4) Sharing Value Created

4) Sharing Value Created

“The age of the primacy of shareholder value has passed. The principles of shared value have emerged.” – Michael McCain, President and CEO of Maple Leaf Foods

There is momentum for the movement to have businesses generate and share value with their stakeholders and even with society as a whole. To that end, one element many of the Survey Participants include in their descriptions of what the future holds for the role of business in society is that on top of value generation, businesses will need to share that value with stakeholders.

Some Survey Participants affirm there is an important nuance to point out: a business could arguably be preoccupied with a given purpose yet is still not sharing the value created. Consequently, a noteworthy number of Survey Participants are championing that the business community must shift from a philanthropic model to a purpose-driven one. Sophie Brochu urges, “We have to move from a philanthropic system to a truly social system.” Some warn the shift will happen regardless of whether businesses help to make it happen. For instance, Marc-André Blanchard anticipates that soon businesses that are simply practicing CSR will no longer be seen as doing enough for society.

Zita Cobb takes this point even further and states that one of the problems with the current economic model that really needs to be addressed is that too many business leaders are making decisions to pull operations out of communities leaving these often smaller communities high and dry. Zita Cobb argues businesses are consolidating under the guise of efficiency and necessity when it is really about the need to feed shareholders’ and investors’ unquenchable thirst for perpetual growth. Zita Cobb advocates for a new type of capitalism extremely focused on sharing value with communities, “We need to find a way to make our system look more like community capitalism and not corporate capitalism.”

It seems to be for these reasons that a handful of Survey Participants bring forward the idea that business leaders should be adopting the concept of ‘shared value’. In Cathy Glover’s opinion “Defining purpose feels like a public relations exercise” and businesses should be more concentrated on adhering to the Michael Porter/Mark Kramer school of ‘shared value’.32

For Porter and Kramer, ‘shared value’ is about “creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges.”33

Michael McCain is of the view that both ‘purpose’ and ‘shared value’ must be a part of a business’ core operations for it to claim to contribute positively to society in an authentic and real manner. Michael McCain puts the two on an axis, providing four quadrants that determine if the business has a purpose and is creating shared value.

Figure 11: Shared Value & Purpose continuum