Corporate Governance

Wall Street should heed OccupyWallStreet

October 7, 2011

Police protect a Wall Street icon in NYC, and SF protestors occupy a Chase bank. Photo by David Shankbone & Stephen Lam/Reuters

Corporate America should be paying attention to #OccupyWallStreet, which at breathtaking speed — less than three weeks –  has sparked protests across America, made the front pages of national newspapers and led to an explosion of creative and effective Web-based content. (Check out We are the 99%.) This unruly, chaotic series of leaderless demonstrations may or may not be the beginnings of a left-wing equivalent of the Tea Party–that is, a grass roots movement with the power to impact the national political conversation — but it’s not going to fade away anytime soon.

To be sure–lots of things now being said by and about these protestors are laughable. Manhattan’s financial district is not Tahrir Square.  Capitalism itself is not the problem. Taxing the richest 1%, even at confiscatory rates, won’t support the other 99%. One unofficial list of “proposed demands”  from the group includes a $20 minimum wage, free college tuition, a trillion dollars for infrastructure, another trillion for ecological restoration and across the board debt forgiveness for all. Whoopee! Like so much of what passes for political debate these days in America, the conversation here is all about benefits, and not at all about costs. Didn’t any of these kids take economics in college?

Nor is these protests “the most important thing in the world,” as Naomi Klein said the other day. Not yet, anyway.

But they are important, and here’s why. These nonviolent actions are built around a couple of fundamental arguments — grievances, really — that business leaders and fans of capitalism (like me) need to take seriously.

First, the American economy isn’t working for tens of millions of people–not just the unemployed, but many more who are living from paycheck to paycheck. People are scared, frustrated, discouraged, angry or all of the above. They no longer believe that working hard and playing by the rules will give them a better life. They’re probably right. Low-skilled workers  in particular are disconnected from the American dream of an ever-improving standard of living.

Second, the rich powerful people who are largely but not entirely responsible for the financial crisis and the global recession – the shorthand for this group is “Wall Street” – have, for the most part, neither apologized for their actions or nor paid a price. They created the mess (yes, with the help of reckless borrowers) but they’re doing fine. Come to think of it,  they’re doing fine because the rest of us bailed them out.

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Aron Cramer: Business needs to step up

September 7, 2011

Aron Cramer

Today, I’m pleased to publish the first in a series of guest posts from Aron Cramer, the president and CEO of BSR. BSR (formerly Business for Social Responsibility) works with its 250 member companies to promote a more just and sustainable world, through research, consulting and industry collaborations. Aron, who’s a longtime colleague and friend, has worked all over the world on business issues ranging from labor rights in global supply chains to Internet freedoms in China to the meaning of “sustainable consumption.” Here, looking ahead to BSR’s 2011 conference in San Francisco, he writes about the need for business leaders to step outside the boundaries of their companies to re-energize the sustainability agenda.

Most years, people are reluctant to see summer fade into fall. But the summer of 2011 was a bit of a bummer, bringing hurricanes and earthquakes in the American Northeast; ongoing political stagnation in the United States, Europe, and Japan; and signs that the world’s mature economies are stuck in neutral—and may remain that way for some time. Leaving this summer behind feels like a relief.

It’s up to business to turn things around. That’s why BSR has made redefining leadership as the theme of the BSR Conference 2011.

We view this opportunity as having four dimensions, which we outlined in our most recent annual report. In this series of blog posts, I want to elaborate on each one, beginning with the need for business leaders to invest in the infrastructure required for sustainability. [click to continue…]

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Let’s do away with CSR

July 10, 2011

Maybe it’s time t0 do away with corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Not merely the words and the idea but the infrastructure: CSR departments, CSR reports, CSR conferences and CSR executives.

And, as long as we’re at it, let’s think about ditching the triple bottom line, the pursuit of shared value, corporate citizenship and especially, yuk, the idea that stakeholders deserve a say in how to run a business.

All of these are, at best, distractions and, at worst, ways of thinking about business that create a separation between a company’s core business and its impact on the world. Both ought to be life-enhancing. No more and no less.

I’ve been thinking about CSR and how to talk about it for years.  I wrote my first article on corporate responsibility for FORTUNE in 2003. It ran under an odd headline — Tree Huggers, Soy Lovers and Profits — because my editors knew that  words like corporate social responsibility turn off readers. I grappled with the meaning and terminology of CSR again in my 2004 book, Faith and Fortune, which explored connections between religion, faith, values, spirituality and business. The language of faith and values, I subsequently decided, wasn’t the best one to use when speaking to corporate executives about business and its impact. I’m now inclined to talk about sustainability. For all its vagueness, corporate sustainability is an idea that is both practical–no one wants to kill their company–and radical, because no company  is truly sustainable, at least as defined by the Bruntland Commission as promoting development in a way that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

But the here goes beyond language. I was reminded of that when reading an excellent new book by Carol Sanford called The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success (Jossey-Bass, 2011). No, I don’t love the title or even her terminology. (One chapter is  called, yikes, “Stakeholders as Systemic Collaborators.”) But Carol’s arguments and insights (and the title wasn’t her idea) are spot on. Carol argues that the most successful and profitable businesses, over time, will not be those that “practice CSR” but instead those that rethink their purpose, reorganize themselves to draw upon the creativity and passion of all, and integrate responsible behavior into the way they do everything they do.

As Carol writes:

Responsibility isn’t a set of metrics to be tracked or behaviors to be modified. It is central to both the purpose and prosperity of a business and must be pervasive in its practices.

This may sound obvious but it leads her (and her readers) to new ways of thinking about business. Businesses, she says, should strive not just to minimize the harm they do, but to do good, to become restorative, to “improve and evolve healthy systems.” She explains: [click to continue…]

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Toyota: Streamlining nonprofits

June 29, 2011

Any company can give away money. Most don’t do it very well.

It’s harder, smarter and ultimately more valuable for companies to share their talent and expertise.

That’s what Toyota is doing with a program, announced today at the Clinton Global Initiative in Chicago, aimed at helping schools, hospitals and other nonprofits stretch their dollars further.

Toyota is famous for its lean, worker-friendly approach to manufacturing. Its Toyota Production System isn’t so much about efficiency–although that’s the end result–as it is about respecting workers, letting ideas bubble up from the shop floor and driving continuous improvement, or Kaizen. The Toyota system is “at its core a problem-solving method,” says Jim Wiseman, a group vice president and company spokesman who’s been with Toyota for 22 years.

Toyota will now share its expertise more widely. In a news release, the company says:

The company will be working with up to 20 community organizations across the United States in the first year to help improve performance, beginning with the St. Bernard Project, a New Orleans recovery organization that employs returning war veterans, AmeriCorps members and volunteers to rebuild homes devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

Techniques pioneered on Toyota assembly lines have already helped local non-profits, mostly on an ad hoc basis. [click to continue…]

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B the change you want to see

May 3, 2011

Is shareholder capitalism broken?

Few would argue that it’s working well. Business as usual has us on a path to climate catastrophe. The housing/banking industry collapse threw the world into recession. We’ve seen Fukushima, the BP oil spill, the Massey coal mine deaths. Growing income inequality has become a persistent worry.

The conventional response to all that – indeed, the one that I share – is that smarter (though not more) regulation is needed. But a growing number of business people say the problems go deeper. They say a new kind of corporate legal structure is needed to require companies to operate for the  good of society, not just for their shareholders. These new corporations—they’re called B Corporations—are growing in number, and their structure has been enshrined into law in four states—Vermont, Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia.

Here’s what B Lab, the nonprofit behind B Corp, says on its website:

Our vision is simple yet ambitious: to create a new sector of the economy which uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. This sector will be comprised of a new type of corporation – the B Corporation – that meets rigorous and independent standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.

And in its annual report:

After the latest round of economic and environmental crises, it’s clear we need systemic solutions to the systemic problem that places the interests of shareholders over the interests of workers, community and the environment.

Interesting, no? A couple of months ago, I heard Jay Coen Gilbert, a founder of B Lab along with Bart Houlahan and Andrew Kassoy,  talk about B Corp (it stands for Benefit Corp.) at a GreenBiz conference; afterwards, we caught up by phone to talk some more. [click to continue…]

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Is big business too powerful?

January 23, 2011

Corporate America has pretty much had its way in Washington for the past couple of years. Its CEOs and lobbyists got the Wall Street bailout. They got the auto bailout. They set the terms of the health care bill. They blunted financial regulation. They blocked climate legislation. If they were tied to the defense industry, they enjoyed a surge of military outlays. Of course they preserved the tax cuts for the rich. They did all of this, mind you, after the Democrats swept the 2006 and 2008 elections and gained control of  Congress and the White House.

Remarkable, isn’t it?

Now, with business-friendly Republicans in control of the House, the most powerful corporate lobbies—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers—have even more clout. They can, at minimum, stop just about anything they don’t like.

But they would be well advised to use their power sparingly.

I write this as a rational optimist, and as an unabashed believer in the power of business to do good—by creating jobs, generating wealth, satisfying people’s wants or needs, and enabling an unprecedented wave of economic growth during the past half century. (See China, cappuccino and cell phones, my first blogpost of 2011) But it’s hard for me to ignore the fact that the benefits of that growth are not being as broadly shared as they should be, at least here in the U.S., and that the reason for that, at least in part, is business’s outsized power in Washington.

The growth of inequality is especially troubling in the aftermath of the great recession. Wall Street is booming again, the stock indexes are up, corporate profits are growing…while the middle class and especially the poor—43.6 million of them, one in seven Americans—are being left behind. [click to continue…]

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Seventh Generation: Not coming clean…

November 7, 2010

Seventh Generation’s ouster of co-founder Jeffrey Hollender remains something of a mystery, even as details emerge about the sequence of events that led up to his unexpected departure last month.

The company’s version of events is, in essence, that Jeffrey couldn’t let go of the place to which he’d devoted the last 20 years of his life, even after he’d hired a new CEO, Chuck Maniscalco, to replace him. Jeffrey’s associates say there’s more to the story, but they won’t be specific. And he’s not talking.

I’ve been in email communication with Peter Graham, the chairman of Seventh Generation’s board of directors (and Jeffrey’s childhood friend), and I’ve talked with Chrystie Heimert, the firm’s PR chief, as well as with an associate of Jeffrey. Jeffrey told me by email that he’d like to speak but cannot. Presumably, he’s working out terms of his exit and has agreed, in the meantime, to keep mum.

A friend of his told me: “They basically have Jeffrey handcuffed and his mouth taped shut.”

Here are some things we know: Jeffrey hired Chuck Maniscalco in June 2009, fully intending to step back from his day to day work at Seventh Generation, a leading brand of green cleaners, laundry detergent, dishwashing soap, diapers, baby wipes, etc. Previously Maniscalco had been president and CEO of PepsiCo’s Quaker, Tropicana, Gatorade division. (All healthy products, I might note, for those who would like to cast Maniscalco as the evil seller of sugary water in this drama. Fact is, he’s spent most of his career with Quaker.) Jeffrey was enthusiastic, both about the opportunity to explore new arenas — writing books, working with other business leaders, imploring Washington to deal with climate change and toxics — and about the new boss. He wrote:

It may surprise you to learn that my decision was a relatively easy one to make.

…While I knew I still had many meaningful contributions to make to Seventh Generation, it became clear to me that what I could not do was supply the managerial wisdom and experience needed to steer the company on the next stage of its voyage.

In addition to this extraordinary track record as a business leader, Chuck embodies the values and vision necessary to lead us. He “gets” our company’s culture, passion, and entrepreneurial spirit as well as our commitment to corporate responsibility.

So far, so good. [click to continue…]

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Seventh Generation sweeps out its founder

November 1, 2010

Here’s some sad and shocking news: Jeffrey Hollender, the pioneering co-founder and longtime CEO of Seventh Generation, has been forced out of the company.

Details on what happened and why are scant—I hope to tell you more, before long—but Jeff has told friends that his ouster came as a surprise. It evidently followed months of tension with his board and  with Chuck Maniscalco, the former senior exec at PepsiCo who was brought on as CEO of Seventh Generation in June 2009.

Maniscalco, who previously ran the Quaker, Tropicana and Gatorade businesses at PepsiCo,  resigned as CEO in September. But he remained on to manage a transition and is now once again a candidate for the position, according to a letter to Seventh Generation shareholders and employees from Peter Graham, the company’s board chairman. The letter — dated October 26 — said that the board has “reluctantly voted” to put Hollender on leave of absence from the company and remove him from the board.

The board action “came as a surprise to me,” Jeff told a friend, via email. “My sincere hope and intent was to have resolved these issues with the company.”

I emailed Jeff today, requesting an interview.

“Not much I can say,” he wrote back. He did share with me the company announcement and an email he sent out, both of which are pasted below.

Seventh Generation, as most of you know, is a leader in the “green” household products arena. It makes green cleaners, laundry detergent, dishwashing soap, diapers, baby wipes, tampons, recycled toilet paper, tissues, and paper towels. As a private company (though it was publicly traded for a time), Seventh Generation doesn’t report sales or earnings. In a June 2009 blogpost, Jeff said the company had sales of about $150 million. The board hired Maniscalco to drive sales to $1 billion. (See: A new CEO for Seventh Generation)

Jeff’s impact has been felt far beyond the walls of Seventh Generation, which is based in Burlington, Vt. He’s co-author of an excellent book, What Matters Most, about the corporate responsibility movement. He speaks frequently about business and sustainability, and has  been politically active on behalf of climate change, among other issues. He sits on the board of Greenpeace USA. He recently formed a joint venture with the Kpalan education company called the Sustainability Institute. His Inspired Protagonist blog is a model of corporate transparency.

Speaking of transparency…. there’s not a word (as of Monday Nov. 1) on the Seventh Generation website about his departure.

Interestingly, Peter Graham, the board chairman, is a childhood friend of Jeff’s. They attended Riverdale Country Day School together and several years ago traveled to India. It’s not clear whether Graham backed Jeff in the power struggle at Seventh Generation, or turned against him. [Disclosure: My wife Karen Schneider went to high school with Jeff, who I've known for years, and Peter Graham, who I've never met.] Obviously there’s more to this story than we know; if any readers of this blog have insight, by all means, be in touch.

In the meantime, here’s an email that Jeff  shared with me:

[click to continue…]

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Mark Hurd got off easy

August 9, 2010

Some notable and quotable items from the news:

Mark Hurd got off easy: Yes, by all accounts, he was a great CEO of Hewlett Packard and no, he may not have engaged in sexual harassment, but let’s focus for a moment on what he did.

The WSJ reported today that “the woman [HP contractor Jodie Fisher] was paid at times when there was no legitimate purpose.” In plain English, this means that he sent money to her that belongs to HP shareholders for work that she did not do. If true, this is clearly a firing offense. If it’s not fraud, then what is it?

The HP board, it seems to me, should have fired Hurd for cause and taken away his severance, which is being valued at about $35 million by The Journal.

As my friend Nell Minow, the corporate-governance expert and founder of The Corporate Library, tweeted the other day, linking to a column by Henry Blodget:

Wait A Minute — Why Does Mark Hurd Get $50 Million Severance When He Lied In His Expense Reports? http://bit.ly/aUSYA6 10:58 PM Aug 6th via TweetMeme

See Nell’s blog here.

As for those who say Hurd will be hard to replace, well, if that’s indeed the case, that’s his fault. A key job of any CEO is to groom potential successors, and assemble a team that can keep a company running smoothly in his or her absence. It’s never a one-man show, and shouldn’t be. One measure of just how well Hurd led HP will be the company’s performance in the next couple of years.

A climate “Pearl Harbor”: Congress’s reluctance or inability to act to curb global warming has led some people, notably Joe Romm, to speculate about what it might take to spur action. Back in 2008, Romm listed a number of “climatic mini-catastrophes” that might move public and policymaker opinion, among them the Arctic going ice-free, a mega-drought hitting the American southwest, more super storms like Katrina and “a heatwave as bad as Europe’s 2003.” I don’t know how the current Russian heat wave compares to the 2003 heat. But shouldn’t it be a wake-up call, if not a Pearl Harbor, when it comes to global warming?

For a detailed meteorological analysis, see Dr. Rob Carver’s blog at Weather Underground. Russian officials now say the heatwave has cost 5,000 lives as fires range out of control, says the Telegraph. Russia banned grain exports last week, with uncertain effects on world food prices. “Russian grain exports totaled 21.4 million metric tons last year, about 17 percent of the global grain trade,” The Times reported. What’s more, according to The Times’ Green blog, Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, blamed the crisis on climate change and called for action:

What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate.

Unhappily, a crisis in Russia is highly unlikely to rouse the U.S. Senate to action. But imagine if this heat and drought were affecting wheat farmers in, say, Kansas and North Dakota?

Actually, even that might not have an impact. A poll released last week by the Shelton Group found that most people who doubt that climate change is occurring, and caused by man-made activity, would not change their mind even if reality of man-made global warming consumers would not change even if the polar ice cap melted, kids couldn’t go outside to play or shifting weather patterns turned Nebraska into a desert. My goodness.

But the good news is…that while Congress is stalled on the energy and climate front, and while consumers seem less engaged, companies are increasingly finding that sustainability is good for business. As my friend and colleague Joel Makower reports at GreenBiz.com:

The footwear and apparel industry has joined forces to create an Eco Index tool to better understand materials’ and products’ impacts….Meanwhile, appliance makers agreed last week to new energy and water efficiency standards for major appliances that will reduce the nation’s utility bills by billions of dollars. A new bartering exchange was launched to help small businesses with excess supply of goods or services barter for things they need. And John Finisdore writes of an effort by more than 200 companies to understand and manage their dependence and impact on ecosystem services.

I wrote about the outdoors industry initiative (See How ‘green’ are those hiking boots?) last week. You can read more about Timberland’s effort to develop standards for its products here.

Speaking of Greenbiz, later this month I will be leading an online conversation with John D. Gagel, Sustainability Manager at Lexmark International, and Daniel Schmid, Head of Sustainability Operations at SAP, about how sustainability initiatives can drive profitability.  We’ll hear stories from Lexmark and SAP about tools and techniques for monitoring, measuring and reporting on corporate sustainability performance with an aim to driving financial returns. Greenbiz will host the free webcast on Tuesday, August 24, and it is likely to fill up fast, so register soon.

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The business of rating business

May 30, 2010

good-better-bestIs Coca Cola a more sustainable company than PepsiCo? Which company is greener, Dell or Hewlett Packard? Both UPS and FedEx say they are environmental leaders—who’s right?

Underwriters Laboratories (UL) — one of the world’s oldest and most respected standard-setting organizations — is going to help settle some of those arguments.

In cooperation with Greener World Media – the publisher of Greenbiz.com, where I’m a senior writer — UL plans to launch a ratings system for companies by the end of the year. This is a big deal because it could help bring credibility and clarity to the very crowded and confused business of sustainability ratings, rankings and eco-labels.

The news that Greener World Media and UL are working together on a sustainability standard surfaced last week when Marcello Manca, the vice president and general manager of UL Environment, spoke on a panel at the Amsterdam Global Conference on Sustainability and Transparency convened by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). At the same time, my friend Joel Makower, the founder of Greener World Media, wrote a detailed blogpost, explaining the origins of the project, which go back to the early 2000s.  Joel calls the new venture “LEED for companies,” saying:

We’ve long described this in shorthand as “LEED for Companies” — that is, a point-based rating system along with good-better-best levels of certification. We have been inspired by the success of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED green building rating systems, which created definitions of “green building” where there were none. Those ratings systems were critical catalysts in spurring the green-building market. Similarly, we believe this new standard and rating system will help define sustainability at the enterprise level, growing markets for certified companies.

If all goes according to plan, the new ratings system will rise above the crowd because it combines the knowledge and networks of Joel and Rory [click to continue…]

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