Meet the Expert
Geoff McDonald
Former Global VP - Marketing, Communications, Sustainability and Talent, Unilever
- London-based thought leader and global advisor in HR, marketing, communications and sustainability.
- Career at Unilever spanning 25 years, culminating with his leading the company's groundbreaking work in business model transformation with purpose at its core.
- Previous roles at the company have included work across Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, Asia, Europe and the Americas. Unilever is a global corporation with turnover of £50 billion and 150,000 employees in 90 countries.
- A sought-after speaker, he inspires and provokes organizations to put purpose at the center of everything they do. Has spoken at Cambridge University, Warwick and Oxford as well as corporate events across Australia, Europe, Japan, North America, and Africa.
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Purposeful Business - Doing Well by Doing Good
Former Global VP - Marketing, Communications, Sustainability and Talent, Unilever
Common Problems
- Your company is not trusted.
- The documentary "The Smartest Guys in the Room" depicts how an addiction to greed and corruption led to the fall of Enron. While this offers an extreme example of a toxic corporate culture, there are plenty of companies in business today that are still focused more or less exclusively on money and power, at the expense of everything else. There's no real regard for the customer. No real regard for the employees. It's all about meeting quarterly goals and generating mindless growth. Regulatory agencies are seen as the enemy and the aim is to wriggle through any loopholes and do whatever is necessary to turn a profit.
This may seem to work in the short term, but it's not a sustainable way to operate. Just because a company can legally do certain things doesn't mean they actually should do those things. What a company stands for now matters just as much, if not more, than what the company is manufacturing or selling. We all have access to more information than ever before, and some of that is information a company would just as soon not have you see.
As Goldman Sachs discovered, one whistle blower can cost your company billions of dollars overnight, because people are increasingly looking to do business with companies they can trust.
- Your company is not mindful of the physical or social environment that exists on the planet.
- There is an increasing awareness that everything on the planet is related to everything else.
"Global warming" may still be a controversial phrase in some arenas, but no one is arguing that "climate change" is anything but a reality. Toxins in the air and water are also a growing health concern. The human population may still seem incredibly diverse, but all the recent gains in genetic research have proven that race is just a cultural construct and that we humans are all very closely related.
Companies can no longer just displace people or exploit the environment, and worry about it later. There is a growing awareness that our resources are very limited and embattled, and that our long-term survival as a species depends on protecting the environment and learning how to get along with each other. To be perceived as socially responsible, companies must strive to embrace human rights globally, and respect the fragility of this tiny blue planet that we all must learn to share.
- Your company is seeing an increase in absenteeism and is having difficulty attracting and retaining talent.
- If your employees are not happy, it's a huge waste of your single most important resource and it can have a very negative effect on your bottom line.
Absenteeism is on the rise, and is estimated to have cost U.S. corporations more than $576 billion in 2012. *
A recent New York Times study conducted in 142 countries around the world found that 87 percent of the people working today find their jobs depleting and disengaging. Only 13 percent reported being happy at work. When they studied the companies where the people were happy, they found that these companies were addressing the needs of their employees' physical, emotional, and mental well-being, and the employees felt there was a real purpose to what they were doing at work.*
Being purposeful is becoming a tool for attracting and retaining talent. People want to work for companies that are making a positive contribution to the world we live in.
* Source: Forbes, Sept. 12, 2012
** Source: The New York Times, May 30, 2014 - Your company understands the need for a more purposeful strategy but your corporate culture does not support this.
- Many companies have recognized the business case for becoming more purposeful and have attempted change on a strategic level. The problem is, those companies have not also shifted their culture to support the changes they are trying to make.
The thing is, culture will beat strategy every time. If your company has made a commitment to becoming more purpose-driven, but your leadership is not on board, and the culture is not supporting the change and developing the right behaviors, and metrics are not in place that relate to those, then the strategy can't succeed.
Leadership has to be committed to advocating for purpose and to leading change within the culture. The custodian of the culture is usually the CEO, but there's also a critical HR function that needs to be in place to support the process. - Your company is having difficulty identifying a central and unifying moral purpose.
- As they grow and evolve, many companies lose sight of their own founding purpose.
Barclays Bank is a good example. Founded by Quakers in 1690, and run according to Quaker values of mutual trust and respect, the bank was held in high regard for close to 300 years. Beginning in the late 1980s, however, the culture at Barclays shifted. As profits in securities and derivatives rose, the power of the traders overshadowed that of the more conservative institutional bankers. An individualistic, bonus-driven ethos took over. In the wake of the recent scandal surrounding Barclay's manipulation of Libor rates, Barclay's CEO Bob Diamond had to go before Parliament. A former trader who exemplified the newer and more individualistic, profit-driven culture at Barclays, Diamond was asked during the proceedings if he knew what the bank's founding Quaker principles were. He had no clue.
It's natural that things change, but when the changes leave the heart and soul of the company in the dust, it's worth looking back at what brought the company into existence in the first place. - Your company has a Corporate Social Responsibility department, but it is separate from your core mission.
- If purpose is truly embedded into your company's culture, and all your processes and strategies have purpose at their core, then you don't need a Corporate Social Responsibility department. The company that has purpose at its core is engaging in socially-conscious capitalism. It's part of everything you do.
Many companies have CSR departments because they want to enjoy the benefits that come from feeling like they are doing some good in the world. But the CSR department sits on the sidelines. While there's nothing wrong with doing something helpful, and it is certainly better than nothing, the bank that makes $100 million by sneaking up the interest rates on its credit card holders and then spends $100,000 on mosquito nets for people in Africa is probably not really concerned with making the world a better place.
When there is no core sense of purpose, this has a tendency to permeate the rest of a company's culture and produce negative results.
Purposeful Business - Doing Well by Doing Good:
Common Problems
Expert Topic