November 2021
Our tenth episode of our ‘In Conversation with…’ podcast series features Andrew Magowan, Director of Sustainability and General Counsel at Berry Bros. & Rudd.
In this episode, Andrew explores the significant impact on businesses, both as employers and brands, of the expectation to “do the right thing” in terms of sustainability. Andrew shares his thoughts on the government’s role in driving change in relation to sustainability issues, noting the value and impact government intervention has made in other areas. However, believing businesses must take the lead, Andrew shares his perspectives on approaching sustainability as a risk management issue and offers some practical advice on how to take those first steps to meaningful sustainable change. For further information about Andrew, you can follow him on LinkedIn here, or if you’re headed to Northern Ireland, check out The Inside Trek.
In Conversation With…Andrew Magowan
Series 1: Podcast 10
Lucy Lewis: Hello and welcome to the Future of Work Hub’s ‘In Conversation with…’ podcast. I’m Lucy Lewis, a partner in Lewis Silkin’s employment team. In this podcast series, I’ll be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspective on what the future of work holds.
The pandemic has accelerated longer-term societal, economic and technological trends, giving us a unique opportunity, a once in a generation challenge to rethink who, how, what and where we work. But, while the pandemic has been a significant catalyst for immediate change, it is only one of many drivers of change in the world of work. In this podcast, we’re going to be looking in particular at sustainability which has been driving change for some time, but its significance to the world of work is accelerating at pace.
In the month when the UN’s Climate Change Conference COP26 is being held in Glasgow, this feels like a very good time to be discussing all of this with today’s guest speaker, Andrew Magowan.
Andrew is a lawyer and most recently spent 7 and a half years as General Counsel and Company Secretary for ASOS and is now Director of Sustainability and General Counsel at Berry Bros. & Rudd. Andrew is passionate about environmental and social responsibility and is of the firm view that a long-term focus is essential to business success, so I’m delighted to be having this conversation with him today.
Welcome to the Podcast, Andrew. I wondered if you could start just by telling us a little bit about yourself and, your career. What’s led you to end up working primarily in the area of sustainability, now obviously as the director of sustainability and GC Berry Bros.?
Andrew Magowan: Sure. I mean my background’s a traditional legal one, to be honest you know law degree, law school, training contract in the city and then, a corporate lawyer for a city law firm for 5 years or so. Before jumping in-house and doing the typical things at that end, working my way up through, a variety of different businesses, in a variety of different industries before becoming general counsel.
And, at that point - sustainability certainly wasn’t a feature really in what I was thinking about at all. But, when you get to the general counsel level, your role effectively is horizon scanning at the longest or widest terms. You know, I saw it as looking out for the things that, that we weren’t thinking about enough, but that could come along, maybe quicker than we might imagine and impact the business. So, I kind of, highest level of risk management. I suppose about 4 or 5 years ago when I start, just a part of doing that very process, when I started to look at what was the biggest risks that could come along and impact the business, I was working in ASOS at that time, it was sustainability. It was the impact that, business was having on the planet and the people who work on it.
So I got involved in it, from a pure hard-headed risk management perspective. It’s not as though I didn’t believe in it as such, but to me it was just, it was as natural as risk managing any of the other things that I saw within the businesses. And, as I got into that what I realised was that there were probably two aspects of my background that were helpful in that respect. So, you know, I’m certainly not sustainability by any stretch of the imagination, there are plenty of people who are, and they’ve got a huge role to play but, the legal training, which is kind of about standing back dispassionately and, you know, analysing what’s going on to work out what are the key things that you need to be dealing with and the biggest things that you need to be tracking in on so, prioritisation effectively. That skill set I found to be very useful because sustainability is a huge topic, there are lots of different things that, you know people want you to care about and its almost as too big a topic to deal with in one thing. So, prioritisation I think is a huge part of sustainability.
The other bit then is just, as well, after sort of 10/15 years of being in boardrooms as company secretary and, general counsel and presenting to boards, I had a good understanding of what made executive boards and PLC boards tick and how you got their attention.
That’s another thing that, that’s crucial to this is to getting boards onside and to presenting it in a way that allows them to wrap their head round it and to be able to, to work out what they can do rather than as I say, it just being brought to them as a huge, big problem, where the easy natural reaction then is to go, “Well that’s far too big to deal with we’ll ignore it or I’ll do the easy things round the side rather than the big things that have got there”.
To me this is just, working in sustainability now, is a natural corollary of the role of a general counsel and, I fully expect it to be a sizeable chunk of the remit for, pretty much all general counsel going forward if it’s not already that.
Lucy Lewis: That’s interesting and we’ll definitely come back to this idea about how people get started, how you get, get buy in before we finish because, we’d love to have your thoughts on that.
Change in employee expectations
But one of the things that we’ve been talking about quite a lot, on the Future of Work hub, is the role that employees have in driving that change. This idea that actually, what employees want from their employers is changing, they’re expecting their employers to, to act with social purpose, to be responsible, and I wonder if, that’s something that you’ve recognised through, through your career? And if you have, why you think that’s happening?
Andrew Magowan: Oh yeah, I’ve certainly seen that throughout my career. You know it, sustainability is something that, your workforce will want to see dealt with. Who they work for matters to them, they don’t want to have to explain their employer’s actions to their friends and family and, that was particularly pertinent at ASOS. There was a, let’s say a younger workforce there than the average company, and they were particularly clued in on sustainability. And they weren’t shy at grabbing me or some of the other executives when the opportunity arised to suddenly go “Right, I wanna talk to you about this, and why’s it happening and why is this happening?” And to be honest, I obviously hated having to stand in front of them, even one of those colleagues, never mind all of them without a substantive answer on whatever point they wanted to discuss. So, I think even quickly within the first couple of times I remember being collared, for want of a better word by them it made me go out and go “Actually, we need to have these answers”. And they were huge in driving us to look at what we needed to do.
So, the workforce absolutely has a huge part to play and, what I like about it is that immediacy, they’re standing in front of, the people who run their business and they therefore have a huge ability to be able to shape what those people are thinking about, or to show them what’s important to them.
Lucy Lewis:
Change in consumer trends
And of course, those employees are also consumers. Do you see a change in consumer trends, or do you think that’s slightly behind?
Andrew Magowan: It’s… there’s certainly a long way to go, but I don’t think you can argue that consumers are beginning to change and take a lot more into account in that respect.
There is increased discussion, and therefore awareness of people about…through things like even the media we can actually talk about it more in the news etc. But, because of that increased awareness and discussion with their peers, and their colleagues, there’s absolutely an increased knowledge of what’s there. But there’s also, combining with that, a number of other things like, you know, brand culture has increasingly created a situation where, who you buy from says something about who you are and what you believe in.
And in particular I think that’s manifesting itself in the generations who are younger than I am now.Where they spend their money, their limited pounds is one of the few things that they can still control and, they’re beginning to look much more closely at where they can … right, what do the businesses that they buy from stand for? And, what that says about them? It’s not universal, people still have to live their life and we all have to make decisions and comprises, from time to time but, I think there is an awareness certainly of that and as a result of that, and the shifting through to the businesses we are beginning to see, right, okay, not just that this is an opportunity but this is something we have to be preparing for, albeit that we can argue about how long people are taking to prepare for that.
Lucy Lewis:
The role of Government
And when we look at those things that are driving change, the other thing that we sometimes talk about on the future of work hub, and I think it’s particularly relevant here, particularly with COP26 is, what should the role of Government be in this? We’ve seen some interventions at home, we’ve seen other things tried abroad. Do you think we should be saying that driving the sustainability agenda is our expectation of Government? Or actually is it something that should fall to business?
Andrew Magowan: I think businesses need to take it upon themselves first and foremost. As I say it’s a risk management issue to me and, businesses should be managing the risk for their own benefit as much as anything else and I think the primary responsibility sits with businesses to recognise it for what it is, which is a huge threat to their business, to their business model, to their industry, to the planet and the people that they rely upon. So, I think the primary responsibility absolutely sits there! That businesses should be sitting wrestling with … “Right, okay what are the impacts that I have? And what are the biggest impacts that I have and how do I go about making the biggest difference to those impacts so that I can reduce the likelihood of them happening and the impact of them if they do happen and all that kind of thing?”
The primary responsibility absolutely to me, sits with the businesses that are there, but that is not by any stretch to say that the Government doesn’t have a huge role to play in, helping people. To me, it’s about thinking about things. To me, a lot of this is, I’m a big believer that once you start to think about a topic that you, effectively can’t stop thinking about it. Once it’s in there it will keep sort of twirling away in your brain, and that’s a role to me that legislation can play.
There’s some good examples of that from the past, you know, the modern slavery legislation, the gender pay gap reporting. Those have led to a lot of positive developments. Now, there’s a number of people who have, issues with those legislations and they’re not perfect by any stretch, but to me a key point is that legislation doesn’t have to be perfect or all-encompassing in order to be effective, if it’s focused on the right things.
What I like about both of those examples is that they made businesses go and look at what they were doing and, in the process, for the bulk of them in looking at what they’re doing, they see things that they don’t like and realise that they need to go ahead and deal with. Modern slavery reporting, gender pay gap reporting, the SEC or carbon reporting, that’s part of accounts now, you know, they have led to improvements in those areas, just by dint of making people go and find out the data and find out what’s happening.
Now, could they be better?Oh look, for sure, you know, I would love to see effectively the bar steadily increased on those in terms of the amount of information they require, or to be coupled up with targets and some harder things sitting behind them. But it doesn’t mean that those bits of legislation were wrong or incorrect, the key is really that, as I say, to me they’re aiming at a crucial thing which is, transparency and making businesses go and look about what they’re talking about and tell people what they’re doing and, that that needs to be coupled then with as they say to me, steadily raising the bar. That’s a kind of approach to me that, its applicable not just at what Government can do but also within the businesses themselves, its that bit of “look go and look at what you’re doing, do something and keep improving it”. Don’t get stalled doing nothing while you try to work out exactly what to do.
Lucy Lewis: And that feels like a really good time to come back to that, that question about how you get business buy in. I said I was going to, to come back to it. We know, from the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, it’s something again we’ve been talking about on the future of work hub, that 7 out of 10 employees expect their employers to act on social issues so, to act on climate change. There’s this enormous responsibility, but it’s also a really big challenge and one of the things we both know, that happens when the challenge is too big is that people just don’t know where to start.
Steps to meaningful sustainable change
So, I’d be really interested if, you had advice that you can give to the podcast audience about what should they be doing? How can you go about taking those first steps, those first steps to meaningful sustainable change, to your point? How do you go about building buy in, so that people actually want to do something about this?
Andrew Magowan: Sure. To me the start one is you need to be sincere and committed to this, first and foremost, and then be open about what’s in front of you. I’m a big believer in that people, they understand that this is a complex topic and that they’re not expecting perfection straight from the get-go. But that, as long as you are being sincere and committed and open on this, they will first of all give you, they’ll understand that this takes some time to do and that you, that it is difficult to effectively change, a business model or business practices that have been in place for decades so, they will give you a degree of latitude and time to work at what you need to do.
I think they’ll also give you the authority and confidence to be able to say “No, I’m gonna focus on x, y and z”, but that’s only if you’re being sincere and committed and open about what you’re doing. So that has to be the bedrock of what’s there, is actually go and “Look, do I, effectively an honest assessment of, do I care about this and do I see this as a risk? And if I don’t, I’m gonna say why not”. But, once you’ve got that, the first thing to me would be “Just start now, don’t wait for perfect”.
As I say, that’s one of the things that if you’re being open and honest I think that you will have that platform to allow you to go in and go “Right, let’s get on and get something done here”. Don’t get stuck waiting or trying to work out the perfect answer that’s here. This is much more a case of do in iterate, do in iterate, do in iterate.
To help with what you do in iterate, to me it’s very much about focussing on, the biggest specific impact that your business model will have and then looking at how you can make the biggest difference to those impacts. Every business will have different degrees of things that it is causing or that it’s creating. If I look at a wine merchant like Berry Bros. & Rudd, almost every step of the business uses something that emits carbon and the one bit that doesn’t, which is growing grapes and grain is acutely affected by carbon. So, immediately carbon leaping out is something that needs to be dealt with.
If I look at an online fashion retailer like ASOS, its about the finite resources that you’re using, the amount of plastics that you’re using and the tens of thousands of people that are involved in your complicated supply chains.
So yes, it’s specific to each business but, there will be bigger impacts that leap out when you just step back and look at the kind of business in the industry that you’re in. And key to me is, “Right, focus on those” because it’s making the biggest difference to your biggest impact that really is, that’s really what’s needed and also that’s what people expect. Anything else other than that, is basically greenwash. It’s doing the small things round the edges rather than wrestling with the real problem. So I think it’s essential and, its essential off the back of that to also go “Look, for all the other topics to go, I know they’re important I’ll do the easy stuff on it but it is crucial that I spend my time focusing and thinking on the biggest impacts that my business model has.”
Once you’ve got that, data has a huge role to play in this, it’s getting the underlying data in place. It’s only with that transparency of what’s happening where, that you enable everyone in the organisation to understand their responsibility for it, who owns what piece and how they can go off and then start to set targets and goals to make a difference to that. So, there is a bit of “Let’s go use the underlying foundations that are there” and, it’s worth taking the time to do the digging in that.
Now again, you don’t need perfect in order to start – you just need, a blank doesn’t help you, you don’t know what to do when you’ve got no number there, so finding a number to start with allows you to go “Right, okay I understand the relative importance of this”. It allows you to start whilst you can go back and again, refine that data, and make it sharper, improve your learnings from it. So it is, to me, it’s another example of that do in iterate, do in iterate approach that I think is essential to this.
The next one really is to remember that, that there’s a tendency to think that you need to come up with all the answers yourself as well. That, if I sit and look at one of Berry Bros., we use a lot of glass bottles and glass requires a lot of carbon to produce it. The immediate instinct is to think “I need to, I need to know the solution to, to glass”. Now, that’s half true I do need to be aware of what the solutions are for glass going forward but, effectively there will be people in every industry doing the thinking about their business model that you are doing for your business model. So rather than trying to answer their problems, to me the best thing is to stay on top of what’s going on in the industries that you rely on, help them to understand that there’s a demand for new thinking on this topic and what you want to achieve and help them keep the conversation going to work out those answers themselves because really its by, effectively divvying up responsibility for this and everyone looking at their respective areas that will help make this everything come together the fastest.
So, it really is again about focussing on “Right, what’s your role and how can you utilise that?” Then encouraging the others that you interact with it to do that. So, part of this will be, a large part, so this is conversations about reaching out and trying to join up those networks and help everyone do similar thinking on that front.
You certainly need a belief that it can be done but recognise that there will be big unanswered questions there. Finally the key one really for me is to not settle until this is finished. Yeah, take the better that’s most quickly available, but then keep striving for even better, even better, even better, until we get out the other end.
Really, we will have a problem if people think it’s just “Oh well, I’ve made this bit better and I can stop thinking about it then”.I don’t think really that’s how most people work but, they say, I suppose the key thing about what I’ve just said there really is about, its do in iterate, it’s do in iterate, it’s do in iterate, the similar way in which, I suppose the big tech companies have been able to, build huge organisations, to me that’s how we will build the huge solution that’s needed to this problem.
Lucy Lewis: That’s really interesting and actually enormously helpful advice, thank you.
Future of Work
It’s been lovely for me because I’ve spent quite a lot of these podcasts talking about the pandemic and we haven’t had to do that in quite the same way, but I am going to ask you a final question because I’ve asked everybody in this podcast series to share your thoughts on what you personally think will be the biggest and most radical change for the future of work that we’ll see come out of the pandemic?
Andrew Magowan: It’s a good question. I’ve got one obvious one and one sort of less obvious one I think I’d say. To me, the biggest one I can certainly see is just that shift in the balance between home and office, and the impact that that will have on the property world and what offices are and, to some extent then business working models.
I think there is, certainly, I don’t believe the understanding of a better balance between well, I think there’s certainly an understanding that people can work, do a certain amount of work as effectively from home as they can be in the office, equally though I think there’s a better understanding of what the offices do and I think there will be a better mix of that going forward.
The one that’s sort of a little less obvious, but it’s maybe a wee bit more specific to the kind of things that I’ve been working on is, I’d like to hope that there’s a shift in risk management away from looking at likelihood assessments as being that important because, that leads you to avoid engaging, in advance, on unlikely events like, the pandemic when it happened and instead there’s a move towards looking at, impact and speed assessments, it’s all the risks that hit fast and hit hard that you need to prepare for, and certainly that’s how I have changed a lot of the way in which I’m, a lot of the discussions I’m having, within Berry Bros. & Rudd and other businesses is to start to look at “Right, what can hit fast and hard, and let’s start prepping for that” and that likelihood is less useful than we thought it was.
But to be honest I’ve got no idea if anyone else is doing that, that’s just a personal learning from looking back at, having been as I say effectively at broadest level risk management for 10/15 years and not having properly prepared for a pandemic if I’m being honest.
Lucy Lewis: I think it’s really insightful and it is actually something that we’ve been talking a lot about in these podcasts, the idea that, business will need to move away from, feeling like it can predict everything and move, and particularly with employees to upskilling people to be prepared, to be prepared for things that you can’t necessarily predict in quite the same way.
Skills agenda
So, I think it is really, really insightful and it does go to a lot of the skills agenda, the sorts of, resilience and skills that we need to build in employees to be able to manage things that we can’t predict in quite the same way. It’s been a very good learning for that I think.
Andrew Magowan: I think that’s, I think you do make a good point, it is about, yeah there was a belief before that we could predict when things would happen and that that what was most important and, I like that way of putting it, it really isn’t, it is about “Right, let’s just, if we can see it happening out there and it’s got the potential to have a huge impact on us, well we need to have thought about it and we need to have done level of prep for it”. Yeah, I think that’s, yeah. Now I think about it, I’m going “Yes, more people should”, I hope everyone who’s involved in risk management has changed their way they’re thinking of it to start to go along those lines.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you so much for joining, me today Andrew, it’s been really fascinating its, a really big topic at a very timely point and so your advice about what people can do to get started has been particularly important.
If you’d like to find out more you can follow Andrew on LinkedIn and if you’re headed to Northern Ireland, check out The Inside Trek. Thank you, Andrew.
Andrew Magowan: Thanks very much.