Release date: June 29, 2022
Speaker: Rodolphe Durand (Professor of Strategy and Business Policy, HEC Paris)
Description: For twenty years, heavy criticisms have been levied at companies, challenging their legitimacy. Previously thought of as repositories of progress, today companies are charged with contributing to planet-plaguing evils from widening inequality to the ecological crisis. However, a new book recently translated from French titled “A Broader Vision of Business: Toward a New Narrative” by Rodolphe Durand (Professor of Strategy and Business Policy, HEC Paris) and Antoine Frérot (CEO, Veolia, worldwide leader in water and waste treatment) challenges this view. They reflect on the conditions to elaborate a new narrative and make firms more responsible and boons to address the colossal challenges of our time. While some companies’ actors have forgotten this perspective, this underlines the urgency of bringing it back to their true raison d’être: the company’s usefulness for society. In this webinar, Durand explored these ideas to lay the foundation for modern companies based on the lessons of recent crises and shared perspective from a CEO and a research professor.