Trust and Purpose Are Essential for Better Companies and a Better Country

Trust and Purpose Are Essential for Better Companies and a Better Country

At the Business and Society meeting held by ICARE, there are elements on which the speakers—whether business owners, executives, academics, or representatives of municipalities, unions, or social movements—seem to agree: trust and organizational purpose emerge as essential to having more and better companies, as well as a better country.

 

We as companies are called to play a leadership role in building a shared future. “It is time to re-energize our ability to drive development, to make the value of entrepreneurial purpose visible, and to place the value of trust at the center of business activity,” says Carolina Altschwager, member of ICARE’s Business and Society Circle and Founding Partner of Almabrands.

 

Carolina introduced the session “The Most Demanding Social Expectations Challenge,” where Américo de Paula, Head of Solutions Architecture at Amazon, noted that of the company’s 16 leadership principles, one added recently is “strive to be Earth’s best employer,” which shows how much importance the company places on its employees.

 

The executive added that “innovation” and “failure” are twin words, giving employees room to experiment, and where trust is essential.

 

In that sense, and reinforcing this point, Carolina Altschwager considers it remarkable to have an Organizational Culture that is centered on customers and employees and that, at the same time, encourages innovation and embraces failure as part of growth.

 

María Teresa González, CEO of Statkraft in Chile—an international leader in clean energy generation and the largest developer of renewable energy in Europe—stressed how crucial it is to dramatically accelerate the use of clean energy this decade. However, we are facing “an impatient society that, within this energy transition, demands that we think about how we can do better. We come to communities to stay for a long time, and in some cases we have held 400 meetings with certain communities. We put ourselves in others’ shoes, seeking to understand the communities’ worldview. These are costs that must be taken on.”

 

Roberto Alvo, CEO of LATAM Group, talked about what the airline’s post-pandemic return to Easter Island meant, “not out of charity, but out of responsibility, which allowed us to reconnect people and families.” He added that for some time now, the company no longer thinks in terms of customers, but of citizens, who must not only be sold to, but served.

 

Cristián Vergara, CEO of Essbío, said that “we work with a purpose that is at the core of our strategy and that meets such a broad international standard (in the face of disasters, climate change, etc.) that we have become invisible. People take good service for granted.”

 

Amparo Cornejo, Vice President for South America at Teck, added how essential it is for mining companies to establish long-term relationships with Indigenous communities, not only with them in mind, but also for business development.

 

There are cultural elements that need to be decoded, requiring a shared, long-term perspective, and for that, very strong social teams are needed. She described how the relationship with the community of Huatacondo changed dramatically when the community asked for some overhead cables to be run underground instead, which meant a significant project delay as well as additional financial resources.

 

The Business & Society Circle worked for a long time to build this meeting and capture in a document the challenges and lines of action we face in this changing and increasingly demanding environment in order to become Better Companies and increasingly civic-minded businesses.

 

You can download the document at this link.