This is the Impact Study as presented to a C-suite roundtable in Amsterdam in February 2024. It opens on the role of business in society and traces that history from Florence and Port Sunlight through to shareholder primacy in 1974.
The turning point it names is 2019 and the end of a fifty year era. Four years on, the study finds stakeholders louder, more demanding, and more powerful, and companies without a practical roadmap.
Key findings
- Companies now get attacked from both directions. The deck records accusations of doing too little or too much, and a risk of being caught in the crossfire.
- Seeing stakeholder value creation as an opportunity rather than a risk is where the groups diverge most. The slide shows 89 and 88 percent for overperformers against 48 percent.
- Purpose used as a strategic filter shows the sharpest split. Seventy-one percent say purpose guides all strategic decision-making, against 7 percent.
- Representation lags understanding. Representing stakeholders in decision making runs at 61 and 38 percent against 3 percent, while understanding stakeholders runs at 76 and 64 percent against 17 percent.
- Connection is measured as well as claimed. Overperformers report 3.5 times more connections with other functions and 5.5 times more connections with senior leaders.
What the study rests on
The evidence is more than 450 vision interviews, a quantitative online survey of more than 750 board members and six C-suite functions, and a social AI hypertrend study of 120,000 sources across 52 markets with nine country deep-dives.
Ed Freeman, Mark Kramer, Patricia Nzolantino, and Jeremy Grantham are among the named interviewees. Everything is reported as overperformers against underperformers.
A separate social analysis compares what the two groups talk about, drawing on 97,837 tweets and 19,952 LinkedIn posts, and finds overperformers using two classes of language against four for underperformers.
Ground and reimagine
Grounding starts with knowing yourself and understanding stakeholders, using a materiality matrix. Engaging stakeholders splits 64 and 56 percent against 9 percent.
Reimagining works future backward and starts by zooming out to a longer term focus, at 70 and 79 percent against 23 percent, toward a utopian vision of the emerging future.
Pride in corporate purpose is high in both overperformer groups, at 90 and 92 percent against 26 percent. The deck insists that the aspirational role has to connect to deep belief systems and be rooted in company DNA, and that it is not a brand program or a marketing tactic.
Focus and organize
Focus means transformative change: prioritizing stakeholders and defining value per stakeholder. A defined value creation strategy across all stakeholders runs at 69 and 74 percent against 3 percent.
The deck warns against treating this as whack-a-mole, asks for the courage to define what to stop, and requires short term issues to be addressed inside the long term growth story.
Organizing means systemic interdependence. Driving systemic change runs at 69 percent against 9 percent, and working interdependently across functions and departments at 67 and 54 percent against 7 percent. Government and public institutions collaboration runs at 82 and 66 percent against 46 percent.
Five ambitions, and what each one implies
The roundtable asks each company to choose an ambition level: supporter, challenger, collaborator, leader, or creator.
The ambition then sets the work at each stage. Grounding moves from customer understanding to full ecosystem understanding, and reimagining from embedding a brand vision to co-creating and calibrating it continuously.
Focus moves from brand equity and performance marketing to systemic stakeholder value creation. Organizing moves from aligning messaging around the brand to a radical rethink of collaborative business models and partnerships. Unleashing moves from functional expertise to next-generation capabilities and Da Vinci leaders.
The leaders it asks for, and the room it was presented to
Unleashing rests on role modelling against the Da Vinci leader profile: open minded, courageous, optimistic and future focused, and demonstrating authenticity.
The roundtable itself included a session on leading for impact with Eric Kramer of WPP, and Yolanda van Die and Peter Jacobs of ING Netherlands, then a table discussion on blockers and enablers.
A cross-functional executive panel closed the event, with Frank van den Brink of KennedyFitch, Erica van Vonderen-Hahn of Basic-Fit, Bernard Osta of Vestiaire Collective, and Andreea Vonk of Booking.com.
Scope and limitations
The percentages are shown as three figures per question, covering two overperformer groups and one underperformer group, and the slides carry the legend rather than base sizes for each split.
Source
This page summarises The Impact Study, by Institute for Real Growth, WPP, February 27, 2024.