyees, shareholders - helps to expite the implementation of sustainability principles.
The presentation of Stefan Heimes is not available due to Daimler Corporate Policy
The Voice of the School: Steve Downing, Associate Professor at Henley and Director of the Sustainability Lab and Leader of the Elective in Entrepreneurship illustrated how organisations improve their triple bottom line, i.e. helping to secure high social, environmental and financial performance, and helping individuals identify their values and develop a greater sense of integrity and spirit in their work and life. His speech offered the following take-aways: the money you are putting into sustainability is not cost, it is an investment with a return that can be calculated. He also depicted how present sustainability has become in the daily business actions of big companies with Unilever as a prime example. Sustainability has clearly passed the status of "communication only". Eventually, Steve illustrated that a paradigm shift is taking place not only in the micro-economic context. In the macro-economic world, purely GDP-related thinking is enhanced by parameters that allow the measurement of sustainability. In general, he stressed the importance of taking the topic in a pro-active and positive way in order to produce the successes needed to warrant long-term well-being for mankind.
Members please click here to have a look at his presentation.
The Voice of the Boardroom: Helmut Drewes, CEO of Agrista, presented his project which allows farmers in emerging and developing countries to invest into new projects by offered risk reduction to banks and risk transfer from farmers to buyers. The company´s algorithm to calculate the optimum way of moving agricultural goods from producers to consumers allows the creation of highly efficient value chains as well as the support of the tremendous need for more grain on a global level.
Helmut proposes a concentration on the Big Picture of the international value chains with its respective needs and offers rather than a concentration on detailed business plans and excel sheets. He furthermore promotes optimised and minimum risk fund flows as well as optimised flows of goods to ensure well-being on an environmental, ecological, and social level.
Members please click here to have a look at his presentation
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