Buying our products won't buy you a pass to heaven, says Natura founder

Painful, life-threatening experiences offer an extraordinary opportunity to fast track a path to greater wisdom.

This was certainly the case for Guilherme Leal, co-founder and co-chairman of Natura, Brazil’s largest cosmetics, fragrance and toiletries maker, when he collapsed with a heart attack at the age of 37.

Life lessons

Leal, a billionaire as a result of his stake in Natura, tells the Guardian how “the pain helped me to integrate myself” and spurred the realisation that all of life is interconnected.

“If we want to grow our own happiness,” he says, “we need to invest in growing the community happiness and take care of the whole … Each of us has the real power to change the world, to respect and connect with nature. We are nature. We try to build our business through this practice.”

Leal has used the lessons from his spiritual awakening as the foundation for building a hugely successful company with 7,000 employees and extensive operations across Latin America. In 2013 it posted net sales of $2.65bn (£1.72bn), helped by its 65% stake in Australian cosmetics maker Aesop.

Business and beyond

While attention in the West has tended to focus on Unilever CEO Paul Polman as the leading light of the corporate responsibility movement, Leal has spent the last 25 years pushing for sustainability to be placed at the heart of business. He is not afraid to be at the cutting edge of change, and only last year signed up Natura as the first publicly-listed company to join the B Corps movement.

Leal has helped create and promote a number of social and environmental initiatives in Brazil, including the Abrinq Foundation for children’s rights and the Ethos Institute for corporate responsibility. He has also shown he is prepared to cross the political threshold, having run as the Green Party’s vice president under the leadership of Marina Silva in the 2010 Brazilian general election, in which they garnered a fifth of the votes.

A key focus for Leal has been preserving the Amazon rainforest by showing that it has economic as well as environmental benefits.

“At the end of the 1990s we decided we should invest our best efforts to work in a sustainable way with the ingredients that the Amazon produces,” he says. “We are working with the communities in building institutional relationships with local governments and businesses to create ways to get value from the Amazonian area in order to keep the forest as the forest. This makes sense for us from the perspective of climate change and of poverty.”

Reality check

Despite this, Leal believes purchasing Natura’s products should not be seen as “buying your pass to heaven,” and that while the company is accessing a lot of traditional knowledge and discovering day by day how it could help produce better products, western technology is also required.

“I think that we should combine our scientific knowledge with a much deeper connection to the whole system that takes care of us … For thousands of years, [indigenous communities] have been surviving in harmony with nature. I think we need to recover this knowledge to adapt, connect, and add to our scientific western knowledge.”

Does Leal despair that after all these years of activism, so few companies are driving sustainability into the heart of their operations?

He recognises that the speed of change is not fast enough, but sees a growing acknowledgment from major corporations that they cannot continue to rack up profits without taking account of planetary boundaries and social justice.

While Polman and Apple CEO Tim Cook have recently won plaudits for telling investors to take their money elsewhere if they are interested only in making a fast buck, Leal has been pushing this message since Natura’s stock market flotation more than a decade ago.

He not only believes a focus on quarterly earnings distorts corporate decision making, but also that no-one wins from a short-term focus. To those who believe the global economic system is too powerful and complex to challenge, Leal points to leaders past and present to show this is not true.

“I think the system is very powerful, but I really believe that we are the change, as Gandhi used to say. Examples like [Gandhi] show us that the biggest changes are produced by individual new behaviours. So really, if you are doing the right thing, you will be gathering a lot of people to create change.”

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