#SharedValue & Sustainability: In Conversation with Nestlé Waters North America
09 Wednesday Jul 2014
Posted in CSR, CSR reporting
Tag Archives: supply chain
#SustLiving: In Conversation with Unilever’s Chief Sustainability Officer
09 Wednesday Jul 2014
Posted in CSR reporting, CSRwire, ESG
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#sustliving, aman singh, Brand Management, Chief sustainability officer, consumption, CSR reporting, CSRwire, Disclosure & Transparency, Environment, ESG, gail klintworth, Leadership, Stakeholder Engagement, stakeholder engagement, supply chain, Supply chain management, Sustainability, triplepundit, Twitter, unilever
A conversation with Unilever’s Chief Sustainability Officer Gail Klintworth on the Sustainable Living Plan’s progress, challenges, what’s necessary to shift global & local consumer mindsets and more: Moderated in partnership with Triple Pundit’s editorial duo Jennifer Boynton and Nick Aster.
Connecting the Dots Between Consumers, Consumption & Sustainability: The External Face of Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan
09 Wednesday Jul 2014
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Brand Management, Business, cause markeing, cause marketing, CSRwire, employee engagement, Environment, ESG, marketing, packaging, palm oil, PepsiCo, roundtable on sustainable palm oil, sanitation, Stakeholder Engagement, supply chain, Supply chain management, Sustainability, sustainability, unilever, unilever sustainable living plan, waste, water
What role does a consumer-facing sustainability strategy play in an ambitious plan like the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan? That’s where I left off in my interview with Marketing Chief Keith Weed last week in our review of the ambitious Plan two years since launch.
From Desire to Habit: Unilever’s Five Levers for Change
He chose to respond by explaining a framework called the “Five Levers for Change” that his team developed to solve exactly this dilemma. An excerpt:
- Make it understood. Sometimes people don’t know about a behavior and why they should do it. This Lever raises awareness and encourages acceptance.
- Make it easy. People are likely to take action if it’s easy, but not if it requires extra effort. This Lever establishes convenience and confidence.
- Make it desirable. The new behavior needs to fit with how people like to think of themselves, and how they like others to think of them. This Lever is about self and society.
- Make it rewarding. New behaviors need to articulate the tangible benefits that people care about. This Lever demonstrates the proof and payoff.
- Make it a habit. Once consumers have changed, it is important to create a strategy to help hold the behavior in place over time. This Lever is about reinforcing and reminding.
“We need to continue to work with others to drive this change. If we achieve the Sustainable Living 
Plan, and it doesn’t change business at scale, ultimately that’s a fail. Unilever’s impact is huge but we’re still a drop in the ocean. We need a movement going for businesses to help address this,” he explained.
“We are already working with organizations like the World Toilet Organization, UNICEF and others on sanitation, for example, which is a very important issue for us. Two million children die every year from pneumonia or diarrhoea. In a world where there are more mobile phones than toilets or toothbrushes, our work ahead is sure cut out for us,” he added.
The fact is Unilever cannot do it alone. None of it.
And Weed and team have understood that since launching the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. While scale is a huge factor, organizations require individual and mass power to change consumer behavior and habits. And that is where the Five Levers for Change along with creative partnerships like the kind Weed referred to can help.
Making Sustainability Personal…
“I was in Brazil recently speaking to a lady in Sao Paulo about the environment and the city’s pollution. For her this meant dust from the nearby construction and the tainted flavor of her water supply. These were her immediate challenges – not deforestation or climate change. People view the world through the prism of my world – family, friends, and community. Our world is a step bigger: the city you live in, the supermarket, the local dump, etc. And the final level, ‘the world’ is the rainforest, the ice melting in the Arctic,” Weed continued.
His point: We need to connect “my world” with “the world” for consumers. “Right now we’re at level one. When I asked the lady what she thought would solve the issues, she suggested stopping the
littering because it would stop the drains from getting clogged and therefore avoid local floods. Level One,” he said.
What companies need to do is create a movement and work with people to drive change. A natural question then: Is Unilever working with other companies on its initiatives or primarily with nonprofits?
… and a Business Driver
One example Weed offered was palm oil.
“We purchase a lot of palm oil but it still makes only for three percent of the world’s palm oil. We started our journey by promising to source 100 percent of our palm oil sustainably by 2020. It’s a clear signal to the entire palm oil supply chain that that is the future we are working toward.”
“But this goal would be impossible to reach across the value chain without working with other purchasers of palm oil. So we work with other businesses and NGOs on the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil to do this collectively.”
In fact, Weed says Unilever managed to reach the 100 percent goal last year because of this collective effort. The next step: To make the supply chain of sustainable palm oil easier and connected by 2020. “Right now procuring sustainable palm oil means weaving through a very complex supply chain,” he added.
Another example: the work of the Consumer Goods Forum, which includes 650 members including manufacturers, competitors, retailers and NGOs, responsible for over $2.5 trillion in sales. And Weed is pretty positive about the goals and work of the Forum: “There are a lot of companies getting behind the need to address the negative impacts of deforestation, and momentum is starting to build,” he said.
While momentum is starting to build – with several companies announcing new initiatives and collaborations – the issue did bring us back full circle to where we started: how do we connect these overarching partnerships with the average consumer?
Subtle Messaging & Cause Marketing
And what role does cause marketing play in Unilever’s 2020 plan? Should we expect more nuanced advertising on the lines of the Dove campaign, for example? Or go full throttle like Patagonia’s 
“Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign?
It’s going to be subtler, says Weed. “For example, for our Tomato soup in Germany or our Ketchup in India, we talk about sourcing tomatoes sustainably. With our Lipton tea, we talk about sourcing all our tea and tea bags sustainably by 2020,” Weed explained.
“Consumers comprehend these messages differently though. When we talk about sourcing our tea sustainably, customers see the Rainforest Alliance logo as a sign of better quality and taste, not necessarily sustainability. With our Hellman’s mayonnaise we discuss cage-free eggs. Consumers perceive that as an indication of better food: animals are better looked after therefore they’re getting better food. However, it’s still early days,” he added.
Work Culture: Participating in Change
Early days also for Unilever’s employees, who are witnessing – and participating – in a significant shift culturally at a company that has left behind decades of “doing things one way” to a more complex ideology. How has the company’s culture evolved since 2010?
According to Weed, the greater purpose espoused by the Sustainable Living Plan has been significant for employees – kind of like Performance with Purpose over at competitor PepsiCo. “The notion that you can work for a business to earn money, build a career and also do it in a better way is significant. We need new ways of doing business in the future – our generation has stolen from our children’s
generation financially and environmentally – so we ‘re going out and saying we want our employees to innovate and encourage new ways of doing business,” Weed said.
In fact, the marketing chief, who also leads internal and external communications for Unilever, says despite the many crises facing our world today engagement levels among employees have gone up consistently every year.
A sentiment that resonated in an email I received this week from Kam Erik Fierstine, a project delivery manager in Unilever Engineering Services at the company’s Henderson, Nev.-based ice cream plant. Here’s what he wrote when I asked him about the culture at his company:
“The Sustainable Living Plan is something that is quite apparent to those of us that live in a desert-like area where we are very conscious of water usage. It has shown our employees that Unilever has the same values that we were raised with. Our employees would not put up with a leaky faucet at home, and now they have the backing of management to proactively fix these simple issues at work.”
“We all agree that we want to leave a healthy planet for future generations and we can help do that by conserving our resources. Our employees see the management team walking the talk and that empowers them to escalate issues and voice new ideas. They will now do small things to make a larger impact like pick up things from the floor or switch off conveyors or equipment when not in use.”
The Henderson, Nev.-based ice cream plant was recently honored by the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy for its sustainability practices.
“They see us taking on challenges in a positive way and that’s inspiring,” Weed wraps up.
Originally written for and published on CSRwire’s Commentary section Talkback on May 1, 2013.
Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan: The Challenges of Being Too Ambitious
09 Wednesday Jul 2014
Posted in CSR, CSR reporting, CSRwire
Tags
agriculture, Brand Management, Business, cause marketing, climate change, Consumerism, Corporate Governance, CSR, CSR reporting, CSRwire, disclosure, Disclosure & Transparency, dove, energy, environment, Environment, food, hygiene, Leadership, lifebouy, marketing, nutrition, paul polman, Social Enterprise, supply chain, Supply chain management, Sustainability, sustainability, Sustainability Report, unilever, unilever sustainable living plan, water
Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan was created and launched amid much fanfare in 2010. It was lauded for its ambitious goals, an exhaustive list of metrics and for its commitment to put sustainable and equitable growth at the heart of its business model.
This week, the consumer products company released its second progress report and it began with a stark statement from CEO Paul Polman:
The world continues to face big challenges. The lack of access of many to food, nutrition, basic hygiene and sanitation, clean drinking water or a decent job should be a concern to all of us. We firmly believe business has a big role to play in striving for more equitable and sustainable growth, but large-scale change will only come about if there is real collaboration between companies, governments and NGOs across all these areas.
Now, the report is impressive, exhaustive and filled with data. So to get beyond the flash, the avalanche of 
numbers and statistics, I reached out to Keith Weed, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer also responsible for the Sustainable Living Plan, to discuss not only the challenges of reaching some of the goals Unilever is striving for by 2020 but also the successes, the unforeseen road bumps and the transformation the company is undergoing culturally because of the Plan.
To get started, here are the three overarching goals Unilever began its Plan with:
- Help more than a billion people take action to improve their health and well-being;
- Source 100 percent of agricultural raw materials sustainably;
- Halve the environmental footprint of its products across the value chain.
Ambition: Sustainability in Perspective
“The report is indicative of what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to do things at scale. This is not a [standalone] CSR project in Africa but something that touches every single element across our value chain,” he began.
It takes a mindset shift to put Unilever’s plan in perspective. As Weed explained, “The idea that it isn’t just about the footprint of your facilities…we have to think all the way through the lifecycle of a product from consumer to facilities to sourcing to the impact of key productions. The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan guides our direction.”
Did his team realize the magnanimity of the goals they were setting? “We knew that we couldn’t achieve all of them but that if we set them like this, we would find solutions along the way by working with others,” he said, adding, “When you get interconnected, solutions and opportunities open up. That was the spirit we started with.”
And the results encapsulated on Unilever’s website and a 53-page PDF download, are in keeping with that spirit. “It’s not about mechanically ticking off the targets and goals. Our Sustainable Living Plan is a movement to get business to move toward socially and environmentally sustainable future,” he clarified.
The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan: Highlights
First of, he reminds me that from the outset, the Plan set out the sustainability goals to be achieved alongside the mission set out in 2009 to double the business. “We serve two billion people a day and another 2.5 billion are expected to be added to the world’s population by 2050. So our goal is to reduce our environmental footprint and increase our social impact while doubling our business.”
The good news: “We have started to drive sustainability into the core of our business and today, our sustainability efforts are helping to drive business growth.” One example is Unilever’s popular Lifebouy soap, which was rebranded in 2010 with a social purpose alongside:
[We went] from selling soap to encouraging people to wash their hands – and wash them correctly. And our efforts have resulted in double-digit growth over the last three years – and reaching millions with our Handwashing campaign. It’s proving the coherence of our strategy of combining social impact with business growth instead of just a sales goal,” Weed explained.
Other examples:
- Laundry cleaner: Unilever increased its market share by 10 percentage points since 2010 to over 25 percent, with its concentrated liquids, which according to Weed carry a much lower carbon footprint in production and use.
- Dry shampoos: A huge opportunity for the company, right now dry shampoos are mostly sold in the U.S. – where Unilever occupies a 75 percent market share. But as the company enters into more water-restricted countries, Weed predicted an accompanying increase in sales. The environmental benefit? Compared to heated water, dry shampoo reduces CO2 by 90 percent through lower water usage and less heating of water for the shower. An added benefit for developing countries: water conservation.
- Dove: The Self Esteem campaign continued to gain momentum with 62 percent of women who know of the campaign now recommending Dove to others. “The campaign started with the idea that we should think differently about how we portray beauty,” said Weed, “Today, it’s a global movement.”
- Oral hygiene: Unilever’s oral hygiene campaign helped its Signal brand grow by 22 percent in 2012. “People brush their teeth in the morning and evening, which requires more toothpaste, ergo a virtuous circle,” contextualized Weed.
A Twist on Purposeful Cause Marketing?
So cause marketing spelt and implemented differently. By attaching value and impact with its core products, Unilever is addressing a question all consumer products companies continue to struggle with: how do you change consumer behavior to scale a company’s sustainability efforts?
For Unilever, this has meant active pairing of product and messaging with a focus on impact and growth, yet ultimate success is far away.
As Weed explained:
This is a coherent strategy that works – we’re increasing our social impact while growing our business. However, while we’re making good progress, we’re still facing challenges across the value chain, whether it’s with sourcing, food production or disposal.
And each carries with it a nuanced set of challenges, a complex set of solutions and invariably a cobweb of marketing, brand positioning and partnerships.
We have reduced our CO2 emissions, non-hazardous waste to landfill has been reduced in 50 percent of our factory sites, we’re sourcing over a third of our agricultural raw material from sustainable sources, up from 14 percent when we started in 2010…yet we’re miles away from our 2020 target of 100 percent,” he offered.
Scaling Behavior: Easier Ideated than Done
Of course, a key ingredient in Unilever’s Plan is the ability to scale. For the world’s largest tea 
producer, these achievements might mean small metrics today but when scaled are attribution to an entire value chain at work on technological improvements, environmental studies, and more. However, the opportunity is also a challenge:
“The sheer scale of our commitments is tremendous. For example, we want to be able to educate a billion people by 2020 on washing their hands correctly. That’s a lot of people – despite the progress we’ve already made since 2010 –119 million people reached since 2010, of whom 71 million were reached in 2012. Scale has been more challenging than we originally thought,” Weed explained.
Another challenge: encouraging people to adopt new behaviors.
Consumer Behavior: The Toughest Challenge Yet?
“When someone tells you something about hygiene, it’s easy to do it for a couple of days and then switch back to your old habits. Habits are hard to change and we’re seeing this come up in almost every initiative,” he said.
Using the example of laundry, he exemplified:
The biggest use of domestic water across households worldwide is for laundry. Only a few hundred million in North America and Europe use machines. The other billions wash their clothes by hand and usually use four buckets of water to do so: wash in one, rinse in three. Our challenge is to reduce that rinsing from three buckets to one. So we came up with a product that kills the foam – wash in one bucket and rinse in one bucket. Water used is instantly cut to half. And we expected the product to be a runaway success.
The team found that embedding that behavior change of using one bucket instead of three was instrumentally 
tough. Even in water scarce markets where people have to walk long distances for water. “Rinsing is hard work. I thought this would be a rapid victory but we found that it takes time to change habits and we ended up reaching only 29 million households, much lower than anticipated,” he recalled.
When your footprint encompasses billions of culturally diverse populations with very different social and environmental settings, scale becomes an ever-moving target.
Perhaps Weed puts it best again: “If you went to work in a Boeing 747, it wouldn’t make a difference to the planet. If half the planet started doing that, it would make a huge difference. The power of individuals is when you scale them together.”
Its hard work.
And Unilever’s 2012 Progress Report while celebrating the company’s achievements does not undercut the challenges ahead. “We’re breaking new ground every day. We’re showing results. But there are several pieces we are yet to crack,” said Weed.
Originally written for and published on CSRwire’s Commentary section Talkback on April 24, 2013.
Shared Success at Verizon: No Silver Bullet for Sustainability, Say CSR & Sustainability Chiefs
09 Wednesday Jul 2014
Posted in CSR, CSR reporting, CSRwire, ESG
Tags
Business, carbon, community, Consumerism, CSR, CSR reporting, CSRwire, Disclosure & Transparency, energy, environment, Environment, ESG, ghg, iirc, integrated reporting, Philanthropy, recycling, shared value, supplier responsibility, supply chain, Sustainability, sustainability, technology, verizon
Verizon recently released its second Integrated Report, combining the company’s financial and non-financial data and metrics into one clean look at its overall performance.
While the technology giant has been publishing its environmental, social and governance results for almost a decade, integration with the firm’s financial performance is relatively new. And Verizon saw several significant changes in 2012 to its approach to sustainability and shared value – which Verizon calls “shared success” – including a reformat of its Foundation’s model.
In a recent webinar, I had the opportunity to discuss the report, Verizon’s goals, challenges and a whole host of issues with Verizon’s CSR and sustainability chiefs Kathy Brown and Jim Gowen, along with an engaged audience.
Here are excerpts – and a link to the webinar recording.
Whether you’re eager to learn more about Verizon’s approach to sustainability or what the future holds for integrated reporting and sustainability standards, the webinar will provide you with exemplary context, insights into one company’s efforts to reduce its impact, and how a multinational must pick a strategy that is holistic, focused and measurable.
Shared Success:
Kathy Brown: “When Lowell McAdam became our CEO a year and a half ago, he brought with him a set of principles by which he inspired us to live. It is a value-based approach to our work in the market. We deliver outstanding communication and technology for our communities and country. And we are to share our success with the community. While Michael Porter gets a deep bow for creating Shared Value, these pillars – solutions, service and sustainability – state our mission and our version of shared success.”
“We want to achieve measurable social impact. We can do a number of things at one time because our technology is powerful enough for us to find a way to do well for our shareowners and stakeholders, communities and countries in tackling the world’s problems…Specifically, we are focusing on how technology can bring transformational change in education, healthcare and energy management. The platform is our fiber network [and] our wireless network. Through these [networks] we are able to reach millions of users and applications that can literally change the world.”
Setting Aggressive Targets:
Jim Gowen: “Our sustainability program includes aggressive targets, follow-up and our people [who] really do make the difference. In September 2009, when we created the Office of Sustainability, one of the challenges was how were we going to make an impact on a business that [in many areas] is growing exponentially. So we set the Carbon Intensity Metric as the way to grow most efficiently. We set an objective by 2020 to improve our carbon efficiency by 50 percent. Since 2009, we have driven our carbon efficiency 37 percent.”
“But as I often tell my employees, that was the easy part. Now comes the tougher part. We’ve taken care of all the low hanging fruit. How do you keep that momentum going? For example, e-waste is one of our biggest impacts. We’ve set a goal of collecting more than 2 million pounds of e-waste by 2015. That’s no small feat.
We’re doing that internally as well as externally with our Recycling Rallies.In the last two years, we’ve held 36 of these [across the country]. That objective is very important to Verizon and our customers.”
Environmental Footprint: Setting the Stage
Jim: “Our environmental footprint is quite large. Supporting hundreds of millions of customers takes a lot of work. We operate 42,000 cell towers, 31,000 facilities globally, and [a] 38,000 private fleet of trucks and vans, etc. We had to concentrate on our own resources and see how to become sustainable.”
“We focus on four key areas: making our networks more efficient; expand[ing] our renewable sources of energy; run[ning] our fleets more efficiently; and reduc[ing] the lifecycle cost of ownership of how we operate. From purchasing to logistics and sustainability – they all match up nicely.”
Highlights from 2012: From Packaging to the “Magic Bus”
Jim: “How do we make our packaging more environmentally-friendly? How do we handle the end of life for that? We asked our OEMs to make their equipment more energy efficient – 30 percent more than legacy equipment. Then we looked at our consumer stores: 131 stores have been LEED certified so far with the U.S. Green Building council, and a pilot is underway to increase that number across our markets.”
“We recently launched our Magic Bus program. The idea was generated by one of our line managers in New York who suggested that, instead of driving our own vans around very congested areas of New York, why couldn’t we drop off our employees with their equipment to provide service to our customers?”
“From that originated a three-month pilot where we used vans that could host eight to 10 technicians with their equipment and inventory on board, and we started driving them around areas of Manhattan. We would pick [up] and drop them [off] and provide service to them throughout the day when they needed it. The benefit was significant – for our customers and our employees. We’ve now started 25 of those Magic Buses in New York and removed 250 of our vans off the roads of New York City.”
No Silver Bullet for Sustainability
Jim: “There is no silver bullet and no magic button. It’s going to take a lot of trial and error and a lot of commitment. While we think and look at our lifecycle approach, we’re still in our immaturity stage, and the 
opportunities ahead of us are so powerful that we can have a significant impact”
From Sustainability to Integrated:
Kathy: “Our Shared Success Council is made up of senior executives across the company – including marketing officers, product managers, general counsel, etc. – who are clearing the strategy for growth and in the process, sharing the idea of Shared Success. The report recognizes these efforts.”
“The process involves a lot of collaboration between executives and the folks on the ground. We focus a lot on our data, and we don’t see this journey as involving any one data point. It’s a journey of doing business, and the report reflects that. We’ve shown enormous efforts and growth, and the information is easy to read and use for our stakeholders across the board.”
Jim: “The report also helps us tell our story concisely. Our customers are asking, as are our investors. They are asking how we’re measuring ourselves? What are our goals – people want to invest in sustainable companies – and how are we incrementally achieving those?”
Technology and Health Care: Powerful Answers
Kathy: “We need to work on reducing costs on factory delivery systems and improv[ing] patient outcomes. Think about what you have on your iPad or phone today. We believe we can, in a more systematic way, think of security and identity issues for patients, fast connections, and [the] ability for patients and doctors to talk to each other in a secure environment through our technology, etc. We call this Powerful Answers.”
Who’s Reading the Report?
Kathy: “Internally, the audience is our employees who can have sense of our values as a company. Externally, people want to do business with companies with a heart but also have the technology and wherewithal to solve their problems. Beyond individuals, this includes communities [and] governments who take on big ideas about congestion, smarter cars, health care, etc. This report does a good job [of] painting the bigger picture for this audience.”
Jim: “[The] hip market that will change the world [is] using our technology, and this report helps them see first-hand the choices they have. Sustainability at Verizon is driven by our employees and our communities, not just one executive.”
Supplier Responsibility:
Jim: “Over the last couple of years, we have queried our top 200 suppliers, which represent 80 percent of our total spend, to ask them how they manage their CO2 and greenhouse gas impact. What goes into the products they supply to Verizon? And we were very surprised at the answers we got back and tallied them up and graded them.”
“Whether they’re early adopters or much more mature with their sustainability strategies, we’ve set ourselves a 2015 goal: to operate with over 40 percent of our suppliers that have targets and greenhouse gas emission goals. That impact is significant, and we’ve already seen that through the innovation they’re bringing to us about how they can become more sustainable and continue working with us.”
Evaluating Success:
Kathy: “We get all sorts of consumer indicators of how we’re doing in our community. We know how they use our network, what they think of it, etc. Once we start asking consumers how we’re doing in terms of impact, the responses have been very good. But it has been a challenge to do that in a broad way across many segments.”
For more insights from Verizon, listen to the webcast.
Originally written for and published on CSRwire’s Commentary section Talkback on April 18, 2013.
Practicing CSR: Edelman’s 2012 Corporate Citizenship Report Reveals Tough Love
08 Tuesday Jul 2014
Posted in CSR, CSR reporting, CSRwire
Tags
Brand Management, Business, CSR, CSR report, CSR reporting, CSRwire, disclosure, diversity, Edelman, human rights, iirc, john edelman, Leadership, marketing, PR, pro bono, supply chain, Sustainability, transparency, voluntary disclosure, volunteerism, work culture
When a PR and marketing firm publishes a corporate citizenship report, there’s a tendency to view the results – and the commitments – with a pinch of salt. After all, they’re traditional masters of spin. Right?
Wrong, says John Edelman, the namesake PR agency’s managing director for global engagement and corporate responsibility. Here’s how Edelman’s press release describes the firm’s commitment to corporate citizenship:
“Some call it corporate social responsibility. Others call it sustainability. For Edelman, global citizenship resonates most as a term describing the larger responsibility business has to society. The firm recognizes its place in the world as global citizens, local offices and individuals.”
“We’re incredibly pleased [that] we were able to provide over $5 million in cash, non-cash (volunteerism) and in-kind giving in FY12 to the communities in which we operate. Giving back has always been a big part of our agency’s heritage and helping our communities is just one of the ways in which we can be responsible global citizens,” John added in a recent conversation over email.
So what does the report detail beyond the private firm’s green commitments and philanthropic donations?
Human Rights & Supply Chain
Reminding me that citizenship at Edelman has only been a global function for two years, John pointed to two major accomplishments. 
“The introduction of our human rights policy and our supplier code of conduct. When I started in this role, we began to see more and more client requests and requests for proposals (RFPs) in regard to our citizenship policies. Our development of these two policies in FY12 is directly related to stakeholder expectations of Edelman as a global company,” he wrote.
The firm also joined the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange (Sedex), a web-based platform and registry where companies report on CSR-related initiatives around business and labor practices, health and safety and the environment.
For the past two years, the firm has used the GRI framework as a baseline for its CSR reporting. In 2011, the firm also became “one of 80 companies to join the International Integrated Reporting (IIRC) pilot program…as part of our commitment, our report reflects elements of the Integrated Reporting framework, such as identifying our capitals and transforming that capital to value.”
Challenges of Setting CSR Goals…
I have often said/written that the challenge of contextualizing what corporate social responsibility means for the service-based industries is uniquely harder than the consumer products sector. Not that the pressure is any less, as evidenced by the increasing numbers of CSR reports publishing in the last two years, but I do believe that B2B firms must dig deeper to identify – and fulfill – their responsibility to society, employees and the environment.
What’s been a unique CSR challenge for a firm that relies on its talent and has an immense global presence?
According to John, “the environmental initiatives and goals have been the most challenging.” He explained:
“The biggest contributor to our carbon footprint is business travel, which accounts for 73 percent of our emissions. Business travel for client-facing projects is a key part of what we do every day. Other industries and companies have more control over Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions and can achieve reductions through direct actions. Given that we need to travel to service our clients, it’s harder for us to control our Scope 3 emissions. While we understand this challenge, we still need to work towards reducing our GHG emissions.”
“To that end, we are working individually with each hub office on setting a greenhouse gas reduction target and implementing practices such as increasing usage of video-conference facilities and purchasing 50 percent recycled paper.”
And it’s not just setting the goal that’s been hard.
…And Implementing CSR Programs
Implementing new programs across the firm’s markets has been a challenge as well, he said. “We 
want to be a guiding force without being too prescriptive. We want to empower our employees around the world to implement and take part in citizenship initiatives with the understanding that they need to balance these with their regular workload,” he added.
John points out the inherent paradox that organizations like Edelman must tackle: how do you compel employees to volunteer and donate their time, money and skills while expecting them to manage a full workload and often, as is common in the PR world, 60-80 hour work weeks?
Ultimately it comes down to the committed few, driven by their passion and subjective understanding of their society and environment.
Disclosure: Led by Demand for Transparency
Since inception, Edelman has been a proudly private company. So why bother reporting on its non-financial goals? Especially when their service/product is often perceived in the market as spin?
It all comes down to being transparent, says the veteran marketing executive.
“Transparency has never been more important and we strongly believe that whether you’re a private or public company, you must be accountable for everything you do. Being transparent is part of how we operate and it’s necessary for us to report on the progress and challenges of our citizenship journey.”
As an example he pointed me to a section of the report, which highlights that the firm’s carbon footprint at “15,518 metric tons CO2e [had] actually increased since our last footprint period.” “We provide explanations for that increase, such as improved data-capture practices and control data quality, particularly on business air travel,” he said.
CSR: Business Opportunity?
Which leads to another question: As a PR agency, what was the motivation behind launching the Business + Social Purpose division – led by the legendary Carol Cone – beyond the obvious business opportunity with companies evolving from cause marketing initiatives into more robust CSR strategies?
“It was clear that we wanted to ‘walk the talk.’ Working with clients on sustainability and citizenship is certainly a business opportunity, but beyond that, we needed to evolve and integrate our own practices. This is what we tell our clients: sustainability and citizenship should be integrated into the overall business,” he said.
Has the client-driven practice impacted cultural behavior and the firm’s organizational hierarchy?
“We have partnered with our Business + Social Purpose (B+SP) team members since we established Global Citizenship as a functional department. This partnership was important because citizenship was a new function, and we wanted to access the expertise of our people to evolve our own Global Citizenship capability.”
“As an example, we involved our B+SP team in our materiality analysis to prioritize our FY12 report topics. Through this analysis, we added an entire section on engaging with our clients, as a result of the dialogue with our B+SP members.”
Walking the talk? That at least is the objective, he said.
“We talk about the importance of the inside matching the outside, and the idea that your employees are your best ambassadors. Citizenship is an integrated part of our overall corporate strategy and having a unified message and integrated approach to it is imperative for effective impacts on our business and society, rather than having a siloed approach where citizenship sits on the periphery of the company’s strategy and operations.”
CSR Reporting: The Ultimate Reward
The ultimate reward of having a CSR strategy is when you can use the reporting function as a reflection on your organizational practices and improve them incrementally. As Edelman helps other organizations weave their way through and inculcate CSR into business strategy, it is important that the firm use the same philosophy internally.
“In the long-term, citizenship needs to be further integrated into our overall management systems. We 
have been making incremental progress year to year….During year one, we established a foundation; during year two, we have established some goals. In year three, we hope to develop metrics around CSR performance and eventually, we hope to create a citizenship scorecard that can be integrated into our management systems,” informed John.
How does the firm measure the impact it is driving with its clients?
“We believe it is important to measure impact of citizenship by looking at internal and external measurements. In addition to contributions to the bottom line, such as money saved by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and hours and value of volunteerism, it is important to measure employee engagement, such as employee recruitment and retention.”
“Now that we have established goals in some of these areas, we will next develop metrics to assess employee engagement and impact. In an effort to drive a deeper level of employee engagement, we created the Community Investment Grant program, which provides any full-time employee around the network with the opportunity to apply for funding to support a nonprofit organization where they volunteer or serve on the board.”
And let’s not forget the external piece, he reminded me.
“Any citizenship initiative must be tied to producing public engagement behavior outcomes which are at the core of Edelman’s business strategy such as building deeper communities, building trust, adding commercial value, and changing behavior.”
Holistic CSR goals, got it.
Originally written for and published on CSRwire’s Commentary section Talkback on September 21, 2012.
Changing Business from the Inside Out: How to Pursue a Career in CSR and Sustainability
07 Monday Jul 2014
Posted in CSR
Tags
amd, Apple, Business Ethics, Career advice, career advice, career in sustainability, careers, CSR, CSR jobs, epa, gap, intel, Job search, Jobs in CSR, jobs in CSR, Leadership, Net Impact, Nike, Social Entrepreneurship, social media, supply chain, Sustainability, sustainability jobs, tim mohin, Work culture
What does one do to get a job in the field of corporate social responsibility? And moreover, how do you excel at something so nebulous and undefined?
I’ve spent the last eight years trying to decode these issues and report about what companies are doing to not only embrace the essential message underlining CSR but also integrate a sense of responsibility within their culture. I interviewed practitioners, researched numerous CSR reports, and conducted multiple surveys on the issue to identify what exactly translates into a “CSR career” or “CSR job”.
While feedback, comments and social media indicated that my reporting was helping raise awareness and compelling professionals to think about their choices, I realized that what we needed was a reference guide, an encyclopedia of sorts, a How-To of practical tips from executives who are embedded in large corporations and have experience influencing change, leading behavior change and staying patient when the profits vs. CSR debate rears its head.
Turns out, Changing Business from the Inside Out: A Treehugger’s Guide to Working in Corporations is the handbook I was looking for.
Written by Tim Mohin, Director of Corporate Responsibility at AMD, the book offers critical pieces of advice and practical tips for current and aspiring professionals who believe they can make a difference through their careers.
And that is the segment that Mohin wants to target. He told me a couple of years ago that he wanted to write a book aimed at people who “want to change the world through business.” Then, jobs were few and we were struggling as an economy. Occupy Wall Street was yet to take shape. And corporations were focused on surviving a deep recession not worrying about their social responsibility quotient.
But as we know today, this recession has not only furthered the divide between consumers, employees and corporations on a whole host of social, environmental and economic issues, but also pointed the finger to each and every one of us. Where does the blame lie? How did we get here?
In this vacuum of trust in the marketplace, Mohin’s book is a much-needed antidote for professionals and students who want to restore our economy, while protecting the environment and benefitting society, but lack the practical advice.
Changing Business from the Inside Out: A Treehugger’s Guide to Working in Corporations
We sat down for a heart to heart about the book, his tips, his journey at AMD and much more.
“The book is meant for people who want to use their careers to change the world. I want to enable the next generation to create the change they want to see happen,” he began. For Mohin, a vocal co-supporter of student-led organization Net Impact whose conferences attract thousands of job seekers, students and professionals each year, the field isn’t as “rosy as it looks.” [Note: Net Impact members get a discount!]
“Increasingly I felt that people who wanted to have a meaningful career didn’t understand what the field involves. There are certain sets of skills that need to be acquired,” he added.
The CSR field is growing. And companies are starting to respond to what was primarily a movement driven by activists, students and academia, by creating CSR departments and integrating corporate citizenship into business strategy.
Each of these points of integration, implementation and planning however, requires specific skill sets. And as more job opportunities emerge, Mohin believes it is up to the incumbents to educate and mentor an “army of professionals who can work in CSR and sustainability.”
Should Companies Create CSR Departments?
He likened the evolution of CSR to the quality movement in the 1980s when every company responded by starting a quality department. “Today, large companies realize that they must have someone in charge of CSR. It’s not a new department per se but builds upon the community, public affairs or environmental teams and adds on other parts of corporate citizenship,” he said.
Now, the question of having CSR departments has always triggered opposing reactions among professionals, executives and job seekers. Should CSR be a separate department? Or an integrated element of everyone’s job description? Or a C-suite led initiative?
For Mohin there is no debate, contrary to what several of his peers in corporate America have told me.
“I do think we need a department: it should be senior, small and strategic. Fundamentally, what that department is doing is setting direction, vision and key performance indicators [KPIs]. But the real work is being done by traditional line management functions.”
“For example, most companies need to have a CR council and together we work through top-level goals to meet our vision, execution and measurement. When you look at CSR, it’s too broad for any one manager to manage. By nature, it’s a cross cutting service group that works with others to get the job done,” he emphasized.
“But if there is no one in charge, it gets lost and nothing gets done.”
Preparing for a Career in CSR
But many of the skills, programs and business processes are transferable outside the CSR function, as I discover every time I interviewed a CSR executive and analyze their career’s trajectory. Mohin concurs. “Remember that most CSR functions simply report the news,” he told me, adding, “The news, though, is created in line management and mainstream corporate roles like procurement, HR, legal, and supply chain.”
Mohin’s advice hits home. For years, I have advised students and professionals that to forge a career in CSR, they must first develop a sector expertise, a specific skill set and then decide which element of CSR they can fit into. Using “I want to work in CSR” is never a good starting point.
For the author, it comes down to “Skills, Processes and Programs.”
“In chapter one, I identify how CSR has evolved at companies and how organizational structure affects the practice. Use this to figure out where you fit. Then turn to chapter two, where I list out the skills necessary for a successful career in CSR,” he said.
Once you’ve identified where you fit, chapter three and four offer a crash course in CSR strategy and how to respond to emerging issues. The rest of the book focuses on the many different programs under the umbrella of CSR. “So pick the one that applies to your skills and passion and then understand how to excel in that particular field,” he explained.
Apple, Gap & Nike: Supply Chain Crucial Area for CSR Jobseekers
For example, supply chain is an area that Mohin has devoted part of his career to while at Apple. But his emphasis – two long chapters – on the area of supply chain has more to it than passion or experience. “For me, this area is the No. 1 growth area in corporate responsibility. When you see the trend starting back a few years ago with Nike and Gap’s supply chain woes, and now Apple in the electronics industry, the critical importance of supplier responsibility becomes clear,” he said.
“Now it’s becoming embedded in companies more so than ever before because of outsourcing. Companies have found outsourcing to be cheaper and strategically more efficient for them. But accompanying that, we need a supplier responsibility program, therefore the growing demand for professionals who can understand all the nuances of both supply chain and social responsibility,” he said.
Another important reason that there are jobs in this area: Supplier responsibility is a big, complicated task. “One that requires quite a large team of skilled professionals. At Apple, it started with just me and I quickly hired a small ream but if you compare to Gap, I believe they have about 70 people in labor standards. Disney has even more,” he said, adding, “Now, imagine the scope and scale of managing all social responsibility for suppliers of all the Fortune 500 companies.”
Running a Data-Driven Program: Leading Through Influence
In order to drive a CSR program, however, whether it is supplier responsibility or environmental impact, every project requires a robust method set in place for the collection and analysis of relevant data that can feed strategy and project the achievability of goals.
And that’s where Mohin places his bets for success.
A common thread at every company he has worked for, including Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and Apple, is managing data-driven programs. The ability to set quantifiable goals and measure progress has been a crucial aspect of his career in corporate responsibility. “[Data] has been a hallmark of my career,” he said.
So much so that Mohin has devoted an entire chapter on the need for establishing meaningful goals and knowing what to measure. In the book – chapter four – he uses the examples of Intel, Coca-Cola and Starbucks to exemplify his emphasis. In our conversation, he referred to lessons from his tenure at Intel.
“When I was the environmental manager at Intel, the first thing I did was establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) so that we could start measuring our global environmental performance and forecasting the future. As soon as we figured it out, senior management wanted to know. And because we were focused on the data, we were quickly able to identify the process changes and reductions that decreased our emissions even while production was increasing,” he recalled.
His advice?
“[You] need to be able to understand what’s important for your business and your stakeholders and how you can quantify progress in these areas to be successful. These metrics together become a dashboard seen by senior management regularly so they track the success measures and identify areas to improve. Running your program this way ensures that you will get the engagement and buy-in needed for a successful corporate responsibility strategy,” he said.
“Once you start to measure what’s important to your business and your stakeholders, you start to see alignment.”
Finally, I asked him to list the top skills he believes anyone aspiring to excel in CSR and sustainability must have. [Buy the Book]
In Mohin’s words, you must be:
1. A Lifelong Learner
“In corporate responsibility, you have to be flexible and curious. You’re often working in areas that are not your strong suit but if you’re open to new experiences and unafraid to be the dumbest kid in the class, this field is for you. Not everyone has that kind of personality. You have to be comfortable in your skin. And, it helps to have a thick skin.”
2. Able to Lead & Influence Without Being the Decision Maker
“You must be able to lead and influence when you’re not making all the decisions leading up to the end goal. You must be able to understand the system well – such as identifying and building relationships with those who have the budget and the authority to get things done – and be able to work with them and influence across a broad spectrum of people and groups to work toward a common goal.”
3. Able to Communicate Well
“It is one thing to know your business and another to describe it to someone else who may not know your business as well. It’s like talking to your mother about CSR. To be able to do this job, you have to be a good communicator. It’s a critical skill in many fields but absolutely essential in CSR. CSR leaders are like the ‘de-coder ring’ in many companies because they have to understand the inner workings of many business groups and explain it to others.”
4. Social Media Savvy
“The world of communications has changed in fundamental ways and the future will be very different too. We need to stay on top of were communication is headed – and right now, that’s social media.”
“What I learned from social media is that I get more out of it than I put in. I learn something new every day through social media. Communication is happening in real-time with real content and being social media savvy is an essential element to be effective in many fields.”
5. Able to Understand the Importance of Stakeholder Relations
“Remember that the field of CSR is new, it’s evolving. But also remember that social media and hyper transparency are becoming the new normal, which makes stakeholder engagement not just a priority, but essential.”
“The world is watching and CSR is about our behavior as a company. If you’re not asking people ‘how you are doing?’ and ‘how you can get better?’ then you’re flying blind.”
Originally written for and published on CSRwire’s Commentary section Talkback on August 16, 2012.
Corporate Social Responsibility at Target: Behind the Red Bullseye
07 Monday Jul 2014
Posted in CSR, CSR reporting, CSRwire, ESG
Tags
Business, Consumerism, Corporate Governance, CSR, CSR reporting, CSRwire, education, energy efficiency, environment, ESG, ESG goals, packaging, Stakeholder Engagement, supply chain, Sustainability, sustainability, sustainable design, target, transparency, water reduction goals
Target released four new corporate responsibility goals in 2011:
- Increase sustainable seafood selection
- Improve owned-brand packaging sustainability
- Increase diabetes HbA1c testing compliance
- Increase reading proficiency
Now, Target’s 2011 CSR Report offers pages of graphs measuring the Minneapolis-based retailer’s progress against these goals. While the graphs look promising and underscore the challenges of operating in a competitive market with multiple layers of stakeholders, I wanted to understand the context behind these goals and what the execution would look like.
I sat down with Tim Baer, Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary with Target, for a conversation about the goals and how his team plans to demystify complicated supply chains and motivate its employees and customers toward healthy and sustainable choices.
Aman Singh: While the PDF of goals and progress gave me a sense of exactly that, i.e., progress, it didn’t give me a sense of Target’s mission/values. Can you elaborate?
Tim Baer: At Target, we’re committed to positively impacting the lives of our guests and team members. Since 1946, our legacy of giving and service has been reflected in a commitment that today totals more than $3 million a week to our communities.
And at the end of the day, by continuing to serve our team members and communities, we ensure our future success. As a result of our giving model, we benefit from being a workplace and shopping destination of choice for our team members and guests. Not only do our guests value our commitment to communities and giving, but our team members do as well.
To bring our vision of strong, healthy and safe communities to life — which we can’t do alone — we work with community, business and civic partners who inform and share in our approach. We know we can make a meaningful impact, so we set goals to guide our work in three focus areas — helping to put more U.S. children on the path to graduation, reducing our impact on the environment and helping Target team members live healthy, balanced lives.
Why is education such a big goal for Target?
Education, specifically K-3 literacy, is important to Target for three primary reasons. First, we believe that every child deserves the opportunity to reach his or her full potential. And, we’re compelled to do our part to address the education challenge in America, putting more kids on the path to high school graduation.
Second, based on guest surveys, we know that our guests care about education more than any other social issue, and we’re committed to giving to communities in a way that positively impacts our guests and their families.
Third, we know that reading proficiently by the end of third grade is a significant milestone on the path to graduation. This is the time when a child transitions from learning to read, to reading to learn. A child who cannot read proficiently by the end of third grade is four times more likely to drop out of high school when compared with a child who can.
Ultimately, education is critically important to the success of our children and our economy. By supporting education, we are investing in developing an educated workforce that is prepared for today’s and tomorrow’s challenging work environment. At Target, our team is our competitive advantage, and preparing future team members with a quality education today makes good business sense.
Your data shows that you were not able to achieve your water reduction goals? Can you give us a sense of the challenges and where improvements need to be made?
To recap the report, Target used 3.45 billion gallons of water, representing a 0.3 percent reduction in water use per square foot from our 2009 baseline. Although our absolute water use exceeded our initial baseline, we also increased our total real estate square footage, which led to a decrease in water use per square foot.
The most significant challenges we faced in 2011 were drought-like conditions in some of our mature markets like Texas, Minnesota and Iowa, where we have a relatively high concentration of stores requiring increased irrigation. This negative impact was modestly softened by our rollout of several water-saving initiatives, which we estimate will contribute a reduction of 1.4 percent annually starting this year.
A few examples of our water-saving initiatives include:
- Expanded installation of smart irrigation controllers that irrigate based on real-time local weather data in lieu of set times,
- Use of ultra-low flow urinals and water closets, and
- Elimination of continuously running dipper wells for ice cream and coffee stations at Target Café and Starbucks locations in our stores.
We’re also in the process of installing real-time water submeters in a number of stores to pinpoint the quantity of water a typical store uses for various operations. This will help improve our evaluation of water-saving opportunities moving forward.
You have a goal of reducing owned-brand product packaging for at least 50 product designs by 2016. Is that aggressive enough?
While we’ve targeted 50 packaging designs, these changes will be implemented for a much larger number of items that use the same packaging.
We know environmental stewardship is important to Target guests, and our sustainable packaging designs will let them know that Target’s commitment to reducing our environmental impact begins before our products hit shelves.
Over the next five years, Target will be developing sustainable packaging designs that yield at least a 10 percent improvement in one of several attributes of our existing owned-brand packaging. We’ll do this in several ways, including reducing overall packaging, using more recycled or renewable content, and reducing product waste. We’ll also look to use more recyclable materials in our packaging, 
counting these improvements toward our goal only if the updated packaging is 100 percent recyclable.
The goals indicated regarding packaging are limited to your owned-brand products. Are there any plans to push your suppliers and CPG partners into more responsible, transparent and environmentally friendly actions?
We believe in leading by example and hope that by creating more sustainable packaging for our owned brands, we can inspire our suppliers, CPG partners and peers to implement more sustainable packages in their own products.
The report indicates strong progress toward empowering employees to be more health-conscious. Can you discuss some of the challenges behind the numbers?
For us, 2011 was a year of learning in regards to team member wellbeing.
We recognized goals specific to preventive service utilization rates were difficult to measure consistently and accurately, so we adopted HEDIS [National Committee for Quality Assurance’s Health Effectiveness Data and Information Set] measures. By doing so, we can support our wellbeing efforts by comparing our utilization rates to those of other employers or healthcare entities like medical groups or health plans.
The size and geographic distribution of the Target team member population reaches across 49 states, 1,700 stores, 37 distribution centers and nine domestic headquarters locations. We employ more than 365,000 team members and know they have varying degrees of health engagement, variable disease prevalence and differing perspectives on healthcare services. This is an opportunity for us to develop tailored programs that address these differences, more effectively reaching every team member, regardless of where and how they live and work.
Can you summarize the key highlights of the report?
All of Target’s corporate responsibility objectives ladder up to our larger goal of creating a brighter future for our team members, our communities and the world we live in. Target is here for good. Through all of these initiatives, we’re committed to positively impacting the lives of our guests and team members.
Additionally, Target’s 2011 Corporate Responsibility Report is the most transparent corporate responsibility report we’ve ever released. It represents the first time Target declared a GRI Application Level and obtained a GRI Application Level Check. [For more information, Target’s GRI Application Level/Check Statement from GRI were posted on www.Target.com/hereforgood on July 13, 2012.]
Why bother reporting on this set of internal goals? How do you measure the “success” of your CSR report?
Our commitment to our guest extends far beyond our stores, and we believe truly great service includes supporting the communities where we live and work. In business, Target collaborates and innovates to drive results. Key to that collaboration is transparency when it comes to measuring and reporting progress toward goals, allowing us to grow as a company.
Originally written for and published on CSRwire’s Commentary section Talkback on August 6, 2012.
Social Responsibility, Beer & Aliens: Journey to Becoming the Best Beer Company in a Better World
07 Monday Jul 2014
Tags
ab inbev, Anheuser Busch, Brand Management, Business, carlos brio, carol clark, community, community development, CSR, CSR report, CSRwire, environment, ESG, executive compensation, Social Impact, Social Responsibility, Stakeholder Engagement, supply chain, Sustainability, sustainability, water conservation
I caught up with Carol Clark, Global VP for Beer and Better World, to drill deeper into Anheuser-Busch InBev’s latest CSR report. Key highlights:
The report is titled Connecting for a Better World. AB InBev makes beer. What’s the connection?
At AB InBev, our dream is to be the Best Beer Company in a Better World. We believe that taking consistent, active measures in our core areas of social responsibility means constantly connecting our business with our stakeholders, especially in the communities where we live and work.
It takes a team effort to address these issues. Through our work to promote responsible drinking, reduce our impact on the environment and support our communities, we work with others who share our collective goal of making a difference.
There’s a quote in the report from Carlos Brito saying “We’re not aliens.” Can you offer some context?
When Carlos Brito said, “We are not aliens …” he was responding to a question at the Business for Social Responsibility Conference last fall about why AB InBev actively promotes responsible drinking.
AB InBev today has over 116,000 employees operating globally. We live on this planet and share the same concerns as our friends and neighbors. Many of us are parents and understand how important it is to talk with our children to help prevent underage drinking.
Similarly, we don’t want to be on the road with drunk drivers, and we’re committed to supporting prevention efforts such as encouraging the use of designated drivers. We’re committed to addressing these issues not only from a business perspective, but also from a personal perspective.
What is the ROI in producing a comprehensive CSR report such as this one? Media mentions? Retention? Rankings? 
Publishing our CSR report keeps us focused and accountable to our stakeholders and ourselves. The scrutiny that this annual process brings gives us an updated perspective to help us further drive our performance, engage our employees and very importantly, thank them for their great work over the past year.
From an external perspective, we’re satisfying the requests from varied stakeholders for transparency on our social responsibility efforts.
The report is over 80 pages. Who is your primary target audience? And, who would you want to target?
We have a lot of good things to talk about! We use the report to share our progress with diverse audiences – from community stakeholders to investors, to media, to government officials – around the world.
Alex Prud’homme author of The Ripple Effect recently said that “Water is the headlining story of our century.” Are you focusing on sustaining your business by reducing water use, R&D on water replenishment or identifying alternative products altogether?
Water is our primary environmental focus and we aim to reach a water usage rate of 3.5 hectoliters of water for each hectoliter of production by the end of 2012.
We tackle the issue of responsible water use by doing more to conserve both in our operations and in the communities where our breweries are located. Progress requires operational changes and continually applying the most updated technical innovations. It means going further with supply chain and community partners to help conserve water outside our walls. But it also requires reinforcing a mindset that doesn’t take water for granted.
[Anheuser-Busch InBev’s 2011 Global Citizenship Report]
It can be argued that 8.2% reduction in water usage since 2010 is not a lot. Primary challenges in reaching double-digit reduction?
Actually, if you look at the beverage industry, this is a significant achievement. And it’s important to keep in mind that we’ve focused on water and energy efficiency for some time now, so there is very strong year-on-year progress. And we’re also making these reductions while continuing to grow our business. That means that each year, our brewing operations teams find innovative ways to do more with less when it comes to water.
To date, we’ve achieved an average water use of 3.71 hectoliters per hectoliter of production across our global business, which represents a 13.7% reduction against our 2009 baseline.
Our target, which we’ve stated publicly, is to reach 3.5 hectoliters of water per hectoliter of production by end-2012, which will put us on the leading edge of water usage for the brewing industry.
Your report mentions the billions paid in wages and income taxes. Not a lot of reports make these metrics a part of their community development results. Why the emphasis on wages?
As the leading global brewer, we have operations in 23 countries. We have a significant economic impact on the local communities where we do business through the jobs we create, the wages we pay and the taxes we pay governments at all levels. We feel that it’s important to report on and recognize the value and impact we are bringing to communities where we live and work.
Can you talk to the “ownership culture” of the company?
One of our 10 AB InBev Principles is about ownership: “We are a company of owners. Owners take results personally.”
[Sustainable Beer: Anheuser-Busch InBev’s 2012 Environmental Goals]
We strive to create a culture that encourages responsibility and accountability, and that applies to our work on social responsibility as well. Creating this culture of ownership helps us build those connections and team approach, both internally and externally, to helping make a difference in our communities as we strive to be the Best Beer Company in a Better World.
Originally written for and published on CSRwire’s Commentary sectionTalkback on April 26, 2012.
Bob Willard’s Business Case for Sustainability: A Better Way to Make a Bigger Profit
03 Thursday Jul 2014
Tags
amazon defense coalition, apple's factory standards, bob willard, Brand Management, Business, Business Ethics, cecp, CEO Network, chevron in ecuador, corporate governance, CSR, CSRwire, Environment, ESG, Events, interface, ray anderson, supply chain, Supply chain management, Sustainability, sustainability, toronto sustainability speaker series
The constant struggle between business’ social and environmental responsibility and investor demands is already an old tale. “The field has stretched and magnified so quickly that even though I have only been doing this work for three years, it feels like 10,” confessed a fellow attendee at a recent conference.
It’s true. Increasingly, more of us – those of us who eat, drink, sleep and dream CSR and sustainability – succumb to the comfort of believing that the sector is steadily progressing toward safer, clearer, more transparent practices.
But are we?
With Wall Street continuing to demand quarterly results, stringent returns on investments and short payback periods, are we really supporting sustainability in its truest sense? The examples, after all, are endless: Apple’s factory standards, Goldman Sachs’ unethical business practices, Chevron’s continued governance malpractices as reported by the Amazon Defense Coalition, and a new report that calls Wal-Mart’s sustainability championship as mere greenwashing.
As the CECP’s Margaret Coady remarked recently on CSRwire Talkback, how can sustainability executives tie consumer expectations and investor pressure into cohesive strings of action? Are the two sides completely incompatible?
Bob Willard, author of The Sustainability Advantage – and the updated The New Sustainability Advantage – recently held a well-attended webinar organized by the Toronto Speaker Sustainability Series [TSSS] on objections handling for sustainability executives. Some of his lessons – which you will soon be able to download as a useful reference guide, courtesy TSSS – focus on identifying mind shifts, behavioral change, graciousness and emphasizing education.
Now, Willard is traveling to New York to present at the Ethical Sourcing Forum on March 29 – 30, 2012 on connecting these lamentations with the business case for sustainability. A former IBMer, Willard’s work is renowned for its articulate arguments and concrete examples. His book is a firestorm of information and data. Here’s what the founder of Interface, the late Ray Anderson, said:
Bob Willard has performed a service of inestimable value: quantifying the business case for sustainability. By focusing at the level of the firm, Willard has bypassed the overriding but somewhat esoteric question, “How long can the rape of Earth by the modern industrial system go on before ecological collapse?”
The answer to this big question lies in the cumulative effect of millions of firms, large and small, waking up to the untapped profit potential that’s all around them. Bob Willard has shown how to capture that potential in real profits. Consequently, the answer to the big question is: Let the rape stop now; there’s a better way to make a bigger profit. Read this book to learn how.
Willard believes that until recently, there has been little evidence expressed in business language to show executives actual benefits from sustainability strategies. But that sustainability strategies can drive new bottom-line opportunities, avoid impending risks, and be a catalyst for business innovation, even in an economic recession.
While there are speakers aplenty who can talk about sustainability today in logically constructed sentences, there are few who have decades of experience to back up their arguments and can not only envision sustainable capitalism but show us how to get there. Willard falls in the latter category. So, if you are in the New York City area, join the CSRwire team at the Ethical Sourcing Forum to learn and engage with the leader himself.
Originally written for and published on CSRwire’s Commentary sectionTalkback on March 16, 2012.
In Good Company: Singh on CSR 