Claudia Winkler

Claudia Winkler did not start out as a sustainability voice. She trained in business at WU Vienna, was openly ambitious, and by the age of 32 had reached the board of an international telecommunications group working across eight European markets, which she has described as quite revolutionary for a woman at the time. In her own words, she was a successful corporate executive who became a social entrepreneur, and she is candid that this was a big bridge to cross. That move, from optimising an existing business to rethinking what a business is for, is the thread that runs through everything she has done since.

Claudia Winkler turned that conviction into a company most people would call impossible: a mobile operator built around giving money away. She co-founded goood, which became Europe's first B-Corp-certified telecom provider, and it donates ten percent of every customer's plan to social and ecological projects, which has funded roughly two hundred of them. B Lab named goood one of its Best for the World companies in 2021 and 2022. Alongside it she founded ventures across other fields and runs Wirhelfen.shop, a civil-society engagement marketplace she built with Caritas, because her instinct is to put the puzzle pieces together rather than back a single bet. You can see the whole through-line on her author platform.

Claudia Winkler is probably best known today as a writer. Out of a lockdown discussion series she and the sustainability adviser Alice Schmidt ran in 2020, called the Optimist Café, came their book The Sustainability Puzzle (2021), which walks both newcomers and experts through how systems thinking, circularity, climate action and social transformation fit together, and which the two of them first brought to the show that year. Her framing is relentlessly a business one: she likes to cite the United Nations figure that delivering the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals is a twelve-trillion-dollar opportunity, because, as she puts it, once you talk business, a business person finally gets why they should do this.

Claudia Winkler then took the technology piece of that puzzle and wrote a whole second book about it. Fast Forward (2023), written with Alice Schmidt and their respective husbands Florian Schütz and Jeroen Dobbelaere, is about harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) for a sustainable future. Her central line is that technology is agnostic: it has no agenda of its own, so it is the people who build and use it, all of us, who decide whether it helps solve global problems. Coming from telecom, she reads tools like ChatGPT the way she read the smartphone, less a brand-new technology than the interface that finally puts a powerful one in everybody's hands.

Claudia Winkler is, in short, the rare sustainability advocate who speaks fluent business and stays an optimist on purpose. She is the self-described eighty-percent partner to Alice Schmidt's hundred-and-twenty, and she values the constructive tension between them, because she is convinced that the way to move people is not to tell them the world is ending but to tell them the better story, of which, she points out, seven billion creative people could write a great many.

“My call is always: technology is agnostic. It doesn't have an agenda. It's the people who create the technology, and we all are the people. It's us, the society, who have to shape this future.”

It is the line that ties her telco past, her B-Corp present and her two books together, and it is why she came on the show twice.