5
T
he white board in his office features quotes from Lao Tzu and
Buddha. A variety of haikus are pinned to his walls. He practises
yoga every day, decries avarice and materialism, and is an ardent
advocate for environmental stewardship and social responsibility.
So you’d be forgiven if you assumed that Kent Walker is an
earth sciences or humanities professor.
The reality, however, is that he’s a business professor who considers
holding the corporate world accountable for its impact on the
environment as the cornerstone of the vast majority of his research.
“We’re really good at making money, but it’s time to start
looking much more seriously at some of the major problems
we’ve created,” says Dr. Walker, who joined the Odette School of
Business in 2010. “Every generation has its problems. For ours, it’s
the environment. I have five-year-old twins. What are we leaving
behind for them?”
Walker’s research interests include environmental performance in
North America and China, sustainability, toxic air emissions, green
washing, corporate reputation, and the renewable energy industry.
Last year, he received a $50,000 grant from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council to identify the archetypes
associated with strong corporate environmental performance, with
the aim of providing something of a roadmap for other companies
interested in reducing their own carbon footprint.
The problem with most current corporate environmental
research, Walker says, is that it tends to take a reductionist
perspective by only focusing on how a particular factor or set of
factors such as recycling or energy consumption, for instance, are
related to environmental performance.
“A lot of what we do is isolate variables and look at their impact,”
says Walker, who was voted by students in Odette’s strategy division
as the 2012-13 Professor of the Year. “You never get things in
isolation.We’ll be looking at how these variables relate to one another,
and looking at their interrelationships. We want to know how these
variables all come together to inform environmental performance.”
He plans to take a more holistic approach, and a portion of
that grant money will be used to buy a data set from Sustainalytics,
a global sustainability research and analysis firm that supports
investors by integrating environmental, social and governance
factors into their investment processes.The company has a database
with environmental data on more than 4,000 companies worldwide.
Working with Bruno Dyck, a member of his PhD committee
at the University of Manitoba, Na Ni, a professor at Hong Kong
Polytechnic University, and a small army of graduate students and
research assistants, Walker’s team will conduct a case meta-analysis
on that Sustainalytics data, as well as a number of existing
Harvard
Business Review
cases, collected on more than 200 companies from
around the world that vary in size and scope.
The team will look at everything from the external environment
in which those companies operate, to their structure, their strategies
and internal variables.These can include ownership, size, age, culture,
levels of departmentalization, whether they have environmental
committees, carbon intensity, emissions curbing programs, and
whether they’ve ever been fined for environmental infractions.
The study will also allow him to contrast and compare
organizations with low and high corporate environmental
performance. Most existing research focuses only on companies
with strong performance, Walker says.
“The literature tells us little about firms with weak corporate
environmental performance. We can’t fully understand strong
corporate environmental performance until we also understand
weak corporate environmental performance.”
Ultimately, companies will be coded on a scale and the
archetypes, or hallmarks, of both strong and weak environmental
performance will be clearly identified.The research will help
organizations understand how the strategic and structural choices
they make affect their company’s impact on the environment,
Walker says. “The results will be able to demonstrate to business
leaders exactly what they need to do in order to improve their
environmental performance.”
And while some may argue that the impact humanity has
made on our natural environment may be irreversible, Walker is
optimistic that, if the corporate community embraces the concepts
of sustainability, it may not be too late to save the planet.
“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think it would have some
kind of positive change,” he says. “We spend a fair bit of time talking
about how bad the state of the environment is. It has to change.
We have to get better.There’s so much more that we can do.”
V
RESEARCH
At left: UWindsor business Professor Kent Walker, sporting his moustache in “Movember”.
BY STEPHEN FIELDS
The Business Case for
Corporate Accountability
“WE SPEND A FAIR BIT OF TIME TALKING ABOUT
HOW BAD THE STATE OF THE ENVIRONMENT IS.
IT HAS TO CHANGE. WE HAVE TO GET BETTER.
THERE’S SO MUCH MORE THAT WE CAN DO.”
KENT WALKER
