What is success? I think the most important thing is to achieve what you set out to achieve. Just being a CEO in itself is not success. I would not relate success to a title or a position. My career has had a level of serendipity all along. I've never planned anything out more than a few years.

The moment you discover in life that it's not about yourself, that it is about investing in others, I think you're entering a steadier state to be a great leader. Because above all, I think the main quality of a leader is to be a human being. There's no reason you are special because you happen to have this job or these responsibilities.

My biggest fear is that we [Unilever company] at one point in time will not be able to attract the best and brightest [workers]. I don't worry so much about the business, the strategy. If we can continue to attract the best, I know they will ultimately figure out how to run the company in a very tough environment.

We put a gender lens on our whole value chain.

If we achieve our sustainability targets and no one else follows, we will have failed.

This world is changing enormously. In any position in a company you need to work very hard on learning new skills every day, but you also need to unlearn some of the old skills from the past.

It is unacceptable that more than 1 billion people are hungry every day while another billion are obese.