PURPOSE, INC.

Michael Young:

Welcome to the Purpose, Inc., the podcast where we discuss corporate purpose and stakeholder capitalism. I'm your host, Michael Young.

Corporate social responsibility and sustainability is a large question, and it's a big part of what I talk about here on the podcast. And I think broadly corporations are trying to become more sustainable and do better on a wide range of environmental and social issues. And many or most are willing to give organizations some leeway and the benefit of doubt. Others want them held to account and to higher standards and regulated. And still others, environmental activists are openly and consistently criticizing organizations for what they're doing. And so a question would be when that happens, how do you respond? When environmental critics attack your company, what do you do? How do you respond? How do you react? My guest today is Bob Langert, and Bob led McDonald’s Corporation’s CSR and sustainability efforts for more than 25 years, retiring in 2015. And over the course of his career, Bob dealt with any number of major environmental and sustainability issues in his career. And McDonald’s, as you can imagine, has a huge global footprint, and they were pushed by activists on a number of issues, everything from waste to animal welfare, obesity, Amazon deforestation, sustainable fishing, even potatoes. Right? McDonald’s is the largest buyer of potatoes globally for French fries. And Bob dealt with all of these issues over his career.

And he's written a book called The Battle To Do Good: Inside McDonald’s Sustainability Journey. And it is a very fine business book, and I mean that. Anybody who knows me knows I'm not a huge fan of business books. But what Bob has done is written a book that is, and you can read it at many levels, but it is a thorough going study and analysis of what happened at McDonald’s over a 25-year period dealing with internal stakeholders and external stakeholders and critics on that list of very large environmental and sustainability topics. And so you could read it as a memoir, but I think it’s better to read it as a how-to manual on what to do and how to respond. And you can read it at many levels from a from a crisis communication standpoint, from an investor relations standpoint, from PR and a brand survivability standpoint. But what animates the whole book is really the approach that that Bob Langert took throughout his career at McDonald’s when the company was attacked by many, many organizations, EDF, PETA, World Wildlife Federation, on and on and on. Every organization that has anything to say about environmentalism or sustainability came at McDonald’s. And I think the approach that Bob took there was to not only respond but to invite those critics in and to build partnerships and build productive partnerships that allowed McDonald’s but also the environmental group to really meet and work together on solutions. And so it is a very fine book. It’s highly readable. It's very interesting. You get the feeling of being a fly on the wall inside of McDonald’s Corporations. A lot of these issues were being addressed, Bob must have been a phenomenal note taker because you really get the sense of being there. And so it's quite an enjoyable book. I'll link it in the show notes, and I commend it to you to read. So again, Bob Langert, incredible journey at McDonald’s across a long, long history. And we get into a lot of this in today's discussion. So without further ado, my conversation with Bob Langert. Bob, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Bob Langert:

Great to be with you.

Michael Young:

Thank you. All right. So I've read your book, and it’s really interesting on many levels. And we're going to get into the memoir, the whole thing. And I think what's interesting for me at least is you could read this book at a number of different levels. You could read it as a memoir. You can read it as a book about brand survival, about crisis communications, about PR, about IR, about supply chain, about partnerships. It's fascinating on many, many levels. So I really do want to commend you, and it's an exciting read actually, which you don't often say about business books.

Bob Langert:

Michael, I will say I'm delighted to hear that because when I started writing a book, people would ask me what I was trying to achieve. I was trying to actually make sustainability in the whole journey be a page turner. I wanted it to be a page turner. So [inaudible 00:06:37] at all, that is wonderful.

Michael Young:

You succeeded because again, I had no expectations going in, but you exceeded my expectations massively. Because I think one thing, you're a very good note taker, and I really felt like I was there in a lot of these situations. Like you really pop them off the page. So exciting, exciting stuff. All right. But I do want to get into the book and in particular, the various and many major, major battles you fought. And I'll just, for the listeners who haven't read the book and I will link the book in the show notes, you really confronted and managed a number of major social, environmental, and sustainability issues at McDonald’s over 30 years that were really on a global scale. And that's the other point about this book, that it is absolutely massively global. And so we can take this in chunks, but the issues, the battles were around waste, animal welfare, obesity, Amazon deforestation, fishing, sustainable fishing, a sustainable supply chain. And then I think what animates all of these were how you tie this all together in terms of your response and in particular, your response to McDonald’s critics, which again, I found incredibly fascinating and enlivening to read your approach. So I'm going to stop talking and get after it any way you want Bob.

Bob Langert:

Well, where do we begin? Well, you mentioned the theme of we were at the center of so many issues that were very global and very societal. And I learned early on with the waste issue, that was the first one I worked on for the company, is that you got to work with the critics. You got to work with some sort of external party that gives you credibility, and hopefully, they're a thoughtful NGO or some sort of outside group that's not trying to destroy you. And we got lucky with the Environmental Defense Fund because they sent a letter to our CEO. Said, hey, can we work with you? And we didn't even know EDF at the time this was 1989 or so. And so we just said, hey, we're in trouble. We don't know what we're doing. I mean I was hired to head this stuff up, and none of us knew anything about environmentally sound packaging including me. So I was on a big learning curve. I needed expertise. I needed people that knew their stuff about waste. We had nobody in McDonald’s who knew anything about it. And besides all that, we needed credibility because no matter what we did, we needed some sort of credibility partner to say that, hey, McDonald’s is actually doing a good job. And we struck gold with the Environmental Defense Fund, and I still love them today. They're such a smart organization. Great people. They helped us reduce waste. We ended up signing a deal with them, creating 42 ways to reduce, reuse, recycle. We thought they were kind of the enemy because we didn't really know them. We invited them into our restaurants and ends up that they’re nice people. I like them. Our people like them. They became good friends. I still talk to them today and just a wonderful result that made the company very confident about the future issues that we would address.

Because that became our formula. That hey, animal welfare, my boss said, figure out an animal welfare strategy in the mid-90s or so. Again, we knew nothing about animal welfare. We make hamburgers, French fries. We serve the customers out in the retail space. We didn't know all these supply chain issues. So again, somehow through working with animal rights organizations, this one of my favorites because I would talk to Peter Singer who wrote Animal Liberation. And look up Peter Singer. He's pretty controversial. His book is considered to be the modern treatise starting the animal welfare movement. And it was a tough read for me because I don't really agree with it all. But I was trying to understand Peter Singer and how that type that organization and people that believe in animal rights, where do they come from? Because I mean obviously I work for McDonald’s, and I'm not on the same belief system. But in order to have a conversation, I wanted to be on the same page. I met with him. I had breakfast with him and met him other times. And again, really like Peter Singer. He's a very smart guy, and he was the one that told me to work with Dr. Temple Grandin who was a renowned animal scientist who I didn't know at the time. I should have known. So I ended up seeing her and that was a marriage made in heaven because she was a rock star in the animal welfare industry. She's a very special leader. She's autistic, but she really knows how to work with animals. So we kind of gave her the keys to our supply chain for all the meat companies. And after several years, we implemented her programs with our suppliers and had great success again implementing programs to improve animal welfare systems. So I'm glad you caught that theme. We can go where you want.

But I would say that's a very common element for a solution versus what I see today. I still see, back when we worked with the Environmental Defense Fund, that was not done at that time. Back in 1990 when we announced this whole thing, it was a brand-new thing. Big companies weren't working with NGOs. Now they're I would say quite common. But  the reality is from what I see is still when companies are attacked by outside groups and outside issues, they tend to get very defensive. They tend to dig a hole. They either resist, deny, fight, or do something like that and always wonder why they don't work more with the critics. Critics don't necessarily mean they're bad guys. Most critics actually want you to succeed in what you're doing, and that's what we learned. Nine times out of ten. I'm not saying every group out there is out for the welfare of your organization but most are. And if you can find a common ground, you can hit home runs left and right. And I feel that's something we did pretty well in our history.

Michael Young:

And Bob, I want to really dig into that point about the corporate response. And I think one of the things I noted in the book is the fact that in many cases, you were taking directly inbound criticism, and then the organization had to react and had to respond. And you talk about the views of legal and marketing and PR and the executive suite. And it did seem as if a big part of your job was both formal and informal diplomacy internally. How did McDonald’s evolve in the way it thinks about and thought about these issues? I mean clearly these are very high-profile organizations. You mentioned EDF. It's World Wildlife Fund. It's PETA. It's Greenpeace. How did you get internal stakeholders to focus on these issues the way that you did?

Bob Langert:

Well, we trie d to work with what the truth was. Get beyond the rhetoric. So for example, PETA attacked us on various fronts, and PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, I have to say, they had some very ugly but hey, maybe very effective methods of getting public attention. Showing up, throwing blood on the streets which was ketchup or interrupting our speeches that we would make and running to the stage and crying out bloody murder in front of everybody. I mean they had some shock tactics. So of course, you think any of us like that? No, we don't like that. I didn't like it. But when you actually looked at the core of what they were advocating for, more room for laying hens, getting rid of gestation stalls for hogs. I know these are technical issues for the listeners. But what we tried to do was we found that those issues had legs. They had some legitimacy. So we didn't like the carrier necessarily. We didn't like some of these tactics. But then I would tell our team within McDonald’s, let's put that to the side for a second. Let's look at the actual issue. And then let's work with an organization that is very scientific and thoughtful i.e. Dr. Temple Grandin came in and we formed an animal welfare council of many, many experts to help create strategies for animal welfare. So we would take an issue that could be emotional. We're getting attacked. Instead of playing defense on it, well, you're automatically defensive a little bit because you're not doing this proactively. But you decide to react. So the way to be proactive in reacting is setting up your own way of approaching it. You're not going to work with PETA. You're going to work with animal welfare experts. So we got attacked on obesity. hey a legitimate issue for society.

I mean I think at first we thought at McDonald’s, why are we being attacked on it? We're good people. I eat at McDonald’s all the time. You can be healthy and eat at McDonald’s. And yeah, we serve food that is on the spectrum of could be indulgent food to a certain extent. So we were attacked left and right. Movies made, Super Size Me movie if you remember that movie. I mean that hit to the core of what we did. But again, what we tried to do is say, you know what? We play a role in this. The actual issue is important. Let's figure out what we can do, and we set up a council of nutritionists, about 12 of them that I recruited around the world that advised our company, that advised our leaders. I still remember those great nutrition leaders from around the world talking to our CEOs and all of our senior executives. It was fascinating, and they had a great impact in showing us kind of what to do. So for example, on that one, these nutritionists, in general, they said, you know what? Your influence at McDonald’s is with kids, and it's hard to change adult habits for eating. But why don't you really focus your nutrition efforts with kids. And if you go to McDonald’s today, the Happy Meal today is a far cry from the Happy Meal of 10 or 15 years ago. It's a downsized French fries. It's an automatic fruit or fruit or vegetable type serving. We don't put the drinks, it's now a default setting they have to have either milk or water for their drink. So it's a spectacular change. It's one that I thought was one of our better changes, again, due to looking at this thing more scientifically.

Now probably the best example I can give is when Greenpeace attacked us in 2005 or 2006 on destroying the rainforest in the Amazon based on growing too much soy. And soy's being exported to Europe, and it's used for chicken feed for like McNuggets. Well, Greenpeace showed up in dozens of restaurants in UK dressed up as chickens. They chained themselves to the tables and chairs, and I woke up one morning to learn that they had this campaign. Well, again, my first reaction is, what the heck? I don't like what they're doing. They're attacking our restaurants. They're doing something sensational. But then I read the report called “Eating Up the Amazon”. I called Conservation International. I called my contact and my friend at the World Wildlife Fund. I learned from my two good NGO partners that I already had partnerships with that the report from Greenpeace was actually a good report. It was accurate. So we called Greenpeace within a day and said, hey, we agree with you. I later learned that we shocked them by agreeing with them because how could you mount a campaign when the campaign company, us, agrees with them? But we said your solutions to solve it, they're not based on reality. I mean we can't change the soy industry. We don't even know anything about it. We don't even know who our soy suppliers are. It's like four steps removed from what we buy. But we said, if we partner together and we can get other companies and retail companies to sign on, if we can get suppliers like Cargill who's one of our strategic suppliers and one of the big traders in Brazil to be a thought partner on this, I bet you we can make things happen. We did all that, and within three months, a moratorium was announced by the soy industry by themselves to stop the practices. And it's been in place ever since, and it's been very effective. So it just goes to show you that when you base things on science and thought and collaboration, if that's your starting point, why not have it be your starting point and see if it works? It's worth a try. And we found that it works most times.

Michael Young:

Yeah, absolutely. And Bob, maybe just a few minutes on the role and response of the communications and the PR team in particular. And it seemed like that organization went through a journey and an evolution along with you whereas, as you said, the typical response is you get the lawyers, you ramp up the PR team, and you come out swinging. How did that evolve over time at McDonald’s?

Bob Langert:

A lot of evolution on the communication front. Lots. Where do I start? I would say at first, back in the early days, the 90s and the first 10, 15 years, it was mainly like a denial or putting up a fight, and we went on the attack quite often from a communication viewpoint. But then what we found is it just wasn't helpful. It just made people think less of us. And then we started to wise up. I think a lot of it had to do with Fast Food Nation. That was a book about kind of McDonald’s and how bad McDonald’s supply chain is and all the abuses in it supposedly. And there's a movie coming out. So we prepared for that one totally different, and we prepared for Super Size Me in a totally different manner. And our communication strategy was one of recognizing the issue at hand. So we got away from denying. We said, hey, nutrition, obesity is a key issue of our times, and we recognize that. And we have a role to play. And that would be our starting point. So rather than start with a punch or two, we started out saying at the big level, you have a great point to make. And then we usually had partners that worked with us that we would work with third partners to let them speak about what we do. We found that over time, are people going to believe a Bob Langert or some other corporate suit, I use that in quotes, bout what we're doing? No, not necessarily. So hey, if you want to talk to some of our nutritionists that work with us, they have free reign. They can say what they want to say. If you want to talk to Dr. Grant, then call them. If you want to call Greenpeace, call them. If you want to talk about sustainable beef, call the people we know at the World Wildlife Fund. That was a big part of our strategy as well.

And I would say in general, Michael, even to the day that I retired in 2015, I was never really happy with our communication strategy overall. Probably the biggest complaint that I got within McDonald’s, all the people that work for McDonald’s and there's a lot of them, about 1.8 million people work for McDonald’s globally, the number one complaint that I heard from our own people was, why don't we share our story of what we do more with the public? Why are we just sitting ducks, taking all these missiles and in general, we're not out there sharing our story in a more proactive way and putting my money behind it? Yeah, we had a website, and we did reports. So we did some basic nuts and bolts stuff. But it was the basics. And in general, why didn't we do more? I still think it's because why do more? You can get in trouble. It's a pandora's box. The lawyers definitely had to redo everything, and in general with the lawyers, everything became generic and non-meaning. I mean they would come up with things that I would say in press releases. I go, I would never say this. I'm not going to put out something that I'm not going to say. So I would fight quite often about making our communication much more honest and authentic because I still think that's a problem today. Companies need to communicate in a different style when it comes to sustainability. It's not about how great you are and trumping all the good things you do in a way that you would trump your latest product launching, your latest sandwich that you introduce. It’s way more humbling, open, sharing things that don't go right.

You're not going to get anybody to believe you on a sustainability journey unless you say the things that you struggle with. Where is it that you fail? Where is it that you're not making progress? And be honest about it because then when you say, but here's our progress on animal welfare, here's what we're doing on Happy Meals, here's what we're doing on deforestation and sustainable fish, then people are going to believe you. Because customers know the world's not perfect. They expect companies to try hard to work in collaboration to find solutions and to make incremental progress. And that's what I always pitched when I was at McDonald’s, and we did it to a certain extent but never to the level that I thought we should or could have. And I think since, since, I still follow McDonald’s, I think they do a better job of it, today but I still think generally within the corporate world and talking to my peers that are leaders, it’s one that many people in the sustainability field wish there was more creativity in and more innovation because many of us believe, including me, that we're putting a lot of money on the table to be gotten. I mean we all know, we've done enough customer research at McDonald’s, other companies have done similar research, to know that customers really do care about this area. They really do. It's hard to find customers that don't care. So are they willing to spend more money? Maybe not. But it's a deep, deep concern, and they're willing to reward and punish companies on it. And I just think from a marketing and communications, and we're still at the very low end of companies figuring it out and getting rewarded for it.

Michael Young:

Yeah. And well, just hearing that description, Bob, I think the issue of how vast McDonald’s operation is globally and you mentioned we didn't even get into potatoes or any number, you mentioned hogs and chicken cages. And there are so many issues. You talk about the AIM model in the book and another kind of a piece of framework or methodology that I'd commend to our listeners on how to think about issues proactively. But you also mentioned in the book that there were some, and I think it was the deforestation issue in particular that wasn't on anyone's radar. So how did you come to adopt that and how did you use the AIM model and sort of what were the strengths and the weaknesses of that that approach during your time?

Bob Langert:

Well, you write about the AIM model that stands for anticipatory issues management or some way to look at emerging issues. And we really set it in motion early on in my lifespan there at McDonald’s because again, we were getting taxed left and right. And we said, well, rather than play defense, let's get an AIM team together. So we got people from all over the world to meet on the phone mostly once a month, and we'd say, hey, what's our list of issues? And 30, 40, 50 issues. Which ones are the most important? We'd go through all of that. Which is the most material to McDonald’s? Where can we make an impact? All those types of questions. And imagine a name chart where the theory of it is for an issue to percolate and to penetrate into society, it goes through an evolution of emergence, and at the emergent state, that's where you want to work on it. If you let it fester and don't address anything, it becomes more mainstream into society. And by the time an issue is more mainstream, that means it's becoming political. That means it's in the media. That means lawyers are getting involved. That means you have a tax, and that means that companies are now maybe reacting in a way to solve something overnight that might not be a good solution, that might cost some more money. So theory of AIM is that if you catch it early on and work on the right issues at the right time, you're saving money, and you're doing things in a thoughtful, rational, scientific approach.

And probably my best example of that is McDonald’s efforts to create sustainable beef. There really wasn’t anybody out there protesting McDonald’s. Hey, we want sustainable beef. Most people, you even ask today, what is sustainable beef? But we felt just strategically that beef is at the very core McDonald’s. Beef in general has problems with it perceptual wise, whether it is with animal welfare, whether it’s carbon footprint, global warming, and other issues with beef that it was becoming less relevant to today's consumers. So we want beef to be more relevant, more attractive, and we thought the sustainability approach would do that. So on our own, we said, we're the ones that went to WWF. We went to World Wildlife Fund, and we asked them, can we initiate a sustainable beef movement? So we initiated that. It’s a long story. it's in the book. But very proud of the work that we did to kind of coalesce the whole beef movement all the way from farmers and producers to retailers and NGOs and put them in a global round table for sustainable beef, create standards and measurements. And it's still a work in progress, but it was done with all the intentions of AIM rather than sit back wait, to be attacked, and spend wasteful money on a poor solution. AIM is meant for the proactive company.

And I would say there's probably a couple main themes in my book, one we've talked about it already. In my 30 years McDonald’s working on this stuff, one was collaboration that we talked about already, but the other one was to be proactive and strategic. It still baffles me why companies, any company that doesn't have a strategy on this that's from the C-suite I think is very foolish. And there's too many companies that don't have it today. Yeah, probably most of the big companies have it now. Most big companies have officers on sustainability, and they have some sort of team working on it. But that's the big company. Once you get past some of these big Fortune 500 companies, it's still tough going. And so I'm a big advocate that sustainability for companies is not something to be afraid of, and I still think that it's a thought many companies have. Yeah, it's messy. It's problematic. I don't know enough about it. Let's stay away from it. Let's kind of PR our way out of it maybe a little bit. Whereas, in fact, they should look at it as, wow, this an opportunity to connect with consumers. The new workers that are coming in that want to work for this. It’s a way to save money. I can improve my brand. I got a whole section on how important this is for companies and their brand. There's so many good reasons to work on this that make sense if you do it strategically and you don't let the outside world dictate the strategy for you.

Michael Young:

Yeah. And Bob, one of the other topics you talk about in the book is that everything is about change management. And how did you and do you think about influencing others within the organization? And how did you develop those relationships, build that trust, and get people who had very different, I mean that goes back to the sort of huge company, very different agendas. How did you get them on site on some of these issues? How did that work?

Bob Langert:

In reflection about my time at McDonald’s, it's probably my favorite thing to do. I mean it's just I really enjoy taking on these tough issues. But then you got to work with the leaders of the company. A person in charge of sustainability, I can't make changes in supply chain, I can't make big changes in operations. I got to work with leaders in those organizations. So I don't know. I'd be interested in writing a book on this. There's so many books about trying to be influential and making change happen. All I can tell you is it starts out with developing really good relationships. I was in it for the long haul. I learned early on from my first boss who was a great guy and one of the top 10 leaders of McDonald’s, Shelby, he's in my book. I love the guy. He gave me a long leash. He invested money in me. He let me travel the world and meet with people. He said, Bob, just go out there and meet and greet and get to know these people, develop relationships because you want these people to know who you are. You want them to know that they can trust you, know that you're a good person and you're going to follow through what they say, know that you know your stuff. And so I always had that as my guiding light, that I'm going to develop relationships. I am going to be the most trustworthy person there can possibly be so that when I go to the head of restaurant operations and ask them to be the officer in charge of the planet pillar for McDonald’s strategy for the future on the environment, that that person, in this case, Ken Koziol, he’s in the book. I've known Ken for 15 years. He's a great guy. I know him really well. And it wasn't like I was asking the world of him. He knew where I was coming from. I knew where he was coming from. And I don't know. It's a lot better to get people to agree to do things when you have a runway that's already existed.

And by the way, that's the same thing with NGOs. I mentioned before that when we were getting attacked by Greenpeace, I went to Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund. I wasn't calling them out of the dark. I knew those organizations for the last decade. Trusted them. Knew them. I knew that John Buchanan from Conservation International, if he said something about what the truth was in the Amazon, I knew it was the truth. So to me, that's leadership. John Buchanan is a great leader because when he says something about that, I know it's the truth. Jim Cannon was the one that led us at McDonald’s, and he was with Conservation International at the time, to get into sustainable fish. He was so good, so expert that our suppliers for fish who did not want him to attend the meeting to set up that strategy. They thought Conservation International was radical. Let's not invite them in. They'll cause trouble. They're breaking windows in our restaurants. Well, they had all these false notions of who they were. Ends up that they became big buddies with Jim Cannon because Jim Cannon knows what he's talking about. And they developed a lot of trust. So relationships, trust, following through, being a subject matter expert.

So I guess that's the other thing. You have to know your stuff. And so when people would ask, I would always deliver whatever it was that needed to be delivered. It's the truth. Sometimes people don't want to hear it. But you actually gain credibility by telling things that they don't want to hear. Like here's the truth of the matter, what's good or what's bad. Anyway, that's the starting point. It's a very long run thing. So you can't develop it kind of being hired today. So I'm not sure if all organizations are like McDonald’s where it's so relationship driven. But certainly at McDonald’s, that's the way it was. And since I was with the company long term, I was there for the long term. I would hire people that would get frustrated after a year and say, oh, they thought they're making little progress, they're taking steps backwards. It’s so hard. I go, no, no, no, take a look over the last year. Look at how far we've come. We've taken three, four, five, six, seven steps forward. Yeah, in that time, we've taken a couple steps backwards too. But sustainability is for the long run. It's not for the short-term people. People that want to get into it should not be looking for overnight results because that's not the definition of what it is. To make something sustainable means you are getting the culture to change, you're getting people to think differently. And so the bad thing about too many people in sustainability is that they lead with passion. They lead with what they think is the right thing to do. By the way, most times they're right about the right thing to do. But if you tell people what the right thing to do is, you're going to get people opposed to what you're doing. You have to get to the leaders and get them to want to be in the same place that you are at. And that is an art. And whether I practiced the art well or not, all I can tell you is that's what I tried to do. I did not try to push an agenda obviously. I would try to, in my heart, I was pushing it, but in my actions, I would always go to people and I'd ask them. I'd educate them. How can we solve this? I would come up with ideas. I would lead them along. I'd do all the things I could do to get them to want to do it.

Michael Young:

That's great. The other point in your book is you talk about the convening power of McDonald’s and particularly in the Amazon, how you were able to very quickly build coalitions that went way beyond McDonald’s. And could you talk a little bit about that experience and what you learned from doing that? Because I think the saying takes a village, right? It's going to take everybody, and I think one of the lights that shines really brightly in the book is that you had capital, political, influenced capital. You had money. And you used that to really commanding effect in bringing others with you along in the journey. So talk about that if you would.

Bob Langert:

Yeah. Well, exactly that. We ended up knowing that we did. I mean we were a leader. We were a big company, big brand. We're in 120 countries. We had a big impact. So in beef, even though we bought 2% of the beef in the world, we were probably the biggest buyer of beef. Anything that we bought, we were one of the biggest buyers. So if you're going to make a policy change on packaging or beef or chicken or Happy Meals, it's going to reverberate beyond the boundaries of McDonald’s. And that's what we learned from the EDF exercise that I began our conversation with. When we changed our packaging at McDonald’s, we realized that almost all the industry was making the same changes. So that always became a strategy of ours is to convene as much as we could. And by the way, we had success, but we had failure. Not all companies want to work together. I remember on animal welfare, we changed the size of the cages to a bigger cage size for hens, and then Burger King came out with something that was like one inch bigger. And we had been trying to form a coalition of fast food companies in animal welfare, and we failed. So I'm giving an example where we just didn't because the competitive nature of us was just too inherent at that time to work on it. But I gave you the examples of a beef, how we coalesced and how we work with our suppliers, how we work with Cargill and Greenpeace.

Sometimes we went alone though. So I remember when we made the gestation stall announcement for instead of sows, mother pigs which are called sows, being confined to these pens and they can't move around, we said, in the future, we're only going to work with suppliers that had group housing for sows. Well, we had tried for 10 years on a voluntary basis to get suppliers to get out of gestation stalls, and they didn't. We made some progress, but basically, they didn't. So in this case, we pulled the plug on the convening and we just went out unilaterally and said, we've tried. It failed. The voluntary approach hasn't worked. So basically we're kind of mandating this, that in order to be a supplier, this is the way it's going to be. That is not our favorite approach. I remember going through that. Oh, no, we don't like doing this. We don't like mandating because nobody likes being told what to do. So we had a blend. But I think that made the convening power even more powerful because people knew that at McDonald’s, well, at the end of the day, we had enough clout to even go change on our own. But that was never our first option. It was always to change together.

Michael Young:

Well, they need to know there's a shotgun behind the door, right? So Bob, in the last couple of minutes here, the last five or so minutes, could you maybe talk about how you see things evolving? And now we look back, post-pandemic, McDonald’s is a big employer in inner cities. It’s got an immigrant workforce. How do you see the way that McDonald’s business is evolving? Because it's still very front and center on some issues, wages, things like that. How do you think other organizations can learn from your journey and what foot do organizations need to put forward as they look at a new and evolving business and social contract?

Bob Langert:

Well, I think there's a lot of lessons learned here. One is I certainly learned over the years that the priority for what sustainability means at this moment in time, it changed all the time. I mean so I spent several years working on waste, the majority of my time. But I spent a lot of time, the majority of my time was on animal welfare. Then I spent the majority of my time for five, six years on nutrition. So you see what I mean? It's like the job is never the same. And in today's world, I bet you if I was at McDonald’s, I'd be spending most of my time on social issues exactly as you said because social issues are so important. And you know the list and whether it's wages and benefits and diversity and all those issues. And the workforce has changed dramatically in my lifetime. I mean early in my lifetime at McDonald’s, the average worker in our restaurants was 18, 19 years old, high school workers, college workers, working part-time. That was the model. When I left McDonald’s, the average worker at McDonald’s was 29 years old. That's a whole different workforce trying to make a living. So it’s a different mindset that requires different thinking.

And I think that's another lesson learned in terms of what probably needs to be done. This really needs to be embedded in the C-suite in a real way. If I were to do an audit of companies today, that would be my first checkpoint, to see if they really have a meaningful, thoughtful approach on sustainability. I would be looking at their C-suite agenda. Is it on the agenda on a regular basis? Are there people at high levels responsible for it? Is it being discussed just as other things in the business are being discussed? I'm not saying it's the most important thing, but it should be right there all the time being talked about. There should be a strategy. There should be measurements. There should be accountability. Those are the key things that are needed. And if I don't see them, that means they're missing, and they need to get on the ball to get it done. And once you get it in the C-suite and get a strategy, get started, get measures in place, get goals, get accountability, and that's the great starting point. Now a lot of companies have done that at a big level. They've set goals, and we all read about all these great goals. So with those companies, then it's all about making progress, which is a whole different challenge. But I still think the majority of companies are still at this more fundamental level that they need to get the ball rolling more.

Michael Young:

All right, Bob. We're going to have to leave it there. It's been a fantastic conversation on your inside McDonald’s sustainability journey and your 30-plus years at the company. And I'm really grateful to you for coming on the podcast.

Bob Langert:

Well, thank you very much. Enjoy talking about these issues. And thanks so much.

Conclusion:

The Purpose, Inc. Podcast is a production of Actual Agency, helping innovators communicate in a changing world. More at www.Actual.Agency.

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