{"id":447,"date":"2017-01-23T14:28:37","date_gmt":"2017-01-23T14:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/events.sustainablebrands.com\/sb17ct\/?p=447"},"modified":"2017-10-21T22:50:24","modified_gmt":"2017-10-21T22:50:24","slug":"consumers-at-the-heart-of-change-2-2-2-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/events.sustainablebrands.com\/conferences\/sb17ct\/2017\/01\/23\/consumers-at-the-heart-of-change-2-2-2-2\/","title":{"rendered":"SHARED VALUE \u2013 TOUGH BUT TIMELY MEDICINE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Solutions are to be found in the problems but how many businesses can face the facts?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

When in hot water, take a bath. To many westerners, this Chinese saying is nonsensical. Yet it accords with a fundamental African way of thinking: when faced with something profoundly troubling, the solution lies in a deeper experience of that very state.<\/em><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My own encounter with this logic came after three years of trying to solve a health problem with the help of western medicine. Frustration eventually led me to African practitioners. The diagnosis required me to take medicines that would not remove my problem, but would actually intensify it. That, according to African doctors, is the way to deal with certain intractable problems: by intensifying your experience of them, you wake up the part of you that is powerful enough to become the solution. It was a tough and scary option, but I \u2013 and my health \u2013 have never looked back.<\/p>\n

Shared value adopts a similar logic, which perhaps explains why it has found greater traction as a pithy phrase in annual reports than as an operational reality. When faced with intractable societal problems \u2013 such as poverty, unemployment or climate change \u2013 most firms seek to avoid, mitigate or insulate themselves as much as possible. But risk-based logic runs dry when we realise there\u2019s a tax to pay \u2013 somewhere down the line \u2013 for disconnecting from what sustains our lives and businesses. Some day, some stakeholder, some community, perhaps even the earth, will present the bill. And the longer we wait, the bigger it\u2019s likely to be.<\/p>\n

Shared value is a business strategy that seeks business opportunity \u2013 at scale \u2013 in societal challenges. At first pass, it hardly sounds like a great leap: business has always responded to needs \u2013 sometimes even creating them when they don\u2019t exist. But shared value\u2019s starting point is societal need \u2013 not consumer need. And that nuance makes all the difference. It introduces a radical shift in the value proposition and a new starting point for innovation.<\/p>\n

When trade liberalisation followed South Africa\u2019s membership of the World Trade Organisation in 1995, SA fashion retailers began a massive offshore drive that was duly fed by China\u2019s entry onto the world market. Over the next decade, our clothing manufacturing sector effectively collapsed. Close to 38% of clothing and textile workers lost their jobs between 1996 and 2005. The tax hit retailers a few years later in the form of longer lead times, currency fluctuations, questionable quality, reliability of supply and logistical challenges.<\/p>\n

In this context, the shared value solution is painfully obvious. By helping to restore local manufacturing capacity, clothing retailers address their supply chain constraints, clothing and textile businesses re-emerge, jobs are created \u2013 and there\u2019s more disposable income to spend on fashion.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, most shared value innovations are obvious. It makes sense for Discovery to incentivise their clients to better health \u2013 they are picking up their clients\u2019 hospital bills. Of course SABMiller should use local crops such as cassava and sorghum for their African brands, engaging thousands of smallholder farmers \u2013 as long as it does not interfere with local food security. And how logical that Yara Fertiliser should partner with government and NGOs to develop agricultural growth corridors in Southeast Africa.<\/p>\n

These shared value strategies employ different innovation patterns but are informed by the same underlying insight: the solution lies in embracing the problem \u2013 not seeking to avoid it. In our experience however very few companies think this way or have the courage to do things differently. Even fewer investors and policymakers have this perspective on their radar.<\/p>\n

Shared value opens a space for new business models, new (often unconventional) partnerships, new finance sources, new performance measures, and a renewed connection with social context. Although fast being forgotten, this is deep African thinking \u2013 emanating from Harvard professors \u2013 with competitive application across the world. If you really understand shared value, you\u2019ll know it\u2019s not for the faint-hearted. But you\u2019ll also know that business\u2019s usual medicine isn\u2019t working.<\/p>\n

By Nicola Robins<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Solutions are to be found in the problems but how many businesses can face the facts? When in hot water, take a bath. To many westerners, this Chinese saying is nonsensical. Yet it accords with a fundamental African way of thinking: when faced with something profoundly troubling, the solution lies in a deeper experience of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101012,"featured_media":448,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/events.sustainablebrands.com\/conferences\/sb17ct\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/events.sustainablebrands.com\/conferences\/sb17ct\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/events.sustainablebrands.com\/conferences\/sb17ct\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/events.sustainablebrands.com\/conferences\/sb17ct\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101012"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/events.sustainablebrands.com\/conferences\/sb17ct\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/events.sustainablebrands.com\/conferences\/sb17ct\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":451,"href":"https:\/\/events.sustainablebrands.com\/conferences\/sb17ct\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions\/451"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/events.sustainablebrands.com\/conferences\/sb17ct\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/events.sustainablebrands.com\/conferences\/sb17ct\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/events.sustainablebrands.com\/conferences\/sb17ct\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/events.sustainablebrands.com\/conferences\/sb17ct\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}