As should be expected, Jeff Swartz, Timberland CEO, opened the conference with a humble discussion of Timberland’s accomplishments and his perspective on sustainability. Jeff’s honesty, transparency, and personal passion was abundantly visible in every statement he made.
Jeff was followed by a panel that included Alex Cummings, Chief Administrative Officer and Executive Vice President at Coca-Cola as well as Melanie P. Healy, Group President for North America at Procter & Gamble. Alex opened with a bold but unbelievable statement, saying that in order “for Coca-Cola to be sustainable the communities where we live and work must be sustainable.” How do you deal with obesity? “We encourage active lifestyles. It’s about calories in and calories out. We disclose calories on all our products. We don’t believe the government should legislate lifestyles.”
From my seat in the front row, I told Alex and Melanie that while it was “Wonderful to hear all about your great accomplishments, tell us about your biggest disappointment, your most significant failure, and what you do that most significantly adversely effects our planet.”
Alex answered, “We all like to talk about what we’re doing right, our great successes. Our carbon footprint is a negative but…,” a long list of all the positives followed. “We’ve done this, that…blah, blah, blah.”
In a much more thoughtful and reflective manner, Melanie discussed the fact that P&G sells to 4 billion out of the 6 billion people on the planet and admitted that “Pampers creates a lot of waste. We need to explore what to do to encourage responsible consumer behavior and think not just of the product but the whole product lifecycle. 20% thinner, 20% dryer. All our new products must be 10% lower in life cycle impact than the product they are replacing.
“Our goal,” she said, “is to delight our customers, but we have not been able to delight the lowest income, most underserved consumers. We haven’t found the right products to do so. We must develop a diaper that is affordable and lasts all day for the underserved consumer, then bring that innovation back to the developed world.”
Always a dependable voice for honesty, Bob Monks, one of the fathers of the social investing and good governance movement, spoke and made sure we all knew that good deeds like these will not address the inherent flaws in the system itself.
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A Government Visionary
Seth Harris, Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor, questioned the status of the degraded “social compact” between business and the workforce with regard to benefits, retention, and retirement. He noted that while the Business Roundtable was “pushed to place business’ responsibility to society and employees on par with its responsibility to shareholders, this compact was destroyed in the post-Enron world. Over the past several decades, business has abandoned its historical commitment to employees to provide healthcare, pensions, and employment security…Government must fill the gap.” (Remember, we’re at an Economist conference!)
Leo Hindery, Jr., Managing Partner of InterMedia Partners, noted that the Chamber of Commerce is totally hypocritical when it says that any “purchase domestic” program is protectionist, when all other 19 of the G20 countries in have their own domestic purchase programs. He also said that a healthy U.S. economy must rebuild its manufacturing capacity and that none of the current Government programs in place will make a dent in the current U.S. unemployment problem.
The next day, at 12:30pm, I stood alone on the stage to speak. Disturbed by the state of the world, the absence of corporate transparency, and the failure to address systemic problems, I ranted a bit.
“I may sound a lone note here,” I said, “but I believe that the vast majority of companies fail to be “good” corporate citizens, Seventh Generation included. Most sustainability and corporate responsibility programs are about being less bad vs. good. They are about selective and compartmentalized “programs” rather than holistic and systemic change.
“Companies and consumers are unfortunately encouraged to do the wrong thing because, as Bob Monks discussed yesterday, they externalize their costs onto society. We need full cost accounting, higher short term capital gains taxes, and strict limits on CEO compensation.”
I talked about Seventh Generation’s global imperatives, which we see as a way to begin thinking about and solving some of these problems: Restoring the Environment, Inspiring Conscious Consumption, Creating a Just and Equitable World, Systemic Thinking, Radical Transparency, and our commitment to Influence Beyond Our Size.