How Courage Can Help Leaders Stay the Course

You may not have heard of the Bühler Group, but you have almost certainly eaten something processed by their machines. As a global manufacturer of plant equipment, Bühler indirectly feeds two billion people each day. Rice, pasta, chocolate, coffee, and beer are just some of the food items they help produce. On my podcast Deep Purpose, I recently spoke to Stefan Scheiber, CEO of Bühler Group.

For a company that is a key player in the world’s food production, Bühler has its fair share of critics. Some say Bühler needs to do more to solve food inequality and reduce food waste. Others say the company is spending too much on addressing social issues at the expense of running a profitable business. 

This is the never-ending challenge faced by Scheiber. How does he deal with it? By exercising courage. 

During our conversation, he elaborated on the two simple yet conflicting realities that animate his work. The first is a basic fact of life: that “Every child, every woman, and every man on the planet needs one thing every day, which is access to good and healthy food.” The second is the reality that nearly a billion people experience severe food insecurity, despite the fact that the world produces enough food to feed its population 1.5 times over: “Tons of water, energy, and land is used to produce food, and 30 percent of that food is wasted before it even gets to consumers.”

This is why Scheiber has made sustainability a major part of his responsibilities as CEO. He wants the food industry to be a part of the solution, to “innovate for a better world.”

Bühler is a privately owned company that has been in the same family for more than 160 years. That means it doesn’t face the same pressure as a public company whose shareholders monitor its stock price regularly. But while Bühler may have more freedom to pursue its sustainability agenda, it still needs to generate sufficient profits to secure the future of the business. 

With this tension in mind, I asked Scheiber: How do you respond to people who say that environmental sustainability and financial returns are simply not compatible? Scheiber said he remains convinced Bühler can use the “best of the physical and digital worlds” to create solutions that will satisfy both financial and environmental goals. 

It’s inevitable, he said: “If you come up with a strategy, if you address these topics, of course you’re going to be criticized. And I believe it’s important that we are ready and embrace the criticism.” And the discussion is going to be very different if you are living in Japan, Russia,  India, the United States, Switzerland, or Sudan, which makes it all the more complex. 

Starting in 2011, Bühler set out to make major changes to address climate change by engineering new technologies to reduce the energy and water used across the food supply chain. The company also set an ambitious goal of reducing food waste by 50 percent by 2025. Some customers pushed back on these initiatives because of the effort and cost involved. But Bühler stayed the course, and for his part, Scheiber has remained committed to working toward these goals.

Making sustainability commitments is easier said than done, though. In explaining how he approaches disagreements with more profit-driven stakeholders, Scheiber cited Nelson Mandela and his decades-long fight against apartheid as inspiration. Mandela said:

Leadership falls into two categories. Those whose actions cannot be predicted, who agree today on a major [issue] and who repudiate the following day. Those who are consistent, who have a sense of honor, a vision.

Ultimately, what Scheiber found admirable was Mandela’s ability to be consistent in what he stood for — while being willing to reach out to his opponents and find common ground. 

When Scheiber became CEO, in 2016, he sought to encourage the difficult yet productive conversations for which he admired Mandela. He introduced the Bühler Networking Days conference, a platform to facilitate industry-wide dialogue on innovation, sustainability, and education. Taking place every three years, the conference gathers over a thousand industry professionals, academics, and entrepreneurs to foster collaboration toward accelerating transformation within the food industry, whether in the form of adopting “greener” technologies, implementing less wasteful processes, and/or committing to aggressive (yet necessary) sustainability goals.

While Network Days has continued to convene hundreds of decision makers in the food industry, Scheiber told me the conference’s success was also about recognizing the power of one — namely, his personal purpose: “At the end of the day, we don’t own this planet. To bring people together to generate a better world for the future is something that drives me. That is my purpose.”