SHAPEHOLDERS BUSINESS SUCCESS IN THE
AGE OF ACTIVISM
M A R K R . K E N N E DY
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sometimes the simplest of habits have the most profound impact. In my family, every school year began with my six siblings and me lining up in front of the front door of our home and taking a first day of school photo. Perhaps this is a tradition in your family. After the photo my mother shared one piece of advice with us, the same advice every year. Her counsel was to be on the lookout for new students, those who were different from the others, and help them fit in. This habit not only helped new kids in town, but it has been immensely beneficial to me. It led me to meet lifelong friends like Joe San and Ken Sun from Hong Kong. I have also found that cultivating a habit of perceiving differences and integrating those who are different into your circle is a good foundation for success in any walk of life. When I was twenty-one, both my mother and I were delegates to the 1978 Minnesota Republican Party Convention. My mother was a single-issue voter. When deciding who we should vote to endorse, I was surprised that my mother decided against ix
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the candidate most zealous on her key issue and instead favored another candidate who, while affirming support for my mother’s issue, also had a broader platform and therefore would have wider appeal and a greater chance of winning the election. My mother’s motivation was narrowly focused, but she took a very broad view in her approach. She instinctively understood that a candidate’s fixation only on her single issue would not lead to success, that advancing her one issue was more likely to be achieved by someone who perceived and embraced other concerns while pursuing that goal. My father reinforced this idea of constantly seeking to bring others into your circle by teaching every child, grandchild, and mentee to look someone straight in the eye, give him or her a firm handshake, and say, “I’m _______, glad to meet you.” While I suspect many parents modeled the simple and easy to understand idea that good things happen from finding ways to unite with others for mutual benefit, my experience has been that this lesson is often left behind when people suit up for business or pursue politics. Believing to my core that business can be a positive force for good, after two decades working in business I ran for Congress under the banner Kennedy Means Business as a businessman who was skilled at perceiving differences and finding a path to unity, of taking in the concerns of others as I advanced my own. My mother’s focus on attracting broad enough support to achieve results, not simply heated rhetoric to excite narrow interests, stuck with me. I understood that achieving desired outcomes in an electoral campaign required crossing the fifty-yard or midpoint line. Dancing in your own end zone or goal may be fun, but it achieves nothing. I focused on understanding the differences among voter segments and crafting an appeal that united them in support of my campaign. During my campaigns I prohibited my staff from using the words “Democrat” and “Republican” in press releases. I counseled that if x
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we can’t explain the advantages of my position without resorting to partisan labels, we clearly are not explaining it in a way that will capture the swing voters who are essential to electoral success. In the end, I beat the one in a hundred odds of defeating a fourterm incumbent. I won by 155 votes out of a total of more than 290,000 votes. I would have lost if I had left the lessons of my youth behind. As a congressman, I explored all sides and sought actionable consensus. A whole series of Hill rags automatically showed up in bulk at my office’s front door each morning—Politico, Roll Call, The Hill, CQ Weekly, and the National Journal. To understand competing views, I supplemented these by ordering not only the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to get the view from the left and the right, but also the Washington Post to get the broader Washington view, USA Today to get the mainstream America view, the Minneapolis Star Tribune to get the home-state view, and the Economist and the Financial Times to get the nonU.S. view. My day began then as it does now with reading each publication, paying special attention to the contrast in how each topic was covered. What was the top story in one was buried in the middle of the B section in another. Competing newspapers’ headlines for the same event would give one the impression the papers were covering different topics. This habit helped me identify how I could frame my messaging and form my coalitions in ways that would push beyond agitation to achieve action. To my dismay, I discovered that both parties were driven by talking points that consisted of little more than the best poll-tested phrases as to why they were right and the other side was wrong. Republican talking points emphasized how the tax cuts proposed by President George W. Bush benefited all taxpayers. Democratic talking points blasted the cuts as benefiting only the rich. Neither talked about the impact of the cuts on future debt levels. I discovered that congressional life gave little heed to the lessons of our youth. xi
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Every Tuesday morning, members of each party caucus meet separately. Members are implored to support the team. In this case the team is the party, not the nation. Yet the idea that the opposing sides would line up to shake hands with the other side at the end of each political contest, as I had experienced playing sports, was frequently absent. Those who delude themselves into thinking that only the other party acts this way, not their own party, betray their own myopia. There is no monopoly on partisanship in politics. Unfortunately, citizens of all ideologies have narrow political vision.1 It is citizens with one-sided views of the world who have molded the Congress we have today. Congress is even more narrowly focused than it was during my service a decade ago. Congress’s approval rating during my service peaked at 84 percent and was regularly above 50 percent.2 It often struggles to maintain double-digit approval ratings today. This is not good for those who serve or those who are not being served. As a congressman I found businesspeople little better when it came to integrating the views of those not directly involved in the marketplace. Jonathan Swift said, “Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” In Congress I saw a whole other world that had been clearly within my line of sight but was previously invisible to me. I had never thought much about who made sure that when you flushed the toilet the right thing happened, that everyone had access to clean water, or that the transportation infrastructure was optimally designed. These concerns escape the view of many in business. Few see these and other social concerns as market needs they could profitably address. I saw how elements of society with no stake in a company’s success can foment hysteria, turning their attention to one particular corporation, making it the personification of some hotbutton issue, and giving it little chance to alter the proclaimed xii
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judgment imposed by agitated elements of society. I saw my former employer Arthur Andersen become essentially extinct even before final judgment of its guilt was reached. I saw Stanley Tool nationally demonized and hounded to abandon plans to reincorporate in Bermuda, Dubai Ports forced to forgo expansion in America, and China’s CNOOC oil company blunted in its proposed purchase of Unocal. I saw how the fault lay primarily with the businesses involved. These businesses would blame the reaction on politics. Yet doing so is an admission that they do not understand politics. I hope to help you understand that blaming something on aggressive activists, sensationalistic media, or meddling politicians is an admission that you have forgotten the lessons of your youth. This is not their problem. This is your deficiency as a businessperson. These business leaders didn’t think of social concerns and did little to prepare for the debate their proposed actions would spark. Nor did they engage in advance with those whose findings would be decisive in achieving their aims. They were surprised by the reaction of Congress, even though anyone who understood the mood of the moment could have predicted the ensuing political response. On the House Agriculture Committee, I saw industry participants challenged by environmentalist criticism of farming practices, health activists agitating to alter the dietary guidelines, and protectionists pushing to impose national labeling laws in violation of global trade agreements. On the Transportation Committee, I saw those pursuing funding for road maintenance and expansion confronted by those seeking funding for mass transit and beautification projects instead. During deliberations on the Financial Services Committee, I saw companies scrambling to contain activists’ efforts to constrain their ability to charge market rates of interest and to ensure that a slew of proposals under the banner of “consumer rights” actually benefited consumers, not just trial lawyers. xiii
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When businesses were trying to defend their interests from attack or move their own priorities forward, they often failed to acknowledge or address legitimate outside views. I was regularly shocked by the naïvetÊ of their requests to me as their representative. I am not promoting the sophistication of a crony capitalist, but of discernment that displays an understanding of competing points of view, an accommodation of their valid concerns, and the ability to clearly articulate how positions are good for society, not just for business. As a packaged food association was making the case for their position on the government’s dietary guidelines in 2001, I could not help but think that their pitch assumed I was unaware of or unsympathetic to the concerns of organic food enthusiasts (though today all food companies are now sprinting to address those preferences). It was clear that most businesses viewed such challenges as a sideshow, an appendage of the market, not matters that they tightly integrated into their overall strategy. They often compartmentalized public affairs as a staff function and failed to integrate market and nonmarket dynamics into a unified strategy. In both business and politics I found far too many of my fellow travelers with a narrow focus on short-term profits or winning reelection and not on delivering long-term value or governing. Too few really embraced the belief that long-term success requires ensuring others share in your victory. Too few in politics and business try to understand the motivations of others, to embrace a full-spectrum view. They are less likely to achieve the kind of lasting accomplishments that would make their labor personally fulfilling. Society suffers because of their ineffectiveness. Businesses stumble from one explosive confrontation to another. Politicians are trapped in partisan gridlock. Businesspeople must think about and care about the kind of footprint our commercial operations leave. This requires perceiving both unmet needs that our businesses could profitably address and the prickly parts of our operations that we can reform to avoid xiv
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missteps that will torpedo our reputations. We must actively engage with society to enhance the accuracy of our self-perceptions and prospects for mutually beneficial collaborative actions. We will find those irrevocably opposed to our organizations, necessitating the ability to form broad coalitions to win political or public opinion contests. Most of us learned these skills in our youth. Reteaching them from a commercial perspective is the focus of this book.
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