Another great article by Auden, who has long been one of the few people telling it like it is. Among the many things he gets right here is the dangerous new role of the academy. As Daniel Drezner points out, over the last few decades some areas in academia have shifted from careful empiricism to “thought leadership”. The reason for this is obvious: money. The effect is harder to observe. In a recent article in SSIR, Ken Pucker and I describe the damage caused by some green pundits.
Auden is also correct that a “fringe” group of scholars are trying to fight back, but we are up against a lot of money. Some say tens of trillions of dollars are invested in “sustainable” funds. Without a lot of help, I don’t think we are going to win this one.
One way we can all help is to change the baseline of discussion. In many business schools, classes begin with the premise that sustainability is profitable, regulation is unneeded, and purpose-driven corporations will allow the reinvention of capitalism. Such talk makes everyone feel good, for the moment, but that is all. Let’s question the belief that business is going through some great awakening. Let’s take, as Auden advocates, a more evidence-based approach to finding solutions to our problems.
For more than three decades, I have personally known some of the people mentioned in the article, and many others like them. They are highly talented, top quality analysts, and genuinely good-hearted individuals. But their "solutions" always seemed to not go deep enough. It has been always about how we will discover ways for the business corporations to make even more money, with efficiency and sustainability as a side effect, to make them even more profitable.
The right way should never be, (IMHO), first about how we make more profits, and then save the planet as a side benefit.
It must be first about how we must stop ruining the planet, and then to figure out how to re-define our economic, technological, and social systems to bring people out of dire want, bring them health and reasonable prosperity, always staying within the planetary limits. That is the only way to ensure we are not putting the cart before the horse!
It is best to stop putting on band-aids when the disease is deep in the body. As Richard Feynman famously said in his sole-authored appendix to the report on the Challenger Disaster,
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled”
Now it is not just the Challenger Disaster, it is a planetary disaster, and Nature surely cannot be fooled!!
The sum of all of the corporate emissions reductions programs over the past 20 years have resulted in ……wait……yes….carbon emissions growth of 50 percent. This is principally a function of GDP growth. Auden is a truth telling, passionate and committed truth teller (see his great book Getting Green Done) that has prophetically warned, for years, that good intentions and incremental action get crushed by system incentives, growth and corporate double speak. It is high time that we listen up and advocate for systems change.
Auden’s analysis is dead on. And as a business school professor who studies corporate sustainability, I have to agree that we have been part of the problem. Many of us have been beguiled by the potential for win/win solutions. But after more than 20 years of research, it is clearer than ever that the basic truths of economics are still true: Businesses maximize profits. They won’t solve any problems that involve reducing profits. Externalities like climate change harm society and represent a subsidy to fossil fuel companies, so they will fight to keep that subsidy. Governments are the primary vehicle society has for addressing social harms, so we should focus on the policies we need to solve externality problems.
The problem, of course, is that government in the US has become increasingly dysfunctional. You could say it has been captured by business interests, but that obscures the roots of the problem. Our system is no longer reliably representative of the will of the majority due to institutional failures including gerrymandering, the fact that all States get 2 Senators regardless of population while DC and Puerto Rico get none, the Electoral College, and perhaps most importantly, the corrosive role of money in politics. The Supreme Court’s decision that "money is speech" tilts the playing field in favor of the wealthy, and that means corporations play an outsized role in choosing our politicians and the issues they care about.
Which brings us back to climate change. Big Oil, Big Coal, the Chamber of Commerce, and a vast array of corporate-funded "think tanks" like the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have used their political clout for decades to block meaningful climate policy. We need the rest of Corporate America to stand up and fight just as vocally for climate action, because most businesses will be harmed as the planet goes up in flames.
So at this moment in history, when there is no time left to dither about climate change, anyone who cares about corporate sustainability and climate needs to focus on corporate political responsibility (CPR) instead of CSR.
This is why a group of ARCS faculty (kindy referred to by Schendler as "obscure but noble") wrote the article "CSR Needs CPR: Corporate Sustainability and Politics." https://cmr.berkeley.edu/promo/2019/best-article-award/
Thanks! This 14-min reading explain things I’ve been trying to pull off myself for many years now:
1. Why I fell in love with #corporatesustainability (let’s change the world by doing good!)
2. Why I got fed up with it and couldn’t be part of it anymore (I realized after a while I didn’t want to be in complicity with most of it, because it was against my morals)
3. Why people like me became then persona nongrata in the métier (we are “radicals”, “socialists”)
4. Why it is important to deeply re-engage with it NOW (there is, finally, a tiny space to shed light and promote #change in the #justice and #sustainability interface)
Good article and spot on. It is naive to think business will solve the problem of climate change. It is a classic public bad that even with some business leadership the solution will always be under provided because it is a public good. The market cannot and never will provide sufficient levels of a public good. This is basic environmental economics. Sadly market gurus will make grandiose claims to the contrary that will fail. We must have public policy that will motivate all the free riders to jump on board. This does not mean that business should stop strategies where they engage a broader set of values than just profit maximization. This awakening of business is a good thing. Why humans think they should remove their moral values from their decisions when they walk through the door of their business is beyond my understanding. Moving away from this thinking is good. We need good business behavior and we need good public policy to solve these systemic problems. It’s not one or the other, its both.
Hard to disagree with Auden on the insidious role of special interest dollars in our most basic democratic processes today. He’s also right that win-win / fig leaf / elegant design solution / *insert sustainability buzzword here* -type fixes won’t get us where we need to go alone. I do think corporations still stand alone in their potential to offer scalable solutions exactly because of the reasons he was drawn to CSR in the first place ("corporations were the only entities large enough, nimble enough, and motivated (by profit) to solve the climate problem.") But plenty of corporations don’t deserve to be part of the solution, and the ones that do should be expected/encouraged to make some less palatable investments in environmental & social stewardship. Investor and consumer behavior has to change, too. There has to be more appetite for prioritizing long-term needs over short-term wants alongside much stronger policy guiding progress.
As a former CSR professional, Auden’s piece speaks to many thoughts other CSR professionals brought my way.
In the proliferation of academic courses focused on facets of CSR this should be a must-read to provide students with context. And for current CSR experts, hopefully they read this as well and aim to reach the same positive ends we’re all driving toward, but perhaps through different means and with a new lens.
The need for this discussion is evident. All the pledges, commitments, and dollars invested in the name of corporate sustainability (not to mention country NDCs) have not altered the continued increase of atmospheric GHGs, the decline in clean and available freshwater, stopped deforestation, nor the ongoing loss of healthy topsoil. So, clearly "business as usual" hasn’t and won’t suffice.
But to use one of my favorite business terms, the past failures are really just "sunk costs". We can’t dwell on the failures of the past, rather we must build on the structures that exist. I see hope (I know, it’s not a strategy!) that corporate leaders, policy makers, and the finance sector realize that they can no longer pretend that climate change either doesn’t exist or is someone else’s issue (though clearly that is their default preference).
In the 2016 US Presidential Election process, climate change was basically ignored by all the candidates. In 2020, it was a ubiquitous topic and the Biden Administration has baked climate science into every government agency and agenda. There is an expectation that the new US NDC will set a 50% carbon emissions reduction by 2030.
In the corporate world, the rapid adoption of NetZero Carbon goals before 2050 (this includes supply chains) is becoming a defacto requirement. Of course, this will now require regulators, customers, employees, and investors to demand goals turn into action.
The capital markets are literally throwing money at companies that claim have solutions to many of the environmental challenges we must confront. I suspect that many of those dollars will be lost, but let’s applaud the clear recognition that these risks are real and will require solutions.
I would argue that while the last 30 years of corporate and investor sustainability work, while broadly ineffective, did build a foundation for action. Let’s find ways to leverage that foundation to drive real change.
"The reality is that the labor of most corporate sustainability managers is worse than scut work: At least scut work advances toward a goal or leaves you with a clean toilet."
Auden is right that the empirical evidence for across the board win-win action is weak. Perhaps that is why not only academics but also many practitioners are quite skeptical of these far reaching claims. My sense is that many of our students don’t really desire to be cajoled into thinking that there is a strong business case for sustainability, and won’t ever fully believe it, no matter how hard we lean into it. I am increasingly inclined to believe that people are ready to hear some bold truths, proclaimed bluntly, grounded in moral authority. Think about the viral “Calling bullshit” course at the University of Washington. I think the time is ripe to echo Greta and simply tell it like it is.
Perhaps the only thing holding back professors from teaching to Auden’s vision is their own timidity, coupled with a dearth of alternative course materials (@Auden – the world needs an update to the Aspen Skiing Company case, stat). In my class, the textbook is Drawdown, the course project is a business model to tackle climate change, and the word profit barely comes up (but financial viability does). McGill probably isn’t the most progressive of institutions, and my course perhaps isn’t aligned with the worldview of many of my colleagues, but if the past is prologue, I predict that I won’t be stopped in my tracks by the powers that be. Who’s with me?
Evidently, it takes the collapse of the planetary climate system to make it clear that efficiency and sustainability are not the same things. W. S. Jevons must be rolling in his grave.
Great analysis Auden. I just assigned it to my students.
I agree; the CSR approach leads to the idea that easy wins will bolster profits and bring forth a sea of goodwill from customers, employees, and governmental stakeholders. However, it just ain’t so. We won’t solve climate with companies being less bad.
Even the might of economics doesn’t really turn the tide on fossil fuels; we recently found the interests are so entrenched that government regulation and lawsuits by NGOs is what is closing coal plants; not the falling prices of natural gas. https://theconversation.com/whats-really-driving-coal-powers-demise-153868 Anyone who believes the fact that fossil fuels are becoming less economically feasible will lead to speed demise is overly optimistic IMHO.
Now, I’m not so naive as to think entrepreneurs are all noble activists seeking to create change without regard to profit, BUT you’ve got to admit if solar startups do well, that’s a good thing and if they make a lot of money, that’s not bad too.
So what about an academic approach that tries to help new and better products, markets, and industries survive and thrive? What about exploring how those industries can partner with government, NGOs, and academics to supplant fossil fuels as quickly as possible? Perhaps that can be a way of getting the political will behind REAL policies that can actually keep fossil fuels in the ground.
I get that’s not the whole solution, but I wonder if it can be an important part of it?
The greater problem from this mea culpa from Schendler is that only a fool would have believed what he and his fellow neoliberal marketeers were advancing as part of decades of chasing their checks from corporate America.
Is he returning the ill-gotten money? Is he calling for the end of corporate skiing? Is he saying that American higher education and business and think-tanks and writing, all arenas in which he thrived, were all pathetic jokes from the 70s through today?
If so, he should admit in his piece that he was told in on-line forums that he was part of this giant con, yet refused to listen.
Last year I wrote a brief article (link below) about the need to retire the term ‘corporate social responsibility’ because it serves as a linguistic bandaid for the real problem of shareholder primacy. In this terrific article by Auden Schendler published in Stanford Social Innovation Review the topic is much further and more eloquently explored more specifically in the case of continued societal reliance on fossil fuel. The article is long and well worth reading to see how the existential risk of companies’ continued focus on their own sustainable business practices precludes them in many cases for not helping shape the holistic systemic changes that are needed to public policy for planetary and human health and survival. That’s what we’re working on at American Sustainable Business Council with the support of forward-looking members and like-minded organizational partners. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rip-csr-michael-neuwirth-public-relations-leader/
Auden - I applaud your needed and bracing candor. As someone who came to corporate sustainability after being a staffer in a US Senate hamstrong by the filibuster (back in 1991-1993 ! When few outisde the Senate knew its all shaping importance) & a dedicated student of political change in law school, as a federal law clerk and on campaigns including Gore’s I was always worried the corporate sustainability movement was a counter-productive distraction, but done correctly it need not be. Indeed it can, should and needs to be the decisively important community and set of ideas that activates the science inspired global growth companies in the US to recognize how divergent their political, social and commercial interest are from the small minority of fossil fuel companies that r irrevocably married to fuel based generation of power as the world accelerates its transition to technological based generation of power - electrical, social & political. It requires a more rigorous treatment than I can provide here -but we’ll all benefit when we evolve from a paradigm of voluntary corporate “climate leadership” to a demand enforced by direct action 4 all companies to be “climate responsible” including a public CEO commitment to responsible Public policy that is exactly as radical as science demands.
Comments on ‘The Complicity of Corporate Sustainability’ by Auden Schendler
Auden Schendler’s article, The Complicity of Corporate Sustainability is excellent (‘Corporate Complicity’, or ‘Complicity’ here). It lays bare the complicity of ‘corporate sustainability’ with the fossil fuel industry’s long-standing climate action obstructionism. I think this is an important wake-up call: not only for the business community but for society more generally. I see it as part of a broader challenge of corporate hypocrisy, where too many corporate PR efforts (including ‘sustainability reports’) extol the company’s social and environmental virtues while core business decisions contribute to gross ecological and social harm.
Both Auden’s and my early experience with sustainability was with resorts, community and sustainability back in the 90’s (he in Aspen, me in Whistler). As such, we were led (and misled) by many of the same cast of characters with their rosy ‘win-win’ promises! Since then, Auden has been with Aspen Ski Company whereas I’ve worked with strategic sustainable development and leadership inside business, local government, university/academia and ENGOs (in Canada, Sweden and the US).
Here are a few reflections to add to Auden’s good arguments, from my parallel path:
1. Continued Complicity. This complicity is nicely exposed by Auden and yet it is long-standing. Even in the 90’s, Ray Anderson confessed that industrialists like him were, in fact, complicit in ‘crimes against future generations’ and that nothing less than a ‘re-design of commerce’ was required once his own company got their own (efficiency/closed loop) house in order (see also Mid-Course Correction, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist). Judging from his presentations, writing and my conversations with him, I still see Ray and a few other thought leaders at the time as people of great integrity (i.e. not evil)!
2. Sophisticated Complicity (and Hypocrisy). I have recently observed, first-hand, corporate power ‘defining sustainability on its own terms,’ (ignoring or disputing climate science, or simply casting doubt on climate action, as a priority) all while publicly expressing worthy, yet vague, aspirations. In my view, it’s not corporate power simply ‘asserting reality’ but a much more clever, PR-driven ‘rationalization presented as rationality’ (as suggested elsewhere, by Flyvbjerg). After all, ‘being rational’ is a much better strategy for enrolling policy makers and academics, not to mention disguising complicity as ‘loyalty’ within companies. Supposed efforts for ‘embedding sustainability’ can easily become captured by this skewed rationality.
3. Corporate Complicity as ‘Creative Tension’? The article paints a picture of extremes (i.e. complicity, on the one hand, versus a righteous view of ‘cranks and radicals’ on the other). It makes for a compelling storyline. However, a move from polarization towards reconciliation is more likely to yield common ground, and solutions. The necessary, radical - and ‘realized’ - climate transition needs a ‘third way:’ something along the lines of a mediated surfacing and reconciliation of a scientifically sound, robustly principled, sincere intention combined with the strategy, enormous capacity and investments of re-directed corporations. See, for example, Cooperrider’s AI ideas: https://davidcooperriderai.co/appreciative-inquiry-in-a-broken-world/
4. Corporate Complicity or Public Policy Failure (or both)? While the chosen theme of the article is, quite legitimately, Corporate Complicity, the theme could just as easily be the failure of political and policy leadership. In some respects, corporations are simply doing what many have come to expect given the corporate charter, profit imperative, intense competition, along with the ‘free’ atmospheric dumping ground for carbon. In my view, the article could be more candid about the important role for independent government and policy (e.g. ‘how can business be part of, even instigate…‘ and ‘Government might wake up…’). It makes me wonder the degree to which Corporate America given up on the promise of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’? (‘business’ doesn’t appear in this quote). While business’s move into the political leadership void is understandable, does anyone imagine achieving a stable climate in western countries without a renewal of healthy democracies and proactive, public policy leading to more ‘purposeful’ capitalism - thereby changing the ‘rules of the game’ that competitive businesses play? (M. Mazzucato, etc.)? Isn’t it telling that corporations are ‘not’ (on the whole) advocating for certain rules of the game like: paying their fair share of corporate taxes, supporting healthy, ‘non-captured’ democracies generally, more equitable public policy, healthy local community development above centralized profits, a living wage/benefit package for all employees and, more generally internalizing their externalities. What if corporations simply participated in non-prescriptive conversations about finding common ground on the meaning and functions of healthier democracies and public policy, as opposed to ‘fighting’ for certain public policies that directly serve their self-interest? See, for example, Democracy Unchained (Orr, D., et al., eds. 2020). https://thenewpress.com/books/democracy-unchained https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIDqDnDcx6g ).
5. Complicit Corporations in Context. Corporate action (or inaction) on climate is just one of the puzzle pieces – although a huge one – ‘in play.’ How can a broader perspective outside the corporate, echo-chamber rationality (‘business circle’, or business-political lobby landscape) lead to more systemic solutions? What if we also took a systemic, comprehensive and purposeful view; mapping the other ~6 major ‘circles’, all active responders to the climate emergency (and other related ‘emergencies’)? This would include governments, civil society, ESG investors, standard-keepers, and others. This offers the opportunity to lay bare the power asymmetries, articulate the potential reciprocities and catalyze the co-benefits. For more, please feel free to contact me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Good stuff Auden. Thank you so much for your thought leadership and on-the-ground actions. You hit the arguments like dropping onto a fresh line of powder pillows with a sweet big-air kicker at the end.
“How can business be part of, even instigate, beneficial social and political revolution?”
It’s simple. Sales departments need a new metric for success. Measuring how much time and money it takes to make how much revenue is too limited a view. It’s like the logic brains of men born into societies of subjugation were the only minds used when business systems were formed. Oh, right. That’s exactly what we inherited. Binary methods are great for problem solving artificial intelligence, machines that go ping, and charts that go up, but this leaves out the entire field of emotional intelligence and the heart’s wisdom. Now is the time to bring our whole selves to the challenges we face and, like mama always said, follow the money.
Sales departments use incentives, so let’s put a sustainability metric into the deal. Look upstream at how a business makes its money. Give those disgruntled CSR staffers you mentioned the job of reviewing their company’s top 10-20% of accounts. Are accounts aligned with a CSR team’s own internal sustainability objectives? Throw away the corporate carbon calculators and set objectives based on measurable results like the few dozen business related indicators from the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Is your business making money from accounts that are making a mess? Rank them. An easy +3 to -3 will do. Bring sustainability right into the heart of the business of business. Give discounts to accounts that are acting to avoid harm, benefiting stakeholders and contributing to solutions. Don’t be afraid to touch the short-term revenue. Sustainable cross-corporate coalitions will naturally form from inside sales departments as they move from talking about it, to being about it. That’s a revolution.
If Salesforce (full disclosure: I developed a Salesforce Partner application that provides the above functionality) is really a great example of a corporation on the right track, and it’s CEO Marc Benioff has chosen wisely to preach Zen master Shunryū Suzuki’s “beginner’s mind” approach, then we must weave sales and social/environmental benefit together. Keep them apart and we maintain the destructive binary model that put us here, bring them together and we become the one thing that flows naturally from a beginner’s mind—change.
After four decades of prodding and hopefully tactfully challenging the sustainable business field (usually unpaid and from the back-of-the-room), I left a couple of years ago, because my efforts weren’t working, while still keeping a bit of antennae in. However, I don’t agree with a lot of what’s in the article, including the language, and in some cases the logic behind it.
I also noted their progress, as it proceeded from one paradigm to a somewhat better one, of course always self-limiting and (almost) never approaching where it needed to go. Still, any increment of conceptual progress indirectly indicates another one is possible (of course, there’s that usually unmentioned incorrect assumption “We have forever”).
But never did I hear sustainable business ever promoted as “business could, through its own operations, drive the solutions to climate change.” Or, the “presumption that corporations, unrestrained, will save us.”
It was always going to take many things, and still will. But there’s no reason an elevated sustainable business sector can’t play a disproportionate and critical helping role. We need all the help we can get!
Blaming the sustainable business field for lack of societal progress towards addressing societal needs, and for the continued political power of big oil and money, when there are so many simultaneous other factors, is extreme.
He also leaves out success stories, such as (although I stopped reading them) in any issue of the sustainable business press. And there are still the heavyweights: Interface, Patagonia, Salesforce, and I hope others by now that could get almost anyone first hearing about them surprised and confused, in a good way. (I used to think “would” get anyone pleasantly shocked, and become the almost automatic new baseline, but have learned that’s not the way things work.)
My guiding epistemological principle is if there are at least two, more if there’s three, exceptions to the general understanding of something, such “business is evil;” or, if not inherently, “They are forced by the system to act that way,” than something else is going on. And, if we are of a social science bent, we should be prepared to re-examine our views.
In other words, what explains those surprisingly positive actions, and can we bottle it?
I’d also like to see evidence, preferably directly from them, that the Sustainability MBAs have not been successful; and, if so, what they now think is still doable, and how.
Now he is clearly most right is that the sustainable business field has not achieved its potential.
There are a lot of reasons. I used that, and similar experiences in other sectors, to reflect and see that there are many mindset barriers towards their (and others) achieving their potential, both within (those self-limiting paradigms), as well as within the sustainable business press and trade organizations; and, what could have facilitated their better evolution, without.
The latter, and reasons why it is not entirely their fault, is that, contrary to the presumption in the article, practically no one knows they even exist.
The mainstream media ignores them (I’ve many times asked The New York Times to cover it), as does the government, most academia, environmentalists. I’ve concluded that in a world it seems often intermediated through narratives and ideologies, they suffer from not having a political home. Not on the left, right, or even center. And ideologies don’t change easily.
You can’t come to support what you’ve never heard of; or, if you do, it’s categorized automatically as “Greenwash,” whether it is or isn’t, with their remaining imperfections always highlighted. Sustainable business then must be an oxymoron.
Finally, the political changes he is calling for them to make seems to have recently finally hit a tipping point, albeit needing a prod and not consistently, with the Georgia ballot law.
Who would have anticipated seeing at least the early signs of a war between the Republican Party and big business?
Similarly, regarding “Biden’s aggressiveness on climate is almost shocking, but he needs support—from the business community,”—he’s getting some of it!
This could get interesting!
Here’s my very different vision of the sustainable business field when I was still writing about this.
“On 40 Years Watching the Sustainable Business Field: Part II of Using Sustainability to Recharge America’s Problem-Solving.” Sustainable Brands. February 6, 2017. http://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/organizational_change/matt_polsky/40_years_watching_sustainable_business_field
Great piece, Auden! I read this as a brilliant, powerful reminder that the environmental challenges we face—especially climate change—come from systemic flaws in the workings of the market. Because the flaws are systemic, they can’t be fixed by individual businesses, no matter how well-intentioned. The fixes have to change the rules that govern business—and, again, that can’t happen company by company. And not acknowledging that is what you provocatively call complicity. I love your analogy to the Crying Indian ads, which tried to convince Americans in the early 1970s that we could solve systemic environmental problems by (trivial) individual action: We just had to stop littering. As you say, individual corporate sustainability efforts, even when sincere and far-reaching, just deflect us from the basic truth: We can’t solve our problems company by company, we need systemic changes in the rules. And that requires political action. If corporate leaders really want to lead on this issue, they need to join broad coalitions to demand the kind of systemic changes that are required for true sustainability.
All the assumptions made in this article about supposed dangers of global warming are proven false by a huge body of academic literature over decades of work. The ideology expressed by the author is false and anti-human.
COMMENTS
BY Andrew King
ON April 9, 2021 07:31 AM
Another great article by Auden, who has long been one of the few people telling it like it is. Among the many things he gets right here is the dangerous new role of the academy. As Daniel Drezner points out, over the last few decades some areas in academia have shifted from careful empiricism to “thought leadership”. The reason for this is obvious: money. The effect is harder to observe. In a recent article in SSIR, Ken Pucker and I describe the damage caused by some green pundits.
Auden is also correct that a “fringe” group of scholars are trying to fight back, but we are up against a lot of money. Some say tens of trillions of dollars are invested in “sustainable” funds. Without a lot of help, I don’t think we are going to win this one.
One way we can all help is to change the baseline of discussion. In many business schools, classes begin with the premise that sustainability is profitable, regulation is unneeded, and purpose-driven corporations will allow the reinvention of capitalism. Such talk makes everyone feel good, for the moment, but that is all. Let’s question the belief that business is going through some great awakening. Let’s take, as Auden advocates, a more evidence-based approach to finding solutions to our problems.
BY Ashok Gadgil
ON April 9, 2021 07:04 PM
For more than three decades, I have personally known some of the people mentioned in the article, and many others like them. They are highly talented, top quality analysts, and genuinely good-hearted individuals. But their "solutions" always seemed to not go deep enough. It has been always about how we will discover ways for the business corporations to make even more money, with efficiency and sustainability as a side effect, to make them even more profitable.
The right way should never be, (IMHO), first about how we make more profits, and then save the planet as a side benefit.
It must be first about how we must stop ruining the planet, and then to figure out how to re-define our economic, technological, and social systems to bring people out of dire want, bring them health and reasonable prosperity, always staying within the planetary limits. That is the only way to ensure we are not putting the cart before the horse!
It is best to stop putting on band-aids when the disease is deep in the body. As Richard Feynman famously said in his sole-authored appendix to the report on the Challenger Disaster,
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled”
Now it is not just the Challenger Disaster, it is a planetary disaster, and Nature surely cannot be fooled!!
BY Ken Pucker
ON April 10, 2021 11:49 AM
The sum of all of the corporate emissions reductions programs over the past 20 years have resulted in ……wait……yes….carbon emissions growth of 50 percent. This is principally a function of GDP growth. Auden is a truth telling, passionate and committed truth teller (see his great book Getting Green Done) that has prophetically warned, for years, that good intentions and incremental action get crushed by system incentives, growth and corporate double speak. It is high time that we listen up and advocate for systems change.
BY Tom Lyon
ON April 10, 2021 03:04 PM
Auden’s analysis is dead on. And as a business school professor who studies corporate sustainability, I have to agree that we have been part of the problem. Many of us have been beguiled by the potential for win/win solutions. But after more than 20 years of research, it is clearer than ever that the basic truths of economics are still true: Businesses maximize profits. They won’t solve any problems that involve reducing profits. Externalities like climate change harm society and represent a subsidy to fossil fuel companies, so they will fight to keep that subsidy. Governments are the primary vehicle society has for addressing social harms, so we should focus on the policies we need to solve externality problems.
The problem, of course, is that government in the US has become increasingly dysfunctional. You could say it has been captured by business interests, but that obscures the roots of the problem. Our system is no longer reliably representative of the will of the majority due to institutional failures including gerrymandering, the fact that all States get 2 Senators regardless of population while DC and Puerto Rico get none, the Electoral College, and perhaps most importantly, the corrosive role of money in politics. The Supreme Court’s decision that "money is speech" tilts the playing field in favor of the wealthy, and that means corporations play an outsized role in choosing our politicians and the issues they care about.
Which brings us back to climate change. Big Oil, Big Coal, the Chamber of Commerce, and a vast array of corporate-funded "think tanks" like the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have used their political clout for decades to block meaningful climate policy. We need the rest of Corporate America to stand up and fight just as vocally for climate action, because most businesses will be harmed as the planet goes up in flames.
So at this moment in history, when there is no time left to dither about climate change, anyone who cares about corporate sustainability and climate needs to focus on corporate political responsibility (CPR) instead of CSR.
This is why a group of ARCS faculty (kindy referred to by Schendler as "obscure but noble") wrote the article "CSR Needs CPR: Corporate Sustainability and Politics." https://cmr.berkeley.edu/promo/2019/best-article-award/
And this is why the Erb Institute at the University of Michigan has created a CPR Taskforce. https://erb.umich.edu/corporate-political-responsibility-taskforce/ Some of us are indeed trying to follow the path Schendler is pointing towards.
BY Mariana Lyra
ON April 11, 2021 08:40 AM
Thanks! This 14-min reading explain things I’ve been trying to pull off myself for many years now:
1. Why I fell in love with #corporatesustainability (let’s change the world by doing good!)
2. Why I got fed up with it and couldn’t be part of it anymore (I realized after a while I didn’t want to be in complicity with most of it, because it was against my morals)
3. Why people like me became then persona nongrata in the métier (we are “radicals”, “socialists”)
4. Why it is important to deeply re-engage with it NOW (there is, finally, a tiny space to shed light and promote #change in the #justice and #sustainability interface)
BY Dr. Susan Kask
ON April 11, 2021 09:03 AM
Good article and spot on. It is naive to think business will solve the problem of climate change. It is a classic public bad that even with some business leadership the solution will always be under provided because it is a public good. The market cannot and never will provide sufficient levels of a public good. This is basic environmental economics. Sadly market gurus will make grandiose claims to the contrary that will fail. We must have public policy that will motivate all the free riders to jump on board. This does not mean that business should stop strategies where they engage a broader set of values than just profit maximization. This awakening of business is a good thing. Why humans think they should remove their moral values from their decisions when they walk through the door of their business is beyond my understanding. Moving away from this thinking is good. We need good business behavior and we need good public policy to solve these systemic problems. It’s not one or the other, its both.
BY Tara Doyle
ON April 11, 2021 11:36 AM
Hard to disagree with Auden on the insidious role of special interest dollars in our most basic democratic processes today. He’s also right that win-win / fig leaf / elegant design solution / *insert sustainability buzzword here* -type fixes won’t get us where we need to go alone. I do think corporations still stand alone in their potential to offer scalable solutions exactly because of the reasons he was drawn to CSR in the first place ("corporations were the only entities large enough, nimble enough, and motivated (by profit) to solve the climate problem.") But plenty of corporations don’t deserve to be part of the solution, and the ones that do should be expected/encouraged to make some less palatable investments in environmental & social stewardship. Investor and consumer behavior has to change, too. There has to be more appetite for prioritizing long-term needs over short-term wants alongside much stronger policy guiding progress.
BY Kyle Rudzinski
ON April 11, 2021 12:35 PM
As a former CSR professional, Auden’s piece speaks to many thoughts other CSR professionals brought my way.
In the proliferation of academic courses focused on facets of CSR this should be a must-read to provide students with context. And for current CSR experts, hopefully they read this as well and aim to reach the same positive ends we’re all driving toward, but perhaps through different means and with a new lens.
BY Tim Dunn
ON April 11, 2021 02:48 PM
The need for this discussion is evident. All the pledges, commitments, and dollars invested in the name of corporate sustainability (not to mention country NDCs) have not altered the continued increase of atmospheric GHGs, the decline in clean and available freshwater, stopped deforestation, nor the ongoing loss of healthy topsoil. So, clearly "business as usual" hasn’t and won’t suffice.
But to use one of my favorite business terms, the past failures are really just "sunk costs". We can’t dwell on the failures of the past, rather we must build on the structures that exist. I see hope (I know, it’s not a strategy!) that corporate leaders, policy makers, and the finance sector realize that they can no longer pretend that climate change either doesn’t exist or is someone else’s issue (though clearly that is their default preference).
In the 2016 US Presidential Election process, climate change was basically ignored by all the candidates. In 2020, it was a ubiquitous topic and the Biden Administration has baked climate science into every government agency and agenda. There is an expectation that the new US NDC will set a 50% carbon emissions reduction by 2030.
In the corporate world, the rapid adoption of NetZero Carbon goals before 2050 (this includes supply chains) is becoming a defacto requirement. Of course, this will now require regulators, customers, employees, and investors to demand goals turn into action.
The capital markets are literally throwing money at companies that claim have solutions to many of the environmental challenges we must confront. I suspect that many of those dollars will be lost, but let’s applaud the clear recognition that these risks are real and will require solutions.
I would argue that while the last 30 years of corporate and investor sustainability work, while broadly ineffective, did build a foundation for action. Let’s find ways to leverage that foundation to drive real change.
BY kristen
ON April 12, 2021 06:42 AM
"The reality is that the labor of most corporate sustainability managers is worse than scut work: At least scut work advances toward a goal or leaves you with a clean toilet."
Wow - I’ve never felt more seen.
BY Dror Etzion
ON April 12, 2021 07:07 AM
Auden is right that the empirical evidence for across the board win-win action is weak. Perhaps that is why not only academics but also many practitioners are quite skeptical of these far reaching claims. My sense is that many of our students don’t really desire to be cajoled into thinking that there is a strong business case for sustainability, and won’t ever fully believe it, no matter how hard we lean into it. I am increasingly inclined to believe that people are ready to hear some bold truths, proclaimed bluntly, grounded in moral authority. Think about the viral “Calling bullshit” course at the University of Washington. I think the time is ripe to echo Greta and simply tell it like it is.
Perhaps the only thing holding back professors from teaching to Auden’s vision is their own timidity, coupled with a dearth of alternative course materials (@Auden – the world needs an update to the Aspen Skiing Company case, stat). In my class, the textbook is Drawdown, the course project is a business model to tackle climate change, and the word profit barely comes up (but financial viability does). McGill probably isn’t the most progressive of institutions, and my course perhaps isn’t aligned with the worldview of many of my colleagues, but if the past is prologue, I predict that I won’t be stopped in my tracks by the powers that be. Who’s with me?
BY Mark McElroy
ON April 12, 2021 03:29 PM
Evidently, it takes the collapse of the planetary climate system to make it clear that efficiency and sustainability are not the same things. W. S. Jevons must be rolling in his grave.
BY Jeff York
ON April 14, 2021 01:10 PM
Great analysis Auden. I just assigned it to my students.
I agree; the CSR approach leads to the idea that easy wins will bolster profits and bring forth a sea of goodwill from customers, employees, and governmental stakeholders. However, it just ain’t so. We won’t solve climate with companies being less bad.
Even the might of economics doesn’t really turn the tide on fossil fuels; we recently found the interests are so entrenched that government regulation and lawsuits by NGOs is what is closing coal plants; not the falling prices of natural gas. https://theconversation.com/whats-really-driving-coal-powers-demise-153868 Anyone who believes the fact that fossil fuels are becoming less economically feasible will lead to speed demise is overly optimistic IMHO.
Now, I’m not so naive as to think entrepreneurs are all noble activists seeking to create change without regard to profit, BUT you’ve got to admit if solar startups do well, that’s a good thing and if they make a lot of money, that’s not bad too.
So what about an academic approach that tries to help new and better products, markets, and industries survive and thrive? What about exploring how those industries can partner with government, NGOs, and academics to supplant fossil fuels as quickly as possible? Perhaps that can be a way of getting the political will behind REAL policies that can actually keep fossil fuels in the ground.
I get that’s not the whole solution, but I wonder if it can be an important part of it?
BY Martin
ON April 15, 2021 05:28 AM
The greater problem from this mea culpa from Schendler is that only a fool would have believed what he and his fellow neoliberal marketeers were advancing as part of decades of chasing their checks from corporate America.
Is he returning the ill-gotten money? Is he calling for the end of corporate skiing? Is he saying that American higher education and business and think-tanks and writing, all arenas in which he thrived, were all pathetic jokes from the 70s through today?
If so, he should admit in his piece that he was told in on-line forums that he was part of this giant con, yet refused to listen.
BY Michael Neuwirth
ON April 16, 2021 10:03 AM
Last year I wrote a brief article (link below) about the need to retire the term ‘corporate social responsibility’ because it serves as a linguistic bandaid for the real problem of shareholder primacy. In this terrific article by Auden Schendler published in Stanford Social Innovation Review the topic is much further and more eloquently explored more specifically in the case of continued societal reliance on fossil fuel. The article is long and well worth reading to see how the existential risk of companies’ continued focus on their own sustainable business practices precludes them in many cases for not helping shape the holistic systemic changes that are needed to public policy for planetary and human health and survival. That’s what we’re working on at American Sustainable Business Council with the support of forward-looking members and like-minded organizational partners.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rip-csr-michael-neuwirth-public-relations-leader/
BY Jim Boyle
ON April 18, 2021 02:25 PM
Auden - I applaud your needed and bracing candor. As someone who came to corporate sustainability after being a staffer in a US Senate hamstrong by the filibuster (back in 1991-1993 ! When few outisde the Senate knew its all shaping importance) & a dedicated student of political change in law school, as a federal law clerk and on campaigns including Gore’s I was always worried the corporate sustainability movement was a counter-productive distraction, but done correctly it need not be. Indeed it can, should and needs to be the decisively important community and set of ideas that activates the science inspired global growth companies in the US to recognize how divergent their political, social and commercial interest are from the small minority of fossil fuel companies that r irrevocably married to fuel based generation of power as the world accelerates its transition to technological based generation of power - electrical, social & political. It requires a more rigorous treatment than I can provide here -but we’ll all benefit when we evolve from a paradigm of voluntary corporate “climate leadership” to a demand enforced by direct action 4 all companies to be “climate responsible” including a public CEO commitment to responsible Public policy that is exactly as radical as science demands.
BY David Waldron
ON April 19, 2021 11:03 AM
Comments on ‘The Complicity of Corporate Sustainability’ by Auden Schendler
Auden Schendler’s article, The Complicity of Corporate Sustainability is excellent (‘Corporate Complicity’, or ‘Complicity’ here). It lays bare the complicity of ‘corporate sustainability’ with the fossil fuel industry’s long-standing climate action obstructionism. I think this is an important wake-up call: not only for the business community but for society more generally. I see it as part of a broader challenge of corporate hypocrisy, where too many corporate PR efforts (including ‘sustainability reports’) extol the company’s social and environmental virtues while core business decisions contribute to gross ecological and social harm.
Both Auden’s and my early experience with sustainability was with resorts, community and sustainability back in the 90’s (he in Aspen, me in Whistler). As such, we were led (and misled) by many of the same cast of characters with their rosy ‘win-win’ promises! Since then, Auden has been with Aspen Ski Company whereas I’ve worked with strategic sustainable development and leadership inside business, local government, university/academia and ENGOs (in Canada, Sweden and the US).
Here are a few reflections to add to Auden’s good arguments, from my parallel path:
1. Continued Complicity. This complicity is nicely exposed by Auden and yet it is long-standing. Even in the 90’s, Ray Anderson confessed that industrialists like him were, in fact, complicit in ‘crimes against future generations’ and that nothing less than a ‘re-design of commerce’ was required once his own company got their own (efficiency/closed loop) house in order (see also Mid-Course Correction, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist). Judging from his presentations, writing and my conversations with him, I still see Ray and a few other thought leaders at the time as people of great integrity (i.e. not evil)!
2. Sophisticated Complicity (and Hypocrisy). I have recently observed, first-hand, corporate power ‘defining sustainability on its own terms,’ (ignoring or disputing climate science, or simply casting doubt on climate action, as a priority) all while publicly expressing worthy, yet vague, aspirations. In my view, it’s not corporate power simply ‘asserting reality’ but a much more clever, PR-driven ‘rationalization presented as rationality’ (as suggested elsewhere, by Flyvbjerg). After all, ‘being rational’ is a much better strategy for enrolling policy makers and academics, not to mention disguising complicity as ‘loyalty’ within companies. Supposed efforts for ‘embedding sustainability’ can easily become captured by this skewed rationality.
3. Corporate Complicity as ‘Creative Tension’? The article paints a picture of extremes (i.e. complicity, on the one hand, versus a righteous view of ‘cranks and radicals’ on the other). It makes for a compelling storyline. However, a move from polarization towards reconciliation is more likely to yield common ground, and solutions. The necessary, radical - and ‘realized’ - climate transition needs a ‘third way:’ something along the lines of a mediated surfacing and reconciliation of a scientifically sound, robustly principled, sincere intention combined with the strategy, enormous capacity and investments of re-directed corporations. See, for example, Cooperrider’s AI ideas: https://davidcooperriderai.co/appreciative-inquiry-in-a-broken-world/
4. Corporate Complicity or Public Policy Failure (or both)? While the chosen theme of the article is, quite legitimately, Corporate Complicity, the theme could just as easily be the failure of political and policy leadership. In some respects, corporations are simply doing what many have come to expect given the corporate charter, profit imperative, intense competition, along with the ‘free’ atmospheric dumping ground for carbon. In my view, the article could be more candid about the important role for independent government and policy (e.g. ‘how can business be part of, even instigate…‘ and ‘Government might wake up…’). It makes me wonder the degree to which Corporate America given up on the promise of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’? (‘business’ doesn’t appear in this quote). While business’s move into the political leadership void is understandable, does anyone imagine achieving a stable climate in western countries without a renewal of healthy democracies and proactive, public policy leading to more ‘purposeful’ capitalism - thereby changing the ‘rules of the game’ that competitive businesses play? (M. Mazzucato, etc.)? Isn’t it telling that corporations are ‘not’ (on the whole) advocating for certain rules of the game like: paying their fair share of corporate taxes, supporting healthy, ‘non-captured’ democracies generally, more equitable public policy, healthy local community development above centralized profits, a living wage/benefit package for all employees and, more generally internalizing their externalities. What if corporations simply participated in non-prescriptive conversations about finding common ground on the meaning and functions of healthier democracies and public policy, as opposed to ‘fighting’ for certain public policies that directly serve their self-interest? See, for example, Democracy Unchained (Orr, D., et al., eds. 2020). https://thenewpress.com/books/democracy-unchained https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIDqDnDcx6g ).
5. Complicit Corporations in Context. Corporate action (or inaction) on climate is just one of the puzzle pieces – although a huge one – ‘in play.’ How can a broader perspective outside the corporate, echo-chamber rationality (‘business circle’, or business-political lobby landscape) lead to more systemic solutions? What if we also took a systemic, comprehensive and purposeful view; mapping the other ~6 major ‘circles’, all active responders to the climate emergency (and other related ‘emergencies’)? This would include governments, civil society, ESG investors, standard-keepers, and others. This offers the opportunity to lay bare the power asymmetries, articulate the potential reciprocities and catalyze the co-benefits. For more, please feel free to contact me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
BY Seth Goddard
ON April 22, 2021 05:56 AM
Good stuff Auden. Thank you so much for your thought leadership and on-the-ground actions. You hit the arguments like dropping onto a fresh line of powder pillows with a sweet big-air kicker at the end.
“How can business be part of, even instigate, beneficial social and political revolution?”
It’s simple. Sales departments need a new metric for success. Measuring how much time and money it takes to make how much revenue is too limited a view. It’s like the logic brains of men born into societies of subjugation were the only minds used when business systems were formed. Oh, right. That’s exactly what we inherited. Binary methods are great for problem solving artificial intelligence, machines that go ping, and charts that go up, but this leaves out the entire field of emotional intelligence and the heart’s wisdom. Now is the time to bring our whole selves to the challenges we face and, like mama always said, follow the money.
Sales departments use incentives, so let’s put a sustainability metric into the deal. Look upstream at how a business makes its money. Give those disgruntled CSR staffers you mentioned the job of reviewing their company’s top 10-20% of accounts. Are accounts aligned with a CSR team’s own internal sustainability objectives? Throw away the corporate carbon calculators and set objectives based on measurable results like the few dozen business related indicators from the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Is your business making money from accounts that are making a mess? Rank them. An easy +3 to -3 will do. Bring sustainability right into the heart of the business of business. Give discounts to accounts that are acting to avoid harm, benefiting stakeholders and contributing to solutions. Don’t be afraid to touch the short-term revenue. Sustainable cross-corporate coalitions will naturally form from inside sales departments as they move from talking about it, to being about it. That’s a revolution.
If Salesforce (full disclosure: I developed a Salesforce Partner application that provides the above functionality) is really a great example of a corporation on the right track, and it’s CEO Marc Benioff has chosen wisely to preach Zen master Shunryū Suzuki’s “beginner’s mind” approach, then we must weave sales and social/environmental benefit together. Keep them apart and we maintain the destructive binary model that put us here, bring them together and we become the one thing that flows naturally from a beginner’s mind—change.
BY Matt Polsky
ON April 24, 2021 01:04 PM
After four decades of prodding and hopefully tactfully challenging the sustainable business field (usually unpaid and from the back-of-the-room), I left a couple of years ago, because my efforts weren’t working, while still keeping a bit of antennae in. However, I don’t agree with a lot of what’s in the article, including the language, and in some cases the logic behind it.
I also noted their progress, as it proceeded from one paradigm to a somewhat better one, of course always self-limiting and (almost) never approaching where it needed to go. Still, any increment of conceptual progress indirectly indicates another one is possible (of course, there’s that usually unmentioned incorrect assumption “We have forever”).
But never did I hear sustainable business ever promoted as “business could, through its own operations, drive the solutions to climate change.” Or, the “presumption that corporations, unrestrained, will save us.”
It was always going to take many things, and still will. But there’s no reason an elevated sustainable business sector can’t play a disproportionate and critical helping role. We need all the help we can get!
Blaming the sustainable business field for lack of societal progress towards addressing societal needs, and for the continued political power of big oil and money, when there are so many simultaneous other factors, is extreme.
He also leaves out success stories, such as (although I stopped reading them) in any issue of the sustainable business press. And there are still the heavyweights: Interface, Patagonia, Salesforce, and I hope others by now that could get almost anyone first hearing about them surprised and confused, in a good way. (I used to think “would” get anyone pleasantly shocked, and become the almost automatic new baseline, but have learned that’s not the way things work.)
My guiding epistemological principle is if there are at least two, more if there’s three, exceptions to the general understanding of something, such “business is evil;” or, if not inherently, “They are forced by the system to act that way,” than something else is going on. And, if we are of a social science bent, we should be prepared to re-examine our views.
In other words, what explains those surprisingly positive actions, and can we bottle it?
I’d also like to see evidence, preferably directly from them, that the Sustainability MBAs have not been successful; and, if so, what they now think is still doable, and how.
Now he is clearly most right is that the sustainable business field has not achieved its potential.
There are a lot of reasons. I used that, and similar experiences in other sectors, to reflect and see that there are many mindset barriers towards their (and others) achieving their potential, both within (those self-limiting paradigms), as well as within the sustainable business press and trade organizations; and, what could have facilitated their better evolution, without.
The latter, and reasons why it is not entirely their fault, is that, contrary to the presumption in the article, practically no one knows they even exist.
The mainstream media ignores them (I’ve many times asked The New York Times to cover it), as does the government, most academia, environmentalists. I’ve concluded that in a world it seems often intermediated through narratives and ideologies, they suffer from not having a political home. Not on the left, right, or even center. And ideologies don’t change easily.
You can’t come to support what you’ve never heard of; or, if you do, it’s categorized automatically as “Greenwash,” whether it is or isn’t, with their remaining imperfections always highlighted. Sustainable business then must be an oxymoron.
Finally, the political changes he is calling for them to make seems to have recently finally hit a tipping point, albeit needing a prod and not consistently, with the Georgia ballot law.
Who would have anticipated seeing at least the early signs of a war between the Republican Party and big business?
Similarly, regarding “Biden’s aggressiveness on climate is almost shocking, but he needs support—from the business community,”—he’s getting some of it!
This could get interesting!
Here’s my very different vision of the sustainable business field when I was still writing about this.
“On 40 Years Watching the Sustainable Business Field: Part II of Using Sustainability to Recharge America’s Problem-Solving.” Sustainable Brands. February 6, 2017. http://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/organizational_change/matt_polsky/40_years_watching_sustainable_business_field
BY Adam Rome
ON April 29, 2021 06:47 AM
Great piece, Auden! I read this as a brilliant, powerful reminder that the environmental challenges we face—especially climate change—come from systemic flaws in the workings of the market. Because the flaws are systemic, they can’t be fixed by individual businesses, no matter how well-intentioned. The fixes have to change the rules that govern business—and, again, that can’t happen company by company. And not acknowledging that is what you provocatively call complicity. I love your analogy to the Crying Indian ads, which tried to convince Americans in the early 1970s that we could solve systemic environmental problems by (trivial) individual action: We just had to stop littering. As you say, individual corporate sustainability efforts, even when sincere and far-reaching, just deflect us from the basic truth: We can’t solve our problems company by company, we need systemic changes in the rules. And that requires political action. If corporate leaders really want to lead on this issue, they need to join broad coalitions to demand the kind of systemic changes that are required for true sustainability.
BY David McGruer
ON September 26, 2021 02:46 PM
All the assumptions made in this article about supposed dangers of global warming are proven false by a huge body of academic literature over decades of work. The ideology expressed by the author is false and anti-human.