The key to achieving both of those goals together? Integrate societal benefits with company strategy.
Some companies have discovered that a commitment to tackling societal problems can lead to high performance and profits. It can help strengthen a company in the eyes of its customer base, its employee base and the general public. Technology has made information about a company’s behavior anywhere in the world more readily available. If companies take a proactive approach, they can turn this increased consumer awareness into a benefit.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter explores how companies like Proctor & Gamble, Starbucks and Diageo thought about societal benefits and created new products to support them.
2 Comments On: How to Do Well and Do Good
Step down into what’s taking place in business and public institutions Rosabeth. Employee loyalty is dead: rest in peace. Rx for employee loyalty reform. Business and the public sector are into a phase of creative disassembly where reinvention and adjustments are constant. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are being shed by United Technologies, GE, Chevron, Sam’s Club, Wells Fargo Bank, HP, Starbucks etc. and the state, counties and cities. Even solid world class institutions like the University of California Berkeley under the leadership of Chancellor Birgeneau & Provost Breslauer are firing staff, faculty and part-time lecturers. Yet many employees, professionals and faculty cling to old assumptions about one of the most critical relationship of all: the implied, unwritten contract between employer and employee.
Until recently, loyalty was the cornerstone of that relationship. Employers promised job security and a steady progress up the hierarchy in return for employees fitting in, performing in prescribed ways and sticking around. Longevity was a sign of employeer-employee relations; turnover was a sign of dysfunction. None of these assumptions apply today. Organizations can no longer guarantee employment and lifetime careers, even if they want to.
Organizations that paralyzed themselves with an attachment to “success brings success’ rather than “success brings failure’ are now forced to break the implied contract with employees – a contract nurtured by management that the future can be controlled.
Jettisoned employees are finding that the hard won knowledge, skills and capabilities earned while being loyal are no longer valuable in the employment market place.
What kind of a contract can employers and employees make with each other? The central idea is both simple and powerful: the job or position is a shared situation. Employers and employees face market and financial conditions together, and the longevity of the partnership depends on how well the for-profit or not-for-profit continues to meet the needs of customers and constituencies. Neither employer nor employee has a future obligation to the other. Organizations train people. Employees develop the kind of security they really need – skills, knowledge and capabilities that enhance future employability.
The partnership can be dissolved without either party considering the other a traitor..
Dear Prof Moss Kanter,
While I am a keen follower of yours on twitter and read all articles of your with avid interest, I am afraid that it leaves me sometimes with the feeling that you are either not aware of what is happening in some of the companies in Corporate America or chose to blissfully ignore it so that you do not need to focus on the muck and the mire that exists there.
The days of CEOs taking care of their Employees are long over. Todays CEOs like the guy who is in charge of a High Technology US Company even today behaves and acts like a used car salesman. He sees his Company as a huge “Junk”…to be sold for whatever value he can get. He has his Board to back him up. He will sell his own parents to anyones who gives him money. He wants to be in those business that has no competition and just shuns competition.
He has slit the throats of thousand of his employees, frozen salaries, why even reduced salaries but has increased his own by multiple times ( obscene number – over 800% )during the same period.
How can Corporate America tolerate such characters ? It is like Corporate America calling Alsop Chainsaw )Dunlop a hero one year and then calling him a villain the very next year.
People like you should come out openly and publicly call for a stoppage for such carnage. The Wall Street ? It is the one that rewards by upping the share price of those companies that resort to layoffs – correct ? So what CSR are we talking about / It is high time we stop being hypocrites and flush out these monsters from the Corporate world.
Who will have the guts ?