The 360° Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation

Companies are increasingly facing intense pressures to address stakeholder demands from every direction: consumers want socially responsible products; employees want meaningful work; investors now screen on environmental, social, and governance criteria; ＂clicktivists＂ create social media storms over company missteps. CEOs now realize that their companies must be social as well as commercial actors, but stakeholder pressures often create trade-offs with demands to deliver financial performance to shareholders. How can companies respond while avoiding simple ＂greenwashing＂ or ＂pinkwashing＂? This book lays out a roadmap for organizational leaders who have hit the limits of the supposed win-win of shared value to explore how companies can cope with real trade-offs, innovating around them or even thriving within them. Suggesting that the shared-value mindset may actually get in the way of progress, bestselling author Sarah Kaplan shows in The 360 Corporation how trade-offs, rather than being confusing or problematic, can actually be the source of organizational resilience and transformation.

Sarah Kaplan is Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management where she is the founding Director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE). She is also Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and has nearly a decade of experience at consultancy McKinsey & Company. Her prior works include extensive and award-winning academic publications as well as the business bestseller Creative Destruction.