The study frames the problem as an overstretched leadership. Business leaders are pulled in every direction to satisfy seemingly conflicting stakeholder interests, recognize the need to adapt, and are afraid of getting caught in the political and social crossfire. What they need is a practical roadmap for the shift from shareholder primacy to value creation for all stakeholders.
Angela Ahrendts, quoted on the opening page, puts the same point as a standing tension between the right long-term decision and the necessary short-term priorities, and says no sustained corporate growth is possible without addressing key stakeholders’ needs.
Key findings
- Ninety percent of leaders at overperforming companies approach stakeholder value creation as a business growth opportunity, against 50 percent at underperforming businesses.
- On grounding, engaging stakeholders shows 64 percent against 9 percent, and representing stakeholders in decision making shows 61 percent against 3 percent.
- On reimagining, taking a long-term approach shows 70 percent against 23 percent, and purpose guiding all strategic decision-making shows 71 percent against 7 percent.
- On organizing, systemic change to drive stakeholder value shows 69 percent against 9 percent, and working interdependently shows 67 percent against 7 percent.
- The five drivers are to ground, reimagine, focus, organize, and unleash.
How the study was built
The design combines 475 C-suite vision interviews, an AI analysis of 120 thousand social media posts, and more than 750 online survey respondents.
The scope covers 61 markets, five functional deep dives across CEO, CFO, CCO, CMO, CHRO and board members, eight country deep dives in the US, UK, Netherlands, Turkey, China, India, France and Australia, and cross-industry insights for both business to consumer and business to business.
It is the fifth in a sequence of studies contrasting growth over and under performers, running through 2010, 2014, 2017, 2019 and 2023, and the comparison is drawn from quantitative survey scores on revenue growth and stakeholder value creation.
What separates the two groups
Grounding means an aligned understanding of the organization’s impact on stakeholders. Overperforming organizations actively engage with them and include their perspectives in strategic decision-making.
Reimagining means long-term thinking and a utopian future-focused vision that aligns stakeholders’ minds, heart and will with the company purpose.
Focus means a holistic and integrated strategy that embraces complexity and reduces whack-a-mole decision making by taking short-term decisions in the context of long-term strategy, managing and measuring transformative change separately from day-to-day operations. The social analysis behind it found overperformers talking in two topic classes against four for underperformers, across 97,832 tweets and 19,952 LinkedIn posts.
Organizing means collaborating better across silos inside the company and partnering better with industry partners, NGOs, and government. Unleashing means leaders who combine right-brain and left-brain thinking with empathy, are clear about their own personal purpose, and prioritize active listening, vulnerability, servant leadership, and open communication.
Who stands behind it, and what follows
The advisory board includes Angela Ahrendts, Chris Burggraeve, Colin Mayer of Oxford, Conny Braams of Unilever, Ella Robertson McKay of One Young World, Sylvia Mulinge of MTN Uganda, Ian Lee of Adecco, Javier Meza of Coca-Cola, Halla Tomasdottir of the B Team, Sanjiv Puri of ITC, Sue Allchurch of the UN Global Compact, Lorraine Twohill of Google, Jennifer Remling of WPP, and Hans Ploos van Amstel of Partners Group.
IRG describes itself as an independent not-for-profit organization supported by WPP, Meta, Google, and TCS, which conducts research, delivers executive leadership programs, and offers advisory services. The Oxford Future of Marketing Initiative is described as existing to infuse marketing practice with evidence-based solutions to complex business problems.
The study was taken on the road, with events listed in New York, Mexico City, Cape Town, Sao Paulo, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Penang, Mumbai, Cannes, Sydney, Prague, Stockholm, Tokyo and Shanghai, and three follow-on offers: inspire, unlock, and enable.
Scope and limitations
All the headline figures are reported as a contrast between overperformers and underperformers on the quantitative survey, not as population estimates, and the handout gives no confidence intervals.
Source
This page summarises The IRG Impact Study: Driving More Humanized Growth, by Institute for Real Growth, Oxford Future of Marketing Initiative, 2024-02-02.