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"Die Zukunft fängt heute an."
This sentence appears handwritten in my copy of The New Nature of Business. André Hoffmann wrote it after a presentation at the University of Zurich. Yet it stayed. Not as reassurance — but as diagnosis.
In a year when sustainability has been scaled back or politically dismantled in many places, this reads less like promise than sober fact. A necessity. The book that follows makes the case for why.
A Question of Ownership
The book opens with institutional reckoning. In 2003, Novartis made an offer to acquire Roche. The Hoffmann family, which had controlled the company for over a century, gathered to consider. The offer was substantial, the strategic logic compelling.
The family declined.
But the episode forced a deeper question: "Are we more than a group of lucky individuals who collect dividends once a year?"
For Hoffmann, ownership is not merely economic. It is responsibility — extending beyond shareholders to employees, communities, natural systems. The book distinguishes four forms of capital: financial, human, social, natural.
Most businesses optimize only the first, extracting value from the other three — and recording the depletion as profit. This functions — until soil depletes, trust erodes, talent departs. The central claim: this model cannot be sustained over time.
The Limits of Philanthropy
One of the book's most striking arguments concerns philanthropy. Despite his family's long history of conservation funding — over one billion Swiss francs through the MAVA Foundation, his father's role co-founding the WWF — Hoffmann argues charitable giving cannot address structural problems.
Philanthropy treats symptoms rather than redesigning systems. As long as companies externalize costs, charitable capital arrives as remediation. The alternative: different accounting. If nature appears on balance sheets — if ecosystems, water, biodiversity carry quantified cost — they become subjects of fiduciary concern, not moral preference.
The argument is not moral. It is one of risk management. Double materiality, TNFD, Scope 3 emissions — operational frameworks for pricing what markets have treated as free.
The book references regulatory developments (EU Taxonomy, CSRD, carbon border mechanisms) but stops short of declaring whether voluntary commitment suffices or binding regulation is necessary. The ambiguity seems deliberate.
The Tree as Architecture
Hoffmann structures his vision through a tree metaphor, developed across three dimensions.
The roots regenerate nature. A tree builds soil, creating conditions for future growth. Business must operate similarly — not merely reducing harm, but building system health.
The trunk builds with care. Growth unconstrained by resilience is compared to cancer. Sustainable growth compounds slowly, thickens over time.
The crown leads and lets lead. A tree creates habitat, enables other life to flourish. Leadership as stewardship, not command.
The metaphor provides the organizing logic for case studies that follow — Roche measuring Scope 3, Holcim converting demolition waste into profitable materials, IKEA redesigning for circularity. These are offered not as universal proof, but as evidence the model can work under certain conditions.
Case Studies and Open Questions
The companies profiled are not presented as flawless exemplars. Hoffmann acknowledges imperfections, incomplete transformations. But their movement reveals something: sustainability can function as risk management creating strategic optionality, not merely a trade-off.
Yet a central question remains: Can systemic transformation be driven by voluntary action? Or does it require binding regulation to internalize externalities at scale?
The book gestures toward this without definitive answer. This may frustrate those seeking prescriptions. But it reflects honest appraisal — the mechanisms of change remain contested.
Who Should Read This Book
This is neither light reading nor pure manifesto. It is a working document for those translating sustainability into practice — board members navigating materiality, strategists rethinking value creation, sustainability officers seeking operational frameworks, and asset managers pricing transition risk.
What it offers is better questions. It does not resolve tension between short-term markets and long-term sustainability. But it makes a compelling case that ignoring this tension carries costs that eventually appear on balance sheets, in supply chains, in social license.
André Hoffmann, Peter Vanham: “The New Nature of Business: The Path to Prosperity and Sustainability” NZZ Libro / Wiley, 2025. 292 pages.
A Closing Note
I encountered Hoffmann again recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, speaking on intergenerational responsibility and systemic collaboration. A colleague at Roche confirmed an earlier impression: his commitment is not performative. It is lived.
This matters where sustainability rhetoric often outpaces implementation. What distinguishes this book is not merely the argument it makes, but the credibility behind it. The book is written by someone whose family has profited from and shaped industrial capitalism over a century — and who now argues the model requires fundamental revision. That takes intellectual honesty and, frankly, courage.
His perspective is rooted in childhood — growing up in the Camargue, where his father Luc Hoffmann studied wetlands and migratory birds. The bee-eaters, the flamingos, the landscapes that shaped his early years — they're not metaphor in this book. They're foundation.
Whether that happens through voluntary transformation, regulatory intervention, or combination remains open. But the book makes a persuasive case that the question can no longer be deferred.
The future starts today — not as slogan, but recognition that present decisions determine future options. That may be the book's most important contribution: not a blueprint for the future, but a clear-eyed explanation of why continuing as before is n
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