Anita Roddick, activist, entrepreneur and the founder of the Body Shop, passed away yesterday of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 64. Thoughts go out to her family.

Helsingin Sanomat reports of US electronics retailer Circuit City and their novel layoff strategy. The corporation laid off 8% of their higher/highest paid workers in March, telling them that they could reapply for their old jobs at a lower wage.

"This strategy strikes me as being quite cold," said Bernard Baumohl, executive director of The Economic Outlook Group. "I don't think it's in the best interest of Circuit City as a whole." (Yahoo! News, March 28, 2007)

"Cleaning Up"

“Corporate social responsibility” often means leveraging the concern (or guilt) of the affluent on behalf of those less fortunate: Sell to first-world consumers and redistribute some of the profits to address third-world problems. But a case has been made for a different strategy that involves selling to the poor themselves. In a speech last month, for instance, Harish Manwani, the chairman of Hindustan Lever Limited, pointed to his firm’s marketing Lifebuoy soap to India’s sprawling underclass as an example of its efforts to bring “social responsibility to the heart of our business.”

Hindustan Lever is a subsidiary of Unilever, the packaged-goods giant (it owns brands including Dove and Ben & Jerry’s) that was formed in 1929 by the merger of the British soap maker Lever Brothers and the Dutch food company Margarine Unie. Global brands seem like a recent phenomenon, but Lever was already operating around the world when Lifebuoy entered the Indian market more than a hundred years ago. Another thing that existed a hundred years ago and is still around today is a large number of preventable deaths.

In his speech, Manwani focused on deaths caused by diarrhea-related diseases (the World Health Organization estimates such illnesses kill 1.8 million people a year) and noted that better hand-washing habits — using soap — is one way to prevent their spread. For several years, the World Bank has been involved in initiatives with multinationals, including Unilever, to address the issue.

Hindustan Lever’s Lifebuoy campaign, however, is not philanthropy; it’s business. Throughout its long life, the antibacterial soap has been positioned as a health-and-wellness product: a 1902 ad in Harper’s promised “this wonderful cleanser and purifier” was “the enemy of dirt and disease.” That “core proposition” remains, says Punit Misra, the marketing manager who oversees Lifebuoy and other skin-cleansing brands for Hindustan Lever. Perhaps the most significant change to the product itself in recent years has been the introduction of smaller, and thus cheaper, bars: a half-size, 50-gram bar, for five rupees (about two ounces, for roughly 12 cents), was introduced in the early 1990s. (The small-package approach is now used by many companies in developing markets.) More recently, the packaging was made “more contemporary” by replacing the “strapping young man” on the package with an image of a couple and their children, Misra says.

And five years ago, the company introduced a campaign called Swasthya Chetna or “Glowing Health,” which, boiled down, argues that even clean-looking hands may carry dangerous germs, so use more soap. It began a concentrated effort to take this message into the tens of thousands of villages where the rural poor reside, often with little access to media. “Lifebuoy teams visit each village several times,” Manwani said in his speech, using “a glo-germ kit to show schoolchildren” that soap-washed hands are cleaner. Manwani says this program has reached “around 80 million rural folk” and added that “sales of Lifebuoy have risen sharply.” The small bar has become the brand’s top seller.

C. K. Prahalad, a University of Michigan professor (and Hindustan Lever board member), uses the India Lifebuoy story as a case study in his 2004 book “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” which argues that the profit motive can be a powerful force in addressing global poverty issues. Building a campaign around a well-known product like Lifebuoy can be effective precisely because even the world’s poorest citizens can be “brand conscious.” (Hindustan Lever’s Misra agrees, saying that such consumers will stick with a brand they trust, because “money means that much more to them.”)

Still, is this really the right place for the profit motive? Hindustan Lever’s position is that profitable responsibility is the point. “If it’s not really self-sustaining,” Misra says, “somewhere along the line it will drop off.” Prahalad makes similar points. “The question that comes up all the time is: These companies are pushing consumption, but what we need is livelihood improvement,” he told me in an interview. But preventing illness also means a family might avoid a potentially devastating loss of several days’ work. And ultimately, he says, campaigns like Lifebuoy’s Swasthya Chetna should be evaluated not ideologically but by their impact on the global poor. “The alternative,” he said, “is needless death.”

(The New York Times, June 10, 2007)

More Moore

Michael Moore and Blogger's Confessions (Usher Style)

Michael Moore's new movie "Sicko" about the American healthcare industry premieres in Europe in the fall. If you're traveling to the US this summer, you could to catch it as early as June 29.

Here's another story about Moore you might not have heard.

Now...

"These are my confessions
Just when I thought I said all I could say
My resume shows I got to get /
one more thing out of the way


Even though this blog may occasionally make me as a blogger sound green, social justice oriented etc., that's really not the whole picture. My history includes a stint in a New York investment banking team that did deals with managed care organizations, the same firms and CEOs that Moore attacks in "Sicko." Honestly, I have to be the one of the only Net Impact members in the universe that gets totally worked up while reading about Darfur or watching a movie about Edith Piaf who's also worked for a company providing military avionics and another that pitches managed care mergers. Talk about a split personality. There are no other major skeletons in the closet, though.

Okay, fine. There were those board memberships at Talisman Energy, Halliburton, and TJ Group.

In a sense, the reason these issues get me so fired up is having been there and seen some of this stuff up close. Many guys did not leave the office on 9/11 even despite bomb alerts at Grand Central because "defense companies are going to be on fire, man." (...? - Honey, look at me. I have ovaries. And a womb. And I'm wearing a skirt. I know that's rare here unless you're a secretary, but do I look like a man?)

Senior managers talked passionately about raw material prices, life insurance trends and yield curves without mentioning the dead in the city. There was callousness on a level I'd never seen before. It changed my life. As far as managed care goes, even not having seen more than a trailer for "Sicko", it's pretty clear to me Moore is doing the right thing and chosen to raise awareness about an urgent issue. Mr Moore may get a lot of criticism, but looking at it from both sides of the fence, I absolutely know which side I'm on and strongly believe Mr Moore is on the side of the people for whom the healthcare industry exists in the first place: patients, not shareholders.

This was one of the deals done by the group that employed me. (It's old news now in fast-changing managed care. Trigon was bought by WellPoint.) Now, I could say I had no idea what I was getting into (that would be true), I could claim I was assigned to that group (sort of not true, I had befriended a colleague who I still keep in touch with), I could say that I had no choice (yeah, right), but I guess I can't. For a time, I wanted to see Wall Street. Also, I'm from Finland. Most Finns have no idea what American healthcare insurers do or how the system works. "Keeping administrative costs down and keeping health plans competitive" sounded good to me. Besides, my employer's health insurer wasn't hurting me in any way, so there were no negative personal experiences whatsoever. In fact, the bank even paid for everyone's Lasik surgery, worth (if memory serves correctly) about $12,000 each. (When the market melted, they stopped this practice though.) Anyway, at the time the bank had probably the best combination of healthcare plans any company anywhere could ever have. I, for one, am still thankful. Thanks to the bank's private health plan, I have 20/20 vision again.

The job was no picnic, though, but that's a subject of a whole different confession (Usher didn't do Pt. 3, I just might.) I left New York and soon after befriended a New York ER doctor on my travels. We kept in touch. He told stories about people whose only healthcare providers were the emergency medicine doctors and nurses. It was interesting to start reading up on things. We talked about medical malpractice insurance (I had participated in a pitch for a nearly bankrupt med-mal business) and how a lot of doctors could no longer afford to practise because their insurance costs against potential lawsuits were prohibitively high - in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. There were over 40 million uninsured Americans. Doctors were being squeezed and bullied by insurers and outrageous litigation. Patients were being denied payments by insurance companies. It was quite incredible; as a Scandinavian, you easily take universal healthcare for granted. I began to realize that for the little while that I had spent as part of the American workforce, I had been part of an exclusive group of elite workers and as such, I had received elite benefits. Had I continued, I never would've seen anything different (of course assuming I would've kept ploughing ahead on that same road.) I would've thought everything was just fine.

And then it hit me: why did the financiers orchestrating healthcare mergers never talk about doctors, nurses or patients? Not once. It was as if we operated in a wholly separate universe.

The only answer that seemed in any way credible was that it really didn't matter to us. Nobody even pretended to care. Managed care corporate finance was a business where deals were done one step removed from the CEO who talks to lower level executives who talk to the claims experts who talk to doctors and patients and maximize corporate profit by denying treatments and reimbursements.

Now, there are certainly many things I want to do in life - besides getting a dog. For much of it, money is necessary. Heck, I wouldn't mind vacationing on Mustique one day. But if I don't, I don't really care. And my bottom line is that I sure as hell am not willing to get there by profiting from humanitarians or other people's suffering.

Of course, my former colleagues might laugh at this. I will never forget going to work one mid-week morning from the church. Now, I'm not religious, but sometime in my second year I started volunteering at a Park Avenue church homeless breakfast on my way to work. I didn't tell anyone at the office, I just went. So I got to work that one morning, and my colleagues were just hanging out, laughing. One joked to another, "Buddy, go feed the homeless or something."

I'd like to say this was the turning point that made me resign and change course. Not really. I left the city I love most in the world, but I still went back into finance for a while, unsure of what I wanted to do. Instead of Che Guevara badges and hemp clothing, I still wore heels and the damn pantyhose. I did a bunch of other things. But then I started working at a hospital.

And come to think of it, Che was a med student :) ...

Can't wait to see this movie.

Trailer:

Clip from the film:

Interview:

A great article about Interface, the US carpet maker also featured in the film The Corporation, and its CEO Ray Anderson.

Look for the video feature for an interview with Anderson. The company e.g. recycles nylon thread, cardboard boxes, and carpet scraps, and powers production with methane from a local landfill.

At some point in the near future, maybe I will take some time to write possible counter arguments to some popular tenets against taking individual measures towards sustainability and (corporate) responsibility. Some of them are more serious than others; some are a bit on the informal side, but maybe you recognize a few. (For what it's worth, by writing these up I don't mean to make fun of anyone or be antagonistic. Some of these are merely arguments I've heard over the years.)

• "That's nice, but I won't do it."
• "That's nice, but do you realize that what you do won't make any real difference in the world?"
• "Let me make it clear: I don't like it when someone tries to control how I spend my money and what I do."
• "You're not being realistic."
  
• "I want [fill in the blank]. I deserve it. I've worked hard for it, and I don't want anyone to come and tell me 'That's wrong.' How come it was right for [fill in the blank] to go ahead and do it ten years ago and now all of a sudden it's all wrong and unethical and whatever?"
• "I like to buy stuff. I'm not going to stop."
  
• "The world is going to ---- anyway, what's the use?"
• "I'm not interested. I don't care."
  
• "You're trying to make yourself feel better, but it doesn't make any real difference."
• "You're trying to make yourself feel better and make me feel worse, because I'm not doing this."
• "It's a fad. People who say these things sound like fundamentalists."
• "I don't believe in global warming. The ozone hole is not thinning anymore."
  
• "I don't like the Green Party. Some of them smoke pot."
  
• "It takes away from the bottom line, and we lose to competition."
  
• [Hmph.] "Just who do you think you are? (Huh?)"
• "Just enjoy life! Why are you that serious? It's just work."
• "Just relax. Better enjoy your life, because you only live once, and do you realize you'll be dead before you know it?"
  

Businesses Try to Make Money and Save the World

STEPHANIE STROM

Published: May 6, 2007

ALTRUSHARE SECURITIES is a brokerage firm, engaged in the sort of things you might expect of a Wall Street outfit, like buying and selling stock, and providing research on companies. Unlike its peers, however, the firm is majority-owned by two charities that each control about one-third of it.

So is it a for-profit business? Or a nonprofit fund-raising machine?

In fact, like hundreds of new businesses starting up around the country, it is both. Altrushare is an example of the emerging convergence of for-profit money-making and nonprofit mission.

The practice is even creeping into corporate bluebloods like General Electric, whose $12 billion Ecomagination business promotes its products’ minimal environmental impact as well as their positive impact on the bottom line.

“We’re a for-profit institutional brokerage, and we have to compete on execution and commissions and do so with the same technology and talent you would expect from a top-tier firm,” said Peter Drasher, a founder of Altrushare, which is based in Bridgeport, Conn. “What makes us different is our nonprofit ownership and our mission, which is to support struggling communities with our profits.”

(continue reading here.)

Robert Greenwald's ("Walmart: The High Cost of Low Prices") earlier film "Outfoxed" about controversial American media outlet Fox News is available in full for viewing on Google Video.

The Guardian taps into the case of supermarkets and female workers.

Music Industry 102

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Prominent U.S. hip-hop executive Russell Simmons on Monday recommended eliminating the words "bitch," "ho" and "nigger" from the recording industry, considering them "extreme curse words."

"Our internal discussions with industry leaders are not about censorship. Our discussions are about the corporate social responsibility of the industry to voluntarily show respect to African Americans and other people of color, African American women and to all women in lyrics and images," the statement from Simmons and Chavis said on Monday.

Risto Pennanen writes about perception management and corporate responsibility in Taloussanomat today (Finnish only.) He argues that a corporation's day-to-day reality and its public image must correspond, lest the company experience brain drain and difficulties recruiting young talent.