This is the second session of the program, completed on the platform rather than in a live meeting. Its objectives are to review the growth study findings on humanized growth, understand the case for creating long-term value for all stakeholders, and get practical leadership advice for driving it.
It is the first session on a specific building block, and the block it covers overarches all the others. It is about the why of the organization, its purpose.
Key findings
- The study found that growth over-performers have moved on from Friedman’s shareholder primacy to value creation for all stakeholders, colleagues, customers, the community and the capital markets, and not just for the short term.
- Respondents were asked to rank their growth ambitions. Top line growth came first most often, and on this both groups looked the same, with neither deviating significantly from the index.
- The split appears below the top line. Many more under-performers focused on bottom line growth, which the session concedes may be a matter of survival in some cases. Substantially more over-performers focused on people growth and over-indexed significantly on it.
- People growth means tangibly improving things for the people they work with, the people they serve, and the communities they sit within.
- The forecast is that the future of growth is more human-centric throughout. That came through repeatedly in interviews with 650 CEOs and CMOs, who described humanized growth as the overarching theme rather than one block among seven.
How it shows up in metrics
The worked example is YouTube, which uses time spent on the platform as a key metric. That forces the platform to be easy to use and the algorithm to keep feeding relevant content, which the session calls a people-centric metric rather than a bottom line one.
The logic behind it is that value starts with employees. The session cites research that people who are well looked after take better care of clients, and quotes Tex Gunning of Leaseplan: happy cows give more milk.
The community example is Elana Rosenfeld and Kicking Horse Coffee, which transformed a Canadian town from a sleepy backwater into a community that will go to great lengths to serve the company.
The same human framing runs through the other blocks. Abundant markets means defining the market in terms of human needs. The anticipative organization means connecting as human beings rather than as functional roles in silos. Whole-brained means using human insight to unlock big data and human creativity to unleash new technology.
The case study and the wider goals
Dulux, sold internationally as Flexa or Coral, is the case study. The session shows how it created multi-stakeholder strategies and initiatives triggered by a deep human insight and a shift in the brand’s role, starting from human insight at the core.
The Sustainable Development Goals are used as a reference point for strategy. Created in 2016 for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, they are at halftime, and the 2023 progress report shows only 15 percent on track. IRG includes the SDGs as an element of the humanized growth plan participants build.
What participants are asked to do
The workbook asks three questions: whether the company has a clear strategy for value creation for all stakeholders, whether the strategies are coherent and long-term, and who else should be involved in developing them.
The reflection asks what action can be taken now for immediate impact, formulated as concretely as possible with who, what and by when.
Three optional prereads set up the session: Hamdi Ulukaya’s TED talk calling for an anti-CEO playbook that prioritizes people over profits, an article on the purpose of purpose that splits it into cause-based, competence-based and culture-based, and an HBR podcast with Hubert Joly on when a business should engage on societal issues.
The three stated learnings close the session: humanized growth is the overarching theme of the model and covers the why of growth, it means sustained value creation for all stakeholders, and one impactful way to deliver it is to identify a clear aspirational role for the organization.
Scope and limitations
The document is the platform export of a self-learning session, so the videos and case study interactions it refers to are not part of the text. The findings it reports come from the IRG Growth Study rather than from this session.
Source
This page summarises SESSION 2: Humanized Growth, by Eva Linderborg, Hamdi Ulukaya, Hubert Joly, Elana Rosenfeld, Rupen Desai, George Olexa, Angela, Paul, 2024.