Comments on: What Is the Business Case for Doing Good? A Conversation with Timberland’s CEO, Jeffrey Swartz

By: Jordan Catapano

Jordan Catapano — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:29:33 +0000

Timberland has it right. An immediate family member worked for them for many years and never had a bad thing to say. It’s wonderful when a company can have so many positive effects in so many different areas.
Jordan MGH

By: Bill Maginn

Bill Maginn — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:07:44 +0000

For-Profit corporations are in business to create value. This value has typically been understood to mean financial value, providing returns on capital invested. If shareholders want the corporation to sacrifice some economic value to gain more “environmental value”, wouldn’t shareholders who supported that view put their money where their morals are and invest in those companies that shared that view? And correspondingly they would not invest in companies that were not demonstrating sustainable policies. When enough investors share the belief that environmental value is good, companies that demonstrate sustainable policies will have more investors and will have more economic value as well.

By: Deron Triff

Deron Triff — Sun, 31 May 2009 18:08:31 +0000

Mr. Bruer,
You may be interested in learning about B corporations (www.bcorporation.net) by B-Labs. They are developing and disseminating an emerging legal framework to institutionalize sustainable business practices in a manner that aligns with stakeholder interests.

By: Rich Bruer

Rich Bruer — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:25:55 +0000

Here’s the crux of the problem for Timberland and any public company, as I see and as stated by Swartz: “The shareholder wants to hear the sustainability of earnings and a business strategy that works. They admire, appreciate, condone social justice as part of the conversation as long as it doesn’t have any impact on reducing earnings per share, cash flow, or return on investment capital.”
I am among the growing numbers out there who do not believe publicly traded companies beholden first to shareholder return can ever cross over into being sustainable. Corporate governance laws have to first change to enable officers of companies to manage to the triple bottom line without threat of shareholder lawsuits; the corporation must be seen as having social and environmental obligations every bit as essential as financial. Without such change, the publicly traded corporation like Timberland, with its need to show quarterly growth (and in doing so contribute to unsustainable global consumption), can only hope to be “less bad” through its CSR policies.
The solution simply can’t be about making sustainability sexy among consumers. Many of us are both shareholders and consumers. For us, the solution to sustainability isn’t just about consuming more sustainable brands such as Timberland. It’s about us as shareholders not penalizing the Timberlands of the world for investing in sustainability even at the cost of reduced earnings. Quite the opposite, we should reward them. If we aren’t willing as investors to back off voluntarily from our purely financial demands of the public corporation, then governments must step in to stop us from preventing the Timberlands of the world from doing maximum good. Either that, or Timberland should take itself private.