What some famous companies just did to their “sustainability chief” jobs and what it might actually mean
Start with the facts, because the facts are the whole point.
In about a year, some of the big, famous companies, did some version of the same thing. Nike’s top sustainability person left and the team got smaller. HSBC took the sustainability chief off its top leadership committee; when the person left, the person who took over now reports to the finance chief instead of the CEO, a potential demotion. Unilever’s sustainability chief left after along years, and the job got folded into the communications and PR department. Apple’s top sustainability executive retired, and nobody was hired to replace, rather the work moved under the operations chief instead. Coca-Cola cut sustainability jobs across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia in its latest round of cuts. Starbucks laid off its sustainability chief and merged the job into “social impact.” Procter & Gamble’s first-ever sustainability chief retired, and the job moved toward the marketing side of the business. Nestlé combined sustainability with communications. And McDonald’s moved its sustainability chief to run its beef business, handing sustainability to an executive whose main job is diversity and inclusion.
Is this a trend? Is this something to worry about?
Or rather, what does this actually mean?
Three possible answers
One: sustainability simply peaked, and this is the comedown. Between roughly 2015 and 2022, every big company suddenly wanted a sustainability chief, a climate pledge, and an ESG report. That was never going to last forever. Maybe this is just the bubble deflating and nothing more dramatic than that.
Two: outside pressure is doing this, not any change of heart. There’s a real political backlash against corporate sustainability work, especially in the US. Money is also tighter, interest rates are higher, so anything that isn’t obviously making money looks like an easy thing to cut. On this view, sustainability didn’t fail on its own merits. It just got caught in a storm it didn’t create.
Three, and that can be an uncomfortable one. Maybe this isn’t a collapse at all. Maybe it’s the messy start of real change, and the reason people like me can’t see it clearly is that we’re the ones with the most to lose from admitting it.
There’s a Nobel Prize-winning idea from the psychologist Daniel Kahneman that explains why that’s so hard. His research found that losing something hurts us roughly twice as much as gaining the same thing feels good. We are wired to fight off a loss far harder than we chase an equivalent gain. Hence, it’s not surprising that the people with the most to lose, like careers, titles, budgets, an entire professional identity (including me) are the last ones able to see any of this clearly. Admitting the old model is finished doesn’t just feel uncomfortable. It registers as a loss. And losses are exactly what our brains are built to resist.
There’s an old idea from the philosopher Thomas Kuhn about how big ideas actually change, in science and elsewhere. His point: people don’t usually change their minds because someone won an argument. The physicist Max Planck put it even more bluntly—old ideas don’t die because they’re proven wrong to the people who believe them. They die because the people who believe them eventually retire, or die, and a new generation grows up simply never having learned the old way in the first place.
Here is what we built, over roughly fifty years: rules, standards, scorecards, certifications, ratings, entire company departments, a fancy job title (Chief Sustainability Officer), and even university degrees in sustainability. I jokingly call the people who built all this (myself included) – the sustainability mafia. We got excellent at institutionalizing sustainability. Much of this work was necessary. It helped move sustainability from the margins into mainstream organisational thinking. But can it continue in this way?
We got good at measuring sustainability performance, where sustainability increasingly meant making unsustainability less bad, usually through incremental improvements. We called success when we were making it “investable.” That’s a strange kind of success: brilliant at running the same system we built, while the actual problems kept getting worse.
But what happened suddenly?
The obvious trigger for the last year is explanation two. The political backlash and tighter money. That part is very true, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
But that alone doesn’t explain how easily it all came apart. If sustainability had genuinely changed how these companies made decisions as to what they valued and what counted as success, then it wouldn’t disappear so fast over one bad year or one nervous board meeting. Here’s my explanation for why it folded so quickly. For years, the pitch for sustainability inside companies was that “sustainability is good for business.” That sounds harmless, even smart. But it quietly means sustainability was only ever allowed to exist because it served profit and growth and never as something that might question profit and growth themselves. The moment sustainability stopped looking clearly profitable, it had no other argument left to stand on. It wasn’t a strong structure that got knocked down by a storm. It was a structure that was never built on solid ground to begin with, and the storm just showed us that.
So my honest answer is this: yes, this is sustainability past its peak. Yes, outside pressure caused it. But underneath both of those, the deeper question as to whether this is an old idea finally dying to make room for a genuinely new one, is still open. And it stays open because nothing new is actually replacing it yet. The communications team and the social-impact officer picking up these responsibilities aren’t reinventing sustainability. They’re just relabelling it. That’s a retreat, not a paradigm shift which is required.
Where real change would actually have to start
If Kuhn is right, real change won’t come from convincing people like me. It’ll come from people with less inertia, who never had to unlearn the old way of thinking, because nobody taught it to them in the first place.
And that’s exactly where the problem still sits: in education. Schools are slowly getting better at this. Universities are not. Ask an engineering student on product life cycle, and they would say they had a guest lecture on sustainability and there was a mention of that. Ask an MBA student or an economics student. Currently, most of them are still being trained to treat GDP as progress. The charted accountant still studies accounting for financial and manufactured capital. It will be strange for them to have known natural or social capital valuations. The nearest they would have heard of would be the ISSB Standard from IFRS.
So here’s where I land, uncomfortably. Even when I put on my best optimist mindset, what happened to these companies isn’t proof that a better version of sustainability is already replacing the old one. It’s proof that the old version was fragile. Whether something better comes next depends entirely on whether we start teaching to think differently. Until that happens, the honest answer to the question “Is this a downfall, a political attack, or a paradigm shift?” is still unclear. The first two are definitely true, and the third is only if we recognize that the sustainability order we have created until now has outlived its usefulness and needs a paradigm shift, which won’t happen automatically by integrating functions.
