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Should Business in the Community take a tougher line with its members by challenging them in public? EP talks to the UK organization’s chief executive
Julia Cleverdon does a nice line in amused incredulity, and right now she is deploying it against suggestions that Business in the Community, the organization she has headed for the past 12 years, is in some important respects losing its way.
The fact that she is having to do so is largely down to a decision by UK brewery firm Adnams, a former Bitc small business of the year, to leave the organization on the grounds that it is not challenging enough to its members and has become, according to Adnams chairman Simon Loftus, a cosy club of chief executives with an eye on hobnobbing with its patron, the Prince of Wales (see page two).
Cleverdon’s eyebrows rise especially high at the latter suggestion. ‘Absolute rubbish,’ she laughs. ‘I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life. We try to be as widely inclusive as we possibly can. If you’re trying to move nearly 1000 companies along, as we are, then you’ve got to allow for the chief executive of a large cement company as a well as for the passionate, maverick brewer. And I can think of much better ways of gaining access to the Prince of Wales. Once a year, 250 Bitc members get to be in the same room with him for two hours, and that’s about it.’
She is equally dismissive of Loftus’s suggestion that Bitc is not tough enough with its members. In the first place, she says, the ethos of Bitc is to work from within, allowing firms to challenge and help each other quietly rather than to publicly chastise. And, secondly, Bitc has in any case raised the bar when it comes to its expectations of members.
‘We’ve always been an organization that believes it’s more important to inspire than to bludgeon,’ she says. ‘We’ve got more traction on a company if they’re in membership, and we are therefore able to do more collaborative action. I don’t think you build great companies through compliance or on the basis of fear. We’re trying to move the laggards along, but if we kick them out because they haven’t done much, then who is going to move them along? The government? I think not.
‘I would anyway refute the charge that we’re not challenging enough. In the last three years under the chairmanship of David Varney [now succeeded by KPMG’s Mike Rake] it’s been very clear that Bitc has sharpened up its challenge to new members – and that if they come into membership they will be asked to show that they integrate, measure and manage their CSR, that they get into communities, and that they share experiences with others.’
Bitc’s three-year-old Corporate Responsibility Index, which publicly benchmarks the performance of its members and gives Bitc information on their strengths and weaknesses, has been an important tool for bringing that tougher approach to bear, says Cleverdon. ‘Benchmarking through the index has been a real change, and it has caused considerable angst for some members. But I’d defend to the death the fact that it’s been a good initiative. It’s persuaded a significant number of companies to raise their performance.’
Though she names no names – one of Loftus’s complaints is that Bitc never criticizes its members in public – she is unhappy that ‘some companies, after three years, still say they are unable to fill in the index questions or even to have a shot at the environment index.’
Cleverdon, who joined Bitc from the Industrial Society as development director in 1988 and has been chief executive since 1992, says that of Bitc’s 750 members ‘we have about 100 high-will, high-skill companies, 200 quite high-will and not very high-skill, and most of the rest are trying to sort things out’. She claims to be keenly aware of the growing impatience in some quarters at CSR’s perceived failure to deliver on its promises, but believes the journey is unavoidably long, and that business will inevitably struggle to keep up with demand. ‘It’s easy to forget Bitc’s roots in the wake of the inner city riots of the 1980s [in Bristol, Liverpool and London], and the fairly limited aims that companies had at that time. And it’s difficult to remember how little was expected of business in the 1980s. The expectations now are enormous.’
One consequence of those growing expectations is that Bitc now has a £22million ($41.1m) budget, gets 47 per cent of its funding from government, has 400 staff and, in the eyes of one CSR director who spoke to EP on conditions of anonymity, ‘has become a Leviathan with a head office that feels like you’re walking into the UN.’ Once again Cleverdon is incredulous, pointing out that much of the staff complement is in the regions, ‘where businesses can make the biggest difference’, and that in any case Bitc has increased the size and range of its programmes at the behest of business itself.
‘If companies continue to believe we are the place where they want to learn and share experience, then that’s what will happen. When they stop saying that – and we do a lot of membership survey work – we will most certainly change tack.’
Julia Cleverdon does a nice line in amused incredulity, and right now she is deploying it against suggestions that Business in the Community, the organization she has headed for the past 12 years, is in some important respects losing its way.
The fact that she is having to do so is largely down to a decision by UK brewery firm Adnams, a former Bitc small business of the year, to leave the organization on the grounds that it is not challenging enough to its members and has become, according to Adnams chairman Simon Loftus, a cosy club of chief executives with an eye on hobnobbing with its patron, the Prince of Wales (see page two).
Cleverdon’s eyebrows rise especially high at the latter suggestion. ‘Absolute rubbish,’ she laughs. ‘I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life. We try to be as widely inclusive as we possibly can. If you’re trying to move nearly 1000 companies along, as we are, then you’ve got to allow for the chief executive of a large cement company as a well as for the passionate, maverick brewer. And I can think of much better ways of gaining access to the Prince of Wales. Once a year, 250 Bitc members get to be in the same room with him for two hours, and that’s about it.’
She is equally dismissive of Loftus’s suggestion that Bitc is not tough enough with its members. In the first place, she says, the ethos of Bitc is to work from within, allowing firms to challenge and help each other quietly rather than to publicly chastise. And, secondly, Bitc has in any case raised the bar when it comes to its expectations of members.
‘We’ve always been an organization that believes it’s more important to inspire than to bludgeon,’ she says. ‘We’ve got more traction on a company if they’re in membership, and we are therefore able to do more collaborative action. I don’t think you build great companies through compliance or on the basis of fear. We’re trying to move the laggards along, but if we kick them out because they haven’t done much, then who is going to move them along? The government? I think not.
‘I would anyway refute the charge that we’re not challenging enough. In the last three years under the chairmanship of David Varney [now succeeded by KPMG’s Mike Rake] it’s been very clear that Bitc has sharpened up its challenge to new members – and that if they come into membership they will be asked to show that they integrate, measure and manage their CSR, that they get into communities, and that they share experiences with others.’
Bitc’s three-year-old Corporate Responsibility Index, which publicly benchmarks the performance of its members and gives Bitc information on their strengths and weaknesses, has been an important tool for bringing that tougher approach to bear, says Cleverdon. ‘Benchmarking through the index has been a real change, and it has caused considerable angst for some members. But I’d defend to the death the fact that it’s been a good initiative. It’s persuaded a significant number of companies to raise their performance.’
Though she names no names – one of Loftus’s complaints is that Bitc never criticizes its members in public – she is unhappy that ‘some companies, after three years, still say they are unable to fill in the index questions or even to have a shot at the environment index.’
Cleverdon, who joined Bitc from the Industrial Society as development director in 1988 and has been chief executive since 1992, says that of Bitc’s 750 members ‘we have about 100 high-will, high-skill companies, 200 quite high-will and not very high-skill, and most of the rest are trying to sort things out’. She claims to be keenly aware of the growing impatience in some quarters at CSR’s perceived failure to deliver on its promises, but believes the journey is unavoidably long, and that business will inevitably struggle to keep up with demand. ‘It’s easy to forget Bitc’s roots in the wake of the inner city riots of the 1980s [in Bristol, Liverpool and London], and the fairly limited aims that companies had at that time. And it’s difficult to remember how little was expected of business in the 1980s. The expectations now are enormous.’
One consequence of those growing expectations is that Bitc now has a £22million ($41.1m) budget, gets 47 per cent of its funding from government, has 400 staff and, in the eyes of one CSR director who spoke to EP on conditions of anonymity, ‘has become a Leviathan with a head office that feels like you’re walking into the UN.’ Once again Cleverdon is incredulous, pointing out that much of the staff complement is in the regions, ‘where businesses can make the biggest difference’, and that in any case Bitc has increased the size and range of its programmes at the behest of business itself.
‘If companies continue to believe we are the place where they want to learn and share experience, then that’s what will happen. When they stop saying that – and we do a lot of membership survey work – we will most certainly change tack.’
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