Business and environmental sustainability are not natural bedfellows. Business is about making money. Sustainability is about protecting the planet. Business is measured in months and quarters. Sustainability often requires significant short term costs to secure a sometimes uncertain long-term benefit. To some activists, all executives are exploitative, selfish one percenters. To some executives, all activists are irresponsible, unyielding extremists. And yet engaging with the issue isn’t optional – all businesses must have a strategy to deal with sustainability and, like any strategy, this involves making choices. This Strategy and Sustainability course based on Rosenberg's recently published book by Palgrave (http://www.palgrave.com/la/book/9781137501738) that encourages learners to filter out the noise and make those choices in a hard-nosed and clear-eyed way. Prof. Rosenberg’s nuanced and fact-based point of view recognizes the complexity of the issues at hand and the strategic choices businesses must make. He blends the work of some of the leading academic thinkers in the field with practical examples from a variety of business sectors and geographies and offers a framework with which senior management might engage with the topic, not (just) to save the planet but to fulfill their short, medium and long-term responsibilities to shareholders and other stakeholders. This course promises to be both engaging and thought-provoking, aimed at anyone who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of a subject that is no longer perceived as a choice but a necessity for future managers and business leaders alike.
3. Activists
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Strategy and Sustainability
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Week 4 - Environmental Interest Groups
Part of the issue in choosing a strategy to deal with environmental issues is to fully understand the broad spectrum of environmental interest groups. This session explores how the movement took off, distinguishing between four types of groups and examining how business might consider interacting with them (and vice versa). Learning Objectives: To explore the nature of four different types of environmental interest groups such that their motivations and behaviors can be better understood.
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Mike RosenbergAssistant Professor
Strategic Management
[MUSIC]
This is Mike Rosenberg with Strategy and Sustainability.
We're in session four, which is about environmental interest groups.
This is segment three, where we talk about one type of those interest groups,
which I call activists.
In the earlier segment we talked about conservationist.
We'll now talk about activist, which are very very different type of organization.
A list of activists, the Environmental Defense Fund,
Friends of the Earth, Green Peace itself.
These are organizations typically founded kind of after the anti-war movement.
And many of the people involved in the anti-war movement transitioned into
being with sometimes called deep ecologist.
And people who feel very,
very strongly about the environment and are ready to fight.
Fight more or less, at least to go far in supporting it,
if that means going to jail, they're okay with that.
If that means putting their lives at risk, they're okay with that
because they feel what they're doing is tremendously important.
Some of them turned into quite large organizations, you know with the budgets
on the order of $134 million in the Environmental Defense Fund in 2013,
others are smaller.
Others are smaller with more modest budgets.
Key characteristics of these organizations is what they're trying to fight is
practices or products or something that they feel is bad for humans or for
the ecosystem and they`ll fight that anywhere they can.
You know, they`re not about protecting a place,
they`re about protecting the planet from something, something very specific.
Their scope is everywhere by definition,
because theyve decided something is wrong and harmful.
That should be stopped everywhere and
they're almost always global in their pretension.
Their key strategies, it's a combination of protests, boycotts,
very very high profile media events, and the idea is to raise public awareness,
raise political pressure, and eventually force change.
It's a very, very, in your face kind of forward-looking approach.
And they're not too worried about legal niceties or even
being factually correct because what they're doing, they believe, is justified.
Funding model is typically member subscriptions and
then contributions from people who share the group's goals.
And here, the staff are typically very, very, very committed.
Sometimes they lack the technical depth that they might need
to be really able to understand the issues but that's not the point.
They're not in it from a scientific point of view.
They are in it from an ethical conviction.
That whatever they're talking about is somehow evil or wrong.
The classic example, and really the first and
the most important example, is Greenpeace itself.
Greenpeace was founded in 1971 by a group of very committed people who felt that
the testing of nuclear weapons in the Islands was a bad idea.
They lived in Canada, Northwestern Canada, there some Americans around the table.
But the said their going to blow up nuclear bombs over there and
the radiations going to fall on us and we got to stop them.
And they rented a small boat and then sailed to island,
where the test was going to happen, now they were intercept by the US Navy.
Far, far away from the test site but they got so much publicity that they
actually started to change the mind of the American military.
And American politicians about whether they should test that all this kinds of
devices that alone in the illusion islands.
And that's where Greenpeace came up with this idea of what they call the mind bomb,
which was to do something so spectacular, get so
much attention that yo can actually change public opinion.
They decided that the whales were in danger of being extinct,
so they probably sort to follow the whale hunt and then they got better boats.
And then they would, send their fast boats against the whalers.
The whalers would shoot at them with water cannon,
because they're not going to shoot them with bullets of course but meanwhile,
all that's going on, they're filming, all the time.
And all of these were media events, deliberately staged, to embarrass.
Whoever they're trying to embarrass to change policies.
This is Bridget Bardot, who flew to watch the seal hunt.
For many years there was an annual seal hunt, they would cull the herds of seals
and they would kill the seals in a very brutal way with clubs.
Because if you kill them with knives or
with guns you would harm the pelts and the whole purpose was to get the skins.
So you know, you have these guys clubbing baby seals to death
which does not look good on television.
So here's a famous actress saying this is just the wrong thing to do.
And then I think we already mentioned that in another segment
The advertisement about Kit Kat.
They pretended to make a Kit Kat advertisement but
it was really a protest against the farming of palm oil in Indonesia
which was destroying the habitat of the orangutan.
But basically saying, you know, these chocolate bars are killing the orangutans
and making that association in people's minds.
In order to force Nestle and their competitors to change the way they buy
palm, which would eventually change the way palm oil is being produced and farmed.
So you get a sense of the theory of change that activists have which is
we'll do amazing things, we'll get in the public eye and we'll make change happen.
Over the years they've been against climate change, protect forests,
save the oceans, practices in agriculture, toxic pollution, nuclear power,
the arctic, etc.
It's a big organization, total income last wear was 346 million.
Now you have to subtract how much money to took them to raise the money before you
have much, how much money they have to play with.
And they have to spent over $100 million raising to $346 million in ahead.
This is whole machine behind Greenpeace which is to raise money
in order to save what they think is the planet from very specific issues.
Now an example of an engagement between Greenpeace and a very specific part of
the industry about the oil industry was back a few years ago.
This is Brent Spar.
Brent Spar is a oil platform.
It's built to hold oil, so you have an oil well drilling for oil in the sea.
Nearby you need to store the oil because you're producing the oil,
you need to put it somewhere until the ship can come along and then take it away.
This is the idea of the Brent Spar but in 1995,
Shell actually connected the oil rigs in the region to a pipeline so
they didn't need it anymore and the idea was to destroy it.
So after three years of hearings and talking with the British government about
what to do with these things in the North Sea.
The technical committee decided that the safest, cheapest, and
most ecologically sensible operations was to tow it to very, very deep water and
blow it up, and let it sink to the bottom of the sea.
Greenpeace thought this was a terrible idea.
Greenpeace thinks that you just shouldn't throw.
If you build an oil industry, you should not throw your garbage in the sea.
You should take it home with you as a basic concept of sustainability.
And they said that the platform still had 5,500 tons of dirty
oil left inside of it and all this would gone to the sea floor if it was destroyed.
In a very typical Green Peace Act, they actually got two guys,
they went out in their boats and they got two guys to climb to the top.
Top of the tower with the signs that say, you're not towing this away.
because the idea is there are people who are there on top of the tower, and
they blow it up, these people are going to kill,
so Shell can't blow it up while the guys are on it.
They can't tow it away, so all this was there for a few months
while this huge protest erupted all over Europe, especially in Germany.
About Shell's approach to the North Sea.
I mean, if he's deliberately targeted Shell gasoline stations across
Germany and people,
protesters with these signs saying that Shell is going to destroy the environment.
Two gasoline stations were fire bombed, and someone's,
they took shots to open fire with a rifle against another one.
Shell sales in Germany drop 20% during this time period and
eventually Shell gave up and said fine.
We will tow the thing away, we'll dismantle it,
it was eventually dismantled in Norway.
The cost of doing it this way was three times what it would have been to tow it
In the end, instead of the 5,500 tons of oil that Greenpeace said was on board,
there were 10 tons of oil on board.
And from a scientific point of view, it probably would have been safer,
cleaner, for everybody involved just to sink the thing deep into a trench.
But from a sustainability point of view, if you think about who is responsible for
the North Sea and Greenpeace is looking at all this equipment.
They said, well if we let them scuttle,
which is what you call when they blow something up and let them sink.
If we let them sink this piece of equipment,
they're going to sink all their rigs in the North Sea.
So even though Greenpeace was completely wrong with its numbers,
they still think they did the right thing by stopping Brent Spar.
And again, using their techniques to do that.
You'll be the judge whether it was a good thing to do or not,
it's not my purpose here with this session or
this course which is to illustrate how activist behave.
So if you're in business, you would know how to deal with them and
if you're on the activist side watching discourse.
You can think about what it's implication is for dealing with biusiness.
Now, a very different point of view on all this is, is Bjern Lomborg.
Lomborg is a Danish Economist and
his point and his [INAUDIBLE] in a Skeptical environmentalist.
Another book on Cool It,
on global warming, his whole point is that these interests, these activists.
They say that, their issue is so
important and they get media attention to make it so important.
They get people to donate money to make it important and
they all get good jobs because they're talking about.
Saving the birds or saving the cuddly bears when he thinks and
the people around him, some economists he works with.
Even very, very famous economists say,
there are probably more important problems facing the world today.
One of the examples he uses in the skeptical environmentalist was
Exon Valdez, a horrific oil spill and many many birds were killed by the oil spill.
But he says that more birds are eaten by cats every year in the United Kingdom.
Then we're hurt during the oil spill and
this is of course we're not going to kill all of the cats.
So his whole purpose and his questioning is to see, what are the big problems
facing humanity and do activist actually help us get there or not.
By the way believe that these people are simply not democratic
because they don't care who lives where.
They don't care what's going on.
They'll come in and
stop a practice, no matter what because that's what they believe.
Now, from a business point of view really,
there's only two options with activist groups.
One is to surrender, and one is to fight, the thing is they don't compromise.
They're not interested in compromise because for
them compromise takes away their reason for being.
If what you're doing is wrong, it's wrong, so
allowing you to do a little bit of it isn't helpful.
It'd be for them to be selling out, so that's not really, a combination
doesn't really work either and sometimes the technical arguments just don't matter.
Because when you're talking about public opinion and you're blowing up these mind
bombs and these media things, it's just something different.
So it's a very, very difficult type of group to work with and
if you're facing activists, it's a very different situation.
Now we're facing conservationists.
[MUSIC]
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