This course gives you immediate access to the world leading sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. Scandinavian firms dominate the major sustainability and CSR performance indicators including the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI). In this course we explore the concepts of sustainability and CSR and focus attention on how Scandinavian firms, like Novo Nordisk, have achieved superior sustainability and CSR performances. We consider what lessons can be drawn by managers and firms irrespective of where they may be located in the world. Through this course, participants will: • Gain appreciation of the concepts of sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and be able to situate these concepts within the broader debates about the role of business in society • Understand the sustainability and CSR approaches by leading Scandinavian companies • Describe how partnerships between companies, NGOs, and government are fundamental to the sustainability and CSR by Scandinavian companies • Be able to describe the characterization of the “Scandinavian management” and the role Scandinavian management plays in sustainability and CSR approaches by Scandinavian firms • Become familiarized with concept of “Scandinavian Cooperative Advantage” and understand how it challenges the dominant view of strategic management.
2.5b) Interview with Mads Øvlisen, former CEO Novo Nordisk & “Father of CSR in Denmark
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From the course by Copenhagen Business School
Sustainable Vikings: Sustainability & Corporate Social Responsibility in Scandinavia
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Copenhagen Business School
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From the lesson
Scandinavia: An Introduction
Meet the Instructors
Robert StrandAssistant Professor, Ph.D
Department of Intercultural Communication and Management
If I can talk in just a bit or
ask you a couple of questions here along the lines of Scandinavian culture.
Part of this program we're exploring culture in Scandinavia.
And the role that culture may have on the practices of Scandinavian firms.
Can you offer a thought or two about the role that
Scandinavian culture may have had on the role of the Novo Nordisk culture?
And then perhaps the impact that that has had on the approach to sustainability and
corporate social responsibility here?
>> If I look at particularly Danish culture I'm certain that it has played
a very important role in the way corporation leadership has evolved.
I remember early on when I had my CEO position that
I couldn't get much help in developing a global company.
Denmark did not have a tradition of global industrial businesses.
We early on had some shipping lines, we had the agriculture, we had a few things,
but truly global operating companies we didn't have.
Sweden had had them.
>> Yes. >> We didn't have so
in the beginning I felt a lot of this was trial and error.
But there were some, on the other hand, very important guiding principles.
I think that I believe, I'm not a historian, but
I believe a lot of the way we have evolved has to do with the cooperative
movement in Denmark and with the so called folk high schools.
The thought, at the end of the 18th hundreds,
that it was important that everybody, no matter where they came from in society,
were given the opportunity to educate themselves,
get the education in history and whatever, going into these kinds of things.
But then also the agricultural development
of co-ops where you decided together how to run this business.
And then I must also say that I'm convinced that the size of the country
still means a lot.
No matter where you're born in Denmark, you could say that you
basically have the same teachers, the same professors, and you learn the same.
So there's a lot of uniformity and which also
the power distances here are not very, very big.
And then again, I want my friends from grade school still to recognize me
as a friend, even though I've been running a big business you know.
So all those little pressures in this tribal society
means that we've developed a special culture.
>> I think that you've drawn out a few things in [SOUND] that I'd just like to
emphasize that the cooperative, the reverence and the promotion
of cooperatives, which I would imagine requires a bit of coming together.
It requires some embracing of democratic principals,
it requires some stakeholder engagement, it requires some consensus building,
are these things that you see withing Novo Nordisk?
>> I think that what we have tried to cultivate and
not something that consultants advised us to but
to me what has been very, very important in my time at the Novo,
later on doing orders, has been to have a critical
dialog with all the people who are at the company and
with our various stakeholders.
About how we conducted our business, both to make certain
that we got all the right ideas, but also to get rid of
the impression that people at the top know everything, we don't know everything.
We need to make certain that we can create an environment where
people can make dreams into idea and
see those ideas being realized into significant projects.
And you do that by making certain that you all the time question what you're doing,
how you're doing, within certain principles, certain values,
of what kind of company you want to be.
>> This notion of encouraging critical dialogue and perhaps drawing from
traditions of critical scholarship in the asking of questions.
It seems quite deep-seated in the Scandinavian context and even in
the educational models of how Danish students are taught from a very young age.
Could you talk a little bit about that?
>> Yeah, certainly, two of our grandchildren just graduated from 9th
grade and they told me about their oral exams
where there's a teacher and then there's an extra teacher surveying this.
And, in both cases our grandchildren get in there and
examples Max what can you tell me about short documentary film making in Denmark?
And then they start a song about this.
And then the other teacher says, I'm not certain about this.
My other grandchild, she was examined in a Danish painter from the Golden Age,
and again, where she had observed some things that was not in the textbook.
And the teachers applauded her, and she got great, great grades.
I think it's become very, very important in our teaching institutions to make
certain that is not a, check the box thing >> Yes.
>> So that again, participation and positive critical approach is encouraged.
It's the same relation you've gotta have with your shareholders.
I think you cannot move your company in the right direction
unless you're ready to have a dialogue with your worst critics,
but it's also those critics that can teach you the most, namely many of the NGO's.
When I think of the work we, the collaboration we've had with Amnesty,
with Friends of the Earth, with learning an awful lot.
Both about where our arguments were not good enough so we had to change.
Finding out where we might see problems coming so we'd better operate them,
getting guidance from the WWF etc, etc.
Many companies are afraid of letting the NGOs in
the door as troublemakers, people who have that attitude
are cheating themselves out of one of the best sources of innovation around.
Namely, people who critically are concerned about how your company behaves.
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