Dave Stangis
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Episode Information
Maggie and Hannah welcome Dave Stangis to Magnify Your Impact. Dave is the Chief Sustainability Officer at Apollo Global Management and Founder of 21C Impact. He has spearheaded ESG strategies at multiple Fortune 500 corporations like Intel and Campbell’s Soup and has been recognized as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics. In part one, Dave shares his definition of Environmental Social and Governance, how he led the corporate social responsibility movement more than 20 years ago, and how corporate responsibility can influence a vibrant team culture in a company.
About Dave Stagis:
Dave most recently served as Chief Sustainability Officer and VP Corporate Responsibility/ Public Affairs at Campbell Soup Company, where he reported to Campbell’s President and CEO. Dave currently advises leading companies on ESG, technology, and reputation and resiliency strategies.
Over the course of 20 years, Dave led two very different Fortune 500 corporations, Intel and Campbell, from a standing start to clear and consistent world-class leadership in ESG, Sustainability & Social Responsibility. He guided both companies to multi-year runs on the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, the 100 Best Corporate Citizens List, the Most Reputable Companies in the U.S, World’s Most Sustainable Corporations, and recognition among the World’s Most Ethical Companies.
At Campbell, he created and led the Company’s strategies and external engagement related to CSR Strategy, Responsible Sourcing, Sustainable Agriculture, and Operational Sustainability. He served as an infotech and biotech expert.
Dave has served on the boards of many non-profit organizations and two Public Benefit Corporations (Plum Organics and The Soulfull Project). As Chair of the Board at Net Impact, a global community of 100,000 emerging leaders, he led a successful CEO search and transition.
As the creator and leader of Intel’s Global Corporate Responsibility function, Dave established corporate governance processes, operationalized citizenship and sustainability, and managed activist campaigns.
Dave has been named to the 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics by Ethisphere Magazine in 2008 & 2013, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Trustworthy Business Behavior by Trust Across America every year from 2011 to 2014. He is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Babson College, an Executive Advisor for the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College and a Mentor to the AgFunder Network. Dave serves as an Advisor to Magnomer and Stojo; and is the co-author of two books on strategic corporate citizenship. Sept. 2018.
Dave earned a B.S. (Chemistry/Biology) from the University of Detroit, an M.S. in Occupational and Environmental Health from Wayne State University, and an M.B.A (Finance/Gen. Management) from the University of Michigan.
Read The Transcript
Joe Pardavila:
Welcome to Magnify Your Impact, presented by ForbesBooks. Each week, our hosts, Maggie Miller and Hannah Nokes, talk with business leaders powering their company success with a secret ingredient, purpose. Here's Maggie and Hannah.
Hannah Nokes:
Our guest this week is Dave Stangis, the founder and CEO of 21C IMPACT. Dave advises companies on environmental, social, and governance efforts. Dave has spearheaded ESG strategies at multiple Fortune 500 corporations, like Intel and Campbell Soup, and has been recognized as one of the 100 most influential people in business ethics. Dave, welcome to the podcast.
Dave Stangis:
Thank you. It's great to be here. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Hannah Nokes:
Well, first off, for our listeners who probably have varying degrees of experience with the concept of environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, can you give us your definition? And are we not calling it corporate social responsibility or corporate citizenship anymore?
Dave Stangis:
This is a great way to start because I literally have this conversation every day, and I've already had it once this morning with a large company and I like to describe it within the context of these companies or their sectors as almost all-encompassing. It's a way to take a look at all of these external and internal drivers and make better decisions and launch better strategies for the company.
Dave Stangis:
So, thinking about if we use the term ESG, and some companies are moving to this, and more and more every day, I've seen job titles with this in their title, thinking about what's happening in the environment. What am I focused on in society, both society externally and social indicators inside my company around human capital, and how am I managing all of that in governance? And thinking about this and talking about how I'm managing it and how I'm building a risk reduction strategy, but also an opportunity strategy.
Dave Stangis:
But I'm telling you, it's a very important topic to get aligned on both internally and externally. Some companies will use ESG, environmental social governance as a way to communicate externally to investors and maybe media and press, but they'll still refer to corporate social responsibility, corporate responsibility, corporate citizenship, and even philanthropy internally, when they speak to different audiences because they don't want to alienate people that have invested their life, for example, in corporate citizenship or the corporate giving program. It's a tough road to walk.
Dave Stangis:
And what I advise companies all the time is don't get hung up on the terminology, but be very explicit about what you're calling things and what goes into each bucket. I know it's a long winded answer to your question, but I view it as factoring in all of these really interesting dynamics that are happening in the world among people and using those to make the company better or even the best it can be. That's how I define it. That's how I defined it at Campbell and I tied it to business outcomes. So how can we make products better? How can we build stronger affinity to our customers and consumers? How can we drive innovation? How can we be a place of the best talent in the world? And I think that helps no matter what word you use.
Hannah Nokes:
Would you say you use ESG as an umbrella concept for social impact, philanthropy and corporate social responsibility?
Dave Stangis:
I would say today that is more common. Again, that's a little bit of a challenge, because companies have people with these titles already and some, you have to be very tuned in and astute to the culture of the company, when you're making these somewhat generalizations. But yes, I would say today more and more companies are using ESG. You'll see them, they change the title of their external reports to ESG reports and it gives them a nice framework to put these buckets underneath. At Campbell Soup and a couple other companies that I worked with, they're still using terminology like corporate responsibility and sustainability. And that is a more welcoming term, maybe, perhaps in their culture and to their employees, and to the programs and their partners in the community. But they're using ESG when they're meeting with investors and when they're responding to surveys and rankers and raiders, so it's a little bit of pick and choose. But yes, I think in general, you're seeing companies using ESG more today than they ever have as an umbrella term.
Hannah Nokes:
Interesting. Well, that makes sense, but it sounds like it's an ever evolving thing for sure.
Dave Stangis:
Yes. And it's just beware and make sure you're asking the person you're speaking to, just like you did with me. What do they think? What pops in their mind when they think of ESG or corporate citizenship or corporate responsibility?
Maggie Miller:
Dave, you created the first proactive strategy in the Fortune 100 at Intel, more than 20 years of go before it was trendy. Take us back to that time. What was the catalyst for Intel and what did it mean for the company?
Dave Stangis:
Yeah, Intel, as you know, leading company, very data driven, very strong culture on winning and excellence in execution and very direct inside of the company in terms of culture and engagement. Great, great company. And I was a young safety engineer when I first joined that company, early in my career, they asked me to take on an external facing role. And at the time, the terminology was environmental health and safety. And we were publishing an environmental report at the time before sustainability reports were a thing and long before integrated or ESG reports were a thing. And the company was facing challenges with certain stakeholders. We had communities that were concerned about operations in their communities and perhaps things coming out of the plant that might have been toxic or at the least scary, and they didn't understand them.
Dave Stangis:
We were getting some complaints, especially in certain geographies. We were expanding around the world, so different communities were us tough questions. And we were facing actually share owned resolutions about being more transparent, about what we were doing and what we were measuring. And as part of that, I took the time to meet with these investors. They were socially responsible investors, values based investors, these are now friends of mine that I've had for more than 20 years and communities, and these were not easy conversations. They were very tough, sometimes heated. My role was to listen and learn, but I would bring content experts in sometimes with me. And they often wanted to battle, which is not the strategy in listening. So it was a wake up call to me that the company... We resolved these issues through dialogue and empathy and engagement and really hard conversations and negotiations.
Dave Stangis:
But it was a light bulb for me that the company, a company like Intel, needed somebody that did this job, this had to be a function. I called it corporate responsibility at the time, there were very few models out there. I think McDonald's had somebody doing this work, a guy named Bob Langard, great guy, and the petro chem companies, like a Shell Oil. But it took a couple years to convince the company to put this into place, a position. We had to negotiate and argue and convince people, but we finally put it in place at Intel, one person. And little by little, we built a team, then it turned into a global team. Then it turned into a corporate strategy and it continues to run today. One of the people that I had on my team early on, a woman named Suzanne Fallender and a bunch of others run that program at Intel today, and they're doing really great things.
Hannah Nokes:
So Dave, after Intel, you went on to develop corporate responsibility and sustainability for Campbell Soup company. On paper, those two companies, Intel and Campbell, couldn't be any different. When you're working with a new company, what are some of the most important considerations to building an effective ESG strategy?
Dave Stangis:
It's interesting because I really didn't know what I had learned while I was learning it. I'm kind of building this plane as I'm flying it. We're building an ESG investor engagement strategy at Intel that still runs annual ESG meetings today that had never happened before. And that we learned a lot from that. And at Campbell, they too, 10 years later, were at the same similar point, they were getting shown their resolutions, they tried to write their own corporate responsibility report. They did a nice job on their first report, but it literally took them two years and lots and lots of money. And they realized they could not do this on their own. It wasn't the right way to allocate resources, so they wanted to find somebody that had done this before and could bring that experience of building this thing from scratch to the company.
Dave Stangis:
They too, at the time, were a little leery of hiring somebody outside of food, but it worked out great. I reported to the general council there, but the change management approach, the kind of distillation of core competencies, the understanding of culture, kind of the connecting of strategic dots within a company and then building a change management strategy in this case to corporate responsibility, ESG or sustainability, and then building and connecting all of the internal systems to make it stick, is transferable. I really do believe you can do this in almost any sector. I've done it at Campbell and at Intel, but in today's world, I'm doing it at a much broader set of companies and sectors. And there's a lot that you have to learn, in terms of the culture. And I like to learn, I like to dig into details.
Dave Stangis:
Science and technology is some of the stuff that I'm interested in personally. And the food business has gotten much more scientific and technical and controversial over the 10 years that I was there. So that really helped there as well. You're doing crisis management, you're doing stakeholder engagement, you're managing issues before they arise for the company. And all of those things are consistent. It doesn't matter what sector you work in. The thing that was similar is these were two global brands that pretty much everybody on the planet had heard about. And that brand and reputation management was really important part of the effort and the strategy as well.
Maggie Miller:
Dave, I've heard you mentioned several concepts that are important to Hannah and me. You've talked about core competencies or what we call superpowers in the book. You've talked about dialogue between stakeholders. You've mentioned culture also, several times here. Tell us how you think corporate responsibility can influence a vibrant team culture in a company.
Dave Stangis:
Yeah, it's a great question. And I think that what happens is companies are not... You know this because you study this, but, a lot of people think of companies, as kind of a monolith, as a unified group of individuals making aligned decisions and acting in unison and they don't, they just don't operate that way. There are people all along the spectrum of believers and passionate people that want to change the world and people that have frankly been trained or incentivized over their 30 or 40 years to run business a certain way. And they look at some of these things as a distraction at the least, and sometimes harmful, at the worst. And corporate responsibility is a way too, it's a process that you can go through to bring these people together, to start with what they have. Listen clearly, understand what people think when they hear these terms, what their reactions are, what comes to mind? Tapping into their superpowers as you described. What are the things that this company does better than anybody else?
Dave Stangis:
What do they have in their toolbox that they can draw upon from a manufacturing or a sourcing or an innovation or a communication perspective. And then building something that everybody can agree on. Where you, instead of doing things without bringing people to the table, you brought people to the table at the beginning so that they can agree on where they can win, and what's exciting, and what the role of the company in society is, and how to attract the best talent and how to retain the best talent and how to win? How to actually create competitive advantage using corporate responsibility, sustainability and ESG.
Dave Stangis:
Over time, that aligns culture, it aligns leadership, expectations, it aligns the way you interview and the way you recruit. At Campbell, there's a lot of things that came out of some of the purpose work that we can talk about, but, it changes the way the company operates. And one of the things we did, we changed some of the branding at both of these companies that reflected this. We changed cultural statements and expectations of what it meant to be a successful team member at these companies. So it takes time. It doesn't happen overnight, but it also doesn't happen when this function is siloed, which still a lot of companies, where this is still a bit of a siloed function, unfortunately.
Maggie Miller:
Right. Have you seen that silo begin to become undone?
Dave Stangis:
Oh, absolutely. Clearly there are still companies, it helps to think about this as a big, long, maturity curve, or a continuum of maturity and where these companies are. But many companies are looking to break down these silos and most companies today realize that there's value in having dysfunction as a strategic set of thinking right at the table, no matter where it is, where it reports, it's something that is being thought of.
Dave Stangis:
And the other thing that you're seeing is other functions incorporating these efforts and these ideas and these strategies, so clearly you're seeing it in HR. You're seeing it in communications. Procurement in sourcing is big manufacturing, obviously from the sustainability perspective. But a lot of it in the strategy and the go to market efforts of these companies, where it used to be one person pushing these ideas. Now it's a group of people, usually, it doesn't have to be big, but there's also functional leaders that are carrying that effort along as well.
Maggie Miller:
Sure.
Hannah Nokes:
Dave, I'd love to talk a little bit more about Campbell Soup in particular, the impact that the company has had in the community. I love the story of Campbell's looking at the hunger issues in your headquarters's community. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came about and some of what you were able to accomplish there?
Dave Stangis:
Sure. And I think you're seeing that general trend more and more today, but one of the things I wanted, I was working on it at Intel and I didn't really have time to bring it to full fruition, but I had a little bit of experience in effort that I ran there called community solutions, which was really trying to figure out what we did as a company, drive community impact and business. And at Campbell, I wanted to bring outcome metrics to the community program. Companies talk about climate and energy and water and maybe retention and diversity equity and inclusion, and they might talk about volunteerism, philanthropy, but what I really was trying to do there at Intel and then brought it over to Campbell was, could we adopt or take on some societal outcome? Even if we've never achieved it, could we work on it in a way that was constructive, in a way that drove our investments, in a way that drove our work.
Dave Stangis:
And that's was the start of this idea around Campbell Healthy Communities. We worked with the Community Affairs team at the time. I created four functional teams, one on the sustainability side, one on the marketplace, one on the employee side, and one on the community side. There was an existing Community Affairs team. They had a foundation that had been making grants for years. Good work, but it was spread out across Philadelphia, across southern New Jersey. It had some affiliation with the members of the board and some of the original owners, Kitz family, a lot of family ownership, but, could we tighten that up, make it more strategic and sign up for a health outcome. And we were located, our headquarters was in Camden, New Jersey, which is a city that's a laboratory of issues to solve from hunger to poverty to safety.
Dave Stangis:
But we were a food company and we worked together and we took a lot of destination targets. We took a 10 year, 2020 agenda, we set in 2010. And one of them was to increase the health of young people in our hometown communities starting in Camden. And we launched, we hired a director at the time of Healthy Communities to focus on this work. We realigned our corporate giving. We did this all very publicly with our partners, so they understood. Perhaps some of these long term philanthropic partners, weren't going to be getting the same grants in the future. And let's say focused on improving the health of young people, access to nutrition, training and education around healthy eating and healthy foods, getting healthy foods into the commerce sector there, there was no grocery stores, we had to partner with local community stores and corner stores for healthy foods, work with other nonprofit partners in the community. But really, stopped giving in the Philadelphia city proper and converted that into giving in partnerships and volunteer work and strategies, all around improving the health of young people.
Dave Stangis:
And it continues today. They're continuing that work, they're focused on school districts now and healthy meals there. But it really was just a shift, and you're seeing it at other companies as well is, how can we use our giving, our philanthropy, our investments from our employees, their time, their expertise, to make a difference, a measurable difference in society, that only we can make as the kind of company we are? And I think it's a great place to focus your corporate giving or philanthropy work. Obviously we did it in an authentic way. We didn't go out and claim that we won anything. And we shared all of our failures as well. And you get credibility and you build reputation that way.
Hannah Nokes:
Well, and you really have made a measurable difference for community members there in Camden and beyond, it's a really impressive program. And so obviously with Campbell being a food company, the product, the food, is a huge potential contributor to society. So we talk in our book, Maggie and I talk in our book about how companies can use their superpowers, their products, services, skills, and expertise to focus their world impact. What benefits do you think that it brings to a company to use its superpowers for that kind of impact in addition to potentially writing checks? So we're doing typical philanthropy kind of activity.
Dave Stangis:
It's a huge well of ideas and innovation and potential investments. Once you're aligned in where you want to make a difference and you've sat down and you really understood your superpowers as a company, where are you? Where is your strength from a people perspective, from a technology perspective, from a manufacturing perspective? Then you can double down and you can drive. There's hundreds of examples we could go through and we won't do that. But, some of the examples were at Campbell, specifically, were focused on, what could we do in the agricultural space? We set up a sustainable agriculture program. We hired a lead of that program. We partnered with groups like Environmental Defense Fund and Land of Lakes to drive more sustainable practices in our wheat growing and milling. And we worked with the growers and we told the story through our brands like Milano cookies or Pepperidge Farm Goldfish.
Dave Stangis:
It was a win across the board. It was a win for the farmers. It was a win for the millers. It was a win in the marketplace. It helped our brands drive affinity. And we learned, and we optimized. We had years worth of work with our tomato growers in California. These are long term family relationships. We could convert growing from normal irrigation to drip irrigation, measure that improvement in water. Tell that story. One of the more interesting projects we did for about six years was something called, Just Peachy and it was focused on a food waste, basically a food rescue idea in New Jersey, which the local partner brought to us an idea around farmers in New Jersey were paying tens of thousands of dollars to bury peaches that they had just grown that the grocery stores wouldn't buy, they weren't perfect.
Dave Stangis:
Could we convert it into something? And it was our superpower. We had a pilot plant in Camden where we did testing of products and soup sauces, in this case, salsas. And we worked and did this for six years in a row. Our employees volunteered, our lawyers got involved. We developed labels and ingredients and recipes, donated this back to the food bank and they sold it, made hundreds of thousands of dollars for their social impact investments, fed people, sustainability, volunteerism, social impact, social entrepreneurship, food recovery, landfill diversion, all kinds of efforts when you're focused on your superpowers and putting them to work for good, and tying them into a strategy that is there, and people are agreeing to what can we do from a sustainability perspective? What can we do from a human capital perspective and where can we benefit society?
Hannah Nokes:
That's great. Well, hang on Dave, we have to take a break, but coming up in the second part of our chat with Dave Stangis, the founder and CEO of 21C IMPACT, Dave talks about what someone who's not the CEO of a company can do to drive change within their organization.
Dave Stangis:
It's a conversation about help versus convince and little by little, you make little changes and you change one little thing here, and one little thing there in a way that helps these individuals inside the company.
Joe Pardavila:
We hoped you enjoyed this episode of Magnify Your Impact, a production of ForbesBooks. If you want to ignite purpose in your own company, connect with Maggie Miller and Hannah Nokes at magnify-impact.com.
Part Two
Speaker 1:
Welcome to Magnify Your Impact presented by ForbesBooks. Each week our hosts, Maggie Miller and Hannah Nokes talk with business leaders, powering their company success with a secret ingredient purpose. Here's Maggie and Hannah.
Maggie Miller:
Hannah and I welcome you back to our conversation with Dave Stangis the founder and CEO of 21C IMPACT. He advises companies on environmental, social, and governance strategies. Dave, I'd love to touch on one of the concepts we talk about in our book, which is core ideology. When you arrived at Campbell, the company needed some help defining its purpose and values. I thought that was really surprising since they were a 150-year-old company. So, how did you help them develop their purpose? How did that benefit Campbell's and in general, I think it's important to hear your recommendations for other business leaders as they think about purpose.
Dave Stangis:
Yeah, it's a tough subject sometimes to talk through, but as you mentioned, my belief is that companies are founded with a purpose in mind. I mean, you think about startups today. I advise some startups in the work I'm doing now, and they start with a purpose that they've identified a problem or a challenge or an opportunity in society that they view as a win-win like, I can help solve this. I can build a business to do it. I can also earn a profit and maybe make a difference for other employees. But there's a reason for being. There's a reason we were created. And John Dorrance when he created Campbell, there was a reason he was solving a challenge in society at that time, way back when. But companies, as they grow and they get bigger and they evolve in leadership, you have 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 CEOs come through, they move from private to public, many, most lose sight of that purpose.
Dave Stangis:
And in some companies, the purpose evolves. It changes. They change structure. They merge. They get acquired, but there's definitely an exercise in going back in mining, if you've lost going back and finding that purpose and we didn't call it that at Intel, but we went through that same process, but at Campbell, it was a very overt process. We were nourishing people's lives when I joined Doug Cohen and he was leading a great company and he was focused on employee engagement. But when Denise took over, Denise Morrison, we talked a little bit more about, going back to tap into the purpose of the company. And this was, in the era continuing today of transparency and traceability and real food, and what's in my food and who grew it, where did it come from and tapping into that authenticity of ingredients, and the actual experience of eating and sharing food.
Dave Stangis:
And there was a core group of us that basically were kind of locked up for six months, spent a lot of time in New York. And we brought in the C-suite up in the board and, and came up with a very simple purpose to begin with. This is this real food that matters for life's moments, but it was really the design philosophy that took a couple more years, which we actually called the real food philosophy that led to the culture change, the innovation change, everything about, it changed the way we looked at merger and acquisition partners. It changed the way we designed food. We were reformulating ingredients out the food that we didn't like the way they looked on the back of the, ingredient panel. If a consumer, if the word was confusing or they couldn't find it in their pantry, we'd look for a way to reformulate it and make it simpler, make it cleaner.
Dave Stangis:
It really that's what sounds like simple work was hard and painful. Brands competed within a company like this. It was a multi-brand company. We owned cookies and crackers and soups and sauces at the time and the beverages. So it's definitely worthwhile. It unlocks a ton of opportunity. It really helps you know where to invest, say yes, it also helps you know where to say no. And we held it up as a pressure test every decision, strategic decision we were making and this aligned with our new purpose as a company.
Hannah Nokes:
You mentioned change in management there. I think that's something people actually often forget about when trying to shift to become more sustainable or socially conscious. What's your philosophy on leadership specific to making these kinds of changes in an organization?
Dave Stangis:
Yeah, it's again, this is an interesting topic that I didn't realize I had learned while I was learning it, but it comes to you later as you go through these cycles, but there's this career set this path we're on of corporate responsibility, sustainability, ESG is a passionate one. It attracts people of passion. It attracts people, smart people that want to change companies, the world society, which is great. And that's what makes it so exciting. But it also sometimes attracts those people that haven't figured out as you mentioned, how to actually drive change management and make it stick. I've always been a business person first. I like these topics and I've seen them, I've always viewed the topics we're talking about as resources that were not deployed appropriately. So wastefulness, why are we not paying attention to ESG topics? Why are we not focused on what our employees are thinking or what the society is thinking, or why are we not taking advantage of sustainability drivers?
Dave Stangis:
So I've always viewed them that way. And when we're driving these changes, we'll talk about, what do we want to do in the community? What can we do in sustainability? And we attract these passionate thinkers that join us. And we go off and we do this work. It's great to have the people, you need them. You need this team of fellow travelers and you need them across the company. We build networks, we set up formal structures or matrix teams, but that only gets you so far. You have to move my philosophy or my theory in practice, as you have to move from people to process. So after you've got people excited, you've got people aligned, you've got, you've kind of defined agreement on what success looks like. Then it's time to get into the systems of the company.
Dave Stangis:
And I mean, basically I dissect the company. Doesn't matter what sector it's in. I go through a similar process, where in the human resources space can we engage? Where do we hardwire this in? Then the Campbell, we did, new employee orientation. In some of this work, we changed the culture. We changed individual performance objectives. We changed the way we recruit. We changed the way we communicate to potential candidates, procurement, policy setting. We go ethics code of conduct, where do you need policies? Where are they put in place? Who owns the responsibility? Who's accountable? Who gets rewarded when you win? Who gets penalized? If you are falling behind marketing communications. Not just sending out some annual report, but a communication strategy around this. But basically I could spend the next hour talking about this, but hardwiring these change management pieces and then building the measurement and the accountability and the competency building to make it all happen and make it stick is how you hardwire this change management in.
Dave Stangis:
That way, if a CEO leaves, or if I leave and move on all of this progress, doesn't roll back to ground zero, which is what happened for many years. And what happens still today at some companies.
Hannah Nokes:
So Dave, for our listeners who might be thinking that's all well and good. If you're the CEO and you can establish KPIs and make these major change initiatives happen inside an organization, how can someone from a grassroots level, as an employee start to make these kind of shifts inside an organization?
Dave Stangis:
Yeah, it's a great question. It's not easy, but it is where most of us start. And I think that it goes to some of the competencies that make people in these roles successful or not. A lot of it comes down to understanding number one, being willing to engage across the company, people and senior positions, as well as junior positions and having conversations and finding like-minded travelers like we just discussed. There's a skillset around communication. There's a skillset around influencing without authority and negotiation, but the way this happens in real life. And it's one of the things we wrote the first book about that 21st century corporate citizenship book for practitioners is a step by step process, really having conversations about what is most important to these other individuals in your company, not what's most important to you driving ESG or sustainability or corporate citizenship, but what's most important to them.
Dave Stangis:
What are they trying to drive? And how can you help them with some of this bandwidth you have, and some of this expertise and some of these resources that we've been talking about, some of these superpowers that you may know about that this person may not know about. And it's a conversation about help versus convince. And little by little, you make little changes and you change one little thing here and one little thing there in a way that helps these individuals inside the company. And when you're making the changes, you're searching for business process changes, decision points, product development processes, procurement decisions, things that you can again make this a win-win where you're chalking up points in terms of sustainability, ESG, corporate citizenship, but you're helping these others. And you do have to seek what I've always recommended is to seek out and then build at least at the start a matrix team of people that have some decision making authority.
Dave Stangis:
They don't have to be the C-suite, because that's not where you're going to be able to start as a junior person in this company. But there may be somebody in the HR human resources or legal function that is like-minded, that has the ability to get some things done within their function, perhaps finance, perhaps marketing or communications. And that's how you build and get traction. And it's a little bit of a flywheel and there's some internal cadence that comes with this improvement process. Most companies, it might be a year, but sometimes it's not. And you will not chalk things up, especially if you can start to take goals or do some disclosure reporting, you draw lines in the sand and you move forward. And that's how many of these individuals build these programs over time. It's not easy and it's a lot less common today to have to build these things from scratch than it was 10 or 20 years ago. But it's still a very good set of skills to have to be successful in this space.
Maggie Miller:
Dave, I love how you talk about how we can use the individuals inside the companies and how we can spark those people. So we talk about as well in our book, that's 75% of this workforce will be millennial by 2025. And I'd love to talk about that for a moment. And just from your perspective, hear about some of the biggest ways that these new generations of employees and consumers are changing the landscape.
Dave Stangis:
Yeah. I mean, first let's start internally. One of the things that's happened to me all over my career is, people have come up to my cube or my office and knocked on the door and said, this stuff you're doing is cool. You know, do you have any spots on your team? And the answer's always been the same. I wish I had spots on my team, but at the moment, most of the time I don't, they all want to come and work in this group and the conversations I have with all of them, I'll set up some special time where we actually sit down and we talk about how they can go back to their function and do this work. And it really unlocks all kinds of it's like planting a thousand seeds and it gives them all kinds of energy and power and it multiplies our impact, and there's people that have worked for me that have had people come up to them and ask them that question, as we've gotten more as we've built more teams, I said, never let them leave.
Dave Stangis:
Like don't let them go back without having a conversation with about how they can go back to their function and do this work, this millennial concept, or just young passionate and frankly older passionate people in the workplace today. I think COVID, the era of this past pandemic have given people a lot of time to think about what they want to do. And it's an opportunity for us all to not let this passion and this moment go to waste, put it to good work and the same, especially from a consumer products company, a branded company like Campbell, consumers and listening to consumers and even listening to some of the outliers. It's signal monitoring. I mean, I talk about signals all the time and they're not signals now they're kind of waves, but some point in time, they are signals.
Dave Stangis:
And part of our job is always to be sustainability people, ESG people, we should be focused on the signals and listening, ear to the rail way out in the future so that we can help our companies be prepared. Because usually we're way ahead of our time and it can be frustrating and it can frankly frustrate the companies we work for sometimes. But that's our job. Our job is to make sure that they are never surprised and listening to what is happening with consumers, whether it's millennials, trends, behaviors, marketplace is all a way that we can actually add more value to the companies we work for in the future.
Maggie Miller:
I love that you carve out time your company to make sure that you're planting these seeds of passion for them to take back to their workplaces. That's really quite a gift.
Dave Stangis:
Yeah. I think it's just most of us and this is not just me. I mean, most of us in this profession are pay it forward people. We have been investing our time and effort and sometimes our dollars into building this career, this profession for a long time now. And I think a lot of us are talking these days that it's amazing to see it's all of a sudden ballooned. We're not sure what actually was the, well, I don't think there was just one driver that made it balloon there's many, but there's actually more demand than supply in this profession. ESG sustainability, corporate citizenship for the first time ever that we've been working on it. So it's great to see.
Maggie Miller:
Well, Dave, you talked a bit about your team today already. Can you tell us more about your work at 21C IMPACT, you all advise CEOs and investors about what's real and what's next? What does that look like to you?
Dave Stangis:
Sure. It's interesting because we just talked a little bit about that after you've done this work for so long inside companies, this pay, I've always helped companies and people, most of it pro bono, because I'm working for another company, I'm not doing things that are anti-competitive, but somebody calls up and they say, Hey, give us any advice on how you're doing this or what you did there, how you solve that problem. I always give them my advice. I teach classes, I coach individuals. I've always done that when I've been employed, it's just kind of the pay it forward approach. And that's basically what I'm doing now. I left Campbell almost a couple years ago and it was time I had had been thinking about transitioning for almost two years, had had conversations with the CEOs about kind of leaving and building the right team and transition plan.
Dave Stangis:
It finally worked out after a lot of transition at the top at Campbell, but that's what I'm doing now. I've had, I don't know, close to 20 different clients and companies big, small, mostly publicly traded large companies because that's where my experience is in covering all the topics we've been talking about here. But I also do some teaching doing an exec ed course at Villanova. I am an advisor for three different startups, all mission driven, I would say focused in this area between, disrupting single-use plastics or recycling, some of the single-use plastic streams to food waste upcycling. So there's just, there's no end of the work we can do in this space. And there's still plenty of time to pay it forward and coach people and individuals. And that's basically what I'm doing at the moment. I'm helping talk to a lot of recruiters.
Dave Stangis:
Most of the time I'm helping them find talent or connect talent to roles. I post a lot of open jobs that I see just really to help again, the same thing I've always done. I'm just doing it now in a different format. And that's what 21C IMPACT. It's a play on words obviously of the two books we did write with the center for corporate citizenship at Boston College. And it's all about frankly, there's a new set of rules for companies to be competitive. And I think a lot of the external people that haven't been inside companies actually don't really know what's real with ESG. They look at rankings and ratings, but they don't really understand that the company is managing risks or tapping into opportunities. And they're not adept yet at monitoring signals. So talk, getting to your point about, what's real, there's a lot you can get from external rankings and ratings, but I can ask a few questions of a company and I can tell them or tell you whether or not they're really invested in this or they're really capable or equipped.
Dave Stangis:
And I can also just because as we've been doing this for so long, let you know what's coming in this sector or for this company in the future that they should watch out for.
Hannah Nokes:
Dave in the book, you co-wrote the executives guide, you called corporate citizenship of value creating enterprise. What are some of the ways you can create value in today's competitive landscape?
Dave Stangis:
The reason we wrote that book was for CEOs, C-suites, and board of directors. And I think my premise is, it's worth a hard conversation when we're talking about some of these programs about creating value. If I want to launch a new philanthropic program or I want to launch a new community program, or I want to make an investment in a sustainability initiative, having that overt conversation about value creation, what can we do with this work to create value for the company and value for society? Both? You know, one of the things I learned in working in the C-suite at Campbell for the last three years is that, especially large, publicly traded companies. These are conversations about resource allocation. Most people want to do the right thing. They want to do good things, but there is no special pocket of money for sustainability.
Dave Stangis:
There are fixed and limited resources in these companies and it's an allocation decision. I'm going to make an investment in some of the other thing, or I'm going to make an investment in this, this being, that's corporate citizenship initiative. And that's why you have to have, or I believe you have to have a conversation about value creation. Where can we create value? Where can we optimize the work we're doing in philanthropy or corporate citizenship to create more value for the company and society. It's not all about, driving share owner value, although that's important in a lot of these companies and that's the way the executives are incentivized. So you can't ignore it. And I think that as younger more entry level, people come into the discipline, one of the things I always challenge them a little bit on is to continue to learn about the business in which they work.
Dave Stangis:
How does that company spend money? How does that company make money? You know, what parts of the business are the most profitable, which ones require the most in investment? I think it just helps them be better corporate citizenship professionals in their career. I think that it's an important concept and I think we should be held accountable. CFOs have held me accountable in every company I've worked for value creation and they challenge and test me on it. And I welcome that and I should be able to respond. They should feel comfortable responding to a question at a share owner meeting about why the company is doing one thing or another. And I've had that direct conversation with CFOs and help them work through those answers. And I think it's an important thing to happen.
Maggie Miller:
As we wrap up the conversation, you were talking about trends, and I'd love to hear what trends do you expect to continue or to emerge in terms of corporate social responsibility ESG?
Dave Stangis:
Well, I think, one of the things that has been refreshing to see, although it took a lot of pain to get, there is the rise of the concept of human capital and diversity, equity, and inclusion as a strategic cultural competency within companies, not just numbers of people and demographics, but the fact that companies need to be stronger. They need to be better at managing social issues, taking positions, public policy weighing in on regulations, this is an area that I do not think is going away. Transparency and traceability is a one way street as well. Engaging in real time is just the way it is these days. So again, having very strong capabilities around monitoring and communication, but the other push that we're seeing. So this human capital social equity competency is clear and it's here to stay.
Dave Stangis:
It's going to drive a bunch of different strategies from career development as well as what companies report and disclose and how they talk about human capital. That's all good. I think there's still a strong waiting on climate and carbon, which is appropriate, but I hope it doesn't overshadow some of the other big areas. You take a look at the, for example, the sustainable development goals. There's 16, 17. If you count the partnership, one of areas that need focus, but some of the reporting frameworks are, they're focused on climate, they're focused on environment. We got to get that right. There's a lot of, urgency there. It's just more and more sophistication. I think it is the biggest trend. It's you don't get to fake it anymore, whether you're a company or an individual, which can make it a tough. But I think it's the right trend and it's just going to continue.
Maggie Miller:
Dave, it's been such a great conversation hearing from you, learning from you. I can understand why people want a spot on your team. Just thank you for all the information and all the feedback that you've given us today.
Dave Stangis:
Yeah. Thank Maggie and Hannah. It's been a great conversation. I obviously enjoyed the topics. You're doing great work and it's really fun just to talk about what's going on and what we're seeing and trying to help as many as we can. So thank you for the opportunity.
Hannah Nokes:
Dave, thanks so much for joining us. His name is Dave Stangis. He's the founder and CEO of 21C IMPACT. And that's it for this episode of Magnify Your Impact.
Maggie Miller:
If you enjoyed this show, make sure you take a second to subscribe. So you automatically get our new shows when they drop. Also, if you have a minute, we'd love if you leave us a review. So more folks like you can discover the show.
Hannah Nokes:
We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1:
We hope you enjoyed this episode of my Magnify Your Impact, a production of ForbesBooks. If you want to ignite purpose in your own company, connect with Maggie Miller and Hannah Nokes at magnifying-impact.com.
