WALMART’S JOURNEY TO SUSTAINABILITY
Walmart’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Kathleen Mclaughlin, describes the retailer’s (surprising) journey to leadership in the realm of sustainability.
How did you come to see Walmart as a possible change-maker in the world?
Let me start out with a pretty simple proposition that is, nevertheless, somewhat contentious: business exists to serve society. The question is, how do companies interpret that, and what do they do to fulfill that promise? The most obvious way is to look at what your business does from day-to-day, to serve its customers.
Three years ago, soon after I joined Walmart, I travelled to Soweto, South Africa, where we run our stores under the Cambridge banner. I was in one of the stores with our management team, as they coached the person behind the deli counter about food safety — making sure raw chicken didn’t touch the vegetables, and other important procedures. I stood there for a few minutes, just watching people: entire families were coming in to shop together; mothers had babies on their backs, and were putting rice, vegetables and meat into their baskets.
I had been to that part of Africa many times before, working on HIV/AIDS and maternal health issues — but it suddenly occurred to me that this store was enabling a whole different kind of development. The approach is slightly different in each of the 28 countries Walmart operates in, but essentially, it’s always about bringing affordable food, apparel and general merchandise to people to make their lives better. The value of that clear purpose was made crystal clear to me that day.
For much of the past several decades, the mantra has been, ‘Business exists to serve shareholders’. How did Walmart come to embrace ‘Business exists to serve society’?
It all started ten years ago, with Hurricane Katrina. Walmart has stores in that part of the world, so many of our associates were affected — along with millions of our customers. When the hurricane hit, our people just started jumping in and trying to do whatever they could to help. There were some amazing stories of heroism: Our people were commandeering bulldozers, knocking