The study was conducted by the Institute for Real Growth with the Future of Marketing Institute at the Said Business School of Oxford University. Its primary objective is to identify what distinguishes organizations achieving humanized growth, where value is created for all stakeholders, from those that underperform.
The premise is that companies are no longer defined solely by their capacity to generate profits for shareholders, and are increasingly seen as parts of a larger societal ecosystem responsible for creating value for employees, customers, communities, and investors.
Key findings
- The first driver is to ground: connect to human stakeholder reality. Overperforming organizations show an aligned understanding of stakeholders, engage them deeply, and include their perspectives in strategic decision-making. Transparency in good times and bad is described as a hallmark.
- The second is to reimagine: a future-centric vision and an aspirational role. These organizations prioritize long-term thinking, develop a compelling vision of the future, and articulate a clear corporate purpose, with leaders painting a picture that aligns stakeholders’ minds, hearts, and will with it.
- The third is to focus: a holistic strategy with attention on adaptive change areas. Overperformers leverage both adaptive change, meaning transformative initiatives, and performative change, meaning day-to-day operations, and they stop initiatives that do not align with the holistic strategy.
- The fourth is to organize: driving systemic change and interdependencies. That means breaking down functional silos, empowering employees closer to stakeholders so decisions are quicker and more relevant, and collaborating beyond the organization with NGOs, governments, and regulators.
- The fifth is to unleash: role modeling Da Vinci leadership, which combines right-brain and left-brain thinking with empathy, and creates an environment where employees feel safe to share ideas.
How focus works in practice
The summary is explicit that naming a most important stakeholder is legitimate, citing Patagonia as having done so clearly. What separates overperformers is that they also spell out how they add value for all their stakeholders, with Mars given as the example.
The holistic strategy then becomes the guidance for everything the company does, including all its corporate social responsibility activity, with Dole cited as the example.
The five implications drawn out
The first is that intangibles are the new tangibles. Brand value, customer data, employee loyalty, and reputation are growing in importance, and leaders must develop strategies to measure and manage them effectively.
The second is incentive alignment: overperformers align incentives with their holistic strategies, which pushes leaders to consider factors beyond financial metrics when evaluating success. The third is collaborative ecosystems, where collaboration beyond the organization’s boundaries is treated as essential rather than optional.
The fourth is transparency and authenticity, described as vital in fostering trust among stakeholders. The fifth is the role of leadership, where empathy, vulnerability, and open-mindedness are said to play a pivotal part, and leaders must create a culture that empowers employees.
Scope and limitations
This document is an executive summary rather than the study itself. It distills the findings into five drivers and five implications, and reports no sample sizes, methods, or measured differences behind them.
Source
This page summarises Executive Summary: The IRG Impact Study – Unveiling the Path to Humanized Growth, by Institute for Real Growth (IRG), Future of Marketing Institute at the Saïd Business School of Oxford University, 230928.