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Chiquita’s path from pariah to paradigm

Like me, I guess many of you have listened to presentations on the business case for corporate responsibility or the rationale for having good stakeholder relations, whether delivered by consultants, academics or managers themselves. Cue the picture of bubbles on sticks ("stakeholders"), radiating out from a big bubble ("corporation"), which is always in the centre ("of course"). And for the next slide, why not some survey results on staff morale before and after a new social policy or report? And for the finale, perhaps a quote or two from a famous CEO saying that GOOD business makes good BUSINESS?

These are the tenets being preached at corporate responsibility conferences around the world. Yet such evangelising can give a false impression of why companies have engaged in what we call corporate citizenship. Neat and tidy presentations of messy and emotional situations will not help us understand why changes have occurred, what could occur in future and the limits of such change. How so?

Well, in the-world-according-to-PowerPoint, managers are assumed to calculate the reasons for being nice to everyone, or at least more people than before, and then to do it (or try to). Companies that have faced reputational crises are offered up as examples of what happens to those who don’t follow the gospel of PowerPoint. Yet if we think about the people we know, does this story seem true? I have not yet met any manager who decided to push their company in a more socially or environmentally friendly direction because of a bubbles-and-sticks stakeholder map or some statistics on the money to be made in doing so. I have met dozens who now choose to explain their actions to key audiences, such as investors and peers, by pointing to the business case. But I have not met a single manager who decided to "do" CSR because of the business case. Instead, most have done so because they wanted to, or because they felt pushed, and only then have they sought to make the numbers work. The recent history of Chiquita Brands International is illustrative.