7gen Bloc

Systemic Dissonance: Ben & Jerry's & Unilever
Posted By
Inspired Protagonist
February 22, 2010

You Can't Sell Ben & Jerry's and Own it TooLast week, my close friend, Walt Freese, stepped down after eight years as the leader of Vermont's famous ice cream maker, Ben & Jerry's Homemade, Inc. There was no sign of discontent in the announcement, but one can imagine that life caught between two less-than-happy founding visionaries and a global packaged goods giant had its challenging moments.

I was reminded of this while reading an article in the Financial Times that brought to life the age-old debate about whether you can happily situate a deeply values based business inside the belly of a global corporate giant.

Jonathan Moules, the Financial Times reporter, quoted Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield saying, "Being owned by a large multinational group can seriously hamper an entrepreneur's drive for social change." The pair was in London to promote a plan to make all Ben & Jerry's European products fully fair-trade compliant by the end of 2011, followed by everything they make for the rest of the world in 2013. Ben was also quoted as saying that progress on the fair trade pledge would have been achieved faster if the business had not had to answer to timid managers at Unilever. "As we got into larger and larger operations, we have got middle-level managers that are risk averse and the test becomes if other companies have not done something then we are not going to do it either."

Jerry noted in the same story that, "Ben and I now work in the company but we have no real responsibility, and we have no authority."

So -- all you responsible entrepreneurs on the prowl for some large company to either:
a) embrace you and help scale up your business;
b) pay you a gigantic sum so you can retire to Costa Rica; or
c) allow you to infiltrate their culture spreading the gospel of justice and sustainability -- take heed to this cautionary tale.

If you want to achieve and maintain a meaningful depth of ethical behavior at your company, you're probably wise to avoid the temptations of a merger or buy-out and go it alone. In my experience, that's the road lined with the least amount of compromise and heartache, and the most freedom to pursue your own vision of the seven principles of responsibility I recently outlined in The Responsibility Revolution, the book Bill Breen and I wrote. As Ben and Jerry's experience shows, having to answer to a huge corporate parent often isn't the answer you were ultimately looking for.

photo: Braden Kowitz


Category: Sustainability
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Comments
Retaining Value and Values
Posted by Lavinia Weissman | Mon, Feb. 22, 2010

Jeff,

I have given serious thought to the dilemma you speak about here for years.

I grew up in the food industry in New England where my father's friends all launched what were early stage CSR companies, e.g. Stride Rite. It was during a decade of prosperity and old style of doing business where business owners had control of their businesses.

It is much more complicated now and CSR is even more complicated. In fact, yesterday in my #csr twitter hangout Sustainable Life Media tweeted it was time 4 us to up the ante on CSR. This sentence got retweeted all day.

When Unilever first took over Ben and Jerry's and the string of franchises failed and there were I believe some law suits, my heart just went out for Ben and anyone now working for Unilever.

When Ben spoke years ago when I was living in San Francisco about having to make a decision to hire a CEO for a going rate pay, and the lessons that implied, my response was two fold

I held compassion for Ben and I also recognized as a business women that CSR and Sustainable Values were now growing in a direction of complexity that is not as simple to practice in industry where dedication to one brand can assure a CEO's position to practice from his beliefs and values no matter what.

Last month I talked to Michael Dupee at length about the subject of redefining education for CSR and what it means. We were on the phone for over an hour with some give and take that really set the level of complexity very high for the conversation we started that I am dedicated to germinating into the heart of what Sustainability and CSR practice can become.

Gary Hirshberg, when he wrote Stirring It Up, addressed the issue of sustaining company values and culture as a result of the acquistion of Stonyfield by Danone Partnership in France and how they were able to sustain the company values and a practice of autonomy.

Unilever is a very complex company in some ways it leads CSR responsibly and in other ways the directors shoot themselves in the foot like last year when a participant in a tv show they sponsored died during a "survivor style competition in Pakistan."

The story of whether Unilever sticks with quality to a sustainable and CSR agenda based on Ben and Walt Freese's experience may never be sorted out.

What I can say is that I applaud Ben, Jerry and Walt as members of the hall of fame that established and bravely pushed CSR into the reality it is today.

But the reality in my humble opinion currently is that CSR today is not enough the way the game is played today in any sector or company size. As a world of citizens, I want to see an appraoch to monitoring global companies and small companiesthat goes beyond issues of personality and players (from the CSR) all star team, we will not up the ante on CSR.

The door has opened for that with over 40 NGO's that have authored monitoring schemes on many facets of sustainability that are legitimate and provide an opening for manufacturers and other companies to learn and not have to wait for laws and government policies to change if they take advantage of the monitoring schemes provided by groups, e.g. Accountability, Trucost, Ceres and maybe even the UNGlobal Compact. There are many others that I will summarize in a article that I am writing and submitting for publication or post to my blog.

And

For me personally the only way I see we can up the ante is for anyone with leadership capacity like you and me to join with others to focus on making the values and vision of the Earth Charter a practice of learning where global companies, small business and mid caps learn to empower the new format of education and learning that is key to strengthening our capacity to respond to environment, health and economic degradation and for all of us in the CSR world to transform our thought to sustainability as a practice that creates more jobs, assures anyone who can learn and wants to learn a trajectory of work that helps that person and family sustain and where the venture (social, commercial, non profit or government initiatives) assure that we find some balance to create an ecological economic system of living and sustaining that recognizes that sustainability metrics have to embrace a system of thought that goes beyond the GDP or monetary system to assuring all humanity a quality of life and future for our children.

Best,
Lavinia Weissman

Thanks Lavinia for you
Posted by Inspired Protagonist | Tue, Feb. 23, 2010

Thanks Lavinia for you thoughtful and passionate response. I agree on all fronts. CSR 2.0 or 3.0 can’t and won’t look anything like the first generation. The opportunity and the stakes are greater. The world needs more from the business community than we’ve been able to deliver. We need an ongoing, honest and open multi-stakeholder dialogue and much greater influence politically.

I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Jeffrey

Another look at the systematic dissonance...
Posted by slysamonte | Mon, Mar. 8, 2010

Thanks Jeff for the interesting read. I think the article is supposed to evoke sympathy for the duo and head warning to those with great ideas looking for corporate support. I do feel the article fails to acknowledge the agreements made by Ben and Jerry when embarking on the new partnership and what good it has done in expanding the business and letting more people enjoy the fun of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Once part of a big machine it's hard to move in risky territory and potentially hurt the bottom line when so many other things are dependent on the continuous success of the brand. As entrepreneurs Ben and Jerry may have failed to turn fair trade into a successful business case and push it forward to become a reality for the brand. The corporate world is the place where ideas need to be supported by good business sense. If the guys just want to make the products fair trade and that idea/ideal is not part of the vision of the brand then it will be hard for them to justify. I think the article is fair in judging the conservatism of the company and middle managers and the hampering of products becomeing fair trade. Though if you think again - what if the move caused the brand to fail, then all the work for fair trade would be lost and there would be farmers with out work to do. Currently the Ben and Jerry's brand has a handful or regular fair trade products which are sold across the world and support may farmers. Lastly,the article is unfair in looking over all the other CSR initiatives like sustainable farming which the parent company does.