Leaders as Shamans: Working to Heal a Troubled World

In a world greatly in need of healing, today’s leaders acting as shamans could potentially bring the shaman’s ancient wisdom to the effort to create a more sustainable, just, and equitable world. Today’s shamanic leaders undertake the same roles as the traditional shaman: healing, connecting, and sensemaking in the service of a better world. From a leadership perspective, the shaman’s work is that of healing the world around us and our (human) relationship with that world, which is what many leaders are already attempting to do. In this context, healing can mean making our relationships, systems, and organizations whole or sound. In a similar vein, connecting means working across boundaries of different types, such as relationships, disciplines, functions, sectors, and institutions, among others, to create collaborative initiatives or new insights that can move ideas and institutions forward in a positive way. Finally, sensemaking means helping others understand and interpret their world in new and hopefully constructive ways. It means creating a new vision of the future through tasks like developing new memes or framing new stories or narratives that help people relate to their enterprises or the world in different ways. In today’s troubled world, where our dominant cultural mythologies, policies, and practices have resulted in frighteningly unsustainable conditions and divisiveness, I argue that more leaders explicitly need to (and can) take on these shamanic roles

The Wicked Problems of Global Sustainability Need Wicked (Good) Leaders and Wicked (Good) Collaborative Solutions

Making a difference in the pursuit of a more sustainable world increasingly requires the ability to contend successfully with the wicked problem that is sustainability, and this shift needs to happen at the societal as well as the organizational level. Dealing successfully with issues of sustainability means creating greater system resilience and using resources more wisely, which means working successfully across boundaries, be they sector, organizational, policy, or functional ones. Wicked problems are poorly formulated, confusing, and have many different constituents or stakeholders with conflicting values. This article argues that developing wicked (good) leadership that is collaboratively oriented and wicked (good) solutions that enhance system resilience are two potential strategies for creating change to reduce systemic problems associated with sustainability. Although these approaches do not deal with the problem of resource overuse, they may provide a basis for generating more sustainable approaches to resource use

Inequality, Dignity, and the Sustainability Challenge

The world is facing significant threats from inequality and climate change, both of which are potential sources of societal and civilizational instability. Sustainability crises will most likely affect the poorest in the world much more than the wealthy. Furthermore, a fundamental reason why poverty and growing gaps between the wealthy and the poor are problematic is that poverty too often has the effect of violating the dignity of the poor. Today’s business system fosters ever more materiality, consumption, and product churn, externalizing whatever costs it can and thereby placing those costs into societies and the natural environment. This article argues that greater attention to the dignity of humans and, indeed, of all beings, along with systemic changes that incorporate new measures of progress and performance, the internalization of currently externalized costs, the provision of decent work, and the consideration of ecological costs, among other shifts, could help businesses transition the world to a more equitable and sustainable context

The development of corporate responsibility/ corporate citizenship

This paper outlines the emergence of corporate responsibility/corporatecitizenship as part of corporate practice. The paper first defines the terms, then briefly focuses on the history of corporate citizenship and its evolution over time, highlighting the current popularity of the term both in academic and practice-based work. It turns next to an assessment of the current pressures and dynamics facing major corporations, highlighting the internalization of corporate responsibility practices into companies’’ business models, and a growing infrastructure that involves new standards and principles, the social investment movement, NGO pressures, multi-sector collaborations particularly around so-called bottom-of the pyramid strategies, internal and external responsibility management approaches, and stakeholder engagement, as well as transparency and reporting. Finally, the paper addresses how some of the current pressures are likely to evolve in the future, noting the emergence of new conversations like Corporation 2020, which focus on the core purposes and definition of the corporation, as well as other pressures that are likely to continue to develop, with a brief discussion of the implications for practice of all of these shifts

Inequality, Dignity, and the Sustainability Challenge

The world is facing significant threats from inequality and climate change, both of which are potential sources of societal and civilizational instability. Sustainability crises will most likely affect the poorest in the world much more than the wealthy. Furthermore, a fundamental reason why poverty and growing gaps between the wealthy and the poor are problematic is that poverty too often has the effect of violating the dignity of the poor. Today’s business system fosters ever more materiality, consumption, and product churn, externalizing whatever costs it can and thereby placing those costs into societies and the natural environment. This article argues that greater attention to the dignity of humans and, indeed, of all beings, along with systemic changes that incorporate new measures of progress and performance, the internalization of currently externalized costs, the provision of decent work, and the consideration of ecological costs, among other shifts, could help businesses transition the world to a more equitable and sustainable context

Corporate responsibility and financial performance : the role of intangible resources.

This paper examines the effects of a firm’s intangible resources in mediating the relationship between corporate responsibility and financial performance. We hypothesize that previous empirical findings of a positive relationship between social and financial performance may be spurious because the researchers failed to account for the mediating effects of intangible resources. Our results indicate that there is no direct relationship between corporate responsibility and financial performance—merely an indirect relationship that relies on the mediating effect of a firm’s intangible resources. We demonstrate our theoretical contention with the use of a database comprising 599 companies from 28 countries.

Five Core Dimensions of Purposeful System Transformation

System transformation is fundamental, broad, deep, and multi-scalar change that involves a paradigm change, i.e., a radical shift, in five key interrelated and interactive dimensions that constitute the whole of a “complexly wicked” socio-ecological system. This paper discusses these dimensions and provides a rationale for focusing on them. The dimensions are purpose(s), perspectives, and performance metrics. They provide an umbrella for the other two, power(s) relationships and dynamics, and the combination of practices, policies, and processes (practices for short) that characterize how a given socio-ecological system operates

The Values Proposition of Wellbeing Economies’ Infrastructure Innovation

This paper argues that for wellbeing economies in a flourishing natural to develop, they need to develop new economic operating infrastructure (EOI) that is built on values that support those goals rather than today’s financial wealth- and economic growth-oriented economic goals. We explore the values underlying multiple different types of social innovations in EOI: new economic narratives and stories, wellbeing governance structures, financing innovations that support equity and ecological flourishing, equitable, responsible, and holistic metrics, currencies that support local needs equitably, and contextually appropriate markets. The paper emphasizes how examples of EOI innovations for each type reflect values of: stewardship of the whole; co-creating collective value; cosmopolitan-localist governance; regenerativity, reciprocity, and circularity; relationality and connectedness; and equitable markets and trade

Voluntary or mandatory: that is (not) the question: linking corporate citizenship to human rights obligations for business

"Menschenrechte werden gewöhnlich als exklusiver Verantwortungsbereich von Regierungen wahrgenommen. Mit fortschreitender ökonomischer Globalisierung erweist sich diese Auffassung allerdings zunehmend als unangemessen. Insbesondere in Bezug auf die mächtigen multinationalen Unternehmen führt sie zu einer eklatanten Verantwortungslücke. In diesem Beitrag argumentieren die Verfasser deshalb für verbindliche Menschenrechts-Standards für multinationale Unternehmen und untersuchen, welchen Beitrag auf Freiwilligkeit basierende Konzepte wie Corporate Citizenship und Corporate Social Responsibility zur Klärung von entsprechenden Pflichten von 'Multinationals' machen können - dies speziell in Bezug auf die oft kontingenten Verantwortlichkeiten bezüglich sog. positiven Menschenrechten." (Autorenreferat)"Human rights have traditionally been considered a domain of governments. The ongoing economic globalization, however, has rendered this state-centered view increasingly inadequate. In this contribution the author's will argue that also the powerful transnational corporations must bear more and more direct responsibility for the impact of their actions on human rights. Florian Wettstein and Sandra Waddock will first clarify the conceptual connection between existing approaches to corporate citizenship (CC) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the newly emerging 'business and human rights' debate. Partly in contradiction to the 'traditional' view on CSR/ CC as a voluntary affair for business, the author's will then plea for mandatory human rights standards for corporations. However, human rights obligations are not always clear-cut and evident; especially so-called positive rights often create contingent and often highly ambiguous duties for many different actors. Therefore, the author's will argue CSR/ CC can make a valuable contribution especially regarding the clarification of such imperfect obligations. Accordingly, the relation between voluntary and mandatory approaches must not be seen as a mutually exclusive one, but rather as inherently complementary." (author's abstract