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Photograph by Opto |
What he meant was that in the mid-1990s, Monsanto managers weren’t listening to outsiders who had strong views and a definite stake in the sustainability debate. Environmental groups such as Greenpeace vilified the company for its programs to develop genetically modified crops, and many farmers, especially Europeans, shunned its seed. Mr. Elkington introduced Monsanto executives to concerned farmers, food processors, retailers, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). But Monsanto seemingly dismissed their concerns, and sold its genetically modified seed anyway.
For his book, Mr. Elkington interviewed former Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro, who led the company during its diversification into biotech agriculture, and who bore the brunt of the criticism from concerned stakeholders. Mr. Shapiro admitted that Monsanto had a tin ear at the time, and said if the company had listened better and been better prepared for the criticism when it entered this controversial market, it would be in a better position today. “If there was a next time, I’d have much earlier dialogue with a wide range of interested parties in the scientific, academic, governmental, and NGO communities,” he said. “It would have taken unusually candid and innovative discussions between ourselves and Greenpeace to create a win/win, but that might not have been impossible.”
In the 1980s, Total Quality Management experts told companies to listen closely to customers. Market power was then just beginning to shift away from producers to customers, and insular companies were quickly becoming less competitive. Market power is still shifting, but it is not just toward customers; communities, employees, regulators, politicians, suppliers, investors, and even the media are also gaining influence over corporations. A raft of new books, articles, and Web sites exploring the roles of business in society affirm what executives like Mr. Shapiro have learned on the job: The ability to listen to corporate stakeholders is not merely a useful management skill; it is a competitive necessity.
Listening to stakeholders, as Mr. Elkington shows in The Chrysalis Economy, is a critical component of a larger trend: companies’ taking more responsibility for the ways their business decisions affect the quality of people’s lives. Although discussions about competitive positioning and cost reduction are routine, until recently, it hasn’t been common to find executives analyzing the implications of their actions for employees, the surrounding community, or other constituencies.
How corporations address societal welfare issues has been variously called corporate citizenship, corporate social responsibility, and corporate sustainable development. The Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program — of which one of this review’s authors is executive director — prefers social impact management to corporate social responsibility, because the term more deliberately positions social matters within the business domains where strategic, operational, and investment decisions are made. For corporations, listening, understanding, and responding to the interests of different stakeholders is not just about being charitable or responsible; it is part of thinking about business activities in a way that recognizes the interdependence of commercial and social objectives, and it encourages executives to address them together.
Consider how a lack of understanding of this reality blindsided Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies two years in a row in the 1990s. In 1995, when Shell sought to dispose of its Brent Spar oil storage buoy by sinking it in deep water in the North Atlantic, it certainly did not anticipate the public outrage that ensued. A year later, Shell executives again did not see how external stakeholders perceived Shell’s actions when it failed to intercede as the government of Nigeria, where Shell operates, executed Nigerian human-rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni people. The chorus of disapproval was global.
