A rather disturbing quote from a think-tank director appeared in a recent Reaction newsletter:
Big business has already succumbed to the heavy hand of endless compliance on issues from diversity to human resources to the environment.’
Their editor commented:
‘While such an emphasis on looking after employees is in many ways a force for good, if such compliance and regulatory oversight becomes too overbearing, companies will become risk averse and cautious. Entrepreneurialism and risk-taking will be quashed.
Put another way, go too woke, go broke.’
How I got on board
My interest in relations between Business and Society began in the late 1980s when I was CEO of a marketing agency. I was invited to join the founders of Bristol’s ground-breaking new multi-sector partnership. Later, a spell at the Prince of Wales’ Business in the Community led on to a four-legged but hugely enjoyable career as observer, coach, lecturer and writer.
By the late 90’s, with the RSA’s Centre for Tomorrow’s Company report (1995), the arrival of BITC and other initiatives, what became known as Corporate Citizenship had become all the rage in the business press, MBA syllabuses and consultancies.
Here, many had decided, was the perfect antidote to all those annoying, ill-informed anti-business voices.
‘Let’s show the world that, although our priority is profit and our shareholders’ interests will always come first, deep down we are good people who care about the poor, the lonely, the environment . . .’
Down the years, CCI, ESG and now DEI became the big watchwords, each one developed and then promulgated by the business schools, by not-for-profits and the investment community as Society’s perceived expectations grew louder.
Business, we were assured, had woken up to a wider set of responsibilities.
And yet
A full 35 years on, even as leaders struggle to make sense of ‘post-pandemia’, it seems that Society – according to the media, activist groups, and public opinion surveys – is still not convinced.
35 years!
Week after week, CEOs and their Boards are accused of behaving badly, prioritising shareholder returns and top executives’ pay and bonuses over climate change, fair pricing, diversity and sustainability.
Excuse me, they ask, whatever happened to our flood of green initiatives, sustainable bags and packaging, diversity and equal pay policies, corporate community project investment and all the other initiatives trumpeted by corporate communications departments?
Drowned out by this week’s demo, this week’s ‘scandal’, exposés, that’s what.
So is it hardly surprising that we hear the dreaded heavy march of government attempting to take control, weighing in with new codes of practice and reporting regs, all devised by civil servants with little or no experience of corporate life and approved by ministers with the next General Election uppermost in their mind?
Yes, that think-tank man was right, this train is being driven from behind. What went wrong?
Check your bloodstream
In 1995, Business in the Community’s members numbered 75% of the FTSE Top 100 companies. One day, over a lunchtime pint, I asked a group of their senior managers this question:
How many of your 220 member companies can you truly say have CCI - corporate community involvement - embedded in the ‘bloodstream’ of their culture? (We hadn’t started to talk about DNA back then.)
50%? 30%? 20%? 10%?
Their answer was clear - ‘Three’.
While loads of excellent stuff was happening, in most companies CCI was only seen by the C-Suite as a project rather than strategic. It had not penetrated their Board agenda. True, CCI had a budget and an appointed manager, it always featured in the Annual Report, and the Chair or the CEO always went along to BITC’s get-togethers of other Chairs and CEOs and Prince Charles.
Now let’s fast forward to 2023.
We can all agree that progress has been made. Corporate behaviour is now widely discussed and taught. Fresh thinking on caring leadership, employee welfare and sustainable practice is being embraced everywhere you look.
So why, after all this time, does Society still take such a poor view of us?
After all, Business is where a large proportion of Society goes to work every day. Business is the only sector of society that makes money. The community is where their employees live.
Business has only itself to blame.
For Society to think and speak warmly of Business, it needs to feel more involved and to see convincing evidence that the public finds more engaging than the stories that make us all so angry.
The Big 4 consulting firms have been talking about splitting their audit and consultancy work into discrete entities for at least fifteen years. Conducting a transparent and ethical audit of their own clients is a conflict of interest, in the view of many.
The water companies’ sewage leaks – don’t get me started.
The drive for gender diversity/equality, particularly at senior management level, still has such a long way to go.
Physical (dis)ability is irrelevant when assessing a person’s intellect, skills, or their potential. Isn’t it?
Tomorrow’s leaders – the new crew – are you listening?
Taking back control of this train and, critically, its arrival time are in your hands.
You will inherit a task where your illustrious predecessors have not been seen to perform too well.
Now, you are the ones with the energy, the brains, the resources, the fresh vision and the passion, which was why you were selected.
The success of your organisation under your guidance will, to a considerable extent, depend on how well you grasp the initiative, how your leadership instils an engaging, fully inclusive culture in its DNA.
By ‘inclusive’ we mean – well, you know what we mean.
And perhaps it’s time to rethink how your company, indeed how all Business communicates with the outside world.
‘Greenwashing’, when an organisation spends more time and money on marketing itself as environmentally friendly than on minimizing its environmental impact, has been largely exposed as deceitful. It is now against the law.
But it goes further than that. Corporate communications managers and agencies have surely learned the lesson, they surely recognise the scale of the challenge they face. They are the guardians of the organisation’s reputation and, increasingly, it’s reputation that will be a key determinant of the entire organisation’s success or failure both short and long term.
Reaching that destination ahead of the competition will demand –
A recognition that this partly self-induced threat exists and it matters
An honest assessment of where your cultural weaknesses lie. Think about your DNA as a start point.
A firm, inspiring plan laced through and through with integrity
And communication, both inside and out, that only goes public once it has passed the overnight Bullshit Test
Comments