The 360 Corporation
From Stakeholder Trade-Offs to Transformation
Lavin Exclusive Speaker
Today’s businesses have to answer to more than just shareholder demands. Stakeholder pressures have companies pulled in many different directions, from employees who want meaningful work; to consumers who want sustainable products; to activists monitoring companies’ social and environmental footprint. In talks, as well as her book The 360° Corporation, Rotman professor Sarah Kaplan shows us how the trade-offs we make to fulfill these pressures—along with shareholder demands—can be an opportunity for innovation, organizational resilience, and business transformation.
Sarah Kaplan is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman school, as well as the founding Director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE). Her upcoming book, The 360° Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation focuses on the challenges that arise when stakeholder needs conflict with the corporate bottom line. In the past, corporate social responsibility has been treated as an add-on or a nice-to-have, rather than a crucial component of business. But today, the public expectations of a company are greater than ever. In addition to financial performance, companies now need to make a positive contribution to society to be considered successful. Even the Business Roundtable—a lobbying group of executives in over 200 large U.S. corporations—announced that it was renouncing shareholder primacy in favour of the commitment to “deliver value” to all stakeholders. A rousing business keynote speaker, Kaplan delivers talks that not only show how we can deliver such value, but how we can use the trade-offs as a catalyst for powerful change. As Kaplan writes in The Financial Times, “We need to think of stakeholder trade-offs as innovation challenges.”
Kaplan’s previous research has covered how organizations participate in and respond to the emergence of new fields and technologies in biotechnology, fiber optics, financial services, nanotechnology and most recently, the field emerging at the intersection of gender and finance. Prior to The 360° Corporation, Kaplan co-authored the bestselling book Creative Destruction as well as Survive and Thrive: Winning Against Strategic Threats to Your Business. Formerly a professor at the Wharton School (where she remains a Senior Fellow), Kaplan also has nearly a decade of consulting and innovation experience at McKinsey & Company. She completed her doctoral research at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and holds a BA with honors in Political Science from UCLA, and an MA in International Relations and International Economics from Johns Hopkins University.