Editorial comment by the Ethical Corporation

Schemes for creating social and environmental leaders now abound. But companies should be careful how they spend their money.

A desire to enthuse staff and drive change via social and environmental schemes is a welcome trend in business. Employees and potential new hires cite corporate strategy in such areas as very important. But companies must be careful to choose the right course.

Consider two examples. Coca-Cola, BP and Kroll recently sent a mixture of marketing, environment and other middle managers on a trip to Antarctica, also attended by this publication. The aim was to create environmental leaders who would help transform their companies.

The reality was more, as the Guardian newspaper (also on the trip) put it, “a booze-cruise on ice”. The leadership and climate change training was indeed non-existent, but many participants, on a free holiday, eagerly bought into the sham to justify their time out of the office to colleagues.

Coke has spent large sums of shareholders money on an “e-base” in the region, which currently consists of an empty red hut on an island. Rather than waste money on such nonsense, the company should be keeping a closer eye and a higher spend on its UK climate change targets.

Contrast this scheme, costing companies some £16,000 per head, with the work of another organisation, the Global Institute For Tomorrow (Gift).

Gift, rather than taking corporate executives on a boat tour, uses groups of business people to devise economic and social plans for impoverished regions. Supported by companies such as the Hong Kong Electric Company and Mass Transit Railway Corporation, participants receive intensive training on socio-economic development issues.

They then develop practical business plans for local communities in places such as Yunnan, China, and Gujarat, India. The plans, once in place, lead to corporate sponsorship for the projects with the aim of creating local sustainable businesses from the ground up.

Nascent though the project is, clearly there is much greater potential for change in companies afterwards than with Coke’s scheme. Participants use their business skills and theories on the ground, discovering what works and what does not. Plans are presented to locals and may be rejected if unsuitable. Clearly, young managers can learn much from such an exercise. The businesses stand to gain, too, from exposure of their managers to such front line training.

And, of course, the local communities gain. In one case some 1,538 people in 375 households in Yunnan. The cost? Around $15,000 per head, half what Coke, Kroll, and BP have spent in the Antarctic.

Companies, communities, the environment and employees clearly have much to gain from thoughtful, integrated training programmes. The trick is to spend the money wisely.

Copyright: Ethical Corporation