How can businesses achieve significance? Matt Peacock of Vodafone, the UK telecommunications group, sums it up through the prism of ‘sustainable business’:
“Where companies, particularly big companies, fail to be sustainable, it’s not because they failed to create a department called ‘sustainability’ with a director, and a manager, and ‘heads of...’ and so forth. It’s because they’ve lost sight of their customers’ lives, they’ve stopped walking in the shoes of their customers, they’ve stopped thinking what their customer needs. And it’s a constant risk for all big companies. Big companies are hard to change—they’re like societies, they take a while to understand that the world has moved on. And it’s no coincidence that if you speak to chief executives they spend more and more of their time on internal cultural change, to try to force the organization every day to understand: what are the people out of the window needing, feeling, doing. Because if you lose sight of that, you lose your license to operate and you die.”