Despite calls for businesses to adopt environmental, social and economically sustainable business models, little research exists on the challenges that leaders face when attempting to implement responsible organisational change. This paper aims to address this by exploring the case of Emmanuel Faber’s removal as CEO in Danone in March 2021. Faber, a celebrated leader in the corporate sustainability movement, had successfully instigated high-level change in the governance structure of the organisation, but within one year, Danone’s Board of Directors removed Faber from his role of CEO with a rapidity that surprised many within both the financial sector and corporate social responsibility movements. This article applies Freud’s theory of ‘drives’ to understanding how re-orienting an established business model in a company which had a longstanding reputation for social responsibility, can lead to the unearthing of more ‘primal’ destructive capitalist influences which can de-stabilize responsible organizational change projects. The paper aims to open up psychoanalytically informed avenues of research on sustainable organisational leadership and create new learnings on how responsible leadership practices can lead to embedding social and environmental sustainability within business models.
