September 2006

McBlogging

September 12, 2006

When I wrote a long story about McDonald’s and corporate responsibility for FORTUNE in 2003, my colleague at the time, Joe Nocera, said that the most responsible thing for McDonald’s to do would be to shut down. He was kidding, but he was expressing a view of Mickey D’s shared by liberal elites. What other U.S. corporation has been the target of two Hollywood movies in recent years—Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me and Fox Searchlight’s upcoming Fast Food Nation?

The truth is, McDonald’s takes CSR seriously. It offers healthy choices in its restaurants, has worked with environmentalists for more than a decade around issues ranging from packaging to sustainable fisheries, does lots of charitable work, etc. The company is far from perfect—there’s a raging and very complicated controversy about its ties to exploited migrant workers who pick tomatoes in Florida, and giving away Hummer toys in Happy Meals isn’t exactly green practice. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Bob Langert, who runs the corporate responsibility operation at McDonald’s, is one of the people inside corporate America who is changing things for the better.

Bob and a colleague, Catherine Adams, have been writing a blog for McDonald’s, and it’s worth a look. It’s an effort by the company to be more transparent and open. Some of what Bob writes strikes me as spin—he defends the Hummer giveaway by saying it’s just a toy—but he also offers insight into the tensions that face a company that’s trying to change its business to meet the rising expectations of consumers and critics. Fitting the blog-writing into his schedule isn’t easy, Bob tells me via email, but he says he’s enjoying the writing.

I am always thinking about my next blog, and the next one. I wish we had more comments, more dialogue, but there is a fair amount of blog activity outside my own blog on what I write, so I think that is good.

Corporate blogging’s catching on. I think that before too long, any company that wants to connect with its many stakeholders will have one. The challenge will be to make them authentic–and not just spin.

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Moguls Behaving Badly

September 8, 2006

We know New York’s an expensive place to live, but this is ridiculous. Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of News Corp., who was paid $25.7 million in salary and bonus last year, also had the company pay his $50,000 a month rent on a penthouse apartment in a Trump building on Park Avenue. He needs the place because his new penthouse is being renovated. (The penthouse, acquired for $44 million from Laurance S. Rockefeller, apparently wasn’t up to Rupert’s standards.) Other CEOs, it turns out, get similar perks.

It boggles to mind to think how the News Corp. directors could approve such a deal.

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In Defense of HP’s Leaks

September 7, 2006

You’ve read by now about the soap opera at HP’s board. My colleague David Kirkpatrick thinks chairwoman Pattie Dunn should resign, and I agree. But there’s a larger point to be made here about corporate boards’ obsession with secrecy. And their lack of accountability.

I dealt a lot with this problem while covering Disney during the Michael Eisner era. Shareholders, I thought, were entitled to know what Disney directors thought of the CEO, his performance and his pay. I tried many times to call, write and email board members. Almost always, no one responded. Eventually, one board member agreed to talk with me privately, for which I will be forever grateful. But why wouldn’t anyone else even return my calls?

Mind you, I wasn’t looking for leaks or seeking inside information. (Though getting some would have been great!) I was merely asking for directors to speak with me, preferably on the record, about how well they were doing the job for which they are well paid by the owners of the company. I knpw directors, as a rule, don’t talk to the press. But they should.

And you know what? If we had true shareholder democracy — where owners can nominate directors, who would run in contested elections – boards would all of a sudden be more transparent and more accountable.

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What we can learn from the Danes

September 6, 2006

Wind power, solar power, ethanol and renewables are sexy. They’re fun to write about. But it’s easy to overlook the potential of energy conservation, an old fashioned solution (remember Jimmy Carter in his cardigan?) to today’s problems of global warming and our dependence on imported oil. That was the topic of my column today at CNNMoney.com, after I visited a company called Danfoss.

NEW YORK (Fortune) — Here’s some good news about energy conservation: Americans are a lot more efficient than we used to be.

Here’s the bad news: We’re still a lot more wasteful than we need to be.

You can read the rest here.

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A Tipping Point on Global Warming

September 1, 2006

There’s reason to think we’ve reached a tipping point on global warming. Not, thank goodness, when it comes to rising earth temperatures. I’m talking about the political will to tackle climate change.

Three names to think about: Arnold Schwarzenegger, chief executive Peter Darbee of PG&E and MIT professor Peter Senge.

Who would have thought that the California Gubernator, who lives large with his private plane and seven (!) Hummers, would have pushed through the most aggressive legislation to date in the U.S. to curb greenhouse gas emissions? Schwarzenegger’s not alone among Republican governors, either. New York’s Pataki and Massachusetts’ Romney are backing a seven-state plan to control carbon emissions from power plants.

Darbee, a former investment banker who became CEO of San Francisco-based PG&E last year, has declared that “climate change is a problem.” [NY Times, registration required] His support for the California law, and for federal controls on greenhouse gases, helped blunt the opposition from old-school oil and manufacturing businesses. The fact that PG&E doesn’t currently operate coal-powered plants made it easier for him to support regulation, but so be it.

Senge, meanwhile, has likened the shift in thinking about climate change to the consensus that formed over the years about the harm of tobacco or the need to act against apartheid in South Africa. The author of The Fifth Discipline and founding chair of the Society of Organizational Learning says,

Thirty years ago, no one would have foreseen that smoking in most public spaces would become socially unacceptable. And in 1985, who would have thought that ten years later, South Africa would have a multi-racial democracy, with no violent revolution? Once mental models begin to shift, changes can come far quicker than anyone expects.

It was, you may recall, a coalition of activists, religious leaders, social investors and corporate interests who drove the divestment debate over South Africa. Two decades later, you have Al Gore, evangelical Christians, social investors, Wal-Mart, GE and Republican governors saying that we need to curb global warming. Can federal action be far away?

P.S. Sonal Pandya of Conservation International, an environmental activist who worked for the California law, reminds me that the governor drives a hydrogen-powered Hummer, as Amanda Griscom reported.

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