Beyond Reasonable Greed: Why Sustainable Business is a Much Better Idea!

By Wayne Visser and Clem Sunter. Human & Rousseau Tafelberg, Cape Town.

"Greed is Good". That was a phrase immortalised by Michael Douglas who played Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie, Wall Street. It is a slogan with which many CEOs will identify without blushing.

Daily, voracious firms gobble up their opposition and then "rationalise" the staff of their new acquisitions (ie: spit out the bits) and continue to hunt down more competitors. CEOs become kings - fabulously wealthy like the despotic monarchs of old, and ruthless enough to take risks with the environment that could cause incalculable harm.

The greed syndrome is the very antithesis of the new ethic - the bid for sustainable development and the closing of the gap between rich and poor.

Beyond Reasonable Greed is yet another thought-provoking and highly readable book involving the scenario planner, Clem Sunter, this time with a young analyst and sustainability expert, Wayne Visser of KPMG, as co-author. The book seeks to show how the ruthlessness of big business is jeopardising the human family and bedevilling efforts to create a safer, healthier, less stressed world.

The authors compare monopolistic, no-holds-barred businessmen with lean and mean jungle lions - selfish, ruthless, deadly. Like lions they perceive other species and the environment as existing purely for their own gratification.

The book is obviously not against big businesses or against fair competition (both authors are directors of big companies) but it pleads for nothing less than a reformation in business ethics along the same lines as that triggered by Martin Luther in 1517 . Luther challenged the then all-powerful church whose leaders had become obsessed with the pursuit of personal wealth and grandeur at the expense of the spiritual needs of their communities.

The authors say businesses have become more powerful than governments. Yet the millions whose lives they affect have little or no say in what they do.

"The only difference between a plundering dictator and a plundering director is technique."

Companies who set out to destroy competition by acquisition in the hope of attaining a monopoly are not operating in anybody's best interests - not even their own in the long run. Acquisition, say the authors, sometimes amounts to plunder - and companies are too often run by people who equate success purely with financial wealth. The book cites recent revelations of South African CEOs taking home obscenely large salaries while, "for economic reasons", they retrench workers and increase the job loads of the stressed survivors. Disquiet among shareholders, customers and staff is growing.

Beyond Reasonable Greed could be a watershed book in so far as modern business ethics go.

The fact that its authors are part of the big business scene adds to its veracity.

The main theme throughout its 190-pages is the urgent need for businessmen to understand that success depends on whether a company (or a country for that matter) is being run in a sustainable manner - sustainable not only with regard its own future but bearing in mind the legitimate needs of those whose lives and environments it touches.

A heartening sign is that the young, who lately have been resorting to noisy confrontation when international companies gather (remember Seattle?) are recognising that there are business leaders who, often quite calculatedly, cash in their own grandchildren's environmental inheritance for the sake of short-term growth and profit.

In using the metaphor of the hunting lion to describe ruthless businesses, Visser and Sunter also use the metaphor of the elephant for businesses that move more sensitively among communities and though their environments. Elephants, say the authors, huge though they can be, have a gentle tread and their actions benefit plant and animal communities.

A typical elephant corporation would accept it has a responsibility not only to its stakeholders (employees, customers and so on) but also to the human community in general and to the whole web of life on Earth.

Slowly, but far too slowly, the tide is turning in the latter's favour but awesome damage continues and the gap between poor and rich widens. As Sunter and Chantel Ilbury said in an earlier book, "To be a secure winner you cannot be surrounded by resentful losers."

This book is going to anger many CEOs but few will be so unwise as to openly scoff at its message. One can only hope that many will see its good sense because if the world is to develop along sustainable lines there is a need for a "voluntary effort" by business leaders to "shapeshift" from the merciless lion persona to that of the more sensitive elephant.   

The trend in that direction is mainly, so far, the result of public pressure. For example many corporations are now forced to produce annual environmental audits whose content may determine whether clients or customers stay with them.

The authors cite how Nike suffered when people learned it was using Far Eastern sweatshops employing children to make its expensive sportswear; how the public turned on McDonalds for its environmental insensitivity; and how Levis, keen to establish itself in China, withdrew because of China's inhumane working conditions.

And look too at the disgust of millions of Americans when their President announced that it was not in the United States' economic interests to join the rest of the world in reducing greenhouse gases despite the calamitous risks it poses for many particularly vulnerable countries.  

Beyond Reasonable Greed describes how giant US corporations with vested interests in maintaining the status quo - they include oil and car-manufacturing giants  - backed the US President by producing a document which attempted to discredit the scientific basis of global warming. Some of these corporations, afterwards, feeling the backlash of public opinion, recanted and set up divisions that, for example, have begun looking at alternative energy sources. (While Visser and Sunter call them "lions in elephants drag" they welcome the trend.)

Public pressure, while vital, may be too slow to bring about a sustainable style of development in good time. What is needed is a fundamental change of heart among the lions themselves.

Visser and Sunter pop many myths. One is that economic growth automatically creates jobs -  South Africans have recently been witnessing economic growth yet  unemployment figures have worsened.

The authors analyse what "sustainability" really means and recap the UN's Brundland Report which defined "sustainable development" as that "which meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability for future generations to meet their needs."

Poverty-stricken and often starving nations today have little hope of paying off even the interest on loans given willy-nilly by the developed nations who knew full well how they were ensnaring those nations. It cautions against the motives of the World Trade Organisation whose rules are shaped by giant corporations and whose dealings are rarely mindful of the needs of countries whose resources they often abuse.

Quite apart from entrenching poverty, international corporations have been responsible to one degree or another for even changing the nature of the Earth's atmosphere; for plundering the seas of other nations, for abusing the croplands of hungry Third World nations by using them to grow inedibles (coffee, tobacco, etc)  for First World markets.

The challenge is for business people to understand the environment in which they do business, to see it holistically. They have to accept that they have a moral duty to see that what they do advances human wellbeing.

Wise businesses are not only aware of the way they can affect the external environment but they know that detrimental changes in that environment can, in the end, affect them. But many are indifferent even to the needs of their internal environments - the wellbeing of their staff and the need to encourage employees to enjoy Monday to Friday.  

If the world emerges from the Johannesburg World Summit with a sincere desire to encourage sustainable development - and that is the Summit's mission - then business will have to think differently about its role in society and how it goes about what it does, say the authors. Failure to do so will surely bring about a world-wide reaction ending in demands for sanctions against the lions and rewards for the elephants. It will also play into the hands of those in government who would like to impose central government control.

The book is alive with allusions to films and pertinent lines from pop songs and is filled with highly relevant anecdotes.

It is inspirational and positive in tone but at times sparks with a subdued anger at what goes on in the boardroom.

It frequently refers to the need for big business to communicate - comprehensively. In this context it uses the expression "lion king" - the lion king who, if he has his way, "sees business as a monarchy, not a democracy… Lions don't communicate much, except to roar to intimidate others".

Elephant communication is quite different - zoologists have found that elephants emit long distance sounds as well as short distance rumbling; they touch, caress and care about each other. They have many methods of communicating and listening.  "It is more like dialogue: an ongoing, two-way, interactive process which involves listening as much as talking" and companies analogous to the elephant worry less about controlling and more about caring and sharing.

"(These companies) enter into dialogue with their employees or communities, or environmental ngos because they recognise that these entities are interconnected in some way, be they interested in, concerned about, or affected by the company's operations…

"Elephant companies would rather co-exist with other companies than gobble them up". In contrast the winner-takes-all course "is the path to destruction".

Is such a change of heart among hardened CEOs possible given the powerful universal cult of greed? The authors believe so.

What better example, they say, of a bold and determined volte-face than that which South Africans themselves witnessed in the 1990s. This was when F W de Klerk stood down from a position of supreme power to enter a power-sharing phase with Nelson Mandela and then voluntarily relinquished control. It was not easy, the authors point out. It took courage. But it was the right thing to do and our honour and place in the world was restored.

The lions face the same challenge.

Beyond Reasonable Greed challenges world leaders, corporate heads, shareholders and customers - in fact all of us - to rethink the traditional philosophies that have led us to the current unsustainable and certainly unstable global situation.

It calls for caring and sharing.

Many readers will be able to think of a score of CEOs and politicians to whom they'd like to send a copy of this book. Perhaps it would be better not to sign it.