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KARL MOORE -Today I am delighted to have Professor Michael Porter, who is a University Professor at Harvard and just one of the biggest names in strategy around the world, to join us today. 听One of the things you talked about in your convocation address to the students is about the fact that business has lost its reputation. Why do you say that business has lost its reputation?

MP - Well, I think that too many times business has been seen as acting in its narrow self-interest rather than, essentially, contributing more broadly to society. I think a lot of that is unintentional; I don't think that many managers are deliberately trying to be unethical or are not trying to be sensitive to social needs. But, I think that business have tended to look at themselves as self contained and I don't think they have really understood the way in which they touch the community and that they touch so many social issues. The external standards, of course, have risen in terms of what is expected of a business and the standards, for things like environmental impact, is much higher now than before. So businesses get caught by surprise, they are slow to raise their own internal standards, and I think their reputation suffers. Then there's, of course, the outright frauds and cheats that, unfortunately, we have had too many of lately and it is just, frankly, not only embarrassing but corrosive to the whole image of business despite the fact that business is fundamentally indispensable to any society. You can't have a healthy society unless you have healthy companies that are making a profit, that are employing people and that are growing. So we have this tremendous disconnect that business, in some ways, is the most successful institution in modern society but yet, in some ways, it is the least respected.

KM - So what should business do to get its reputation back to where we think it should be?

MP - Well I think that business has been struggling with this for some years now and the usual umbrella for this effort is Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR. It's a huge movement; companies are out doing all kinds of things to try to win friends and develop a better imagine in the community. They are publishing very fancy CSR reports listing all their wonderful accomplishments. So all this, I think, is well intentioned but ultimately our work suggests that it's relatively ineffective. If you measure success by image then I think that companies are fooling themselves if they think that just by doling out money, and attaching themselves to certain NGO's with good cause's, that they are going to be respected for that. I also believe that many companies are cynically viewing this activity as really marketing and they are not really focused on the social impact that they can actually achieve with what it is they are doing. So I think that CSR has been a good effort in a transitional phase but I think we have to move much more deeply into these issues. I've actually written about this recently and I've actually been working with a variety of companies in this area trying to understand not how companies can try to build their image, but how they can integrate their economic interests and the interests of the broader society together in a unified view of how to compete.

End of Video, 听for those who are interested, here is more of our interview:

KM - Won't that take away from profitability and, in effect, hurt the shareholder value?

MP - Well, only in the shortest of terms. Again, it's interesting, if you start to think about the major issues that society is concerned about...so let's take the environment. So, 15 years ago we thought that to be clean you had to pay more and reduce your profits. In fact economists, of whom I am a card carrying member of that fraternity, were just adamant about this! The idea was if you put any constraint on a business then that is going to drive up the costs! So if you have to improve your environmental quality, then you are going to drive up your costs. Well, lo and behold, that reflected a very simplistic view of the firm and how competition really works. What we find is most pollution is fundamentally waste; it's wasted resources, it's the ineffective use of technology, it's the wasteful use of water and in fact the more environmentally efficient you are the more profit you get. Now there may be a transitional period of investment where you do have to invest, but it's like any other investment. If you invest in improving your technology, closed looping your processes, recycling your materials and taking unnecessary hazardous materials out of your product, lo and behold, you're now more efficient and more productive. So that is just one example where, in this kind of old view of many social issues, there was a trade off; to be better for society you had to give up your economic efficiency, but now we see those trade off's fall away in many of the area's that society is concerned about. So the challenge facing business is how to look for, what I call, the "Shared Value" and look for those situations where a company can advance in important social issues at the same time it makes itself more competitive. Look at those points of connection rather than the points of conflict and, rather than firing off small donations at 55 NGO's and trying to dole out little gifts to the community to be liked, companies will be much more liked if they can achieve meaningful social impact in 3, 4 or 5 issues where their business gives them the resources, technology, and skills to make an impact. So, that's the new model I think.

KM - So the thought in choosing the 3, 4 or 5 areas is to look at your competencies, what you really are world class at, and then translate that into some useful action.

MP - In the social agenda, absolutely. When we look at any companies connections with society, we can identify those in two ways. One set of connections comes from the value chain. In the ordinary course of doing business, a company touches a number of social issues. For example, if you're Nestle and your buying coffee in Africa, you are affecting the plight of small farmers. If you are using water, and again Nestle is a good example for they are a bottled water company, you are touching this question of sustainable water sources. So for a given company, given its business, there's going to be 3, 4 or 5 areas like that where the company actually, through its ordinary course of business, has an ability to leverage or impact that particular issue. There's going to be a lot of other social issues where it's important, it's a worthy cause, but that should be left o some other company which has the, if you will, resources to take action and do something about it. So, again taking Nestle as the example because it's a well known company, Nestle has honed in on 3 areas: #1 is nutrition, they are a food company! They have understand that improving nutrition is not inconsistent with their ability to differentiate themselves but actually now that they have thought of it differently and it's a way to differentiate themselves. Nutrition means different things in advanced countries where the problem is obesity versus developing countries where the problem is absence of certain critical nutrients in the diet. They have selected water (#2) for obvious reasons, not only because they sell water but because they work with so many small farmers and the largest single waste of water is in farming. The third issue (#3) they have selected is rural development and that's because they are purchasing from hundreds of thousands of farmers all over the world, in the developing world. So they can actually tangible affect change in those areas because of their purchasing power, their expertise, their technology, and their ability to create shared value and they can benefit themselves. So instead of getting this notion of corporate handouts that are constantly questioned by the shareholder "can we afford this?" all of a sudden you have a company that is investing in stuff that I think any thoughtful observer would say is really strengthening their long term position, their supply chain, and deeply effecting their reputation in the communities in which they operate.

Read full article: , April 4, 2011

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