Paul Polman is Dutch by birth but, he says, a Geordie by inclination, such is his love of Newcastle United FC and the city’s people. They are, he says, ‘very humble’.
As Geordies go, however, the Unilever boss is more Sting than Andy Capp.
His tastes run more to chatting about sustainability and global poverty reduction with former United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon than lamenting the Magpies’ dreadful start to the season over a few pints down the Scotswood Road.
Paul Polman became chief executive officer of Unilever in 2009 after stints at Procter & Gamble and Nestle
Despite working his way to the top of the global consumer goods industry, Polman affects a lofty disdain for the pursuit of mere profit. His, he never tires of telling people, is a higher purpose.
Indeed, the world of filthy lucre was not his first choice. ‘I wanted to be a priest. I could have done that. I wanted to be a doctor. I could have done that… my fallback option was business,’ he has said.
His first job was as a milkman in the Netherlands, which he told his son Sebastian on a YouTube video, was just as important as being chief executive of Unilever, because of the old people who depended on him.
He took the top job at Unilever in 2009 after stints at Procter & Gamble and Nestle, attracted by its social values, though he almost didn’t get to take the role after being caught up in the 2008 terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, India. He was at dinner with his predecessor, Patrick Cescau, when gunmen stormed the building, but escaped unscathed.
Now 62, he started life in relatively modest circumstances, as one of six children living in the Dutch city of Enschede, where his father was an executive in a tyre factory and his mother was a school teacher.
He studied first at the University of Groningen and then took an MBA at the University of Cincinnati in the US, where he met wife Kim, 64, an American cellist. The couple, who have three adult sons and four grandchildren, live in a swish area of London, bought for £3.4million in 2009, and have properties in Geneva and Michigan.
Virtue-signalling is too feeble a term for Polman’s enthusiasm for everything green and sustainable – a cynic would say it’s more like the relentless semaphoring of his own saintliness.
At the annual Davos jawfest for CEOs and world leaders, he’s prone to pop up on stage with the likes of actress Emma Watson – he signed up for her ‘HeforShe’ gender equality initiative. His green and charitable interests are legion, from running a foundation for blind children in Africa to serving on the United Nations ‘panel of eminent persons’ on sustainable development, alongside Queen Rania of Jordan and Graca Machel, the widow of Nelson Mandela.
With so many good works, it’s a wonder he finds the time to run Unilever as well, a job he has said he would do for nothing.
Back in the real world, he received a pay and bonus package of more than £10million last year and has made more than £64million from his nine-year stint at the top.
Embarrassingly for a company that prides itself on its social responsibility, Unilever’s habit of lavishing rewards on its top brass has put it on a government list of shame as more than a third of its shareholders voted against its pay policy.
But the way Polman tells it, he is not so much on a career path as a spiritual quest. He is guided, he says, by the Dalai Lama’s advice that those who seek enlightenment for their own selfish reasons miss their purpose, and by the ‘universal Golden Rule’ of treating the planet and other people with ‘dignity, respect and compassion.’
How blush-making, then, that his shareholders have taken exception to his behaviour in trying to shift Unilever HQ from London to Rotterdam, to shield the company from hostile takeovers.
In the wrong is not a place the oh-so-caring Mr Polman is used to finding himself.