Promotional poster for Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland
ALICE’S GUIDE TO CORPORATE POLITICS
Alice accomplishes the mission she was destined to finish. But like so many things in life, she only did so due to the people around her. This is especially true in business – you and your company won’t accomplish anything without relationships.
And it is precisely the skill of managing those relationships that is so important. Sometimes these relationships are easy to manage because they’ve developed into friendships. Other times (most of the time?) these professional contacts can be more complicated and the only thing standing in the way between you and your goals is internal politics.
Be mindful of the company you keep and keep in mind the company that you don’t keep.
In the first part of our article, we discussed what the Red and White Queen mean as it relates to sustainability & the business environment. In this part, we’re going to look at some of the other characters in the story and by analogy they teach us something about the personalities we deal with at work.
As a sustainability professional working in a company, you are inherently going to be pushing for change. Change can be good or not. But it is rare in corporate life that change is fully embraced and welcomed. You can make the “business case” the best you can, but ultimately you will find that not everyone is onboard with your initiatives. So here is a light-hearted look at some of the characters in Tim Burton’s version of Alice in Wonderland:
- BLOODHOUND BAYARD – Make no mistake, this guy is working for the evil side. But reluctantly so. In the movie, the bloodhound is forced to work for the Red Queen because they have captured his wife and “pups.” At first, he’s out to get Alice, but has a change of heart and works to undermine the Red Queen. What to do if you encounter a Bloodhound Bayard in the workplace? read more…
PRESS RELEASE: Corporate Responsibility Magazine Releases 11th Annual 100 Best Corporate Citizens List
(New York, March 2, 2010) At 9:30am EST today, Corporate Responsibility Magazine (the new name of CRO Magazine) announced its 11th annual 100 Best Corporate Citizens List, based on publicly-available information and recognized by PR Week as one of America’s top three most-important business rankings.
The list includes a number of companies whose rankings rose significantly from last year.
“Thirty-six of the Top 100 were not on last year’s list, evidence that companies are increasing their focus on public reporting and performance, particularly in the areas of climate change, environment, employee relations, and human rights,” said Corporate Responsibility Magazine publisher Jay Whitehead. “Between 2009 and 2010, for instance, the top company’s total score improved by 66 percent, and the average score of all 100 companies climbed by 19 percent.”
The following is the 100 Best Corporate Citizens List for 2010, with the companies’ 2009 rank: read more…
Defining diversity
In college, the one course I dreaded taking was “Cross-Cultural Communications.” I procrastinated on the 100-level course, waiting until my final semester of senior year to finally subject myself to the torture. I feared the professor would spend the fifteen weeks teaching us how to be politically correct. I was disinterested in learning what I already knew: that words have power.
The course, however, wound up being one of the most fascinating explorations of how society works. Rather than teach political correctness, the course eschewed it; forcing us to look into ourselves, our assumptions, and our society to see the operations of society in a different light.
Through reading seminal works like Edward Hall’s Beyond Culture, we learned about how institutions, racial groups, and religious groups all share something in common no matter how different they are from one another: the need to coalesce around unified traits, speech, and actions. Many of the racial-political discourse in the United States, for example, could be read more…
Photo credit: Chris Blakley via Flickr
THE REACTION OF CUSTOMERS
Coffee customers can be picky.
So imagine this: you’re a wholesaler and retailer and you have a number of progressive-minded customers. And suddenly you tell them you’re not doing a certification program, but you’re creating your own. “We had a good number of customers asking us ‘Why isn’t this Fair Trade?,’” Watts recalled. “[We had] wholesalers saying ‘We want Fair Trade!’ But we felt our own message was suitable for what we were doing.”
So how do you tell your customers what you’re trying to accomplish? “We did feel pressure to give people something. I felt comfortable explaining to anyone who asked why it was fair and why it was more sustainable. … But you can’t have thirty minute conversations with all of your customers. People want and crave read more…
Photo credit: bitzcelt via Flickr
THE SHORTFALLS OF SOME COOPERATIVES
Intelligentsia worked with some purchasing cooperatives meant to drive a portion of the proceeds back to the original producers of the coffee cherries. After two years in working with these cooperatives, Watts began to see a positive impact on the quality of the products, but not necessarily in social changes – at least to the extent he wanted.
So he started digging around. He looked at the entire custody chain of coffee: from the farmer, to the drier, to the importer and then followed the money backwards. Even though Intelligenstia was paying three times the amount others usually paid, “What I realized is that you can’t read more…
Coffee beans before and after being roasted. Photo credit: cgfan via Flickr
For Geoff Watts, the choice was clear: if your needs aren’t being met you either have to take control or just go with the flow. But what do you do when you run a business and you aren’t able to gain the control of your product you need?
Simply, you find a way and make it happen.
Watts is a Vice President with the coffee company Intelligentsia based in Chicago. With two stores in California and three in the Chicago area, Intelligentsia is continuing its expansion into markets such as New York, Vancover, Toronto, and Atlanta among others. Roasting just about two million pounds of coffee, Intelligentsia isn’t the 800 million pound gorilla in the room, but they sure are trying to revolutionize the way the coffee business is run.
In short, Intelligentsia is getting what it wants by skipping over most of the middlemen that typically get in the way. In doing so, they get the high-quality coffee they require while freeing up the flow of information throughout the supply chain and establishing an atmosphere with the incentives and stability coffee farmers need.
If you enjoy coffee, if you seek out Fair Trade coffee, you may be surprised to learn that there’s an alternative to brewing your progressive cup of coffee called “Direct Trade.”
BACKGROUND
Coffee is a multi-billion dollar a year business. After oil, it is the world’s most commonly traded commodity. And while most Americans grew up smelling read more…
