What’s the best way to determine whether or not your business should engage on potentially controversial societal issues?explains how to create a process for decision-making around these issues, in collaboration with your board.
In this episode, Harvard Business School senior lecturer Hubert Joly discusses examples of corporate leaders who determined whether and how to engage with humanitarian crises, geopolitical conflict, racial justice, climate change, and more. HUBERY JOLY: The central issue is of course, when and how to engage on some of these potentially controversial but important societal issues, knowing that doing nothing, ignoring these issues can be very dangerous and engaging can be also risky. And so, maybe the cold call would be, what criteria would you use to decide when and how to engage?
HUBERY JOLY: Yeah, and of course we all remember on September 13th, 1970, a certain Milton Friedman wrote this very impactful article about the role of the firm. And he forcefully said, very forcefully, and of course there was a context around this, but that the sole purpose of the company was to maximize shareholder value. And in fact, he introduced a hiatus in the history of capitalism because before Milton Friedman, going back to the 19th century, companies had engaged on societal matters.
HUBERY JOLY: It’s an important distinction because … And for the most part, I think that’s why the CEO in many cases may be the spokesperson. He or she is going to speak on behalf of the firm. So, we’ll go back to this because I think there’s some major learning from looking at these cases is that you need a set of criteria, you need a process, you need capabilities to be able to decide when and how to engage. It cannot be just left in general to just the CEO.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Yeah. I also thought it was interesting, the case highlighted a couple of situations involving Starbucks. The first being that they had taken a stance on diversity by encouraging their employees to write a particular sentiment on the cups. They’re famous for writing things on the cups. And that had mixed reactions from people.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. We know that, you mentioned earlier in our discussion, that the majority of people expect CEOs to take a position on some of these issues. I think we also know that the millennials they care a lot about the companies that they buy products from, and they really care about the companies that they work for, and they want those companies to stand for something.
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