The story we never tell about transformation

This article is the first part of a three-piece series.

The transformation narrative we keep telling

We know these stories by heart. Paul Polman walks into Unilever, tears up the quarterly earnings guidance, and builds a sustainable living plan that delivers outsized shareholder returns. Ray Anderson reads Paul Hawken’s Ecology of Commerce on a plane and feels, in his own words, a spear in the chest and then spends the next two decades transforming Interface into a model of industrial sustainability. Yvon Chouinard builds Patagonia into a company that gives away 1% of sales to environmental causes and eventually transfers the entire enterprise to a trust for the planet.

These are true stories. They are important stories. And for a long time, I told them myself. In podcasts, in conversations with business leaders, in any room where I was trying to make the case that capitalism and planetary health didn’t have to be enemies.

But here’s what I’ve come to see. By the time Anderson wrote his book, by the time Polman sat for Harvard Business Review, by the time Chouinard’s story became required reading at business schools, the messy middle looked completely different from the far shore. From the place of arrival, it looks navigable. From the middle of it, it looks like drowning.

We’ve been selling the map without telling much about the territory.

I wrote recently in these pages about Interface’s 24-year transformation timeline, specifically the gap between Ray Anderson’s 1994 awakening and the Mission Zero achievement in 2018. But that article was about the timeline. This series is about what it actually costs to live inside one.

What the polished narratives leave out

The transformation stories we celebrate skip something critical: the years between awakening and arrival. They don’t tell you about the depression that follows when you’ve seen the data, and you can’t unsee it, and everyone around you is still talking quarterly earnings. They don’t tell you about the impotence.  The crushing weight of caring desperately about something while watching every effort fail to move the needle.  All while the people with real power refuse to see what’s right in front of them.

They don’t tell you about the exile. How you’re no longer invited to the tables you used to sit at. How you depend economically on the very system you’re trying to change. How you become a stranger in your own professional world, carrying the memory of belonging and the weight of not belonging. They don’t tell you that you’re trading the corner office for a laptop in your kitchen, and the validation of peers for the loneliness of conviction.

This gap in our transformation literature isn’t just inconvenient. I’ve come to believe it’s dangerous. Because right now, in 2026, thousands of business leaders, sustainability professionals, and corporate change-makers are standing at exactly that threshold. They’ve had their awakening. They’ve read the reports. They’ve looked into their children’s eyes. And when they look for honest accounts of what comes next, they find sanitized success stories that skip from insight to impact in a single paragraph.

So they don’t leap. Or they leap, crash, and crawl back to the safety of the sinking bay.

Why this matters more than ever right now

Burnout is now predicted as the leading concern for organizations globally, with 80% of senior risk professionals expecting significant impact. Yet only 41% of those organizations feel equipped to respond. Among climate professionals specifically, 61% experience grief, anxiety, or other forms of distress. Some are leaving the sector entirely.

We are losing the very people we need most. Not because they lack courage. Because no one is telling them the truth.  That transformation is supposed to feel like this. The depression isn’t failure. It’s part of the passage. The impotence isn’t weakness. It’s the sign you’re attempting something that actually matters. The loneliness isn’t isolation. It’s arriving early to a place where others will eventually join you.

A confession, not a case study

Last year, I came across a piece of writing that stopped me cold. It was written by Ernesto Van Peborg, founder of the Sava Institute in Argentina, and former general partner in an AIG fund.  He’s a man who once dined with Hank Greenberg and Henry Kissinger, who wore the Armani suit and the red power tie as badges of belonging, and who walked away from all of it in search of something he couldn’t yet name.

The piece is called “How I Journeyed Through the Darkness of Collapse.” I asked Ernesto to be a guest on my podcast. He declined. I badgered him sufficiently that he gave me permission to share his words instead. And I’m grateful he did, because this is the story that Paul Polman doesn’t tell about his transformation at Unilever. It’s the story that Ray Anderson doesn’t tell about his spear-in-the-chest moment. Not because these men are dishonest. But because by the time they wrote their books, the messy middle looked navigable from the far shore.

Ernesto’s account is a logbook from the middle passage. A confession. It does not skip from awakening to triumph. It sits in the mud. And that is precisely what makes it essential.

What I recognized in his story

I spent three decades in C-suites, building companies from six figures to nearly a billion in revenue, buying and selling over 70 companies. I signed orders to fire 1,500 people who’d done nothing wrong. I left one role with no soul, no heart, no will. I led another company to success. Cash-rich, with solid operations and genuine sustainability and then watched it get sold in a leveraged buyout. The next day, literally the next day, I couldn’t pay regular bills. Ten years later, that company ceased to exist.

In 2015, streptococcal meningitis gave me two seizures, two strokes, and a week in a coma. My doctors call me a minor medical miracle. That virus forced me to ask the question I’d been avoiding: was the way we do business actually working? For whom? At what cost?

When I read Ernesto’s words, I recognized the terrain. Not his exact journey. He crawled through deserts and sat in boardrooms with Kissinger; my path looked different. But the hollowing he describes. The slow recognition that accumulation was not meaning. The impotence of trying to change a system that does not want to be changed. The exile from rooms you used to belong in. The brutal economics of trying to do something that doesn’t yet have a revenue model.

I know that terrain. And I suspect many of you reading this do too.

Why this series exists

Over the next two articles, I’m going to take you through Ernesto’s account in depth. The ascent, the hollowing, the desert crossing, the vortex, and ultimately what he calls the signs of landfall. I’m also going to draw on what I’ve learned from my own journey and from years of interviewing economists, scientists, lawyers, and regenerative practitioners on my podcast.

My intention isn’t to add another polished transformation narrative to the pile. It’s to offer what I wish had existed when I was in my own messy middle. Honest testimony from someone who has been inside the machine, who helped run it, who helped break it, and who is now trying to understand how to do better.

This series is for the sustainability director burning out trying to change a company that doesn’t want to change. For the executive who’s had the awakening but doesn’t know how to tell their board. For the entrepreneur who left the corporate job to build something regenerative and is now living on dwindling savings, wondering how much longer they can hold on.

The climate crisis is not waiting for us to get comfortable. Transformation is supposed to feel impossible. And you’re not failing. You’re transforming.

Here’s what I’ve learned from five years of asking hard questions: there are far more people in these waters than you think. We’re not sailing alone. And I’m betting the horizon we’re rowing toward actually exists.