Pdjose Interview With Auret Van Heerden: Strategy and The Sustainable Enterprise

Strategy and the Sustainable Enterprise
P D Jose
Interview with Auret van Heerden
Interviewer: So, you have worked with a lot of companies to promote stakeholder engagement. Do
you have interesting stories about successes and failures in engaging with stakeholders?
Auret: You know, the issues in the supply chain are very big. If you map your supply chain from raw
materials, all the way, to recycling, and you do a risk analysis, you'll find many risks either human rights
risks or environmental risks at the raw materials phase, at the processing phase, at the manufacturing
phase, at the consumption phase, and all the way through to the recycling phase. And, generally or
often those risks are too big for any one actor to cooperate. So, you need partnerships, you need
alliances, you need coalitions of stakeholders in order to address those risks. And, often you need to
make some delicate tradeoffs and really complicated tradeoffs. You can't do everything. And no one
party has a right to make that tradeoffs. A company cannot decide who is, you know, whose rights are
more important, well, whose priorities come first. So, you need multi-stakeholder coalitions in order
to decide on those tradeoffs. And so, companies when they map their risks in their valued chain, they
should also map the actors—the stakeholders involved to each risks. So, the risk might be a water risk,
it might be a land use risk, it might be a human rights risk— a child labor risk. And, when they have
identified that risk, they need to map the actors—the stakeholders involved and get them all together,
so that you can then decide how to address that risk, and how to make the tradeoffs and the
compromises, which are probably involved. And, this is difficult for companies because companies are
used to acting on their own. And, managers like to have managerial prerogative. So, it's difficult for
them to work out how to communicate with the other stakeholders, and the other stakeholders as
well—NGOs and government agencies, and international organizations and local communities—are
particularly not used to talking to companies. And, sometimes, they don't trust the companies. So,
they're hesitant. They don't know if they can accept the company as a stakeholder or as a partner.
And so, it takes some brokerage, it takes some mediation to relegate all of these stakeholders
together. And, that's a lot of what I do. And, that's a lot of what we call multi-stakeholder initiatives
have to do. It's really great that communication, and that trust, and that working relationship between
the different stakeholders. So that, they can get cracking it. So, they can actually, roll up their sleeves
and get working on the particular issues which face them. And, you know, if you take a company like
Apple, which came to this work quite recently, they were being attacked by NGOs and even by the
media for not doing enough. Or is, in fact, they were doing a lot behind the scenes. They just weren't
talking about it. They weren't open about it. And, they weren't communicating it. So, one of the things
that Apple needed to learn was how to start talking to critical stakeholders and people who, good
faith, they didn't necessarily understand or accept. So, in China, for example, there's an environmental
activist called Ma Jun. And, Ma Jun setup an organization called the Institute for Public Education. I
believe it's called IPE. And, he was doing a map, a pollution map of China. And, he was mapping
factories which were polluting and linking them back to their brands who use those factories like Apple
or HP or Dell. And, Apple, at first, wouldn't talk to him. They saw him as a critic, as an enemy. And, it
took quite a lot of brokerage for Apple to sit down with Ma Jun and to realize that they have the same
goals. They're both trying to control pollution at factories in China. They're just coming at it in different
ways. And so now, Apple has some very valuable collaborations with Ma Jun where they've realized
that sharing information with him and with his pollution map helps everybody to clarify, to identify
risks in the supply chain. But, that's a real journey for companies and it's often a journey, which is
fraught with dangers. Often, you know, they hit potholes in the road as they make their journey.
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