Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson (Public Affairs, 2020)

An academic who does a lot of corporate consulting, Henderson has had a ringside seat as global corporations address climate change and social justice. She’s quick to spot the innovators, understands how they can build support either from a leadership platform or from much farther down the hierarchy.

Her focus is on creating “social value,” which goes beyond the financial bottom line to address things like hunger or racism—and, of course, climate change. Many of her examples are from large multinationals. And she has access to the research to back up her claims. Even though I’m familiar with many of her case studies, I still took 6-1/2 pages of notes. This book is an excellent complement to my own Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. I recommend reading them in close succession. Her book lays out how big corporations have implemented, while mine is more of a roadmap for smaller businesses.

I’ve talked a lot about how changing mindset is so crucial to social change—but Henderson shares the insight that the power structure puts those “there’s nothing we can do” messages out when it feels threatened, or even challenged (p. 5). And yet, when firms seek change at global scale, they do so for their own survival (p. 11).

She’s also very big on ensuring that companies don’t externalize the costs onto taxpayers or customers while privatizing profits (another long-time concern of mine)—and one way to do that is to focus on the true costs, regardless of who’s paying. When we point out that externalized costs raise the true costs of coal from the 5 cents per kilowatt hour that we’ve been led to think it is, to 13 cents (2-1/2 times as much), we’ve just done a whole lot to make clean renewables cost-competitive (p. 21).

Oof—at the rate I’m going, this book review would be 4000 words. Let me just share 10 among many highlights:

1. Most capitalists fail at dividing the pie, while socialists fail to grow it; we have to re-engineer to do both (p. 28)
2. Fair labor practices help companies as well as workers (p. 41)
3. How one brand manager at Lipton, Michiel Leijnse, made the business case for sustainable tea and changed the whole industry (pp. 50-59)
4. How Walmart’s post-Katrina embrace of sustainability generated 13% ROI (pp. 63-65)
5. Toyota’s successful penetration of the US market in the 1970s targeted team productivity, rather than individual workers; they cut both design time and assembly time in half (p. 109)
6. Three keys to reinventing finance: accounting that measures environmental and social good (ESG); impact investors motivated by ESG; rule changes to free companies from investor short-termism (p. 157)
7. Major firms can sway their suppliers (p. 158); the top 100 buyers can shift their entire industry’s practices AND create reporting mechanisms that identify who is in compliance (pp. 175-177). Similarly, getting the world’s largest investors on board will change investment practices much faster (pp. 195-197)
8. Business also has a vested interest in protecting democracy (p. 226)
9. The $12 trillion opportunity in meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (p. 255)
10. Six ways your company can make a difference (pp. 258-268; also see Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World)