countries, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), sustainable business, international entrepreneurship, strategic leadership and global business issues.
Conflict Minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo is written as a trilogy to let readers experience how a business challenge evolves over three distinct phases in one location. This design enables readers to “stack” their learning from one part of the book to another. As business issues take on an increasingly global character, the material is organized to help the next generation of business leaders prepare for a wide range of scenarios in uniquely challenging environments.
Disclaimer: This book is intended solely as discussion material. None of the content is intended to serve as examples of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of any kind. Though inspired by real-world events, many of the names of the people, groups and other entities appearing in this work have been changed to preserve anonymity. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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It was Johan Galtung, “Johan” as he preferred, who introduced me to conflict theory as a way of applying creative thinking to seemingly impossible problems, and as a way of making work and life more meaningful. Johan recommended me to an MA program in peace and conflict studies in 1996, which I enrolled in the following year. For the next four years, I traveled extensively with him to mediation interventions, lectures and workshops in Okinawa and across Europe. Johan offered me a position in his NGO, Transcend, and advised me on my master’s thesis that explored the Transcend method of conflict transformation. During this time, he also arranged for me to do an internship at the United Nations (UN) in Geneva, which opened for me a rewarding career path at the UN and later in business and academia. Those first years with Johan were some of the most intense, educational and adventurous ones of my life. Each day was filled with hard work, friendship and more humor than two people should ever be allowed to enjoy.
Ian Green was Chief of the United Nations Training Section in Geneva when he hired me as a training coordinator. Ian generously ←xiii | xiv→gave me the space to experiment and discover how to create productive learning environments. Though this proved quite costly for him at times, he always went out of his way to make sure I had everything I needed to grow professionally. I can do the work I do today only because of the opportunities I was given in that first stage of my career.
I want to thank Jane Nelson, both for the encouragement she provided me through her book, The Business of Peace, and especially for the personal guidance she gave me. Jane invited me to her office at Harvard University, where she shared with me inspiring insights into the field of business in areas at risk. Much of what I learned from her writings has illuminated for me how ethical decision-making impacts on firm value.
Kiyoshi Amemiya, the inventor of the now-famous demining equipment that transforms minefields into orchards, gave me a once-in-a-lifetime chance to work with him and his team of engineers on a mine-clearing project in Colombia. He provided me with an insider’s perspective—even letting me test-drive the mine-clearing equipment to better understand some of the operator’s challenges first-hand. The onsite experience helped me appreciate the complexity of working for peace in a way that is also financially sustainable.
In the very volatile days following the Great East Japan Earthquake, it was Ray Bremner OBE, then CEO of Unilever Japan, who offered me a seat at the table where he and other members of the crisis response team would meet to review and plan. This life-changing experience gave me a chance to see some of the leadership behind Unilever’s promise of Doing Well by Doing Good in the extreme conditions of disaster relief. This book is very much an attempt to let the reader sit at that same table and join in the decision-making.
Finally, I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my editor and friend, David Hulme. David was helpfully relentless in getting me to think and write more clearly. Visiting David and Satoko for hikes and in-depth discussions at their home in the mountains on the outskirts of Tokyo provided me with the extra push I needed at critical moments along the way.
DYLAN SCUDDER
Tokyo, August 2019
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This book aims to help business leaders of today and tomorrow learn how to stay profitable in an increasingly volatile world. Drawing on the latest risk management research, Conflict Minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo provides an immersive reading experience based on the real-world case of a global company responding to a highly uncertain environment in the midst of armed conflict. The central challenge concerns how to reconcile the competing demands of diverse stakeholders: those most interested in immediate and long-term profitability, social concerns and environmental priorities. The book is grounded in the insight that such issues are always interdependent. As such, companies that ignore their stakeholders put their own future viability at risk.
This is easy to say, but much more difficult to realize. Following the PDCA model made popular by W. Edward Deming and refined in Japan, the book is organized around the four phases of Planning, Doing, Checking and finally, Acting. Within this framework, readers develop competencies by working through business challenges that they prepare for, engage in, reflect on and then draw lessons from that can be ←xv | xvi→applied to the next round of challenges they encounter. Readers work as managers at Pentalemma Inc., a major risk advisory that has several large multinational corporations in its client base. Conflict Minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo is part of a series of books on leadership in complex environments, each covering a different location and linked to a specific industry facing its own unique set of challenges. Each book in the series is written as a trilogy with three distinct phases.
The main question for readers is how to select an optimum business strategy from among several that emerge over the course of the session. They receive a series of reports and press releases, which generate a realistic working environment and expose them to modern business concepts. Parallel to this, they are informed by various advisors, such as business mentors or problem-solving specialists. The experience of reading the book is similar to the experience of managing other urgent problems at work, namely, through a flurry of emails and discussions. Immediately after preparing for the upcoming scenario, it’s down to business. Rather than the traditional outdoor adventure, classroom lecture or hi-tech animation, readers are embedded in a corporate team and focused on a complex issue that must be solved without delay.
Learning is optimized by immersing readers in high-impact business challenges through intense but entirely plausible scenarios. These might be set anywhere in the world—from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Japan. What they have in common is the struggle of making critical decisions in the face of uncertainty. Readers must find practical solutions within quickly changing, high-risk situations. By the end of each chapter, readers will have chosen the plan they think their client company should adopt. The outcome, in the form of client feedback, company results and broader social reaction, will be shared with them through review material that describes plausible outcomes to the decisions they made.
In short, the book emphasizes risk awareness and mitigation by demonstrating for current and future managers how planning for the potential consequences of their everyday decisions helps protect them and their stakeholders from unnecessary risk.
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You are a manager at a company called Pentalemma Inc., which specializes in stakeholder management. The company took its name from the Greek penta (five) and lemma (assumption), the forgotten wisdom of identifying five solutions embedded within a problem and then choosing the best one.1 Pentalemma’s headquarters are near Geneva, Switzerland, with several hundred employees around the world.