WORKING PAPER Redefining Leadership in the Age of the SDGs Accelerating and Scaling Up Delivery Through Innovation and Inclusion Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women, She is a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Center on the Legal Profession, Harvard Law School; Nonresident Leadership Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Women and Public Policy Program (2019-2020). She is the former Vice President of South Africa. & Rangita de Silva de Alwis Associate Dean of International Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center on the Legal Profession, Harvard Law School and Nonresident Leadership Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Women and Public Policy Program (2019-2020). Lead Advisor David Wilkins Lester Kissel Professor of Law, Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession, and Faculty Director of the Center on the Legal Profession and the Center for Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry at Harvard Law School Advisors Deborah Rhode, Ernest McFarland Professor of Law, Stanford Law School Iris Bohnet, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and Academic Dean of Harvard Kennedy School Theodore W. Ruger, Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Bernard G Segal Professor of Law William Burke White, Richard Perry Professor and Inaugural Director of Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania WORKING PAPER Contents INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................................................... 3 Why the Private Sector Should Care About the Sustainable Development Goals .................................... 5 The Higher Moral Purpose of Leadership: How Innovators Can Accelerate the SDGs ......................... 7 Why Transformational Leadership is Key to the SDGS? ..................................................................................... 9 THE LEADERS AND THE SDGS ......................................................................................................................................... 14 Bending the Curve of Life: Vas Narasimhan .......................................................................................................... 14 Novartis and the SDGs: Inspire Action to Create a Healthier World ........................................................... 21 We Must Do Seemingly Impossible Things: Ratan Tata ................................................................................... 36 Lighting Up All of Africa: Tonye Cole ........................................................................................................................ 48 If You Find Problems, You Must Find Solutions: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala ...................................................... 55 Moonshoot - Going Over and Above the Mandate of Excellence: Natalie Payida Jabangwe .............. 66 Tackling Some of the Biggest Issues Facing Our World Today: Mats Granryd - Director General of GSMA ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 79 Diversity is Our Core Value; it is a Moral and a Business Imperative: Mitch Zuklie ............................. 95 Looking Forward: The Future of Work ................................................................................................................. 107 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................................................ 115 Scaling Up .......................................................................................................................................................................... 115 Sustainable Technology – Inclusion, Responsibility, and Safeguards ...................................................... 117 Public/ Private Partnerships to Help the Furthest Left Behind ................................................................. 123 1 | P a g e WORKING PAPER Financial Inclusion: “The JP Morgan model is outdated” ............................................................................. 125 Building Partnerships is Important for Scale ..................................................................................................... 126 “The Future of Work is Female: Many of the Future Innovations will come from the Minds of Women” ............................................................................................................................................................................. 127 Transformative Leadership: Lessons from the Narratives .......................................................................... 129 The authors thank Professor Sunil Gupta, the Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Co-Chair of the Executive Program on Driving Digital Strategy for his insights.. Rangita de Silva de Alwis thanks Emma Li for her invaluable technical assistance. Emma is an investment advisor at Asia Alternatives, a Private Equity Fund founded by three women graduates of Harvard Business School. 2 | P a g e WORKING PAPER INTRODUCTION “For them, I set no boundaries in space and time.” – Jupiter’s prophecy in Virgil’s Aeneid “… Innovators enable collaboration across boundaries and time. Let us unleash innovations to unlock the potential of every person everywhere, especially women and young people.” – President of the UN General Assembly Miroslav Lajčák to Business Leaders and Innovators “‘Statesman’” is a term of praise, a word we use to express our admiration for those men and women who lead their communities with exceptional wisdom and skill. Unlike the modern bureaucrat, the statesman is a figure that appears in every period. In this sense we might say his virtue is timeless.” – Anthony T. Kronman- Yale Law School In February 2019, at the Cyprus Institute, Prof Jeffrey Sachs, University Professor at Columbia University, and Director of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network spoke of “Eudaimonia in the 21st Century: Looking to Aristotle for New Solutions.” “Aristotle shows us the way to return to a global growth that is both sustainable and moral”, said Prof. Sachs, one of the architects of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Sachs’ search for answers to achieve sustainability had him looking to the leadership of ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to understand solutions to this complex challenge to achieve the SDGs. While global education is rightly emphasizing STEM education as an important democratizing tool for the future of work, Sachs urged us to refocus our attention and commitment on the values of ethics, eudaimonia, justice, mutual good, knowledge, and philosophy, so that from the early days children learn the right concepts of a good life, with respect for the community and the common good, with a desire to address inequalities such as poverty. Eudaimonia, or virtue ethics play a role in advancing the SDGs because they focus on the central role played by motives in moral questions. The SDGs are a set of goals premised on the fundamental principle of “no one left behind,” or an “endeavour to reach the furthest behind first,” a bedrock principle which calls for ambition and altruism on the part of leaders both in the public and the private spheres. Digital technology has ushered in a new age and has profound impact on the world of development, disrupting entire industries and allowing some to achieve exponential growth. But the challenge now is how to reimagine business to make the SDGs central to the overall technology strategy so as to achieve the Aristotelian vision of global growth based on virtue ethics-- the connective tissues of the SDGs. The UN Secretary General Guterres has thrown out a challenge: “Let me start by a brutal sentence: either the Sustainable Development Goals are fully assumed with enlightened self-interest by the business community or the SDGs will be a very nice exercise in diplomatic discussions in New York and maybe in some policies of 3 | P a g e WORKING PAPER some Governments, but the impact on people, the impact on poverty, the impact on the planet, will be extremely, extremely small. Without your leadership, our project will simply fail.” Our research examines how the SDGs, considered the grandest vision for sustainable development for the world, can be accelerated by ambitious leaders in the field of innovation. Through careful selection based on the type of industry, scale, impact, and diversity, we study a cohort of bold leaders who are shaping a brave new world. In turn, the urgent charge of the SDGs provides a platform and an innovation lab to incubate new ideas for inclusion and technologies. The SDGs, launched in 2015, are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure equality and inclusion for all people. The SDGs provide the private sector an unprecedented blueprint to make positive impact on the lives of many. Because of their reach and influence, the SDGs provide a cartography to align strategic social impact goals and design a developmental agenda through innovation and inclusion. Yet, four years after the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, Secretary General Guterres has said that “we are not yet on track and must step it up.” In July, at the