What happens when small iconic socially oriented businesses are acquired by large corporations? Such mergers create significant opportunities for creating both business value and substantially ...expanded social value, but they also pose unusually difficult challenges because the merging entities are often strikingly different in philosophy and operating styles as well as in scale. This article examines three examples—Ben and Jerry's acquisition by Unilever, Stonyfield Farm by Groupe Danone, and Tom's of Maine by Colgate—to ascertain what is distinctive about the merger process and to analyze the elements critical to success. The article offers suggestions on how other companies considering similar arrangements might best manage the process of courtship, developing agreements, and executing effectively within the newly merged entities.
Making Sustainability Work Epstein, Marc J.; Buhovac, Adriana Rejc; Elkington, John ...
2014, 20170908, 2017-09-08, 2014-03-10
eBook
The best practices in corporate sustainability performance are no longer the exclusive domain of companies like Ben & Jerry's or The Body Shop, as they were a decade ago; now, large, multinational ...companies like G.E. and Wal-Mart are leading the way with significant financial and organizational commitments to social and environmental issues. However, good intentions aren't enough. Whether motivated by concern for society and the environment, government regulation, stakeholder pressures, or economic profit, managers and strategists need to continue making significant changes to more effectively manage their social, economic, and environmental impacts—and to remain competitive. The guidance they need to do that is in this book.
The weakness in American emergency response capabilities exposed by Hurricane Katrina stresses the need to address core strategic deficiencies on a nation-wide basis. Non-routine emergencies such as ...major natural disasters, disease outbreaks, or terrorist attacks require the ability to identify novelty factors and improvise accordingly.
This chapter looks at the conceptual foundations for measuring social, environmental, and economic impacts and risks. Organizations have to consider the differing and multiple objectives of ...stakeholders. Deutsche Bank (DB), a leading German bank and one of the world's "greenest" banks, introduced its Global Impact Tracking to assess all global and regional flagship projects. This enables DB to evaluate whether its investments as a corporate citizen are efficiently and effectively aligned with its strategic goal of building social capital in its key areas of activity: education; social investments; art; and music. Various approaches have been used to identify and measure the sustainability impacts of a company's products, services, and activities. These approaches provide an important conceptual foundation for measuring sustainability. They include methods such as cost of control and shadow pricing, damage costing, market price and appraisal, hedonic pricing, travel costing, and contingent valuation.
This chapter discusses the importance of leadership in communicating corporate commitment to sustainability, and explores the critical role of leadership in developing and implementing sustainability ...strategy. It details mission and vision statements, and describes the role of organizational culture and people in instilling sustainability. The chapter presents the challenges that multinational corporations face in implementing sustainability when operating globally and considers important industry standards. It shows how government regulations can affect sustainability decisions and how socially, environmentally, and economically responsible investment and rating systems can influence sustainability strategies. The development of a strong corporate sustainability strategy is critical to changing corporate culture and reducing potential negative impacts. The six core principles can help boards in formulating strategies in general and to improve sustainability in particular: leadership, engagement, alignment, diversity, evaluation, and responsibility. A primary goal of leadership for sustainability is setting principles and practices that will help institutionalize the concept of sustainability in the organization.
The rise in reporting of sustainability performance goes hand-in-hand with stakeholders' demands for reliable and credible information from management. This chapter looks at the standards for ...sustainability reporting, the content, format, and distribution of reports, external disclosure of sustainability measures, verification, and internal and external sustainability auditing. The Ceres Principles were an attempt to standardize information and emphasized the importance of both internal and external evaluations of sustainability performance. Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) incorporates the active participation of corporations, NGOs, accountancy organizations, business associations, and other stakeholders from around the world. A growing community of impact investors, who deliberately invest for social and environmental impact, cannot fully evaluate impact investment with GRI. The National Community Investment Fund (NCIF) and the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS) initiative managed by the Global Impact Investing Network (GUN), a US-based non-profit organization, have harmonized their respective metrics to increase impact investors' use of standardized social metrics.
Organizing for sustainability Epstein, Marc J.; Buhovac, Adriana Rejc; Elkington, John ...
Making Sustainability Work,
2014
Book Chapter
Once leadership commitment is established, corporations need to implement their sustainability strategy through appropriate organizational structures, performance measurement and reward systems, ...culture, and people. This chapter discusses the challenges for global corporations, the integration of sustainability throughout the organization, information flow, outsourcing, and collaboration with nongovernmental organizations. Challenges facing decentralized organizations often include loss of scale economies and duplication of functions. Decentralized organizations will also need to incorporate an information system that is able to collect data and information to disperse across business units and geography. Integrating sustainability into the organization is the process of ensuring the achievement of environmental, social, and economic goals through organization-wide efforts. In order to achieve coherence and integration, sustainability strategies are best leveraged throughout the organization, which then needs to clearly define the relationships between the board, corporate executives, business unit managers, and functional managers.
This chapter looks at the drivers of sustainability performance, measuring reputation, measuring risk, and measuring social, environmental, and economic impacts. Many social, environmental, and ...economic impacts may appear to have no market consequences and no financial effect, but many of the externalities are internalized in future periods and do affect the operations and profitability of the firm in the long term. Proper evaluation of the consequences of these long-term impacts when activities are being planned and products and processes are being designed indicates a company's sensitivity to stakeholders that is essential for profitability and sustainability. Measurement is critically important because it links performance to the principles of sustainability and facilitates continuous improvement. The Corporate Sustainability Model offers guidance to managers trying to make the business case for sustainability initiatives. Causal relationships between drivers within the four elements, including inputs, process, outputs, and outcomes as well as between drivers in different elements are based on hypothetical assumptions of causes and effects.
Systems that measure performance and encourage employees to pursue sustainability are necessary to improve social, environmental, and economic impacts, to communicate the value of sustainability to ...the organization, and to hold employees accountable for their contribution to the sustainability strategy. This chapter discusses some of the systems that encourage performance and aid in performance measurement: corporate, strategic business unit, functional, facility, and individual measurement and evaluations; and compensation, incentive, and reward systems. They also include internal waste taxes; emissions trading; and strategic management systems, such as the balanced scorecard, shareholder value analysis, or other dashboards and performance measurement systems. The social, environmental, and economic performance of the entire corporation, individuals, facilities, and business units is an integral part of performance measurement and evaluation systems. The corporate-level measurement system sets the organization up for brainstorming complementary sets of measures down through the organization. Managers should cascade measures down through the hierarchy.
This chapter explores the principles of sustainability and identifies important stakeholder relationships. It introduces a framework—the Corporate Sustainability Model—to guide managers in measuring ...and managing sustainability performance. This framework provides a tool for the implementation of corporate sustainability and the evaluation of corporate impacts. The evaluation of social, economic, and environmental impacts of organizational actions is necessary to make effective operational and capital investment decisions that positively impact organizational objectives and satisfy the objectives of multiple stakeholders. Transparent companies broadly identify their stakeholders. The governance principle is a commitment to manage all resources conscientiously and effectively, recognizing the fiduciary duty of corporate boards and managers to focus on the interests of all company stakeholders. Companies must encourage reciprocity in their relationships with suppliers, by treating them as valued long-term partners in enterprise, enlisting their talents, loyalty, and ideas.
