IN THE BALANCE

EVEN BY THE PANDEMIC’S STANDARDS OF ZOOM fatigue, the hours-long virtual meeting one Sunday in March 2021 was draining. Around 2 a.m., the board members of the global food giant Danone finally wound down their fractious arguments, and announced they had fired the company’s CEO and chairman Emmanuel Faber—a stunningly swift end to his 24 years at the company.

The ouster of an executive at a Paris-based multinational might have been a passing, internal disruption, but for one fact: Faber had become a champion among environmentalists and climate activists for having turned Danone into a company that focused not only on making money and increasing its share price, but also on trying to remake the agricultural business, an industry with a far-reaching impact on the environment. Faber had in 2020 declared Danone—maker of products like Activia and Actimel yogurts, and Evian water—France’s first enterprise à a public company whose goals included targets aimed at bettering the world, akin to an American B Corp. Inserting climate change into Danone’s core strategy, Faber introduced a so-called carbon-adjusted earnings-per-share indicator, measuring the company’s value not only by its profits and revenues—as virtually every business in the world does—but by its environmental footprint too. The slogan he devised: “One planet, one health.”