Creating Shared Value Blog

Last month, the British food and clothing retailer, Marks & Spencer, released a 5-year progress report on their sustainable retailing strategy, Plan A. (Slogan: “Because There Is No Plan B.”) The document, which was released at the same time as their annual corporate responsibility report, sets out the lessons M&S has learned since the inception of the strategy. To be honest, when I opened it, I was expecting just another report: nice photos and interesting anecdotes, but not much in the way of usable insights that could be applied elsewhere. I was wrong. Unlike many similar documents published by other companies, M&S have made a concerted effort to distil and share lessons on how to roll out an ambitious program to reconfigure a value chain across a large, national retailer. It’s a great read.

Writing in last week’s Poverty Matters blog, Lord Ashdown, the UK President of international aid organization UNICEF, called for “investing in emergency risk reduction and helping to build the economies of developing countries [to] be on international businesses’ agendas.” The reason, he argued was not only that corporations are repositories of skills that are valuable in helping communities prepare for and recover from disasters. He also made the case that it is in businesses’ own interests to do so.

Lord Ashdown and UNICEF are on to something with this line of thinking.

At FSG, we often hear from firms who buy into the CSV idea and who see its potential, but are wrestling with how to turn that from a well-meaning HQ-led initiative into shared value creation “on the ground.” They see the path ahead, but their internal structures, processes and culture are geared up for projects that can be completed in weeks or months rather than the longer, more painstaking work that can be required to truly create shared value. For these corporations, asking them to take a longer-term perspective is like asking Usain Bolt to run a marathon; they can probably do it, but it’s definitely not what they’re optimized for.

The idea that companies should create shared value has been building a lot of momentum recently, which is very exciting. However, as anyone in business will tell you, there’s a big difference between having a great idea and implementing it successfully. At FSG, we’re doing a lot of thinking about what the concept actually means in practice, both with individual corporate clients, and in a recent report and upcoming webinar.

A newly minted – and controversial – agreement has been reached between the UK government and 170 large companies to promote public health. Whether it eventually succeeds or fails, and the reasons why it does so, may give us interesting new data on how companies create shared value, and what that means for how to regulate business.