I am very grateful to have the opportunity to speak with you this evening. Many things have changed at DuPont in recent years, but one thing that remains the same is the pride we take in being part of the Delaware business community. We think the atmosphere for business is very good in our state. It is a great place for investment and for business people who are looking for a place to develop successful and rewarding careers.
It is that package of business and its responsibilities in society and in the community is what I have in mind tonight. I attended a breakfast some years back at which the speaker was the late Barbara Jordan, the distinguished member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas and one of our most inspirational speakers. Her message to the assembled business people that day could be summed up in one of her memorable lines: "The business of business is more than just business."
The past year has been a time in which public trust of business institutions and the people who lead them fell off dramatically in the wake of corporate scandals. In my career there has been nothing comparable to the collapse of Enron and similar betrayals of trust at several other companies. There is a large part of the population in our country that feels business has become detached from society – that it operates simply on the basis of self-interest and greed.
At DuPont, we watched these events unfold from a perspective that not many companies have: More than two hundred years of continuous operations with essentially the same set of core values. We list those core values as safety, health and the environment, ethical behavior, and treating all people with respect.
In one form or another, those values have been with our company from the beginning. Our founder E. I. du Pont's business was characterized by a great concern for the safety and well being of his employees even as they pursued a dangerous occupation. He was one of the first manufacturers to hire a physician to look after sick or injured employees. When despite his great precautions, terrible accidents occurred in 1815 and then again in 1818, he established the precedent of paying pensions to the families of workers who were killed.
And E. I. du Pont also was a man of high ethical standards and honesty. From our earliest days, ethical behavior was considered a core value of DuPont and it has remained so. Last summer during the throes of the Enron debacle, our CEO Chad Holliday had a press briefing scheduled for a group of business journalists. He was prepared for a barrage of questions relating to DuPont’s accounting practices. He didn't receive even one. He attributed that to generations of DuPonters doing the right thing and to our very open process of applying the same rigorous set of ethical standards for doing business wherever and whenever we operate.
But we are under no illusion that the future will not require even more of us if all business is to rebuild public trust. I believe that business leaders, going forward, will have to operate as transparently as possible. Investors in particular will want to be certain that they understand how a company is organized, what its goals are. They will expect to be assured by auditors that the reports of the company's performance are what they appear to be.
But beyond the details of accounting and governance, I think that there has to be a renewed sense of accountability to the company’s stakeholders. At DuPont we have always spoken of what we call the "public's consent to operate." We do not take that for granted, and we conduct our business in a manner that indicates we value the public's trust.
We have a very clear sense of who our stakeholders are: They are our shareholders, our employees, our customers and the communities and societies around the world where we operate. When we make a decision at DuPont, we try to consider the concerns and expectations of all our stakeholders. This is not always easy, because sometimes the interest of one stakeholder competes with the interest of another. It is not always easy for a company to reconcile such differences. But our stakeholders expect us to try in any case. They expect to see their concerns reflected in the objectives we set for the company, in the way we conduct our business, and in the results we achieve.
Right now the overarching objective for our company is as clear as it has ever been in our long history. DuPont is pursuing sustainable growth. We define that as creating value for society and our shareholders while reducing the environmental footprint of our products and processes.
This objective goes well beyond the environmental performance goals that are part of sustainability. Today, DuPont, like many companies, is beginning to see sustainable growth in the context of overall corporate social responsibility. We believe the transformation of our businesses to enterprises that create significantly more value while using substantially less depletable resources will be critical to achieving a future world that is sustainable.
But with our stakeholders in mind, we are taking a market back approach. This was reflected last year when we announced that we had realigned our businesses into five large growth platforms, including such areas as agriculture and nutrition, and safety and security. Already they have begun to show their potential as a powerful mechanism for identifying and capturing opportunities in key growth markets.
Importantly, those markets can be anywhere in the world. We see one of our main challenges as helping to make the market work for everyone, including people in parts of the world where individual incomes are very low and who currently do not have the ability to participate in global markets. This is a huge challenge but also one of the greatest market opportunities. It will require new approaches to business and strong partnerships with local organizations and customers.
Let me give you one or two examples. In our Annual Review just published, we have a photograph of cotton farmers in West Africa. In 1998, we introduced a new herbicide for the cotton-growing countries there, where the number one problem is a caterpillar that feeds on the flower buds of the plant. DuPont developed a new family of chemicals sold under the brand Avaunt®. It's a sophisticated product, destroying the harmful caterpillars, but not hurting beneficial insects and other insects important to the ecosystem in those countries. It does not persist in the environment and is safer than the products it replaced.
We invited 20 African entomologists from the cotton companies of seven countries to our laboratory in France to learn more about the product. Our local distributor in Africa also conducted a series of seminars for farmers. The main reason for our success, in addition to our basic innovation, has been a focus on what needed to be done to transfer cutting edge technology to poor nations – and then hard work building a new product by committing time and resources to educate all the stakeholders. The result has been a tangible difference in the lives of cotton growers in West Africa. The high performance of our product enables them to sustain their farming livelihood.
A very different kind of example comes from China. We invited the president of the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine to be a member of the DuPont Biotechnology Advisory Panel and the Vice President of the China Academy of Environmental Sciences to be an external judge of the DuPont Sustainable Growth Excellence Awards. They represent stakeholders in a country of primary importance to our growth. We want to benefit from their perspectives. At the same time, we believe that they will benefit from observing how we do business in our company.
This integrated approach to stakeholder concerns, social responsibility and sustainability informs the decisions we make as we grow our businesses globally and sustainably. Contrary to what some critics of globalization say, I think that responsible corporate action in this regard is a benefit to people everywhere.
I think every business regardless of scale, geographical reach, product or service offered can adopt a similar stance. If you are a building contractor, you can choose simply to build houses, or you can design your business in such a way that you really help create homes and communities. One approach looks at construction as product; the other is a total stakeholder approach.
But you will only make the extra effort if you accept the notion that accepting the responsibility to consider the needs of all our stakeholders is one of the responsibilities of anyone who is in business. The rewards of making that kind of commitment, we have found, are not only in terms of image and standing with stakeholders, but also in terms of opportunity, earnings and growth.
You are here because your companies believe in the mission of the Better Business Bureau to promote and foster the highest ethical relationship between businesses and the public. And I am sure that we all agree in principle with the values that the Better Business Bureau stands for: excellence, integrity, teamwork, trust and respect. Those are core values that any business organization would be proud to call its own.
The ideal that we aspire to is for values like that to be communicated in business transactions everywhere on a daily basis. Business can be seen as a force for good in the world, as a source of prosperity that makes our communities better places to live, as a creator and supplier of products that respond to human needs. Our customers really expect that of us.
So it seems to me that, just as in so many other things, Barbara Jordan got it right: the business of business is more than just business. If we approach the way we conduct business from a total stakeholder perspective, we will demonstrate that business is a vital and progressive force for solving problems and increasing human happiness now and in the future.
04/01/03
Stacey J. Mobley