Filed under: Corporate Citizenship, Google, Unilever | Tags: Google, Corporate Citizenship, Unilever, GE, Kimberley Clark, Anglo-American, SABMiller, Occupy, Walmart
This year, I’ve had conversations on with ten major corporations about business and society – mainly FTSE-100 companies, and mainly at CEO or Chairman level. All really interesting.
They’re all keenly aware of the hostile, anti-corporate sentiment surrounding them. As one client put, “my teenage kids think we’re the bad guys”.
So it’s been interesting to read Screw Business As Usual – not an Occupy manifesto, but the new Branson book. I doubt that Branson’s kids think he’s one of the bad guys; he’s still the anti-establishment rock-star CEO.
It’s a good read. Raconteur-ish, but well researched. As you’d expect, there’s plenty on the power of entrepreneurial thinking, and its potential to solve the world’s problems.
More surprising is that Branson – the self-styled Goliath challenger – is a real champion for the positive impact that big corporations can have. He gives the clearest articulation of this when discussing Walmart:
[Walmart] now has 100,000 suppliers, 2.1 million employees, 200 million customer visits oer week and annual sales of $419 billion (greater than the GDP of more than 166 countries)… Just their sheer size means that when they do get something right it has incredible ripple effects. They can shift a whole industry by applying pressure in the right places… They can also create millions of opportunities when they shift their buying strategy.
It’s a good articulation of why I’m doing what I’m doing right now. There are plenty of other examples he picks up:
• GE’s commitment, through Ecomagination, to investing $1.5 billion annually into R&D on clean tech.
• Anglo-American’s pioneering work to fight HIV/AIDS in South Africa, before the ANC recognized the problem.
• Google’s work making data available to promote an open discussion on global drugs policy.
• Kimberly-Clark’s invention of the tubeless toilet-roll (trivial? 17 billion tubes go into landfill each year in the US alone. Who knew).
• SABMiller’s innovative work in Africa’s newest country – South Sudan – brewing beer from Cassava to in order to buy from local farmers.
• Unilever’s Project Shakti in India, establishing thousands of female “micro-entrepreneurs” in a distribution network across 135,000 villages.
Some of these companies are our clients – and it’s safe to say that none of them have had an easy time being the good guys. All of them have had difficult issues: tax avoidance, palm oil, privacy, safety, etc etc. But these businesses can be a positive force – and Branson’s book gives a handful of them a slap on the back. A bit of positive reinforcement, to balance the well-deserved public pressure.
Image from IndyBay
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