After Monday’s Crowd session, I flew to Geneva for the latest Creating Shared Value Advisory Council session with Nestlé in Vevey. Key task was to judge the latest round of the Creating Shared Value Prize. The Council demonstrated crowd intelligence in action.
Ironic, given all of that, that on Thursday evening I then had to publicly debate the question ‘Is CSR Dead?’ (Corporate Social Responsibility, that is) with two of the main champions of Shared Value, Mark Kramer of FSG and the Shared Value Initiative, and Janet Voûte of Nestlé.
This was a Barclays debate, held at The British Library and chaired by Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts. With #TeamMark comprising Mark and Janet, #TeamJohn featured Covestro CEO Patrick Thomas and myself.
Just before we headed a cross to the Library, I realised with horror that I had prepared my speech on the wrong assumptions – and was increasingly stressed as we met the Covestro team at the Hoxton Hotel in Bloomsbury, and then took a taxi to the Library (through the stickiest of traffic jams) and then was filmed (with a camera that crashed part-way through).
Once the filming was finished, I holed up and redid the speech on my MacBook, finishing it just in time. When the five of us took to the stage, the mood was light from the start. For the first time, I spoke from a computer on my lap. (All photos of debate used here are by Sam Lakha.)
When Matthew took an initial poll of the audience, it was originally calculated that the room was 51% to 49% favour of CSR being alive, not dead – though the actual vote was a few point higher, to CSR’s advantage.
To be honest, I felt somewhat compromised by the fact that I have argued that CSR is in urgent need of a profound reboot ever since we set up Volans in 2008. Still, I gave it my best – and Patrick proved what an excellent debater he is. The audience participation was terrific, with some extremely thoughtful contributions from the floor.
I was on tenterhooks when the vote came, feeling that the Shared Value agenda must have made up some ground. But when Matthew read out the results from the room and the online audience, I was stunned to hear that the needle had swung to 75% in favour of our position.
It really was a false framing of the bigger agenda, something that both Mark and I had argued from the outset. My argument was that this is no longer a matter of Either/Or, but of Both/And.
I see Shared Value as having a crucial role. But as an approach that stresses Win-Win outcomes, rather than Win-Win-Win (Triple Bottom Line) outcomes, it by definition fails to deal with the Win-Lose challenges (e.g. stranded assets) that are shot through the wider sustainability debate.
Yesterday, Friday, included a session with the Covestro team and a wonderful telephone call with Janine Benyus. Then, today, a box of flowers arrived at our door in Barnes, a huge bouquet from Zheng Jieying in New Zealand, celebrating the debate win. We split Jieying’s bouquet into five vases, three of the images I took for her being shown above.
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