Tag Archives: business

Where the UN & Business Should Intersect, by Madelyne Hamblett.

8 Sep

Editor’s Note: Madelyne is the latest intern from the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology to lend us her skills and insights during the summer months. As many readers of this space know, we value the opportunity to familiarize people beyond our “peace and security” bubble with the important issues and processes which are likely to greatly impact future prospects, livelihoods and much more. We need more “champions” of multilateral cooperation and we need them in all those still-underserved spaces, not only where people are denied a place at the policy table, but where people don’t see the value of having such a place. Madelyn sees the value and we are grateful for it.

As a business student from Georgia Tech, I really had no clue about the world I was coming into when signing up to do a summer internship with Global Action to Prevent War. Sometimes I felt out of my depth, and I knew I was lacking context to truly understand much of what I was seeing. But that is exactly why my boss, Dr. Zuber, hired me. He didn’t want me here to provide the same perspective as everyone else. He wanted to me to view things through a business lens, so that is exactly what I did. And when I did, I noticed something. I noticed that the world of business, and the world of the UN do not seem to intersect much. I learned a bit about the UN Global Compact and, of course, NGO’s and the role they should play are discussed a good bit. But during these summer months I heard few discussions of what role for-profit businesses should be playing to help the UN realize the Sustainable Development Goals. This is truly disappointing because, from my view, both have a lot to offer the other.

In the world of business, it has become trendy to “care”. To show they care, corporations will create value statements or claim support for a certain social movement, but too often these are just words, not actionable commitments. As I learned in my Servant Leadership course taught by Dr. Robert Thomas at Georgia Tech, this can actually hurt a business. “Empty values statements create cynical and dispirited employees, alienate customers, and undermine managerial credibility,” (“Make Your Values Mean Something” by Patrick M. Lencioni). Rather than making empty statements that can actually hurt your business, businesses need to start creating shared value. Shared Value, as I learned in my Business Decisions and Creating Shared Value course taught by Dr. Ravi Subramanian at Georgia Tech, is “policies and operating practices that enhance the competitiveness of a company while simultaneously advancing economic and social conditions in the communities in which it operates. Shared value creation focuses on identifying and expanding the connections between societal and economic progress” (“Creating Shared Value” by Michael E. Porter & Mark R. Kramer). So, shared value is about creating a win-win for your business and the world. Just as “caring” is meant to create goodwill among your customers, shared value takes it a step further by giving a business incentive to “care,” taking action that creates a more sustainable business model and creates goodwill among your customers. But how does a business create shared value? That is where the UN could come in.

The UN has a global public network, an understanding of the most pressing issues of the world, and opportunities to get involved, all of which businesses lack. So, the UN could use their global network to help businesses expand their connections beyond the private sector and to the public sector which would be a great first step towards creating shared value. Then, the UN could help businesses identify the issues going on in the world that are most detrimental to their supply chain and provide them with ideas on how to get involved to tackle those issues. This would be the next step toward helping businesses create shared value because it provides a direct way for companies to get involved and improve their communities while also giving them an incentive to stay involved because it is improving their supply chain and business operations. For example, COVID-19 has been a major disruptor to businesses’ supply chains, and it has also been a very important matter at the UN. For-profit businesses could have done more to help the UN to raise funds for and distribute vaccines across the world which would help the global community while also limiting variability and stabilizing demand for these businesses around the world.

Just as many businesses utilize too many words and not enough action, this same issue can be seen at the UN. A lot is discussed, but not enough is done. From my time here at the UN, I have come to believe this is because many people holding positions inside the UN are figureheads with insufficient authority given to them by their country. I am not saying they do not want to do more. They may even hold the same ideals as I do when it comes to what the UN could truly be if the countries of the world just bought in, but, unfortunately, some member countries have not bought in sufficiently. So, the UN remains a symbol more than a tool because it does not always have the power needed to take action. This is where businesses could come in.

Corporations have large private networks, deep pockets of funds, and relatively unrestrained authority over their actions. The UN currently relies on sometimes finicky governments for resources which then may choose to withhold these resources at any time. Businesses could become a new supplier of these resources to the UN, and they would be willing to be that supplier for the aforementioned reasons regarding how the UN would also benefit them. In addition to being a new resource for the UN, their work with businesses could also instigate governments to work closer with and provide more authority to the UN due to public criticism. If for-profit businesses did begin to provide these resources to the UN, the UN would have considerably more power and ability to implement their assistance around the world. For example, COVID-19 has been a major crisis that the UN has been trying to address for over a year now, and, as previously mentioned, it has been a major problem for businesses’ as well. Had the UN approached for-profit businesses and incentivized them to fund and distribute vaccines around the world, then the UN could have possibly finished responding to this pandemic by now and even made headway on creating preventative procedures for future global pandemics.

I believe the UN and the business world have much to offer each other. Businesses could enable the UN to take more initiative and bring about legitimate change in the world while the UN could enable businesses to create shared value and thus a more sustainable business model. “Capitalism is an unparalleled vehicle for meeting human needs, improving efficiency, creating jobs, and building wealth. But a narrow conception of capitalism has prevented business from harnessing its full potential to meet society’s broader challenges,” (“Creating Shared Value” by Michael E. Porter & Mark R. Kramer). Avoiding this narrow conception is why businesses and the UN should intersect in even greater measure to help spur the change we all want to see in the world.

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An Engineer’s Perspective on the United Nations, Cathy An

10 Jun

Editor’s Note:  Cathy (Xin) An came to us this summer via Georgia Tech University in Atlanta.  She was the student of Dr. Robert Thomas, a very good friend of our program.   Like our other capable interns and fellows, Cathy learned the UN “ropes” quickly; but she also experienced a variety of complex issues that will impact her personal and professional future.  As she goes forth to start her career, her reflections on her experiences here are very much worth considering. 

Four years at an engineering institution had taught me to see things at face value, to think analytically, and to be painfully concise and straightforward. By the time I got out, my approach to life was almost scientific in the way I shunned abstract meanderings in favor of formulaic and logical rhetoric. My four weeks at the United Nations as an intern for Global Action to Prevent War (GAPW), a policy organization with a focus on anything relevant to peace and security inside the UN, proved challenging in that it forced me to view new and “foreign” topics with a different lens. In every meeting,  Bob Zuber, Director of GAPW, had to whisper in my ear to fill me in on who was who, who mistrusted who, who’s in charge of what, and the decades of history and back stories influencing every decision. Gone was the brevity preached by my professors, and in came scripted speeches with a 5-minute intro with mandatory thank-yous, mixed messages with hidden political agendas, and conversations that always led to tangents. Anything said concisely was seen as being “blunt,” and people used ornate language as a tool for skirmishing around the topic. Also, oddly enough, everyone around me always seemed to know exactly how the meeting was going to turn out before the meeting even began.

I was thrown into the deep end and submerged in conversations on topics that I had only previously heard brief mentions of. “Yeah the U.S. needs to do something about that ISIS” was oftentimes the level of depth in these conversations with my peers. Terrorism, Daesh, climate change, wildlife conservation, gender equality, violent extremism…in only four weeks I had attended meetings on these topics (and many more) in which policymakers from around the world would sit in a room for a few hours and discuss options for decisions to be made. I listened to Fatou Bensouda, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, highlight her progress on cases involving international criminals in Libya and Darfur, and I was disturbed that I could only recognize one name from her list. I was shocked to see how desensitized people were to certain issues; at certain times it seemed like speakers competed with one another to have the most shocking or brutal testimonies in hopes of grabbing the fleeting attention of an audience that has been hammered for decades with variations on the same sad story.

Something surprising to me was how actively engaged the UN community was on twitter. Tweeting during UN meetings was excellent because it forced me to stay alert, and the 140 character limit helped me sift through paragraphs of filler words to find and present the main idea. I slowly improved my “filtering” skills, whether it be in finding a single relevant phrase stated by a verbose speaker, or in finding the important meetings in a list of meetings that all contained “buzz words” in its headers. Rather than be bombarded with information on issues that other people kept telling me were important, I slowly began to decipher for myself what were actually the priorities on the UN agenda.

What’s interesting is that I’ve always possessed this level of critical thinking, but its usage had been diminished by the time I arrived at the UN. Like many of my peers, I pushed the realm of international affairs off to a “foreign” space that I believed had little immediate consequence on my surroundings. In doing so, my knowledge of the world’s current events had already been predetermined and shaped by media bias; it wasn’t just the colored perspective of a journalist that helped influence my views, but also the media’s criteria by which some stories would be published over others. Furthermore, when you hear only fragments of news occurring in faraway countries, it’s hard to connect the dots and understand how they immediately pertain to you and your business. Indubitably, this lack of understanding is what fosters apathy among so many of today’s youth in relation to international and political affairs. We take what we hear at face value, and when we’re unfamiliar with a topic, the storyteller’s opinions become our own.

This mental separation between international affairs and “reality” is worrisome for businesses in the private sector. In an age of globalization, companies will need to see beyond their current scope and examine the potential implications and risks arising from their decisions and products. I’m positive that Twitter didn’t think ISIS would use twitter and other forms of social media to recruit thousands of youth to become Jihadi fighters; video game companies probably didn’t think that terrorist groups would use their products to simulate the fighting experience for future child soldiers; and those that disregard climate change definitely didn’t think that their actions would create environments conducive to violence in the Sahel region. Only a comprehensive awareness of the issues and concerns of the world will enable the private sector to do its part in being a key player in social enterprise. Fortunately, the United Nations and the private sector are beginning to recognize the benefits of partnership, as seen in many joint ventures including the STI Forum and the World Summit of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

If I could, I would encourage everyone to spend at least two weeks in the UN. Despite its flaws, the United Nations still stands as the pillar of human rights and development advocacy. It’s the world’s most complex institution, and two weeks in it will force anyone to expand their horizon of thinking across multiple sectors.

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