Category: Sustainability
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Stakeholder engagement pays – a silver bullet?
Effective stakeholder engagement contributes both directly and indirectly to the bottom line. This post provides a sample of some proven benefits of stakeholder engagement for the major stakeholder groups. What is exciting, is that the generic communication skills at the heart of engagement are effective in diverse stakeholder settings. Surely engagement capability has to be…
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Engagement and the value chain
A quiet revolution is underway that is transforming business practice. For years we talked about the supply chain. Companies can do good and enhance profitability by converting their supply chains to value chains. To keep it really simple, I believe the key difference between these chains is that various parts of the supply chain seek…
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Staff engagement and the failure of HR
The Human Resource (HR) function has a fatal flaw in its very conception. It is a flaw that limits the ability of HR to foster better staff engagement. It is the inherently schizophrenic nature of the role – in that it has two typically contradictory functions, controlling the employment contract on the one hand, and…
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Engaging stories: Fairtrade cotton
I mostly drink Fairtrade coffee, sometimes eat Fairtrade chocolate, but must confess, I don’t wear Fairtrade cotton. That will change now that I am reading Harriet Lamb’s Fighting the Banana Wars and Other Fairtrade Battles. Struggling to stay above the poverty line Harriet Lamb tells of cotton grower’s subsistence existence in Africa, where cotton supports…
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Engagement explosion
If you consider the relatively recent development of stakeholder engagement, its fair to say that there has been an engagement explosion. Edward Freeman first articulated stakeholder theory in his 1984 book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. It took a decade or so to emerge from obscurity and the concept had to survive criticism from those…
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Stakeholder engagement drivers – Part 5: altruism
In earlier blogs in this series we looked at self-interest and enlightened self-interest as sustainability and stakeholder engagement drivers. This post explores altruism as a driver. It seems natural that business leaders who prosper seek ways to give back to the community. The survival imperative driving the earlier days of their careers may have prompted…
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Stakeholder engagement drivers – Part 4: enlightened self-interest
In the last post in this series we looked at enlightened self-interest, illustrating the concepts with examples of Walmart’s sustainability initiatives. This blog explores McDonald’s journey towards sustainability. McDonalds is one of the many companies that have embarked on a journey towards sustainability following negative publicity. In 1990 a group of protestors in London distributed…
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Stakeholder engagement drivers – Part 3: enlightened self-interest
The first part of this series of blogs outlined three three drivers for stakeholder engagement, self-interest, enlightened self-interest and altruism. In this blog we will look at enlightened self-interest using Walmart for illustration. Such companies want to make money and be more sustainable. They attempt to operate in ways that are not just financially sustainable,…
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Stakeholder engagement – what are the drivers
If you want your organisation to engage better with stakeholders take some time to understand why. This blog explores three levels of commitment to stakeholder engagement – self-interest, enlightened self-interest and altruism. As with any classification system, these levels are arbitrary and could be endlessly debated – they are simply offered to stimulate thinking about…
Bruce-Iri 