More from Jeffrey Hollender, the CEO of Seventh Generation. In the company’s blog (The Inspired Protagonist), Hollender takes a poke at Wal-Mart in his post What is it they still don’t get?
What I particularly like is his clarity on what is at the root of this. Hollender writes:
“It’s sad to see one of the greatest ‘potential’ forces for a more sustainable planet continue to undermine itself. Wal-Mart is on a dangerous see saw. One day, there’s good news, and the next it’s bad. This is a characteristic of too many large companies (BP and Merrill Lynch to name a few others) as they confine their sustainability and responsible business initiatives to a limited number of highly compartmentalized efforts.
These ‘non-system’ activities create as much reputational risk as they do opportunity. Until any company looks at its entire business and develops a ‘whole’ effort to manage all aspects of its activities with an integrated point of view there is little or no chance of sustained success. This is about changing the way we think, how we think, and what we think about.“ [emphasis mine]
This resonates a great deal with the thinking and research I’ve explored in this blog. I can go back to the executives I interviewed as part of my Master’s thesis research. Two sets of manager interviews were at companies that “compartmentalized” social responsibility. One set of interviews was in a company that clearly had a “whole” approach. Interviews with the “whole” approach company stood out in a material way. They:
- Explicitly characterized themselves as “different,” and used that to help establish new thinking.
- Used social mission as an engine for innovations that were intrinsic to the business, across all operations.
- Had continuous conversations and reflections across the company to help interpret how to convert social mission into operations in a consistent and valid manner.
The more I continue this investigation, the more I see the breadth, depth and consistency of these types of conversations as a leading indicator of whether a company is truly on the path to thinking differently. Were I to design an organizational intervention to accelerate the process of change to a “whole” mentality, it would focus on activities and tools that help create and inspire these conversations.
