Building and Advancing Integrity
After more than 100 years in business, you might think the Campbell Soup Co. would be an expert in corporate social responsibility. In one respect, you would be right: In a recent survey by the Reputation Institute and the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, *Campbell placed second behind Google on a list of the most socially responsible companies in the U.S.
You cannot win the game without an ethics program. You just cannot be a leader in terms of corporate citizenship without having a strong ethical culture and programs and data systems in place to manage it. And you can definitely lose the entire game by having one or two slip-ups.
But in downturns and upturns alike, companies large and small still struggle with engaging employees to help the organization become more sustainable. That’s one of the reasons why Campbell created a new position — vice president, corporate social responsibility — to design and integrate an overarching values-based strategy into the core of how it operates. It also hired 20-year CSR veteran David Stangis away from Intel Corp., where he had been global director, corporate responsibility for eight years.
HOW Online spoke with Stangis about the challenges companies face in creating long-term sustainability and how ethics-based initiatives can help them gain advantage over competitors in any economy.
HOW Online: As the vice president of corporate social responsibility at Campbell, what is your job function, and does that include issues of ethics and compliance?
David Stangis: Yes, it includes across-the-board corporate social responsibility and sustainability. The reason I was hired at Campbell was to help them build a strategy and activate it so the company can move forward. The company has been in business for more then 100 years and has done a lot of things right, but it hasn’t really captured the strategy to advance it. And that’s primarily my job, to influence improvement along different vectors, whether it’s environment, government and ethics, workplace or community.
I actually work for the general counsel, so there’s an operational system that surrounds ethical business conduct at Campbell. It’s called “Winning With Integrity” and it’s a corporate compliance program that has been in place for a long time. I am involved in trying to help them optimize it and trying to help the organization communicate it, perhaps putting in some metrics so that when we build transparency around the CSR and sustainability strategies, it’s also one of those strategies that we communicate.
HOW: What are some of the challenges that you’ve seen to designing and implementing a successful corporate responsibility program, and what are some of the challenges you’ve found engaging employees and executives in some of these initiatives?
Stangis: One of the challenges we have today is we don’t have a clear, shared definition of what CSR sustainability means for Campbell. So that if I were to go and talk to an employee group, the passion is extremely high — Campbell has about one of the highest employee engagement scores out there in terms of their employees coming to work ready to work and wanting to make the company and the world a better place — but without a strategy, without a definition, without a kind of a governance system in place that lets them act and incentivizes them to act, it’s hard for them to know what to do.
So I have this passion on tap, but without some strategy and direction — a lot of them want to help — I can’t channel their energy. At the executive level, there’s a very strong buy-in from the top down. It was in place before I came here. It was one of the draws that brought me here.
But they also have seven core strategies at Campbell, and one of them is advancing this commitment to CSR and sustainability. So as all of the business groups and the executives are planning their organizational policies around those seven strategies, they’re trying to figure out how to activate that seventh strategy — and they really don’t have a roadmap right now.
So even though there’s a lot of buy-in, there’s not a lot of focused action. That’s what we have to create for them. Both in terms of the employees and upper management, it’s giving them the tools so that they know what to do to help the company succeed.
HOW: You mentioned that executives at the top had bought into the ethics initiatives. We’ve been reading a lot lately about the idea of “tone at the middle” about how companies should engage employees at all levels to get them into the ethics of their corporate cultures. How does this idea fit into what you’re doing at Campbell?
Stangis: Tone at the middle is the largest challenge in terms of driving sustained results at every company. The CSR strategies, or governance and ethics, or environmental sustainability start either at the top or at the bottom — they rarely start in the middle. If you interviewed the 100 largest companies on the planet, you would find somewhere on one end of that spectrum or the other that they’ve either had a top-down strategy or a bottom-up strategy.
Every company has the challenge of driving tone in the middle, and it’s easier to do in a top-down strategy because we can build a framework. Campbell has picked these seven core strategies, so it’s very broad, and it’s communicated — everybody sees it, they hear it — and it’s part of the nomenclature of the company. So it’s a lot easier to get a tone-in-the-middle buy-in. But they still don’t know exactly what we want them to do, and that’s what we’ll figure out for them very quickly.
Coming up from the bottom is even harder. Usually what happens in a bottom-up strategy in a company is you get the bottom spot aligned, then you get the top spot in, and then they both work together to get the middle.
HOW: Obviously, now, we’re in the middle of difficult economic times. In these difficult times, a lot of organizations shift their focus to more short-term initiatives as opposed to thinking long-term. How should corporate responsibility executives convince their companies, their boards, their rank-and-file employees to invest in more long-term, sustainable initiatives?
Stangis: This has been a common subject at almost every conference or panel I’ve spoken on recently, and there are two things that are going to happen: No. 1 is that CSR and sustainability, even governance and ethics initiatives, that don’t have a clearly understood ROI [return on investment] — it doesn’t have to be a financial ROI, but it has to be an understood value to the business — are going to get cut in this environment even though they’re what helps, as bad as the environment is, to force companies to focus. And if companies are looking for areas where they need to cut back on discretionary spends, they’re going to look at areas that don’t have a clear ROI.
But the other thing is the concept of long-term and short-term. Short-termism is basically the opposite of corporate social responsibility or sustainability. The ideology that we’re trying to put in place at Campbell is to push people’s decision frameworks out beyond the quarter to three, five, even 10 years.
A question we ask in a strategic planning session is, “The issues that we’re working on, the decisions we’re making today, will they be the right decisions if we look back at them 10 years from now?” And that hardly ever happens in any company, but it’s part of how the practitioners in this space have to force their companies to look at problems. They have to look at them through those lenses.
HOW: Do you think companies view responsible behavior as more of a business imperative now? And is this what’s driving corporate citizenship initiatives in today’s business world?
Stangis: I think it’s much more of a business imperative now than it was before. Every good company would always say that it’s a business imperative, but every day that goes by it seems that there’s another company that has gotten itself into some kind of problem because it didn’t pay attention to integrity from the beginning. It can go across all different sectors.
The other thing that’s happening is that consumers are pretty quick to punish companies they feel haven’t been operating with integrity and ethics in mind. One of the descriptions I use is it’s an “ante to get in the game.” You cannot win the game without an ethics program. You just cannot be a leader in terms of corporate citizenship without having a strong ethical culture and programs and data systems in place to manage it. And you can definitely lose the entire game by having one or two slip-ups. So I don’t know that it’s driving the CSR agenda, but I think it’s one of the things, just like you might take a look at being a good environmental steward today. You’re not going to be a leading corporate citizen or a sustainability leader or CSR leader without having strong ethics and integrity programs. It’s just not going to happen.
HOW: You brought up that consumers are requiring that companies they buy products or services from act with integrity. Why do you think the desire for responsibility and accountability has grown for many companies today?
Stangis: I think there are two dynamics. There’s a cultural dynamic that people feel they can have more sway in their purchasing decisions. But there always has been a core group of those people. They’ve always existed, but that population is growing today. And it probably started in the movement of just being good corporate citizens and then expanded to include the environment, and now you see people voting with their feet on governance and ethics.
The other dynamic is information. It doesn’t take much. And you don’t have to be an Internet-savvy computer user to be able to make choices based on a company’s behavior. It’s out there. Companies screw up in one country around the world and all of the sudden, within the day, the whole world can know it. It’s front-page news. There’s just a proliferation of information. And companies are now using these characteristics to try to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.
HOW: You’ve been working in CSR for some time. How has corporate citizenship, corporate responsibility, changed in the last 10 years since you helped create the CSR function at Intel in the late ‘90s?
Stangis: What’s happened is that a range of different players have entered the field. And most companies entered into it as an expansion of some existing program. So you’ll find people like me that have been around for a decade in the CSR space. Some may have come from the environmental side; a few may have come from the ethics or governance side; many come from the community and philanthropic side. Ten years ago, there were good companies. They had great programs in the workplace and the community and environment and ethics. What has occurred over that decade is that they grouped those things together and tried to get business advantage out of them. It first started out with companies trying to minimize risks and reduce harm — decreasing pollution, the number of employees injured. Getting rid of the risks then opened up an opportunity to give something back. Then you saw the proliferation of community programs and volunteering and foundations and contributions.
What’s has happened now, through the leaders in this space, is if you take a look and try and define leadership in terms of CSR and sustainability, you’re seeing companies that are creating business advantage and innovating around it. They’re differentiating themselves. They’re taking market positions based on their leadership and creating competitive advantage. There are still a lot of companies that are at those other two stages in terms of risk mitigation and giving back or corporate citizenship, but I think the cutting edge now is integrating this into how the business operates.
HOW: And that’s something that we cover regularly: how that focus on ethics and values can lead companies to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Do you feel that that’s something that’s going on right now?
Stangis: Yes, there’s no doubt about it. There are still a lot of companies trying to figure out how to carve out their competitive advantage. A lot of them are trying everything and then seeing what sticks with consumers, with investors and with their employees.
But there’s a process companies can go through to define what’s most important to them. They can gather feedback from their stakeholders. They can take a look at their kind of business risk that they have in place and the issues they want to manage — not today, but over the long term — and build a strategy. They can use this long-term decision-making framework — impacts to their employees, their impacts to the community, impacts to the environment in their decision-making models in addition to short-term investment, long-term ROI — to really expand the framework or the horizon of their decision.
And if they do that, if they build a strategy around this and incentivize employees to follow that strategy, then basically they’re creating a CSR-sustainability mindset that helps the company move ahead. If they do it right, they’ll get ahead of their competitors in the same sector.
HOW: What about companies that are just starting to invest in responsible business practices? Since the public is so keen now on the idea that they really want companies they deal with to have integrity, how can companies that are just beginning this investment in corporate citizenship avoid being labeled with the damaging “greenwashing” tag by the public?
Stangis: There’s an easy rule I always tell companies to follow: Tell the truth. There are things that you can communicate in terms of environmental performance or “greenness,” if you like, but if you stick to the facts, you’re going to get credibility. You may not be able to differentiate on this right out of the door, but you need to stick to the facts to avoid the greenwashing label.
The other thing is companies really need to take a look inside their own operations. You can’t be out there talking about all of the trees you planted to offset the energy if you’re a huge user of energy and doing nothing to reduce it. So there’s a balance between what you communicate and what you do. Focus on the facts and get your own house in order, especially for new companies.
*Editor’s note: The official name of the company is Campbell Soup Co. On second reference, the company name is Campbell. The company’s products are referred to as Campbell’s. <back to the top>
*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
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