http://www.theguardian.

com/sustainable-business/blog/corporate-power-paradox-sustainability-change

The paradox of corporate power

Jo Confino wrestles with power in corporations, finding
that it is both holding back progress, whilst also leading
the charge towards transformational change

With great power comes great responsibility - or does it? Photograph: Richard Baker

I have spent the last week wrestling with the issue of corporate power and how it is both holding back
progress towards sustainability as well as leading the charge towards transformational change. In other
words, a fat, juicy paradox.
It came to the fore when Jonathon Porritt came into the Guardian to engage in a lunchtime debate for
staff and run a masterclass for managers on embedding sustainability.
When asked where the Guardian should concentrate its editorial resources, he focused on the issue of
power and how the elite, which is largely made up of big business, actively prevents governments from
dealing with the big issues of our time such as climate change and biodiversity loss.
One only has to look at Koch Industries, said to be the largest private company in the US, which has
developed what some would describe as a notorious reputation in recent years for funding rightwing US
thinktanks and Tea Party groups opposed to regulation aimed at addressing environmental concerns
such as climate change.
It is not only Koch. Porritt believes that energy-intensive companies in general continue to actively plan
and work towards hobbling any moves that will push up their costs of doing business, despite the terrible
impact it will have on humanity and the planet.
He points to similar tactics used by the tobacco companies in their attempts to prevent their industry from
being regulated.
He believes the idea that governments are actually representing citizens is absurd, thereby agreeing with
the senior banker Pavan Sukhdev, who headed up the United Nations Environment Programme's
groundbreaking TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) report.
In an interview I did with Sukhdev a few weeks ago he said that politicians today recognise the reality that
75% of their GPD is reliant on the private sector, all of their fiscal deficit is paid for by corporation tax, and
two-thirds of employment is created by it. His conclusion: "politicians are beholden to the corporation."
Juliet Schor, Professor of Sociology at Boston College, who recently published Plenitude: The New
Economics of True Wealth, was in London last week talking at Tim Jackson's Resolve conference on
sustainable living. She showed the audience a slide which illustrated just how much wealth has passed
into the hands of the top 1% of the population in recent years.

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So adding all this together, why is Forum for the Future, which Porritt founded, working so closely with
corporates to encourage them to become more sustainable?
Well, as Porritt and others point out, paradoxically the only real leadership being shown in addressing the
numerous sustainability issues is from business.
How can that be the case? Well, as I have said in a previous blogpost, it's not that business has suddenly
gone all gooey and philanthropic, but because they see in the hard data that unless they act now, there
may not be a business left to run in the next 20 years or so.
I have been doing a bit of preparation for a webinar I am moderating with BSR chief executive Aron
Cramer and Marks & Spencer Plan A director Richard Gillies next week on redefining leadership.
BSR points out four dimensions that are essential for leadership and they all relate in some ways to
letting go of control.
'Setting ambitious targets' is about setting goals that businesses cannot guarantee achieving, such as
Unilever's sustainable living plan. This still feels scary for many businesses because they are do not feel
in control of the outcome.
'Learning from the margins', which recognises that companies no longer have all the answers and need to
rely on crowd sourcing, such as Procter & Gamble looking outside of their protected walls for new more
sustainable formulations for their products.
'Investing in infrastructure of all kinds' is a recognition that business needs to work on systemic solutions
to complex challenges, which means supporting social, financial and policy infrastructures.
And finally, 'sailing fearlessly toward the future' recognises that the survival of any one large company is
not guaranteed, and the social license to operate can be erased overnight.
Behind all these is a level of uncertainty and complexity that businesses have not had to deal with in the
past that involves them lowering some of the walls they have hidden behind in the past in other words
allowing power to be shared.
While we have enlightened examples of the brave and the few who are taking this to heart, the problem is
that those who have power, as Porritt points out, often do all they can to hold onto it, regardless of the
circumstances. The more they are threatened the more they hold on.
Of course, this leads only to disaster. I am sure we can all point to examples in our own lives for evidence
of that.
I was yesterday reading an interesting article by Paul Dickenson, CEO of the Carbon Disclosure Project,
in a new book called Leadership for Sustainability, which is a collection of articles about how former
students of the 'Responsibility and Business Practice' masters degree, that is now based at Ashridge,
have sought to create change through using an action research approach.
In it he wrote: "I believe our great corporations are really very mysterious.Their senior executives have
some control over them, for a while. But ultimately they themselves are driven by processes and
structures that have transcended human generations. The corporation is a life form that is so ubiquitous
that it cannot be understood by humans. We can no more understand corporations than fish can
understand water."
So where have we got to? Well, perhaps we are seeing an emergent battle within business between an
old system of holding onto power and a new emergent system of shared power and responsibility, fuelled
by the openness of the web and social media.

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How this battle will develop is far from clear and it remains to be seen whether enlightened managers will
be able to change the direction of our corporate supertankers or whether their established processes and
structures are so strong that they will too hard to shift.
My use of the metaphor of the supertanker is apt. The rudder of these massive ships is made up of
several segments because the pressure is so great that a normal single-piece rudder would break under
the strain.
This is maybe why corporate sustainability needs to be such an iterative process, with each small change
providing the ability for the next step to be made. Established business, with their ownership structures,
just do not have the ability to be more radical.
Like Dickenson, I too did my masters in 'Responsibility and Business Practice', and the title of my
dissertation was 'the paradox of power the art of letting go.'
Having dusted it off and gone back over it, it talks of the hope that both power and our love of the planet
can be synthesised rather than being seen in contradiction. This may well be nave, but when Pandora's
Box was opened, at least there was hope in there somewhere.
I cannot help but repeat the final paragraph which is a quote form James Hillman's book, 'Kinds of
Power."
He writes: "Those voices that insist on a contest between love and power are Western, Northern,
Christian and romantic. Partly they are reflected in a simplistic division of the Bible into the Old Testament
of power and a New Testament of love. What results from this opposition but a loveless power of tyranny
and control, and a powerless love that can wish but not will? Love and power are not opponents; it is our
ideas that have constructed them so."

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