Christine Bader: Conversation With a Corporate Idealist

I started thinking about writing this book a long time ago, back when I was working in Indonesia and China for BP in the early 2000s. People didn’t know that there were jobs like mine, where my job was to invest in the health and well-being of communities and of contract workers around big projects, and not for public relations. This was far from the cameras, far from any media, and it was really aligned with the success of the business.

I started to think, “Maybe there’s something interesting to write about someday,” but it was really after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It was the BP that emerged in the aftermath of that disaster, and all the press and the investigations. It was a BP that simply didn’t resemble the BP that I thought I had gotten to know so well.

So, I started talking to lots of my peers doing this work deep inside some of the world’s biggest companies, and I realized that a lot of us were facing a lot of the same challenges of what does it mean to actually do this work? Are we actually getting anything done? Because we feel like we’re making progress, and then something really horrible happens.

So, for me it was the Deepwater Horizon disaster. For others, it was the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, where people have been doing really good supply chain work for 20 years, and still, we just killed 1,100 people in a heartbeat. It was discovering that there are all these common themes and I thought, “There’s a story that needs to be told here.”

To me, an idealist is someone who wants to have a positive impact on the world, and a corporate idealist is someone who sees business as a great way to do that. Someone who sees the potential scope, reach, scale, innovation and drive of business and thinks, “I can put that to good use.” So, the corporate idealist is one who sees the potential power of business to be a force for good in the world, but — as I’ve discovered after a few years of doing this work — also realizes the risks and the constraints.

That’s really the million-dollar question, isn’t it? A real theme that emerged from all of the conversations I had for the book was people realizing that doing this work is incremental, that you’re not going to come in and change the way that business is done overnight — that is going to take very small steps, and sometimes they’re going to be backwards steps. We’re working on the thorniest issues at the heart of globalization, and they’re complicated, and they’re going to take a long time to fix. But we need people to be taking these tiny steps forward every single day.

Yes. Big time. This was a theme that emerged from the book: that people talked about the importance of bearing witness to the impacts of their company, because I think that’s a big part of where these problems arise. I think that oftentimes the corporate decision-makers are really far removed, and that’s part of why they can make these decisions that end up hurting people. It’s much harder to do if you actually looked in the people’s faces.

Well, a controversy certainly helps, but I don’t think I’d recommend people manufacture one.

At the end of the book I propose a manifesto for the corporate idealists, 10 points that emerged from my conversations, and one of them is about the importance of listening. When I got to China, I was working on a BP joint venture with SinoPec, one of China’s state energy companies, and my job there was to ensure that we had international standards for working conditions in dormitories for the migrant workforce we were bringing in.

It took me a while to make the case. I went in saying, “Okay, this is about protecting the human rights of the workers,” and that kind of fell flat. Then I tried, “Okay, these are the standards that BP uses around the world, and we’re going to use them here,” and that didn’t go so well. So, finally, I shut up for a while and just listened to what motivated people and what drives them and what works there. I finally said, “Okay, what I’m hearing is that you all want this to be a world-class model project. If you want this to be a world-class model project, these are the standards that we have to use,” and they said, “Oh, okay. Why didn’t you say so?”

In the book, I interviewed Dave Stangis who is at Campbell Soup and was at Intel, and he said, “Those of us who’ve been doing this for a long time used to evangelize. We used to think, ‘If we could just get the world to see things our way, if we could just get other people in the company to embrace sustainability like we do, just to see the light, that our work would be easier.’” And he said, “We realized that doesn’t work anymore. We need to go around and listen and find out — figure out and articulate how our work supports theirs.”

Over the past 15 years we have seen a lot more breadth, and now we need to focus on the depth. For example, to some companies, “corporate responsibility” means sending employees out in matching T-shirts to paint a wall for five hours a year, and [to] some companies it means recycling their coffee cups. Those aren’t bad things. Those are great, but what I care about, what the corporate idealists I interviewed for my book care about, are these big, thorny issues that are at the heart of how these companies operate. We need more companies taking a hard look at their supply chains, at their business models and their partners.

I have a quote in the book from Aron Cramer of BSR who said that the trick is to get companies to the table and then move the table.

Yes. I don’t have a utopian vision of the future where all companies do everything right and nobody gets hurt, sad to say. I don’t think that corporate idealists will ever be out of a job, just like I don’t think that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International will ever be out of a job. There will always be more work to do.

It’s still totally gut wrenching to think that the company that I love so much could have wreaked such havoc and disaster. But I think, for me, having engaged in this deep reflection of “What does it mean to do this work?” I still don’t think that it undoes any of the good work that I did with the company. But it shows how far we have to go, how important it is to keep going.

As I wrote the book, I was asking, “What were the countervailing forces that prevented the people working on safety from preventing these problems?” I don’t think it’s that necessarily there was one person or one archrival who clearly made one decision that worked counter to the corporate idealists. It was all these incremental decisions or lack thereof that presumably led to these disasters.

Yes. I have a story in the book from Marcus Chung who’s worked for a number of different companies and is a well-known supply chain expert. He said that on one of his visits to India he visited a number of factories, and then the person showing him around said, “Let me show you one factory that’s not on your list. It just supplies for the domestic market.”

He said it was filthy. There was a kid working there. I said, “Well, how did that make you feel? Was that horrible to see?” He said, “Well, of course it was, and it opens up this whole other problem that I don’t know what to do with, of ‘What do we do with factories that are just supplying the domestic market and don’t have these international standards?’ but it actually made me realize, ‘If this is what the factories we are sourcing from looked like 20 or 30 years ago, we actually have made a ton of progress.’” That, to me, is a really optimistic take.

It’s so fraught, isn’t it? It means so many different things to different people.

What I care about is that a company is looking at the impact of the core business on people and on the planet in the short, medium and long term and that it is asking, “What are the biggest tensions that its success might have with the health and well-being of people on the planet?”

Jeffrey Hollender, who I think of as a great leader in sustainability, doesn’t really like the term “sustainability,” because he thinks it’s just not good enough to “sustain” the state that we’re in. We have to be “regenerative” — that is the term everybody is starting to use now.

One response I have is a little bit snarky, which is to say, “Let’s stop and do an inventory right now of everything that you are wearing and everything that’s in your bag. Tell me how many companies you’ve engaged with today. Do you have a coffee maker? Do you have an alarm clock? Tell me what you know about all of those brands.”

I do this myself once in a while, and it’s actually kind of amazing. If you go head to toe you might come up with 20 or 30 brands, and it’s really hard to get good information because I know full well the companies are not all good and they’re not all evil.

So, I think there’s some hypocrisy involved when people say, “Companies are just evil.” I think people who claim that business has no positive benefits don’t realize the positive benefits they are reaping, that enable them to say those things.

There are really two main purposes that I wrote the book. One is for people who are working directly on helping move companies towards better practices, whether that’s from inside or outside. I hope that this serves as a resource to them. I hope that it serves as an inspiration to them. I hope that it serves to connect them to others in this community, because one thing that emerged is that it’s really important, in doing this work, to connect with other peers, because it can be really lonely being one of the few champions for sustainability inside an organization.

But the second purpose is that I hope it forms a more sophisticated conversation about the role of business and society, about what it takes to prevent these corporate disasters and what it takes to encourage better corporate behavior.