image: The 360° Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation by Prof. Sarah Kaplan of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management view more
Credit: Stanford University Press
Toronto - 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"? A new book by Sarah Kaplan, a professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management 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, The 360° Corporation: From Stakeholder Trade-offs to Transformation, published by Stanford University Press, show how trade-offs, rather than being confusing or problematic, can actually be the source of organizational resilience and transformation.
Sarah Kaplan is Distinguish Professor, Director, Institute for Gender and the Economy, and Professor of Strategic Management at the Rotman School. In addition to The 360° Corporation, she is a co-author of the bestselling business book, Creative Destruction as well as Survive and Thrive: Winning Against Strategic Threats to Your Business. Her 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 nexus of gender and finance. Her current work focuses on applying an innovation lens to understanding the challenges for achieving gender equality.
Formerly a professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (where she remains a Senior Fellow), and a consultant and innovation specialist for nearly a decade at McKinsey & Company in New York, she completed her doctoral research at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has a BA with honors in Political Science from UCLA and an MA in International Relations and International Economics from the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
Advance Praise for The 360° Corporation
"Using organizational realities, this book puts leveraging tradeoffs instead of romanticizing shared values at the center stage of managerial decision-making. The 360° Corporation offers rare insights on how to combine humility, inspiration, and aspiration in business. A must-read for anyone interested in the potential of companies to do more than generate profits." --Johanna Mair, Professor at the Hertie School of Governance, co-Director of the Global Innovation for Impact Lab, Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society
"As business leaders, we evaluate and make trade-offs every day. Kaplan has prepared a cogent guidebook to help turn these events into strategic opportunities to capture value. The 360° Corporation outlines the critical criteria and a process of inquiry needed to make better business decisions, especially in today's ever-changing stakeholder environment." --Dave Stangis, Chief Sustainability Officer and Vice President of Corporate Responsibility, Campbell Soup Company
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For more information on the book, visit https://sarahkaplan.info/the360corporation/.
Founded in 1892, Stanford University Press publishes 130 books a year across a wide range of scholarly fields, including the humanities, social sciences, law, and business. In 1999 the Press formally became an auxiliary unit of the Stanford Libraries. For more information, visit http://www.sup.org.
The Rotman School of Management is part of the University of Toronto, a global centre of research and teaching excellence at the heart of Canada's commercial capital. Rotman is a catalyst for transformative learning, insights and public engagement, bringing together diverse views and initiatives around a defining purpose: to create value for business and society. For more information, visit http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca.
For more information:
Ken McGuffin
Manager, Media Relations
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto
Voice 416.946.3818
E-mail mcguffin@rotman.utoronto.ca