GlobeScan Insights

Report from the GlobeScan/SustainAbility Salon – Measuring Responsibility and Building Trust – The CSR Ratings Game

2010-10-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

CSR ratings and rankings can be useful guides to company performance, but should be approached with caution, according to participants at a GlobeScan/SustainAbility Salon in London on October 12.

Attendees from global companies, think tanks, NGOs and research organizations gathered at GlobeScan’s London offices to discuss the significance and of the vastly increased number of CSR and sustainability ratings, with an expert panel chaired by SustainAbility’s Gary Kendall, consisting of Mallen Baker, Founding Director of Business Respect, Seb Beloe, Head of SRI Research at Henderson Global Investors and George Dallas, Director of Corporate Governance at F&C.

Sam Mountford, Research Director at GlobeScan, opened proceedings with a presentation of GlobeScan’s global attitudes tracking among publics and sustainability experts, and an interactive e-vote among all attendees on their perceptions of CSR rating systems.

Some key themes emerged from the discussion:

Public perceptions of trust and responsibility have undergone a number of recent shifts

GlobeScan’s recent public and stakeholder attitude tracking shows that trust in global companies remains very low. There is also a widening gap between public expectations and perceptions of corporate performance on CSR. Responsibility is increasingly associated with the increasing demand for transparency; possibly linked to the boom in social media, with consumers increasingly expect transparency about corporate failures and shortcomings. However, Mallen Baker suggested that actual confidence levels in the corporate world might be higher than this suggested, as it is “very easy to distrust generalities”, as opposed to individual companies and public figures.

Scepticism about the usefulness of CSR ratings

Both participants at the Salon and global sustainability experts polled in The Sustainability Survey doubted the ability of ratings agencies to accurately measure a company’s level of sustainability. NGOs were felt to be the most accurate judges, ahead of ratings agencies. But panelists argued that the results of respondents’ comparisons between ratings organizations revealed a lack of familiarity. Seb Beloe said that ratings were less useful in isolation and too dependent on data received from companies. Ratings, he thought, were also limited by the difficulty in comparison between different sectors, and did not take into account external or historical factors; carbon emissions in the energy sector are complicated by inherited circumstances from previous leaderships or outdated technologies.

Ratings and the trade-off between coverage and quality

George Dallas stressed the importance of understanding what the composite elements of ratings are. Sustainability ratings combine environmental, social, and economic factors, but with no consensus as to the proportional importance of each, resulting in potential subjectivity. Those with a narrower focus are more likely to match specific needs. Seb Beloe suggested that there was a choice when utilizing ratings; either you focus on a specific subset of issues, or you consider a range but use professional judgment.

The increased use of ratings by companies points to the power of branding

The explosion of the ratings field prompts questions as to where the demand stems from. This is the “power of branding” according to Mallen Baker, which would go some way to explaining why the Dow Jones scores highest among ratings companies and why NGOs perform better than ratings companies. People respond to the integrity of NGOs rather than their ability to judge a “universe” of companies. Companies are not single sentient units but broad combinations of communities, cultures and practices. Individual leadership and management structure can have a transformative effect and, along with quality of service, are part of a complex interaction of factors.

What is the purpose of ratings?

Panelists said they thought the problem with CSR reporting was the gap in the market for interpretation into strategy. “Ratings should not be an end unto itself”, according to George Dallas, “Research needs to be actionable and the point of a rating is what you can do with it.” End investors see ratings as a dimension of risk management. Demand for CSR ratings may stem from their use as a positioning tool.

Groupthinking to oblivion

2010-08-09T08:34:00.000-07:00

Last week, I attended the latest in a long series of conferences, round-table events and discussion evenings on sustainability. It had its moments. But a defining feature of these events is consensus – lots of it. Delegates from businesses large and small, NGOs, academics, the media, governments – all without fail voice their concerns about the parlous state of the planet, often quoting alarming statistics about the number of new power stations in China or the plight of fish stocks in the North Atlantic, and violently agree on the need for wholesale changes in consumer, state and corporate behaviour. Trenchant debate about how to achieve this is frequently lacking.

Now, as a pollster, you don’t need to tell me that what we have here is a self-selecting sample. If you’re either apathetic or professionally sceptical about the environmental challenges we face – which, for the record, I am not - you are unlikely to choose to spend your time at these events.

This is certainly not to say that we can dismiss these gatherings out of hand – the sheer number of them, for one thing, tells us that there’s a genuine groundswell of concern out there. But for those looking for explanations as to why we haven’t seen this mushrooming of bien-pensant concern translate (by most measures) into behaviour change on the scale required, perhaps University of Manchester psychologist Geoff Beattie’s new book can help.

Using ‘implicit association tests’ he has investigated how our stated attitudes differ from our unconscious biases and instincts, and has come to the conclusion that we aren’t as green as we think we are. He estimates that between 40 and 50% of people have ‘implicit’ attitudes towards sustainable consumption that don’t match their ‘explicit’ ones.

From a GlobeScan perspective, it wasn’t a huge surprise to read this. We’ve seen the number of self-described ‘ethical consumers’ in our surveys – those who claim to reward or punish companies on the basis of their sustainability credentials – balloon massively in the past few years. Now, are 62% of American consumers really going out there and punishing irresponsible companies, as they told us in 2009? Sales data would suggest not. So what’s happening here?

What’s undeniable is that environmentalism, to a greater or lesser degree, has become the new orthodoxy. The way that sceptics present their case illustrates that, with much talk of ‘a conspiracy’ to hoodwink the public. In that context, we should not be too shocked if people feel a social pressure to pay lip-service to attitudes that they don’t really hold, or if they exaggerate their commitment. People would like to think they are ethical consumers. Hysterical talk of climate change ‘deniers’ – with its overtones of the Holocaust and David Irving – will hardly help the situation.

It’s been said that climate change is the ultimate political, rather than technical problem. Moving to a sustainable world will require creativity and a real understanding of what makes people behave the way they do. Memo to those who share this laudable objective: groupthink and demonization of those who disagree won’t cut it.

CSR and soap bubbles

2010-07-21T07:20:00.000-07:00

As we reported recently, our latest tracking data suggests that Indian consumers are proving to have surprisingly high expectations of companies' CSR, and don’t appear to share the increasingly cynical outlook of their Chinese counterparts.

One particularly intriguing – and perhaps counter-intuitive – finding was that Indian consumers are actually more likely to say they have heard or read about companies’ CSR activities than in most other countries we surveyed – 50%, compared to 30% globally. Of course, there may well be some over-claim here – but if not, maybe Indians have just been watching a bit more TV lately?

India’s Mint business newspaper reports that TV product placement is back with a vengeance in the subcontinent, citing Procter and Gamble’s recent promotion of its Shiksa CSR campaign around children’s rights via a storyline in a popular soap on the Star channel among its examples. And indeed, a GlobeScan colleague confirms that P&G’s efforts to raise the profile of its CSR haven’t gone unnoticed by the TV soap fans in her family in India.

Is this the way forward for companies wanting some credit for their efforts to do good? Maybe. But another trend we’ve noticed is an increasing tendency for people looking for information on what companies are doing to be more responsible to bypass companies’ own CSR messaging – reports, website content and the like – and look instead to independent online sources, including social media. CSR in sponsored soap storylines would appear to run counter to that trend. But as we've seen, the number of people aware of companies’ CSR efforts is relatively low, and hasn’t grown at all in four years. Maybe it’s not a bubble, and P&G are on to something with their soap strategy after all.

Rising expectations around CSR in India

2010-07-08T06:03:00.000-07:00

It's sometimes asserted that corporate social responsibility is a luxury that is just too expensive for companies and consumers in the world's developing economies to worry about. Creating jobs and boosting GDP is, allegedly, all that matters.

Our latest tracking data on attitudes towards CSR in India suggests that this assessment is pretty wide of the mark. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of the Indian public say they want their government to force companies to go beyond their traditional economic roles and work to improve society, even if this means higher prices and fewer jobs. They're more demanding in this respect than the Japanese (55%), British (50%) or Americans (39%). Consumer attentiveness to CSR communications by companies also looks to be on the rise in the subcontinent. And while a highly successful company like Tata is picked out most frequently as a 'responsible company', concerns over labour standards also mean that it's the company that is most commonly mentioned as 'irresponsible'. Consumers, in other words, are conflicted - economic growth is transforming the lives of so many, but this doesn't mean that they're blind to the social and environmental costs that accompany it.

We've seen attitudes around responsible business in the world's other emerging economic superpower, China, become much more cynical in the wake of the Sanlu scandal, in which a highly respected producer of infant formula was found to have contaminated its products with melamine, and caused the death of several children. With faith in corporate leadership on the decline in India, companies are going to need to demonstrate credibly what they're doing to meet these heightened expectations, or risk government stepping in and enforcing a responsible approach to business.

Global governance: just a mirage?

2010-07-08T05:45:00.000-07:00

With the number of intractable global problems mounting inexorably, an effective system of global governance has been the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for many decades now. It may now be as far away as ever. After an amicable but somewhat ineffective G20 summit in Toronto, Philip Stephens of the FT points out that, now the immediate financial crisis has waned, the imperative for governments to come together and co-ordinate policy across borders has also diminished. Voters, he says, expect their national government to ‘shelter them from the storms’, and governments don’t want to admit that they can’t do so without help from outside, and so resist moves that would require them to cede sovereignty.

What’s interesting is the potential contradiction at the heart of public opinion on this issue that our data reveals. The political pressure from voters for visible, unilateral action that Stephens identifies is real enough. But in the latest wave of our tracking in late summer 2009 we saw a remarkable upswing in trust in national governments to act in the interests of society (as the chart below shows)– just at a time when those governments were being forced by circumstances to come together and co-operate in a way rarely seen before. Voters may not like the idea of ceding power outside their borders, but appear to like it when progress is made. Maybe governments need to take heart from this and be more honest with voters about the pooling of sovereignty that is needed to address many of the issues that most concern them.

But if the autumn of 2008 represented a high-water mark in cooperation among national governments, December 2009 and the failure to come up with any sort of adequate deal to address climate change at Copenhagen was surely a nadir. Our next wave of tracking of trust in government, due out later this year, will show whether the mini-boom in public confidence in governments has, like the aforementioned pot of gold, vanished into thin air as soon as it appeared.

Greenwash, and why it matters

2010-07-01T02:36:00.000-07:00

Regular readers may recall that we've talked before about the perils of greenwash.

Here's some more evidence that it's a real barrier to sustainable consumer behaviour. My colleague Eric Whan, our Director of Environmental research, writes:

"We all have ideas about why sustainable consumption has not become mainstream despite all of the effort put toward that goal. Materialism, greed, product (in)efficacy, poor communications--all of these are at least partially valid explanations.

Published this month, the National Geographic / GlobeScan "Greendex" survey of consumers across 17 countries has found that while consumption habits of the average individual have become somewhat more sustainable in more countries than not, gains have been modest. As we at GlobeScan have long said, a broad gap exists between the values that people hold as individuals (green), and their behavior as consumers (not so green).

How to narrow the gap? To get some answers, we asked 17,000 consumers this very question directly. Many will consider this method a rather blunt measurement tool, but the survey question generated the most compelling results of the 2010 Greendex study.

As this chart shows, when asked to what extent ten different factors discourage them doing more for the environment than they do now, the top rated factor was the perception that companies make false claims about the environmental profile of their products. The second greatest obstacle was a belief that individual action is futile if governments and companies do not take action themselves. Less important barriers included conventional explanations such as cost, inconvenience, confusion, and a lack of green product alternatives.

So, if we are to conclude anything from the data, it is that corporate credibility and a lack of leadership in general are the priorities that must be first adressed by those who wish to further sustainable consumption. Thus the question arises: How? I'll leave that to you."

BP: in very Deepwater, but not drowning yet

2010-06-22T05:24:00.000-07:00

If you were looking for a suitable image to convey what a crisis in reputation looks and smells like, you could scarcely do better than this. Hundreds of thousands of barrels of sticky crude oil leeching daily into the Gulf of Mexico, and washing up week after week on the shores of the country that is still the world’s biggest power, ruining people’s livelihoods along with the coastal environment and sending American politicians into apoplexy. The clever tagline that BP devised a few years ago to position itself as part of the new, sustainable future now looks like a bad joke. Far from being ‘beyond petroleum’, the company may now be about to drown in it.
Or so the conventional wisdom goes. What chance does BP have of emerging from the current crisis?
There’s a case for saying that, once the flow of oil has been staunched and the immediate crisis has passed – easier said than done, apparently - the company has a reasonable chance of returning to some semblance of business as usual. BP is a colossal company – the world’s fourth biggest – and its many other operations across the world continue to earn it healthy profits, particularly in an era of high oil prices. Unlike a company producing consumer goods, whose market appeal might be fatally damaged by an incident of this scale, consumers have limited scope to boycott BP’s products, even if they wanted to. Most of BP’s revenue is from its upstream rather than downstream business, in contrast to some of its competitors, and it’s hard to see how the drive to ensure BP covers the full cost of cleanup and compensation would be served by turning off its funding tap.
And there is some reason to believe the effect on its reputation may not be as seismic as has been suggested. BP has faced other problems – the Texas City oil refinery explosion killed 15 back in 2005, and corrosion problems in an Alaskan pipeline caused a spill of an estimated million barrels of oil there in 2006. But when GlobeScan tested awareness of these incidernts among UK and US consumers at the time, we found that most had not heard of them; those that had tended to feel BP were doing a reasonable job in trying to resolve them and – critically – the great majority did not feel that their respect for BP had been damaged as a result.
Of course, the scale of the current disaster dwarfs those two accidents, and together with the BP leadership’s hapless media performances this may mean that all bets are off. But it’s worth considering this: for many years, our data has shown that the oil companies across the board are not popular corporate citizens, and accidents like this are a major reason why. Deepwater Horizon may be a stark reminder of the price we pay for our collective addiction to oil, but for now, there’s no obvious alternative to hand. That, for now, may be enough to save BP’s skin.

The birth of a new megatrend?

2010-05-14T07:37:00.000-07:00

The IT revolution; electrification; the rise of mass production; globalization. What do they all have in common? According to Harvard Business Review, they are all megatrends, and sustainability should now be added to the list.

In business terms, a megatrend – the term was coined back in 1982 by John Naisbitt in his bestseller of that name – is a major societal or economic shift that ‘force[s] fundamental and persistent shifts in how businesses compete’.

Many businesses have certainly found themselves struggling to cope with the greater expectations being placed upon them to improve the sustainability of their processes, products and services. Our regular study of experts in the field reveals that those in the know rate companies only just ahead of government, and a very long way behind NGOs and social entrepreneurs, in terms of how well they are seen to be advancing the sustainability agenda. And while some companies do seem to have taken sustainability to heart and integrated it into their core strategy – our expert panel rates initiatives like Walmart’s Sustainability Index and GE’s Ecomagination particularly highly – other high-profile campaigns like BP’s Beyond Petroleum are seen to have foundered when they came up against a succession of crises and scandals, of which the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is only the latest. Incoherent, inconsistent or insincere initiatives, it seems, aren’t impressing anyone.

But perhaps this criticism underestimates the change in mindset that is taking place within the corporate world. Despite the challenges, and setbacks like Copenhagen, the drive to greater sustainability shows no sign of abating. And as HBR points out, while government is starting to regulate as never before, companies – critically - are betting that investing in innovations in low-carbon technology and energy efficiency will pay long-term dividends. This megatrend is just getting going.

A see-through world

2010-04-28T06:55:00.001-07:00

What makes a responsible company? It's a fair question. Terms such as CSR, sustainability and corporate citizenship are on everyone's lips these days. Even so, there is often a sense that they mean different things to different people.

But sometimes an issue cuts through. As the world economy attempts to put itself back on its feet, somewhat bloodied and bruised after the experience of the last couple of years, transparency is suddenly the buzzword du jour.

Our annual study of consumer views of CSR across 30 countries asks people to say what they consider to be the most important thing a company could do to be considered socially responsible. Treating employees fairly still tops the list, but behaving transparently and ethically is coming up hard on the rails – it was named spontaneously by just 8% of our global sample of consumers in 2005, 10% in 2008 but 20% this year. In the wake of the economic crash, when lots of apparently sound businesses turned out to have feet of clay, consumers increasingly want the whole picture about the companies they deal with, warts and all.

This is backed up by a Business Week survey of the world's top 100 brands, as Sustainable Life Media reports. Trust and transparency top the list of consumer concerns in 2009. The piece also makes the point that as well as expecting companies to keep them fully informed of what they're up to, consumers are quite prepared to use the opportunities the internet affords them to make sure that, when a company falls short, everyone knows about it.

We also share the assessment here that water use is going to be a big, big issue for companies over the next decade – and increasingly, one of the issues on which consumers will be expecting them to be transparent and lay their cards on the table. Water emerged as one of the most pressing issues in our survey of sustainability experts around the world at the end of last year, and our 15-country study of consumer views on the issue revealed that 72% considered water pollution to be a 'very serious' issue and 71% felt the same way about fresh water shortages.

Responsible water use is, in one way or another, a pressing issue for all sectors, not just heavy industry or beverages – and the way companies handle it is likely to be a litmus test of how they respond to the challenges of an increasingly see-through world.

The American nightmare: over at last?

2010-04-16T09:33:00.000-07:00

Cast your minds back, if you will, to the 1990s. The USA had ‘won’ the cold war. The long economic boom was in full swing. Few had heard of Osama bin Laden, outside a coterie of Middle Eastern policy specialists, and even fewer took his threats seriously. America felt, for the most part, prosperous, vindicated and relatively invulnerable.

We all know what happened next – the contested presidential election of 2000 brought George W Bush and the neo-cons to power who swiftly disengaged from international initiatives like the Kyoto protocol, the dot-com bust gave a strong hint that US capitalism might not be as robust an institution as it looked, 9/11 reminded everyone that not everyone shared the American dream, Iraq and Afghanistan were invaded, and swiftly degenerated into running sores that looked like an object lesson in the consequences of hubris.

And sure enough, we saw the effect on global public opinion. We’ve just released the latest wave of our regular tracking with BBC World Service of the way people globally see the influence of different countries in the world. When we started tracking perceptions of US influence in 2005, the proportion of people across our 14 tracking countries who felt that it had a ‘mainly positive’ influence in the world stood at 38% - hardly stellar when set against the nearly 60% that saw Canadian influence as positive in that year. But as the body count in Iraq mounted, it dropped still further to 28% by 2007 – behind not only all the other major powers of Europe and North America but behind Russia and China, too.

That now looks to have been the low point. In the last year of Bush’s presidency positive views of US influence breached the 30% mark, continued to improve in 2009 and this year, with Barack Obama’s first term well underway, are now back at 40% and have overtaken negative views. The rehabilitation, if not complete, looks at least well on track. The USA has China in its rear-view mirrors once again in terms of global public perceptions.

What to conclude then? The upswing in positive perceptions of the US appears to date from the time when the country lost its appetite for projecting its strength in a unilateral way and started trying to mend fences with the international community. At the same time, the countries still felt to be projecting the most positive influence (Germany, Canada, the EU generally) are those that appear most fully committed to international cooperation, while as China’s economic strength and assertiveness has grown, its positive influence is felt to have declined. As far as international public opinion is concerned, it would appear, cooperation, stability and – perhaps - humility rules.

Politics: pass the salt, please...

2010-04-14T12:05:00.000-07:00

Politics in Western democracies these days can seem like a somewhat insipid affair. Ideological cut-and-thrust is hard to come by, leaving political parties to argue about who is best placed to administer the state on the basis of a set of ground rules that are never seriously called into question. Lots of sound and fury masking a great deal of consensus.
Hardly surprising then, maybe, that electorates seem to have concluded that rather less is at stake than it once was and that election turnout continues to slip in many countries.
Ironically, a common complaint is that the truly contentious issues are left off the political agenda as being ‘too difficult’ for parties to handle. In Europe, the debate about continued EU integration is one that is often cited. Which MEP to vote for to voice opposition to the Lisbon treaty, for instance? And while at one level economic questions completely dominate the current UK general election campaign, and there are real differences of opinion between the competing parties as to the best strategy to adopt in the face of a ballooning budget deficit, there seems sometimes to be a conspiracy among politicians from the main parties not to talk in too explicit terms about the stark financial decisions facing the country and their consequences, for fear of giving too many hostages to electoral fortune.
Another ‘hot button’ issue is migration. The extent and effect of the inflow of migrants into Western economies is endlessly argued about, particularly within their popular media. But mainstream parties often try and steer well clear of taking too overt a position for fear on the one hand of alienating an electorate where anti-immigrant feeling is widespread, or on the other hand of being accused of ‘playing the race card’. The FT reported recently that votes for far-right parties were on the rise again in many countries, who find a ready audience for accusations that the mainstream parties are colluding to keep the issue off the agenda.
What’s clear is that the arguments advanced both for and against restricting immigration often rest not only on assertions about the relative value of immigrants to countries’ economies, but also to their culture. Those in favour of liberal immigration policies often argue that the exposure to other ways of life, value systems and beliefs that immigrants bring can be a huge benefit to a society and promote a sense of global citizenship. Our data suggests that, at the very least, opinion is sharply divided on this idea– our latest polling revealed that roughly equal numbers around the world see themselves as chiefly either global or national citizens, but that this isn’t strongly associated with numbers of immigrants – in largely monocultural China there appear to be rather more self-declared global citizens (70%) than in multicultural Britain (54%).
Whatever the truth, these questions of identity seem to be largely absent from political debate in most countries. The future health of democracy will surely be partly dependent on a braver generation of politicians who are willing to stand up and be counted, and tackle the issues that really define us all.

You can take the company out of Japan, but…

2010-03-26T07:40:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed? It’s been several weeks now since Toyota had to recall any cars. The temptation to be wise after the event, of course, is almost irresistible - but if the crisis is, at last, over, what can the rest of us learn from this unhappy episode in Toyota’s history?

Jonathan Hemus of reputation management consultancy Insignia argues in The Guardian that it was actually a corporate strength - Toyota’s hard-earned reputation for quality and an internal culture that regarded anything less than perfection as shameful - that meant that its first instinct may have been to ‘put a lid on the stink’ rather than come clean and thus precipitate the crisis.

But is that sort of culture really so particular to Toyota? Perhaps if there are morals to be drawn, they may have to less to do with Toyota itself and more with the influence that a national culture can have on the way a global organization behaves.

It’s arguable that the very same combination of respect for authority, hierarchical management structure and fixation with the ideals of craftsmanship that allowed Toyota to grow to be the world’s leading car maker and define the much-lauded Toyota Way – but left it unable to respond in a credible and sure-footed way to a major crisis- is the very same one that is espoused by many top Japanese companies. In a culture where successful product liability claims by consumers are, moreover, few and far between, Japanese companies rarely respond to crises well – a point made recently by Jeremy Cato in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

This, then, may be one feature of the rise of the global corporation – the way that nationally-defined company cultures shape the fate of their organization, for good or bad. In the same way, perhaps the most important distinguishing feature of the buccaneering high-profile casualties of the recession – Lehman Brothers, AIG, Bear Stearns, RBS – was their very Anglo-Saxon-ness.

The evidence of this national DNA in organizations is something we see a lot of as we work with global companies – and their local offices - around the world. Scratch the surface, and maybe the multinational corporation isn’t as bland and homogeneous an entity as we all thought.

The net widens

2010-03-09T05:23:00.000-08:00

The term ‘tipping point’ is wildly over-used these days (thank you, Malcolm Gladwell). A quick Google reveals that in the last few weeks it’s been applied variously to phenomena as diverse as the Greek budget crisis, rising CO2 emissions, The Hurt Locker’s Oscar prospects and the antics of the Chicago White Sox baseball team’s manager. Enough already, one is tempted to say.

Sometimes, though, something really does reach a certain level of ubiquity, passes a point of no return or breaks through into public consciousness in such a major way that the ‘t’ word is hard to avoid. Twenty years or so on from the birth of the World Wide Web, the internet may, definitively, be said to have ‘tipped’.

Our latest poll for BBC World Service reveals that four in five adults across 26 countries surveyed regard internet access as a ‘fundamental right’. That those who use the internet now overwhelmingly regard it as a sine qua non of modern life is less surprising than that over seven in ten of those who aren’t online - that is to say, who haven’t used the internet in the last six months - feel the same way. Yes, those on the other side of the digital divide do know what they’re missing. This raises big questions for governments around spending priorities as they try to bring down budget deficits.

The Economist recently reported that, with its 350 million users, Facebook now has more ‘citizens’ than all countries except India or China. Our poll found that more than half of all internet users enjoy spending their time on social networking sites, and the usage statistics bear this out. We may now be reaching a point where Facebookers have more in common with each other in the way they live their lives and their expectations of their community than they do with their non-connected compatriots. Again, a potentially huge shock for our elected representatives. Nationality is still a big deal in driving attitudes, of course – as our polling continues to show – but for how much longer?

Another straw in the wind – our latest polling on corporate social responsibility has suddenly recorded a substantial increase across many countries in the proportion who look online for information about how responsibly companies are behaving. This is the internet as the modern oracle – the definitive arbiter and repository of collective wisdom about all elements of life; companies, political parties, products and services, celebrities: work, rest and play.

A final and revealing statistic from our BBC poll – nearly half of the web users surveyed did not feel they could cope without the internet. And, let’s not forget, it barely existed twenty years ago. For better or worse, this looks like an evolutionary change. Homo hyperconnectedus, your hour has come.

Not-So-Healthy Debate

2010-02-01T04:35:00.001-08:00

We noted a couple of weeks ago that the Obama administration had run into the sand on one of its main campaign promises – to close the Guantanamo Bay detention centre. But next to the the liquidizer of political capital that is healthcare reform, the fate of the detainees in Cuba is small beer.

A David Brooks op-ed in the New York Times last week argues forcefully that, such is the endemic lack of trust in government in the USA, that a would-be reforming administration needs to move slowly and incrementally on a hugely contentious issue like healthcare to build the confidence of the electorate rather than attempting a 'big bang' approach. The Times now advocates a 'weak and feckless' strategy of retreat and regrouping, rather than a 'heedless and arrogant' drive to push the reforms through in the teeth of huge opposition.

Curiously, the assumption that trust in government is at rock bottom isn't borne out by our regular public attitudes tracking data. For ten years, we've been measuring the degree to which people across the world trust a range of institutions to act in the best interest of society, and recorded a twenty-two point jump in Americans' trust in government between late 2007 and late 2009. Certainly, 2007 represented the dog days of the Bush administration, and the shine has certainly come off Obama and his team since our poll was taken, but still. A net trust rating of +25 isn't the worst starting point for major reform.

What looks more likely is that Obama's problems getting healthcare reform through is less because Americans across the board don't trust their government, and more because the nation remains hopelessly, viciously, ruinously divided on a whole range of emotive issues. Despite a filibuster-proof majority in Congress, Obama in fact invested a lot of time and energy consulting on the shape of a reformed healthcare system, trying to forge a 'bi-partisan' plan with support from both Republicans and Democrats. It's far from clear that much common ground exists. The resulting fudge, as the Times correctly points out, hasn't satisfied anyone and the wrangling has in the meantime allowed the reforms to be painted – ludicrously - as something akin to a Communist takeover of the federal government. This is one instance where, ironically, a less inclusive approach might have proven less divisive in the longer term.

Transformational Corporate Sustainability – The Salon

2010-01-28T08:17:00.000-08:00

Every few months, we invite ‘friends of GlobeScan’ - clients, fellow consultants and members of our network from across the world of business, NGOs, media and government - to join us for a Salon. These are informed but informal discussion evenings on one of the issues we regularly research, over organic beer and snacks at our offices in London. On Tuesday, speakers from GSK, Fairtrade, InterfaceFLOR and SustainAbility shared their thoughts about transformational leadership in sustainability.

This time last year our Salon’s focus had been on ‘the great disruption’ - the ongoing financial meltdown then at the forefront of everyone’s minds. Would it prove to be a turning point and the herald of the birth of a more sustainable global economic system, or merely a hiccup in business as usual? As SustainAbility’s Mark Lee, the evening’s moderator and co-host, pointed out, even if the crisis had had a profound impact on the pace and nature of the sustainability debate, the fact that a year later we were now able to meet and discuss the further transformational leadership needed could be construed as reason to be cheerful.

GlobeScan’s Chris Coulter opened with some findings from The Sustainability Survey – our regular study of experts opinion across business, NGOs, academia and government conducted as a joint venture with SustainAbility. This highlighted the growing sense of urgency surrounding sustainability, and also the ‘changing of the guard’ we’ve noted here before in terms of perceived leaders in sustainable business, with new names like GE and Walmart starting to emerge alongside the established names.
The two companies on the panel, both leading lights in their respective industries, symbolised this shift, with Interface having made the leap in 1995, but GSK’s renewed commitment coming more recently with the arrival of a new CEO.

Much of the discussion, indeed, focused on the role of CEOs in driving sustainable change. Thanks to some live polling with our audience, while we knew that 75% of our audience were optimistic that most FTSE100 companies would embrace sustainability at the core of their operations in the next decade, many saw CEOs as a major barrier to doing so. Not all agreed, though - few CEOs these days, we heard, are actively hostile to sustainability. Others stressed that CEOs leadership was indispensable – they were often uniquely able within a company to decide to take a longer-term view of an issue and override targets that other staff were subject to. The two corporate panellists both highlighted the central role of Interface’s Founder and Chairman, Ray Anderson and GSK’s CEO, Andrew Witty – had played in their company’s sustainability efforts.

Most seemed to feel that companies now best positioned to lead on sustainability and become transformational leaders were those that had integrated it into their activities before the recession took hold. InterfaceFLOR Europe CEO Lindsey Parnell said he thought that sustainability was now so embedded within his company and so much a part of how its people saw themselves that the culture would survive any change at the top. In contrast, the feeling was those companies that hadn’t already embraced sustainability so were now too preoccupied with survival to contemplate major culture changes.

But there were felt to be other barriers preventing transformational leadership by companies. GSK’s Duncan Learmouth questioned whether the short-term focus of financial markets was a major obstacle to transformation and a limit to companies’ ability to act on their own. He also highlighted the lack of reliable data and analytical tools available to corporate leaders, without which the adoption of a fundamentally new business model was just too much of a risk. Fairtrade’s Barbara Crowther stressed that market mechanisms still failed to adequately price in ‘externalities’ – environmental and social harm – and that greater regulation was needed. A more responsible approach to marketing, she thought, was also key, with less messaging focusing solely on tempting consumers with too-low prices.

So, was the tipping point coming soon? Most of the panellists thought it was, even if greater consumer impetus was needed to push companies over the edge. And meanwhile, perhaps sustainability as a professional discipline has come of age – as Chris Coulter pointed out, many of those involved in the development of CSR have now racked up the ’10,000 hours’ supposedly required to become an expert in any field. Maybe in 2010 we’ll start to see the fruits of that expertise.

Brown Down, but Far From Out

2010-01-19T06:40:00.000-08:00

The date may not have been announced yet, but it’s clear that campaigning for this year’s general election in the UK is already well underway. Making my way around London, it’s been hard to escape the giant poster of Conservative opposition leader David Cameron. “We can’t go on like this”, the 15-foot high blown-up Dave urges – and a cursory glance at the polls suggests many agree, with some having Labour trailing by over 10 points. On top of this, the Tories have a much larger campaign war-chest and Labour seem more set on working out whether they still want to be led by Gordon Brown than pulling off an electoral miracle.

So – is it safe to assume we’ll be seeing a change of government when Britain goes to the polls this spring?

Not quite.

Most importantly, there’s the economy – on which this Prime Minister’s reputation is especially dependent. When Brown assumed the office in 2007 he was able to contrast years of steady economic growth under his own stewardship as Chancellor with previous boom-bust cycles under the Tories. Whatever its causes, the global economic crisis has rather undermined this selling point in the minds of many.

Brown’s main hope, then, is that that voters see clear evidence of economic recovery before the Spring and there is a corresponding rise in his personal reputation. Cameron’s rhetoric on the economy to date has emphasized the need for austerity, spending cuts and a balanced budget. Contrast this with Brown’s aversion to even using the C-word and you start to see the strategy: wait for the economy to pick up, and then argue that Tory cuts will choke off the nascent recovery.

There are signs he may be helped by a more upbeat mood among consumers. As far back as October, GlobeScan’s Consumer Sentiment Index showed that as many households expected to be better off in a year’s time as expect to be worse off. Forty-four per cent said they considered it a good time to buy major household goods, as opposed to 27% saying it was a bad time. Interestingly, a number of major retailers have recently reported trading figures for the festive period that are up on last year’s.

Structural factors may help Labour too – quirks of the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system mean that the Tories need to secure a disproportionately large swing in order to secure a governable majority.

Finally, there’s always the possibility of something terrible happening to derail the Conservative campaign. This year, for the first time, the public get treated to US-style debates between the party leaders. The ability of these to turn elections probably get exaggerated in light of the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960, but there’s always the potential for gross blunders in live debate. Or the Tories could have one of their habitual internal implosions over European policy.

So, while the odds firmly favour a Tory victory - there’s still much campaigning to do: if enough of these factors - and particularly the economy - turn in Labour’s favour, then Brown could yet work the miracle.

Guantanamo: not closed, and no cigar for Obama

2010-01-14T07:36:00.001-08:00

A year into his presidency, Barack Obama recently confirmed what most already realized: that he would fail to fulfil the promise given in his inaugural speech to close the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay within his first year of office.

Between the reluctance of representatives in Congress to accommodate Guantanamo detainees in their districts, the unwillingness of most of the US's international allies to receive detainees themselves and the political impossibility of repatriating them to countries seen as breeding grounds for terrorism such as Yemen – as well as an alarming lack of coordination between US government agencies, as BBC Radio 4 revealed last night - the problem has proved a real headache for the administration, and Guantanamo remains open.

The Obama administration has sometimes appeared to be out of step with US public opinion on some domestic issues in his first year – notably on healthcare reform – and this is an area where failure to fulfil an election promise may actually go down well with the electorate. A new CBS poll suggests that a majority of Americans oppose the closing of Guantanamo.

But other countries are likely to view the issue very differently. Guantanamo has been a running sore for the US's global image and the promise to close it was one of the most powerful symbols of change from the Bush years put forward by the new administration.

Our annual tracking of perceived country influence last year revealed a continued improvement in views of US influence by the global public as Obama took office. With this year's results due in a few weeks' time, we will see whether this improvement is persisting – or whether the latest disappointment has taken the shine off America's rejuvenated image around the world. Watch this space.

Unrealpolitik

2010-01-05T09:00:00.001-08:00

Three weeks on from Copenhagen, and the blanket of snow currently enveloping much of the northern hemisphere hasn't obscured deep disappointment about the outcome of December's climate conference. No one appears to believe that the deal achieved is sufficient to make an impact on global carbon emissions and limit global warming to within safe levels.

Who's to blame? The list of candidates is long. The image of hapless hosts Denmark may take some time to recover. But what has become increasingly apparent over recent weeks is the lengths that the Chinese delegation were prepared to go to in order to avoid being subjected to a binding global agreement that might hamper their growth . Mark Lynas's account in The Guardian of the walkouts, the snubs and the last-minute scuppering of targets that did not even affect China makes depressing reading.

Given the level of ambivalence among the Chinese public about a strong global deal at Copenhagen (as we noted last month) this attitude by their leaders should not perhaps have come as a surprise. But, by any standards, theirs was pretty ruthless behaviour. That being the case, you might have thought that climate activists and NGOs would not be slow to point the finger?

Not so. Their ire has been directed almost exclusively at the countries of the developed West and, in the case of George Monbiot, at Barack Obama himself. The ink on the non-deal was barely dry before John Sauven of Greenpeace was referring to Copenhagen as a 'crime scene, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport'. Regardless of what Western countries might have put on the table (and in some cases it was substantial), and regardless of Chinese wrecking tactics, the environmental movement's mindset required that the West were identified as the villains of the piece.

Monbiot bemoans the failure of concerned liberals to take to the streets in large numbers to demand action on the climate from their leaders. But why are we surprised? In relentlessly accentuating the negative, ramping up the rhetoric to ever greater heights and allowing post-industrial guilt to trump a sense of what can actually be achieved, the environmental movement has itself been guilty of disempowering those who might have been supporters. If you portray the problem of climate change as unimaginably huge, decry any attempt to tackle it politically as a shameful betrayal and make no attempt to help people imagine how they might live fulfilling lives in a low-carbon world, don't be surprised if most of them bury their heads in the sand.

A few weeks before Copenhagen, I attended a gathering of NGOs, think tanks, labour organisations and corporates to discuss the 'green economy'. Talk turned glumly to Copenhagen, and I wondered aloud to a senior campaigner at one of the major environmental NGOs why his organisation wasn't concentrating its efforts on where advances could be made – lobbying multinationals, working with enlightened US states, championing new technologies. This was sniffily dismissed as 'realpolitik' and I was assured that 'doom and gloom is what we do best'.

This seems breathtakingly complacent to me. Our research shows that while NGOs are still trusted more than most institutions, trust in them is declining and people value them more for the aid and assistance they give than their campaigning work. Instead of peddling 'unrealpolitik', environmental NGOs – and the movement as a whole – should be taking advantage of the fact that they don't have elections to win every few years and play a positive role - building coalitions, articulating a vision, thinking the unthinkable, helping people to imagine what a different future could look like. It's never been more important.

Danish Blues

2009-12-09T10:01:00.000-08:00

With the Copenhagen summit now underway, global attention is focused on the climate change issue, arguably as never before.

Our latest BBC World Service poll shows that – even in the midst of a recession – public concern over the climate has reached its highest level in the 11 years we’ve been tracking it. In total, 64% of those across the 24 countries we polled said they considered climate change a ‘very serious’ problem. In 13 of the countries we’ve been asking this question on a regular basis since 1998, and we’ve seen a sharp increase in concern on this measure from 44% to 63% overall.

Undoubtedly, until the buildup to COP15 started, the economic crisis had been keeping climate change out of the headlines, and the proportion of people in our polling naming the environment as the biggest issue facing their country dropped sharply. But while the economy was imploding, the steady accrual of alarming news about the climate has propelled concern about climate change – a problem which is, let’s not forget, complex, multi-faceted and (at least for now) somewhat abstract – to new heights. As our poll shows, there is substantial support for governments taking a strong line and supporting ambitious targets to fight climate change.

The UEA emails row may have provided a straw to clutch at for the sceptically-minded and the conspiracy theorists. But the likelihood is that any dampening effect that this has on concern will be temporary – particularly if we see a repeat of the scorching summers, hurricanes and snow-free winters that have become an increasing feature of the last decade.

What our poll also shows, however, is that leadership at Copenhagen will probably have to come from somewhere else besides the world’s two leading CO2 emitters, China and the USA. In both of those countries, concern has dropped back since 2007, and both are ambivalent about their governments pushing for a strong global climate agreement in Denmark.

No glamour, thanks - we're European

2009-11-24T09:25:00.000-08:00

Attempting to decipher EU politics has never been the easiest of tasks, and true to form, leaders sprang something of a surprise last week in agreeing appointees for two powerful new positions, apparently over dinner .

These appointments are the culmination of a long reform process encapsulated in the Lisbon Treaty, which should make the process of passing legislation considerably less protracted.

However, in appointing the key figures who will oversee these new arrangements, has the EU missed an opportunity to strengthen the role of Europe in the world?

With Tony Blair earlier touted as a candidate, most attention has been focussed on the Presidency. However, the President’s role is envisioned as largely administrative, involving coordinating the meetings of the European Council. In this respect, the Belgian PM, Herman van Rompuy looks to be a good choice – a quiet and uncontroversial figure.

By contrast, the new High Representative for Foreign Affairs - the UK’s Baroness Cathy Ashton - will speak for the EU on foreign policy issues, and is mandated to negotiate on behalf of its member states. She will also have at her disposal a newly created diplomatic corps .

This marks a significant step towards a stronger European voice in the world – something which GlobeScan’s polling indicates would be widely welcomed: in a study conducted on behalf of the British Council in 2008, solid majorities in 8 out of 9 countries expressed the belief that the EU already has a positive role in the world.

But will Ashton’s appointment deliver a stronger European voice? This role seems designed to suit a high-profile figure well-versed in foreign affairs. By many accounts Ashton performed well in her previous post as Trade Commissioner and is respected in Brussels. However, she has also never held a foreign affairs role and could struggle for visibility, which has led some to question the wisdom of the choice.

Most of all, this decision has hardly done much to enhance perceptions of the EU as democratic and transparent: France and Germany have dominated the selection process from the beginning, and Van Rompuy’s selection was sealed after Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel agreed a common position . In this context, the appointment of Ashton looks like a succesful attempt to buy off British oppostion on the Presidency after the Franco-German duo decided “that’s Blair enough, thank you very much”.

Lisbon is a real step forward, but key decisions are still being made by the two biggest players, still involve complex horse-trading and are formalised over dinner conversations. A brave new world for the EU in some respects, whereas in others - plus ça change…

Whither the 'green wave'?

2009-11-24T07:18:00.000-08:00

Has the green wave peaked? The Economist reported last week that there had been a marked decline in belief in man-made climate change, notably in the US. Citing recent data from Pew, they noted that the proportions believing that the climate was changing, and that human activity was responsible, had dropped from 47% in April 2008 to 36% last month.

Polling in this area is, admittedly, treacherous territory. People's understanding of climate science is hazy. It's one of those areas where they are apt to say one thing and do another. It matters very much what question you ask people (and even what time of year you ask them, which may be a factor in the recent Pew trend in the US). And in a politically charged debate, those seeking to assert that public opinion is on their side can probably find polling data to support their case. We may well examine some more of it in future weeks.

But our data doesn't back up the Economist's thesis. We've been tracking public attitudes around climate change since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the previous peak of environmental concern. While concern fell off markedly in the years following Rio, since the late Nineties, it has been back on an upward curve, and across the 13 countries that we've been able to track consistently since then, the proportion rating climate change as a 'very serious' problem has risen from 43% in 1998 to 62% today. Crucially, the increase has continued this year, albeit at a slower rate - even in the teeth of a global recession.

So what is happening, then? What's clear is that the tumult engulfing the world's markets and the chill economic wind has knocked the environment off the headlines - at least until the Copenhagen hoopla began. So as you'd expect, we've seen the proportions of people in our global tracking spontaneously naming environmental problems as the 'biggest issue facing our country' fall back signficantly - it's a volatile measure that moves up and down according to what's been in the news lately. But underneath that, what's remarkable is the degree to which climate concern remains deeply embedded across many countries - the proportion, for instance, feeling that we need to take 'major steps very soon' to address climate change has remained broadly steady, at nearly two-thirds of the public (63%) across 19 countries.

All things considered, we think that what Pew and others' data shows is mostly that attention, for the moment, is elsewhere. The 'green wave' hasn't, in our view, peaked yet - not by a long way.

Running on...

2009-11-18T13:08:00.000-08:00

The 'peak oil' debate - are we or are we not about to reach the limit of our global capacity to extract oil from the ground, and what does this mean? - rumbles on without any sign of a resolution.

Peak oil proponents, like US investment banker Matthew Simmons, assert that most of the accessible reserves of oil will be drilled out within ten to fifteen years, and that the global economy - and particularly gasoline-dependent countries like the USA - risk decades of economic and social upheaval as they try to adjust to a less oil-thirsty lifestyle. Many disagree strongly. Some respected commentators, like former Shell chief economist turned senior UK politician Vince Cable, believe that the case has been overstated and that there is plenty of oil still in the ground - but point out that we risk becoming increasingly dependent either on supplies either from unstable neighourhoods such as Iraq, or from 'unconventional' - and expensive - sources like the tar sands in western Canada

And others still say that all of this still misses the point – that regardless of reserves in the ground, norms, expectations and regulations are shifting rapidly towards an assumption of lower oil usage. It’s quite possible that as people start to perceive the upside of this shift, lower usage will follow. As Alcatel-Lucent chairman Ben Verwaayen pointed out at BSR last week – the move to a sustainable economy is going to change our lives more than the Internet. We shouldn’t assume the old expectations will hold.

The lack of any emerging consensus in the peak oil debate is borne out in our public opinion data. When we asked people in 23 countries last year whether the world will 'continually produce more oil' or not, 47% agreed and 42% disagreed. But the public, at least, seems to take a relaxed view of how we might cope with declining oil production - 64% agree that their country can generate enough energy from renewable sources to replace coal, oil - and nuclear - in 20 years.

Whether this is overly optimistic is an issue partially addressed by an interesting new report from the UK Energy Research Council, which looks to have moved the debate forward. Yes, they concede, there may still be large reserves of conventional oil still available. But technical limitations mean they are unlikely to be exploited quickly enough to compensate for the decline in the 'mature' fields - and we may see production peak anyway before 2020. The push for renewables and greater fuel efficiency in climate change policy will help - but there will also be a 'strong incentive' to exploit high carbon non-conventional fuels such as liquefied coal, with potentially disastrous environmental consequences. And they warn that the ongoing volatility of oil prices - which spiked again this week amid economic uncertainty - remains a major disincentive to investment in the sort of alternative energy strategies that the public confidently seem to expect.

Looks like the peak oil debate has a while to run yet.

Free Market Blues, 20 Years On

2009-11-08T15:14:00.001-08:00

Some news, in case you missed it (unlikely, given the current wave of anniversary fever): the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago, triggering the collapse of communist governments across Eastern Europe, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and prompting American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama to announce the ‘end of history’. Liberal democracy – and economic liberalism – had triumphed everywhere and ‘mankind’s ideological evolution’ was at an end.

What with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and 9/11, Fukuyama’s verdict on liberal democracy has been looking rather premature for a while now. But when it came to the economics, to capitalism and the free market – surely Fukuyama had it right there, didn’t he? It’s a question we’ve been exploring in our latest global polling for BBC World Service.

The popular verdict on capitalism, it turns out, is pretty lukewarm. Across the 27 countries we polled, we found little unalloyed enthusiasm for the free market system – an average of just 11% said they thought it worked well and did not need further regulation. A bare majority felt that capitalism had problems that could be addressed by regulation or reform (51%). And nearly a quarter (23%) – felt that capitalism was ‘fatally flawed’.

At the same time, the numbers telling us they see free enterprise as the best system on which to base the future of the world have been drifting down. 54% feel that way now, compared to 63% when we started tracking in 2002.Trust in global companies, meanwhile, continues to decline.

In view of these misgivings, then, why is it that the fall of the big banks last year doesn’t really look likely to rival the Berlin Wall collapse in terms of its long term impact on our economic beliefs? Maybe it’s because there still isn’t really an established alternative model to free market capitalism – Hugo Chavez notwithstanding - for public opinion to rally around. And our increased scepticism of political leaders means that such a new system might find it hard to establish itself. But if Fukuyama was right, and capitalism has won, it looks these days rather like a victory by default.

Consumer Confidence - Has Asia's Economic Sprint Resumed?

2009-10-28T06:01:00.000-07:00

There has been much talk of the economic upheaval of the last year as a ‘global’ crisis. And with emergency meetings of the G20 called to address a critical loss of confidence in the banking sector as well as global capital flows still a fraction of what they were, that has seemed like a fair assessment. But perhaps we need to reconsider that ‘global’ tag.

In much of Asia, the recession is looking more and more like a short pause for breath in an economic sprint that’s still ongoing. China’s Statistics Bureau announced at the end of last week that the country’s GDP in the third quarter of 2009 was 8.9% up on the same period last year. Indonesia’s economy is expected to grow at 4% this year – not at all shabby. Compare this to economies in North America and Europe, where if things look a little less bleak than they once did, the return to economic growth is slow and shaky, and a lapse back into recession well within the bounds of possibility. And in some major economies - notably here in the UK, where figures last week showed the economy continuing to contract in the third quarter, it’s far from clear that the recovery has got going at all.

This picture is amply borne out by our International Consumer Sentiment Index - the first in what we hope will be an annual study of consumer confidence across the world. We’ve taken the same approach that academics at the University of Michigan have adopted in monitoring US consumer confidence for more than fifty years, asking people across 22 countries to assess how their finances compare to this time last year, how they expect them to change in the next year, what they think will happen to their country’s economy over the next year and the next five years, and whether they think now is a good time to make major household purchases.

Chinese consumers emerge as the most confident by a long way, with an index score of 113.5, with Indonesians second, recording a score of 100.6. Americans were at only 71.9, and the terminally gloomy Japanese at only 45.1. To put it in some historical context, the highest level of US consumer confidence recorded over recent years was at the height of the dotcom bubble in February 2000, when 111.3 was recorded, while the lowest was in May 1980 as the energy crisis and impending recession started to bite. With two-thirds of Chinese expecting to be richer in a year’s time, perhaps it’s no surprise their economy is booming again – as we know, confidence is central to any economic recovery. And maybe the much-anticipated changing of the economic guard, with the US giving way to China as the motor of growth, is starting to happen sooner than we thought?

Weapons of Mass Delusion

2009-10-07T04:01:00.000-07:00

GlobeScan is in the business of measuring perceptions, not facts. This is something I frequently find myself reminding clients when presenting research findings that sometimes show that their stakeholders or consumers have a much hazier - or just plain wrong - sense of what their organisation is doing than they might like. Unless you've invested almost as much time, energy and thought in understanding your stakeholders' perceptions and communicating to them what you're doing as you have in actually doing it, don't expect to be given the credit.

That said, while they can be serious and expensive, misperceptions are rarely a matter of life and death for our clients. The same could not be said of the various misperceptions that led up to the second Gulf War in 2003 - the most glaring one being that Saddam Hussein possessed the infamous 'weapons of mass destruction'. I was interested to read in last week's Washington Post that Saddam told the FBI that he allowed the myth to be perpetuated largely because he was worried about appearing weak to the 'fanatic' (as opposed, presumably, to just regularly psychopathic) Iranian leaders - and would in fact have been open to a 'security agreement' with the USA to protect Iraq from a potential Iranian attack.

Given the human, political and economic consequences of the decision to invade, this could be one of the costliest perception misreadings of all time. At the very least, it's a reminder to the rest of us take some time to make sure we really understand what other interested parties are thinking before embarking on our own risky projects.