Worldwide Head of AkzoNobel Decorative Paints to visit SL

Wednesday, 30 March 2011 00:49 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Tex Gunning, Managing Director of the AkzoNobel Decorative Paints and Member – Executive Committee will arrive in Sri Lanka on 2 April to participate in the launch of Dulux Ambiance, the latest product in the range of Dulux paints.

A senior executive of the company, Gunning has been responsible for AkzoNobel Decorative Paints since 2008. He boasts of a business career spanning over 25 years with Unilever where his last posting was as Business President Asian Foods.

In September 2007, Gunning was appointed as CEO of Vedior, a global company in HRM services. After a successful merger with Randstad, he joined AkzoNobel as board member for Decorative Paints.

Born in the Netherlands, Tex Gunning holds a degree in Economics from the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is a passionate lecturer, writer and speaker about the role of business in society and about the need for collective leadership to tackle the world’s biggest challenges. Gunning has been an advisor to many other business leaders and academics all around the world.

In his responsible position, in addition to his task as head of the business operations, he is also extremely conscious of the need for business leaders like himself to understand their role in society in the current global context. His long experience in Asia has made him a strong advocate and social entrepreneur in helping to find answers to some of the world’s largest social environmental challenges.

He admits that the 15 years he spent in Asia, when an explosion in population growth was witnessed resulting in numerous problems including poverty, malnutrition and diseases, made him very conscious that business is narrowly defined, focussing on shareholder value rather than looking for a much wider definition examining what the role in society should be.

Therefore, he tried to integrate what he observed in his personal life and business life with the discussion that business should take more responsibility since they had the money, the power, the competencies and the skills while governments seemed to be unable to take on that role.

He also feels the need for shareholders not to think that they could continue to earn money the way they did in the past and that they better pay attention and begin to think also as citizens, as fathers and mothers of children, realising that to sustain their own personal lives and their economic lives, business has to integrate their social agenda with the economic agenda and the environmental agenda.

Admitting that he was once a crusader for issues like child mortality, child malnutrition and poverty, Gunning is presently convinced that the focus should be on climate change.

“I firmly believe that unless the climate change issue is resolved, all other issues like poverty will get worse. Businesses should take a very proactive attitude without waiting for governments to come up with regulations. They should start working on bringing down footprints, particularly CO2 equivalent footprints down massively and invest on nothing that isn’t green,” he says emphatically.

He suggests that enormous monies should be spent on research and development which should concentrate on new technology on the products and on logistics and supply changes in order to get the climate change issue under control.