An ad on TV urges Kiwis to say goodbye to oil by changing to electric vehicles and machinery.
Emotive stuff. A spokesperson for the advertiser says: “We don’t need to be importing and burning fossil fuels for transport when we have better, healthier and cheaper options.”
Hmmm, healthier – for whom? I wonder how electric car owners feel when they see this picture?
Picture: Congolese kids picking up Cobalt mud.
There is a dark side to modern technology: cool smartphones; flat-screen TVs; laptops and notepads; and the network, built upon millions of hard disk drives scattered around the world, which allows us to surf the web, work in the cloud, stream movies and have visual calls and meetings. We do our bit to reduce CO2 emissions – so, we replace our energy-inefficient incandescent light bulbs with low energy LEDs. Energy companies promote renewable energy increasingly powered by wind farms.
But what do we know about the materials needed to drive these innovations?
An environmental reporter once asked: “what links the battery in your smartphone with a dead yak floating down a Tibetan river?” The answer is Lithium. The mining of Lithium in many countries as far afield as China and Bolivia is causing damage to local environments, particularly water sources.
Cobalt is a key metal in modern batteries, especially those used for electric cars and wind turbines. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is home of more than 50% of the world’s cobalt – child labour is widespread. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Tesla and Dell are named in a US lawsuit brought by families of children killed or injured while mining in the DRC.
Few will know what Rare Earth Elements (REE) are. Although labelled rare they are not especially so in nature. The 17 elements go by some very unfamiliar names such as Scandium, Lanthanum, Neodymium and Ytterbium but they underpin modern technology – including wind turbines, hybrid and electric cars, computer memory, DVDs, rechargeable batteries, cell phones, lasers and high performance magnets.
The chemical properties of the REE make them difficult to separate from surrounding materials and from one another. These qualities also make them difficult to purify. Current separation methods generate a great deal of harmful waste to extract just small amounts of REE from the ore. Waste from the processing methods includes radioactive water, toxic fluorine, and several acids.
Picture: Toxic slurry being pumped into a REE tailings dam in China
Improper management of mining waste (tailings) can lead to many types of disaster to the local environment. If a dam is not constructed properly there can be runoff poisoning the local water supply. Poorly-built tailings dams collapse from time to time releasing their toxic waste – killing people and submerging villages and farmland.
Picture: Mud released by a failed tailings dam in Brazil. 270 people died.
Residents are seen in an area next to a dam owned by Brazilian miner Vale SA that burst, in Brumadinho, Brazil January 25, 2019. REUTERS/Washington Alves – RC1A8C3B5800
The mining industry consists of several western giant multinationals (Glencore, BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Anglo American) and a multitude of smaller local entities. The mining community has been making efforts to clean up their act. The Responsible Minerals Initiative has 380 participants, yet the industry is still plagued by major disasters (including in mines belonging to some of the world’s largest mining companies) and face accusations of ‘greenwashing’ – selectively reporting their progress on sustainability.
The most recent mining disaster is Rio Tinto’s destruction of 46,000 year old sacred aboriginal sites in Western Australia. An Australian government report concludes:
“The events immediately preceding the destruction of the rock shelters also reveal Rio Tinto’s legalistic approach to heritage protection, including a self-interested reliance on outdated laws and unfair agreements containing gag clauses prohibiting PKKP from critiquing the operations of the company and restricting their rights to access state and federal heritage protections without first obtaining the company’s consent.”
As we all seek to reduce our environmental footprint we need to be aware of the system impact of our actions. We may feel happy with our new electric car – but are we happy that villagers in China suffer from skin sores and lesions caused by REE-tailings water contaminating their water supply – or that Congolese kids are missing out on education digging up cobalt to help power their batteries?
We don’t need to stop technological progress but we can take steps to get companies to clean up their act. Let companies know that we care and keep pressure on them to be transparent about their supply chains – are these as sustainable as they claim their end-products to be?
Second – recycle. Switzerland’s e-waste recycling system is a model for the world – how are we doing here? The issue facing recycling of e-waste should provide enough fodder for hundreds of university research projects – not to mention chemists exploring green chemistry solutions to mineral extraction. What did you do with your old phone?
Last, we can support the international NGOs such as International Rights Advocates, Earthjustice, and Greenpeace, often working with UN organisations as well as local action groups, to force mining companies to literally ‘clean up their act’ and take greater care of the environments and the people where they mine.
An article I wrote has been published in New Zealand Management – turns out it might be quite timely given the US Business Roundtable last week. Stop the debate and let’s see action.
In this series of three brief articles, Ron Ainsbury, Visiting Fellow at the Cranfield School of Management and Senior Fellow at the Research Centre Business Innovation at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, sets out why and how New Zealand directors should be directing efforts to ensure that their businesses have a clear purpose and have the governance systems in place to ensure that the purpose is followed.
Perhaps, by focusing on purpose and embedding the culture and values to support that purpose, much of the unethical behaviour of corporations could be reduced and so much of the focus on the plethora of compliance rules, regulations and procedures minimised.
Questions for Leaders
These are the fundamental questions that a board (or the CEO) should be able to answer.
Q What is the purpose of this business or organisation?
Follow Simon Sinek’s directive – “Start with Why?”[1]Why do we exist? A statement of purpose is not to be confused with a Mission Statement. The difference is neatly explained in an HBR article by Bruce Jones of the Disney Institute: “Purpose answers Why, Mission answers What”.
Is the purpose expressed in a simple, easy-to-understand way? There are now many examples of well-expressed purpose statements.
If the purpose is not clearly stated then the Board should work with the CEO to develop a meaningful purpose – one that is consistent with the operations of the business. There are several guides as to how to do this, for example, https://www.blueprintforbusiness.org.
Q Is the purpose supported by a set of values that define our organisation’s behaviour?
These should not be just words but should drive the way the business develops its strategy and manages its operations on a daily basis. Values can help drive the business. As Xerox CEO, Anne Mulcahy reported corporate values “helped save Xerox during the worst crisis in our history.”
New Zealand’s Z Energy has a clearly-explained set of values which provide a great example for others to follow.
Figure : Z Energy Values
Q. Does purpose underpin our current strategic plan and goals?
Does the CEO and the Senior Leadership team promote the purpose and values in the way they run the business or are these just mouthed? Does it drive strategy development? Underpin operations? The following slide was part of Unilever CFO Graeme Pitkethly’s presentation to investors in Singapore, December 2015 and is typical of many Unilever presentations to investors and shows how Unilever’s simple purpose statement underpins their business – resulting in returns to investors.
Figure: Unilever’s Strategy explained
Q Do we have a culture that is in synch with our purpose and values?
Sir Winfried Bischoff, Chairman, Financial Reporting Council states clearly that “establishing a company’s overall purpose is crucial in supporting the values and driving the correct behaviours. The strategy to achieve a company’s purpose should reflect the values and culture of the company and should not be developed in isolation.”
A key underpinning of art of the culture of the company will be the mindset that the Board and Leadership team adopts. Examples (not exhaustive) of mindset questions include:
What is our time horizon for decisions – short term profitability or medium-to-long-term sustainability of the business?
How open and honest are we about our business and the way we operate? Secretive and giving away as little information as possible or are we open to public scrutiny?
Are our relationships, with suppliers and customers, short-term and transactional or long-term with a share destiny?
Q. Am I satisfied that our board has sufficient oversight of these activities?
There are several different ways in which a board may exercise oversight, for example, appointing a sub-committee to be responsible, appointing a lead director, appointing a below board committee headed by a director. There are many guides available on line that will help the director, for example:
“Board Leadership in Corporate Culture: European Report” a Research Report by Board Agenda & Mazars in association with INSEAD 2017
FRC – “Corporate Culture and the Role of Boards” July 2016
BITC – “Towards a Sustainability Mindset: How Boards Organise Oversight and Governance of Corporate Responsibility” by David Grayson CBE and Andrew Kakabadse.
Q. Are we being open and transparent in what we do?
In our reporting are we making our customers, our people and our investors fully aware of our purpose, values and strategy to ensure that our activities are seen to be genuine and not just greenwashing or sustainability-washing?
The trend towards integrated reporting is developing with companies publishing just one report and not a ‘sustainability’ or ‘citizenship’ report separate from the financial report. See, for example Heineken’s 2017 Annual Report[2]: “Through “Brewing a Better World”, sustainability is embeddedin the business and delivers value for all stakeholders.”
Conclusion
New Zealand leaders of businesses, large and small, need to put aside the “profitability first” philosophy that dominates businesses today.
By focusing their businesses on purpose and embedding the culture and values to support that purpose, much of the unethical behaviour of corporations could be reduced and so much of the focus on the plethora of compliance rules, regulations and procedures minimised.
In this series of three brief articles, Ron Ainsbury, Visiting Fellow at the Cranfield School of Management and Senior Fellow at the Research Centre Business Innovation at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, sets out why and how New Zealand directors should be directing efforts to ensure that their businesses have a clear purpose and have the governance systems in place to ensure that the purpose is followed. In this second article we look at the evidence that businesses that do embrace responsibility and sustainability outperform competitors.
The Business Case
Business leaders, seduced by the lure of shareholder value maximisation, often proffer multiple excuses for not taking more positive action on ESG[1]issues, that they can’t afford it. Costs will go up. We are too small. Yes, we understand the triple bottom line – but for now it needs to be profit first, people and planet can come later, when we can afford it.
Yet, the evidence reveals these to be false arguments. Businesses that are embedding responsible and sustainable business practices show, lower costs, higher employee engagement and productivity and improved returns.
It may seem strange to have to set out a business case for being responsible and sustainable. Keith Weed, Unilever’s Chief Marketing Officer, has said “I’d love to see the business case for being unsustainable!”
The evidence is now conclusive. As the late Ray Anderson said – it is a better business model.[2]
In 2010 Britain’s Business in the Community recognized a divide between those that “embrace sustainability-driven strategy and management, and those that don’t. These ‘embracers’ are the businesses that will survive and thrive”. BITC commissioned the Cranfield School of Managementto compile the business benefits for being a responsible business, “to help those currently at an earlier stage of the journey”. The study[3]demonstrated seven ways in which business benefits:
Brand value and reputation
Employees and future workforce
Operational effectiveness
Risk reduction and management
Direct financial impact
Organisational growth
Business opportunity.
Since that study, several further research papers have highlighted the benefits. In 2011 a Harvard study[4]provided “evidence that High Sustainability companies significantly outperform their counterparts over the long-term, both in terms of stock market as well as accounting performance.”
In 2014 a study by the Smith School at Oxford Universityand Arabesque Asset Managementshowed that Companies with strong sustainability scores show better operational performance and are less riskyand that Investment strategies that incorporate ESG issues outperform comparable non-ESG strategies.[5]
In 2015 Project ROI[6]built on the 2010 BITC findings cited above and provided detailed economic analyses on business benefits:
Share price and market value
Sales and revenue
Reputation and brand
Human resources
Risk and license to operate.
The report concluded that a “more productive approach will be to develop business-aligned and integrated CR strategies.”
In January 2016 the Financial Times highlighted a report[7]by HBR Analytica and EY’s Beacon Institute that found “companies with a purpose beyond profit tend to make more money.”
In 2017 in a HBS Whiteboard session Andrew Winston[8]neatly summarises the arguments in “The Business Case for Sustainability.” No wonder then that so many leading global businesses are not just dabbling with ESG issues but going “All In”[9].
When Larry Fink, the CEO of the world’s largest investor, Blackrock, writes to the CEOs of companies he invests in and urges them to find their purpose and that the “board is essential to helping a company articulate and pursue its purpose” purpose – it is time for NZ Boards to sit up and take action.[10]
[3]The Business Case for being a responsible business” 2011 available on www.bitc.org.uk
[4]The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance by Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou, and George Serafeim HBR Working Paper 2011
[5]From the stockholder to the stakeholder:How sustainability can drive financial outperformance”by Smith School, Oxford Universityand Arabesque Asset Management 2014
[6]Project ROI Defining the Competitive and Financial Advantages of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability by IO Sustainability and Babson College 2015
In this series of three brief articles, Ron Ainsbury, Visiting Fellow at the Cranfield School of Management and Senior Fellow at the Research Centre Business Innovation at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, sets out why and how New Zealand directors should be directing efforts to ensure that their businesses have a clear purpose and have the governance systems in place to ensure that the purpose is followed.
Perhaps, by focusing on purpose and embedding the culture and values to support that purpose, much of the unethical behaviour of corporations could be reduced and so much of the focus on the plethora of compliance rules, regulations and procedures minimised.
The Purpose of Business
The IOD’s Four Pillars of Governance Best Practice, states that ‘Corporate governance exists to help organisations achieve their fundamental purpose … typically to maximise shareholder value.’ Why?
This focus on short-term profit and maximising quarterly shareholder value has grown since the US Economist Milton Friedman first stated “there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
As a result, since then, most business schools, business commentators and analysts have developed and used various profitability measures such as quarterly earnings per share, to gauge the success of businesses, and stock market investors narrow their focus even further, sometimes to daily profit expectations.
But shareholder value is not a legal requirement. The NZ Companies Act 1993, 131 (1) states that ‘A director of a company, when exercising powers or performing duties, must act in good faith and in what the director believes to be the best interests of the company.’ Australian, US, and UK laws reiterate this, using ‘best interests of the shareholders’ as the guideline for a director’s decision-making.
In recent years the wisdom of focusing a businesses’ purpose on shareholder value has come into question. Martin Wolf writing in the Financial Times wrote: “Almost nothing in economics is more important than thinking through how companies should be managed and for what ends. Unfortunately, we have made a mess of this. That mess has a name: it is “shareholder value maximisation”. Operating companies in line with this belief not only leads to misbehaviour but may also militate against their true social aim, which is to generate greater prosperity.”
This view has been repeated in several articles, for example, James Montier of the global investment firm GMO wrote a well-researched article in which he demonstrated that
shareholder value maximization is “The World’s Dumbest Idea”.
It is time business went back to basics. With a few exceptions, businesses start when an entrepreneur sees a situation where a group of people can have a problem solved. As Peter Drucker once put it, “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”
Creating and keeping customers could mean offering a new product or service that is cheaper, or of higher quality, longer-lasting, is disposable, offers superior performance, offers faster performance, and so on. In each case there is a group of people who are willing to pay for this innovation. If we look at the successful companies of today and trace back to how they first started, we see this clearly:
Nike, founded by an athletics coach, who wanted his athletes to have better performing running shoes
Google founded by students who wanted to be able to find academic papers on the internet more easily
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wanted to help individuals share experiences with friends
Henri Nestlé wanted to help mothers who couldn’t breastfeed
Steve Jobs wanted everyone to be able to have computer power in their hands
Quakers offered to provide safe custody of gold for 17th century London goldsmiths and founded Barclays!
Each of these companies ventured into unethical behaviour, I assert because as they grew their governance focus shifted from purpose, values, and culture to short-term profitability, most probably as a result of stock market pressures.
Of course, there are many people who start a business simply dreaming they will become rich, but unless they find a market and provide an innovative solution, they won’t. If the entrepreneur manages the new businesses efficiently, then she or he earns a profit on the investment.
Drucker sets out three purposes of profit:
validation of the soundness of an enterprise’s efforts (the right purpose)
compensation for the risks that the business is incurring (dividends for investors
the generation of resources needed to fund future growth (sustainability).
The way to ensure the sustainability of the enterprise is to reinvest in innovation and meeting consumer needs.
Some continually argued against this profit-centred approach. Charles Handy, in the Michael Shanks Memorial Lecture in 1990 argued “To say that profit is a means to other ends and is not an end in itself is not a semantic quibble, it is a serious moral point.” And went on to address the purpose of business.
In recent years there has been a move away from Friedman’s profit-centred focus as business leaders have rediscovered the power of purpose. While John Elkington’s “People Planet Profit” may have started a trend towards businesses taking a lead in being socially responsible (CSR ) this new focus on purpose is not CSR it is central to the business. As David Grayson and others argue in their recently-published book, it is about companies going All In” (“All In: The Future of Business Leadership” by David Grayson, Chris Coulter and Mark Lee. Routledge 2018).
In October 2014 Coca-Cola Enterprise sponsored a “Future for Sustainability” Summit and commissioned a Cranfield School of Management and the Financial Times study, entitled ‘Combining Profit and Purpose’.
In a recent article, the strategy guru, Michael Porter wrote: “A big part of the problem lies with companies themselves, which remain trapped in an outdated approach to value creation that has emerged over the past few decades. They continue to view value creation narrowly, optimizing short-term financial performance in a bubble while missing the most important customer needs and ignoring the broader influences that determine their longer-term success. How else could companies overlook the wellbeing of their customers, the depletion of natural resources vital to their businesses, the viability of key suppliers, or the economic distress of the communities in which they produce and sell? How else could companies think that simply shifting activities to locations with ever lower wages was a sustainable “solution” to competitive challenges?
The role of Purpose is thoroughly set out in a seminal book “The Power of Purpose” by John O’Brien and Andrew Cave, required reading for every CEO and Director, indeed, for anyone interested in starting or running a successful enterprise, whether for profit or not.
Even in the world of investment finance, where the purpose of investing is purely for profit, we see a realisation of the importance of Purpose. Earlier this year Blackrock’s Larry Fink encouraged CEOs to reconsider their purpose writing “Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential.”
“The bottom line result is that purpose-driven, people-centric, values-driven companies outperform. Not just because they do better sustainably over time, but because they avoid the risk. They avoid the Volkswagen and the Tesco problems, and they avoid the thing that wipes 30% off their share prices.” Ann Francke, CEO, CMI
Instead of criticising those who have signed up to the New Zealand Climate Leaders’ Coalition we should all be encouraging all business leaders to go further and focus on the wide range of ESG risks and ensure that their individual businesses have a clear purpose. NZ directors may find that they will need to spend less time on compliance.
Next
In the second article in the series Ron will present the evidence that businesses that focus on purpose and manage responsibly and sustainably, taking into account their potential impact on a wide range of stakeholders, generate superior returns for their investors.
The New Zealand Listener has published a cover article on Trash this week – quite interesting in light of the comments I wrote earlier about focusing on waste.
“Shrinking our wrap
With China shutting its gates to our plastics and paper, what can New Zealand do to stem the tide of ocean waste?”
by Veronika Meduna
If you can’t access, the nine-page article highlights the trash issues with data and pictures, reports on several businesses (including B-Corps) in NZ trying to turn waste into reusable materials, and introduces the circular economy with references to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation paper (of 2016!): ‘The New Plastics Economy’.
New Zealand is slowly catching on to the need to tackle trash and waste – and to start thinking in terms of the Circular Economy.
Ron published a new paper with Prof David Grayson.
The Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility has just published a new Occasional Paper: Business Critical: Understanding a Company’s Current and Desired Stages of Corporate Maturity” by Ron Ainsbury and David Grayson. Legal & General sponsored and contributed to the research for this paper, as well as hosting the launch event on 21 May 2014 at their London headquarters. Graham Precey, Head of Corporate Responsibility and Ethics, Legal and General Group plc wrote the foreword to the paper.
Various academic authors and practitioner experts have described Stages of Corporate Responsibility Maturity. The position of a business in these Stages of Maturity depends on mindset, which is based on elements such as its time-horizon, focus, outlook, attitudes to transparency and relationships (accountability), collaboration, and business model. This in turn influences business purpose, strategy, organisation, policies and practices; and ultimately performance. This new Occasional Paper examines these as a company evolves through Stages of Maturity, along with potential triggers to evolve which, in future, may be linked increasingly to organisational resilience and to performance. Maturity models can help organisations to transform themselves. They can be a tool for boards and senior management teams to help identify where their business now is, where it would like to be and stimulate thinking about how to get there.
The paper presents a series of working hypotheses to be tested and debated. The authors invite feedback, comments, challenges, questions and, examples.
