Global citizenship, the blue economuy and the business agenda of sustainability
- Mar 9
- 11 min read
Welcome to Insight Connect, an initiative where we welcome local and global experts to share their view, experience, and insights on cultural intelligence and why it matters. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Jeroen van de Waal. Jeroen is the Founder of OrcaNation, dedicated to educating children and adults on marine preservation and regeneration. And he is also the founder of BlueBeat Group, which is a collective of for-profit companies that are dedicated to revitalising life in our oceans. Together we'll be exploring tangible business opportunities that foundational sustainability can generate. More than a nice to have. It has and will become a key to long-term success, growth, and profitability for global businesses.
With that in mind, we'll discuss how cultural intelligence can help propel this growth.
Transcript
INT: Welcome, Jeroen. It's an absolute pleasure to have you with us today.
JvdW: Thank you, very much Melanie. It's a shared pleasure, I'm happy to be here today speaking with you.
INT: Brilliant. So as means of background, could you please tell us a bit more about how you came to create OrcaNation and BlueBeat Group?
JvdW: Ever since I can remember, I have been in love and obsessed with nature, and especially with the oceans. As a child, I was always watching the documentaries of Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough in the seventies and eighties and the only thing that I could wish for was to one day be able to explore the oceans and the adventures that those two gentlemen were exploring in those days.
So, yeah, it started at a very young age. During my professional career, I worked in the engineering industry building very big manmade assets, mostly for mining and oil and gas. And that work brought me into emerging countries around the world, mostly in South America, Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, where I got the opportunity to do a lot of diving as a passion and a hobby after work, about 10-12 years ago.
I decided to make a dramatic career change, where I decided with the help of a professor from ISEAD, to focus the rest of my useful life on finding my personal Ikigai, combining my love, the things that I'm good at and the things that other people want to pay me for, aligning that with my purpose, which is to save the ocean, planet and ourselves.
INT: Oh, that's really inspiring and a big leap to take from a corporate career to doing that. It's really, really inspiring. And, you work globally, obviously, you're going into lots of different parts of the world from Asia to Africa, Europe, and supposedly the Americas as well. What are notable cultural differences and approaches you've noticed to sustainability, whether it is through people or businesses, and how do you think global leaders can tackle that to try and bring these efforts together?
JvdW: Well, Melanie, when I prepared myself for this interview, I realized that every question that you shared with me could take up to a day per question to get answered. So I will do my best to keep it concise and short. I think if I try to answer your question on a macro level, my observation is that many, many people, especially in the West, separate the necessities around purpose, around ESG, sustainability and the environment from their professional, dedication, devotion, and professions.
And what I believe is that we need to understand and realize rather sooner than later, that we need to embed purpose, passion, environmental sustainability into our day-to-day 24/7. I believe that every adult and every multinational company has a duty of care, for our planet. If I simplify my thinking, most Westerners invest most of their income into their houses, into their apartments and into their gardens, and they always try to make sure that their habitat, where they live, is clean and well organized.
And what we all need to learn and understand is that our planet ultimately is our master habitat. It's our main house. So with 8 billion people on this planet, we have a duty of care for our children and the next generations to keep that massive house, planet Earth, healthy and clean and well organized. That is in a very simplistic way how I look at it, right? So what I'm trying to achieve is that we unlock a new sort of economy. I call it "blue economy", where we start looking at the conservation, preservation, sustainability, and environmental responsibility as part of our duty of care, to keep our living space clean. I believe this is much cheaper and easier to realize than developing life on Mars, if that makes sense. Now your question was, what is the big difference, let's say, between the developed West and the emerging countries where I work and travel a lot? I would say that most people in the emerging countries are still much more connected to the environment and to the planet. They depend and rely much more directly on a healthy planet than most people in the West do. And therefore, I realized over the last 10-12 years that it is almost easier for me to work with citizens, in these habitats and countries, than it is for me to work with people in the developed West.
INT: That's really interesting. And before we started this interview, we were discussing impact. Why do you think that there is more ease? Is it because, as you mentioned, there's more impact on their daily lives? Or do you think that culturally there's a spin in terms of understanding where we're at and what's required? Why do you think there is this difference?
JvdW: I have been working a lot in the last 12 years or so with young people under 18 in the bigger cities on the planet. I'm talking about cities where you have five or 10 or 15 million people and the shocking realization is that many youths under 18 are quite far distanced or disconnected from the natural habitats these days. They are very much connected with the digital environment. They are very much connected with houses and apartments that are running on electricity and air conditioning and heating. And they rarely go outside to celebrate adventures in the natural environment. One of my businesses is the organization of irresistible outdoor education experiences where we take young people into the environment. It could be into the city environment or into the jungle environment or the ocean environment, and we have countries and cities where more than 40% (four-zero%) of the parents don't want their children anymore to go on a school camp because the parents believe that it is too dangerous for their children to be in a natural environment. And I find that quite scary and shocking. When I grew up, we were almost forced to find our entertainment outside - on a river, in a forest, on country land, farmland, et cetera. Because we only had television in Holland every Wednesday afternoon for children. The rest of the week, you had a test image on your TV and there was nothing to watch. We didn't have internet, we didn't have telephones. So you know, your entertainment had to come from adventures outside, outdoors, or maybe from reading books. That was about it. Right. And now, it seems especially in the developed countries and the emerging economies and in the West, that a lot of people are putting their faith entirely in the digital revolution, which I think, is not necessarily that healthy. So in the emerging countries and in the countries in Africa and in Southeast Asia and in the Far East, in South America, we still have a much stronger connection with our natural environment. So, I think the people that live in those regions have a better understanding as to how important the impact of the natural environment is, if that makes sense.
INT: It makes a lot of sense and I do love the analogy of the planet being our back garden. I think it makes a lot of sense and it would resonate with a lot of people in the West particularly. So when we look at putting it back into a business perspective, if we're looking to fund this blue economy and this sort of change happening, businesses have a really big impact in that space, but it's a matter of reprioritising why they should be doing this. So you mentioned the blue economy. Could you get into that in a little bit more detail and perhaps give us examples of businesses that have done it, have built some really well thought through ESG initiatives and where it's paid dividends back for the business as such?
JvdW: Yeah. So, thank you Melanie, that is a very important question and I believe my entire focus to unlock a more liveable planet is on the sentiments and the intelligence of all leaders that are running the current Fortune 500 companies.
The rationale that I'm using is that governments and politicians typically work with their own agendas. I'm not going to generalize and isolate specific countries on this planet because I think it's a global problem. In the United States, in Africa, in Europe, in South America, and Australia, in Japan, all over the world, politicians are operating on short-term agendas and it seems that most of their interest is self-centered literally around themselves as humans or around their political beliefs and the group of people or party that they represent.
I love global citizenship. I love cultural differences, don't get me wrong, I think it's really important that we recognize the South American, American, European, Asian cultures, if that makes sense. But I believe in global citizenship and global responsibility because ultimately planet Earth is one gigantic habitat that we can't segregate by borders. Even though many countries at the moment are trying to reintroduce the borders again, air and water pollution contamination are being distributed with or without those borders. And what we do in Europe impacts people around us, not only in our own countries. So I look at the planet as one integrated entity.
Why do I focus on the boards and senior leadership teams of Fortune 500 companies? Because I believe that those Fortune 500 companies represent 50 or 60% directly or indirectly of the global, gross domestic product, GDP. Most of these multinationals have visions and plans and strategies that run for at least a decade. In many cases, maybe even for 25 years. These companies, with or without the current governments in their countries, will stay on course and deliver on what they need to deliver upon. So my strategy around the blue economy and the ocean economy and the sustainability economy is to teach young and old that you don't need to be a - call it - leftist person or a tree hugger or a socialist to care about our environment. If you are a healthy capitalist, you also need a healthy environment. When you are center or right off the center from a political perspective, you still need safe water, food, air, and a place to live. In other words, I want to show the leadership teams of Fortune 500 companies that it makes a hell of a lot of sense to invest in purpose-driven sustainability strategies. That will help these multinationals to take the pole position from a growth perspective.
One of the questions that you presented to me was about specific companies that have been doing this for a long time, and I think a couple of those companies that I could mention are, for example, Unilever, Patagonia, a former oil and gas company called Ørsted from Denmark, Proctor and Gamble companies that have selected sustainability and purpose and social responsibility as core pillars in their management degrees. Companies that have made sustainability and social responsibility part of the bonus plans of leadership teams, boards, and all their employees. And companies that have recognized that when we do good for society, for our environment, and when we focus on a vision that is driven by a purpose, we automatically will attract much more business, much more business opportunities, a healthier way of doing business and making more profits. Because citizens, employees around the world would love to be affiliated and connected with a company that is driven by a purpose around sustainability and social responsibility, right?
So I think it's a win-win they call the triple bottom line, where you focus on purpose, profit and people. And I think that's now a proven concept.
INT: Amazing. And you were discussing earlier the digital world, and I suppose it's the best vector nowadays for those businesses because those that do it right, we know about it and we see it, but equally, those that do it wrong are being put in front of their responsibilities and why they're not doing it in the right way. Thanks for sharing those examples. I think they're very good best cases in terms of best practice for sustainability for sure. I am conscious of time and we need to wrap up, but I would love to hear some of your thoughts or tips for business leaders who are looking potentially to turn sustainability as their main lever for growth. Where should they start?
JvdW: When I look at the current trends, there is a lot of fear amongst the global population. When you look at the global trends around the macro economy, around, let's say Bitcoin, artificial intelligence, some of the current wars that are being fought around the planet and potential new wars that are on the rise. For example, in Iran, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Ukraine, Russia. So my personal belief is that if global leaders of big Fortune 500 companies can show their teams, their colleagues, their employees, that the company is well intended, purpose-driven, inclusive, and overarchingly focused on supporting humanity on this planet, those are the companies I think that are going to attract the best possible employees, if that makes sense. I love technology. I'm a futurist. I love the positive power that I can get from artificial intelligence, but I'm also totally aware of the negative fearsome power that artificial intelligence can have when you use it for wrong reasons, right?
So what I normally try to say to my colleagues and students that I speak with is that the best way for us to enter into the future and encounter, for example, artificial intelligence, is to stay human. And that sounds maybe simplistic, but what I mean by that is that ultimately what makes our lives beautiful is humanity. And our opportunity as human beings to integrate and exchange experiences with life on this planet, with other human beings, with animals, with flora and fauna, enjoying life as it is on this planet, right? I don't see myself in the future, laying on the sofa with a remote control and big glasses watching digital screens without moving. That is not what I believe our life is about. So, I am positive about a future for us human beings on this planet if we make it more inclusive and sustainable. And we need to be much more conscious about what makes life beautiful on this planet. It's not televisions and big screens and digitization. It is the fact that we are living on a very unique planet with beautiful, unique ecosystems that we haven't yet found anywhere else. Right. So that is what I believe we need to protect and defend, and that is what we need to recognize as human beings as the most important thing. So that is why my purpose is to save the ocean, the planet, and ourselves.
INT: Amazing. I think from a human perspective, staying human and connected to the planet makes a lot of sense. And I suppose from a business standpoint, and you mentioned that before, long-termism is probably the answer. It is to not forget the aim of the long-term, right in the face of uncertainty and what is happening at the moment. Not to focus on what's in front of us, but look further afield. And that's what growth is about, right? That's what business vision is anyway, in the first place.
JvdW: Yeah. I totally agree with you, Melanie. So if I can share with you in 30 seconds how I look at it, my holding company has a perpetual mandate, which runs for 500 years. This is to show my investors and stakeholders that I am looking way beyond my own lifespan on this planet. It is about the next generations. Then from a financial planning and activity perspective, we are planning our core activities on a monthly basis, not necessarily on an annual basis. We want to continuously grow and improve as a business. And I think most companies these days are too focused on quarterly and annual cycles, mostly regarding their profitability, and we are trying to look way beyond that. We want to be profitable and we want to be successful but we don't want to be stagnant in our thinking by following annual calendars, if that makes sense.
Yeah. Anyways, thank you very much for your time, Melanie.
INT: Thank you, Jeroen, it was really amazing and I agree with you, a mix of the short and the long term, but always focusing on what's in front and further away and the legacy, right? It's the heritage and the legacy. It's not just about our own lifetime. Thank you so much Jeroen, it was a pleasure to have you and for those watching, this was Insight Connect, where cultural intelligence lands. Thank you.
JvdW: Thank you so much.