This presentation sets out the 2023 Impact Study and the question behind it: how to implement humanized growth effectively, and what the leader’s own role in that is. It is organized around four moves, ground, reimagine, focus and unleash, with survey gaps reported at each step.
The evidence base is more than 450 vision interviews, more than 750 quantitative online survey responses across 52 markets and six C-suite functions with nine country deep-dives, and a social AI hypertrend study of 120,000 items.
Key findings
- The context is described as the end of a fifty year era, with four stakeholder groups now louder, better informed, more powerful and more demanding: colleagues, customers, community and capital markets.
- Companies are caught between accusations of doing too little and of doing too much. The study reports that 29 percent keep a low profile, limited by fear of being accused of greenwashing or wokeness.
- Stakeholder value creation tracks revenue growth. Against a base of 651, topline revenue growth relative to six direct competitors over the last three years rises from 3.87 for those below average on delivering sustained value for all stakeholders to 5.87 for those rated very good.
- The deck also reports the long-run shift in where corporate value sits, from 17 percent intangible to 90 percent.
Ground: knowing the stakeholders
The first move is human first, built on a stakeholder materiality map. The gap on understanding stakeholders is shown as 77 percent against 17 percent, and on engaging them as 73 percent against 9 percent.
The sharpest gap in this section is representation. Only 3 percent of one group report that stakeholders are represented in decision-making, against 71 percent of the other.
Reimagine: working backward from the future
The second move is to zoom out and take a longer view, reported as 77 percent against 23 percent. The method is to work future backward, and to hold both a utopian and a dystopian vision of the emerging future.
Purpose is the aspirational part of that. Pride in the company’s purpose runs 79 percent against 26 percent, while purpose actually guiding all strategic decision-making runs 62 percent against 7 percent.
The deck sorts purpose into four sources, cause based, competency based, economic value based and culture based, and states three tests for it: connected to deep belief systems, rooted in company DNA, and not a marketing or communications tactic.
Focus: choosing, and stopping
The third move is adaptive change: prioritizing stakeholders and defining value per stakeholder. Having a value creation strategy across all stakeholders runs 69 percent against 3 percent.
The deck reports a text analysis of 97,837 tweets and 19,952 LinkedIn posts showing that over-performers hold two classes of language where under-performers hold four, which it presents as an integrated rather than a compartmentalized perspective.
Two demands follow. The courage to define what to stop, and the discipline of addressing short-term issues inside the long-term growth story.
Organize and unleash
The fourth move is systemic interdependence. Driving systemic change to create stakeholder value runs 68 percent against 9 percent, and working interdependently across functions and departments runs 72 percent against 7 percent.
Connection is measured the same way as in earlier studies: 3.5 times more connections with other functions and 5.5 times more with senior leaders. Colleagues closer to stakeholders are empowered to act for the business at 72 percent against 23 percent.
Collaboration extends outside the company. Industry collaboration runs 71 percent against 57 percent, and collaboration with government and public institutions 50 percent against 46 percent.
The last move is role modeling. Create space for all people and ideas, show vulnerability, and model the behavior. The closing frame is the da Vinci growth leader profile, mapped onto ikigai: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.
Scope and limitations
The deck shows several figures per statement without labeling each one on the slide, so the comparison groups have to be read from the study. The correlation between stakeholder value creation and revenue growth is based on 651 responses and is a correlation, not a causal claim.
Source
This page summarises Reimagine the Future, Redefine Growth, by Institute for Real Growth, November 8th 2023.