Engineering Higher Impact:  Q & A with GBC Executive Director John Tedstrom

Imagine creating a coalition of businesses dedicated to training their capabilities and resources on fighting the world’s most catastrophic health challenges—HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. It’s a pretty powerful idea. Now re-imagine it.

A re-imagined GBC emerged from a 2007 process that engaged members, governments, NGOs, and other partners in a deep analysis of how this Coalition can maximize its value and impact. The result in a nutshell: GBC members want their programs to produce more action and better results. They are looking to GBC to help them do so. So GBC created a new strategic focus on just that—turning ideas into action.

The strategy is built around a strong core competence—creating connections, co-investments, and collaborations that are architected to support and drive execution. GBC will continue to provide the networking opportunities members value, but will increase focus on outcome-driven networking, designed to produce actionable partnerships that channel business’ focus to where it can do the most good.

This marks an increase in the clarity of the GBC value proposition—what GBC brings to members specifically, and to the global fight generally. GBC will also build its expertise and broaden its reach in the area of measurement and evaluation. For example, the Business Practice Action Standard (BPAS), GBC’s comprehensive HIV/AIDS program evaluation tool, is being reformulated so it can be applied to tuberculosis and malaria.

The new GBC strategy then takes the Coalition’s assets to a logical higher level. An innovation called Impact Initiatives will move companies from unilateral to multilateral action—creating global teams with an optimal mix of cross-functional, public and private, global and local all mobilized to make major headway on a common objective.

The plan is a manifestation of business’ will to move from fighting to defeating HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria—not on their own, but by doing their part better than ever before. The strategy increases coherence and further moves public health efforts out of the silos that hold back their full potential.

» Questions or comments? Send us feedback about the new strategy.

Q: What prompted this rethinking of the GBC approach to the fight against HIV, TB, and malaria?
A: We start from the understanding that the global community is losing the fight against HIV, TB, and malaria: for every person who gains access to life-saving highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), approximately four new HIV infections occur. A child dies every 30 seconds from malaria in Africa. We have today in 2008, new lethal strains of tuberculosis that are emerging in multiple regions of the world and for which we have no real medical solution.

Under those circumstances, we had better rethink our approaches. Business believes in continual improvement, and there is no more important focus for improvement than the work to defeat these diseases. I want us to move from fighting these diseases to defeating them. We need to get to the point at which we can honestly say, “We’re winning.”

We then ask, “What are the best opportunities to get greater impact from business?” Now, a unilateral effort—a company working on its own—makes a critical contribution. A workplace policy, for example. But there is tremendous untapped potential for multilateral, collaborative approaches—companies, governments, NGOs, and others working together. GBC will facilitate and support action on both of those levels.

Q: Are GBC members motivated to move from fighting to winning? Do they think the changes you’re talking about are the right ones?
A: That’s the other part of what prompted the rethink. Of course our members want to win this fight. In a sense, you could say business is all about winning. If business leaders feel their efforts will pay off, they will make tremendous efforts.

Our members want GBC to focus on what they feel we are uniquely positioned to do, which is maximize the effectiveness of their work. That’s what our changes will do. Businesses want programs and strategies to be well coordinated, to bring together critical actors strategically and coherently. They look to GBC to leverage our own competencies and to be that coordinating mechanism. Businesses also turn to us for the technical assistance and support they need to move their individual initiatives forward.

» Questions or comments? Send us feedback about the new strategy.

Q: Are there some companies that do more than others?
A: Of course. I think that it is incumbent upon us, the GBC secretariat if you will, to look for opportunities to engage each member more deeply in the fight against HIV, TB, or malaria.

Our mission, and this is something I’m personally committed to, is to help every member move forward. If we don’t, we’ll never move from fighting to winning. This is something I think about every single day, and I’m constantly evaluating myself and GBC accordingly.

So, whether you won the award for business excellence at our Annual Gala last year or you’ve just started with us and all you’ve done so far is pay your membership dues to support our work and show solidarity— everybody can do more, including GBC.

And that’s why we’re determined to take our relationships with each member company to a new level on a regular basis. That’s why we’ve shifted to a new system of relationship management, in which each company has one person at GBC who knows the people, knows the issues, knows the strategy, the exposure of the company, and can walk them through our entire range of services and determine what fits best, and what kind of engagement with GBC will move them, and the global cause, forward.

Q: The need is obviously great, but you’ve also mentioned that the timing is right to “scale up” business action in this fight. Why is that?
A: Part of it is GBC’s growth. In size, we’ve gone from 17 to over 220 member companies in six years. Think of it: 220 companies working in concert, sharing knowledge, working together in teams. Collectively, this constitutes tremendous power to do good—particularly if strategic linkages can be made to the other actors who most need or can best leverage this formidable strength.

We’ve also strengthened expertise, capacity, and reach through our merger with Transatlantic Partners Against AIDS (TPAA). TPAA gives us a strong base of action in a region in which HIV and TB are growing faster than anywhere else. Russia is the front line in terms of holding back growth in the pandemics. And GBC’s capability has been steadily growing, a foundation built aggressively and strategically since the organization’s founding. We’ve built up knowledge and competencies that have reached critical mass. Tools like the Best Practice Action Standard (BPAS) were created, have proved their value, and have been refined. We and our members have learned a lot, tried a lot, and had some successes—and we can draw on all that and get more from our investments in health.

The other part is that partners are in place and ready to go—an important piece of the puzzle. A few years ago, we didn’t have a PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), for instance. The Global Fund is achieving new levels of success. Governments are eager to work with us, as GBC has shown in China, Ukraine, India, Russia and in many African countries like Kenya, Botswana, and others.

» Questions or comments? Send us feedback about the new strategy.

Q: What does it mean to move from a unilateral engagement against the diseases to a collaborative approach?
A: Let me give you an example. It’s one thing, and it’s quite wonderful, when a company has its own workplace program and is then able to expand that program and go into the community.

 It’s quite another thing if you have five or ten companies who all work in the same place and who have a common interest in strengthening their communities, taking care of their workers and their families, creating the enabling environment that is necessary for strong economies and stable societies. These companies can now work together on a much larger scale, sharing resources and know-how and involving more stakeholder networks.

GBC’s role is to bring these partners together: to create teams of member companies, local governments, and NGOs, and to engage seamlessly with organizations and international donors—like the Global Fund, PEPFAR, and others.

Q: High-level coordination is complex. How do you do it?
A: “Impact Initiatives” are the central innovation of our new strategy. They are the structure through which we define critical needs, create the strategy and plan, and then make big things happen. This approach will create global cross-functional teams in the same way that an individual business pulls together the knowledge, skills, competencies, and talent internally or with partners.

We will use our networks and competencies to catalyze, stimulate ideas, organize, and provide the technical expertise and tools that our Impact Initiative teams need to get the job done. These collective efforts should be thought of like any business project: they should have a solid business plan; they should have a rigorous monitoring and evaluation component; they should have concrete and specific targets; and they need to have a world-class communications plan that will ensure knowledge is shared and inspire others to replicate our work and continually move to a higher level.

» Questions or comments? Send us feedback about the new strategy.

Q: How do you determine what these teams of businesses, NGOs, governments, and partners should focus on? What determines the “impact initiative” agenda?
A: Good ideas can come from any place and we don’t want to create a system or a process that’s so rigid that we miss strategically important opportunities. Having said that, we do feel that one of the things that we are best positioned to do is to bring our companies together with international partners, with local partners and governments to talk about the needs and the gaps that are not being well served. By doing this, we don’t duplicate other people’s efforts and reinvent the wheel; instead, we look for the sweet spot, if you will, where business can come in and fill a critical need, and do so in a strategically important and effective way—to make a real difference in the lives of people on the ground.

Q: GBC’s membership is very diverse—not just in terms of industry and region but also in terms of degree of involvement in this fight. How do you reconcile that?
A: If you look at a company, a multibillion dollar company with large workforces in Africa, for example, and you compare that to a hedge fund in midtown Manhattan that focuses on the U.S. and other developed countries, their needs are very different and their interest levels are very different. In one case, there’s a real bottom line issue at stake—that’s the health and productivity of the workforce and the broader health and vitality of the surrounding community.

In contrast, with the hedge fund in midtown Manhattan, they’re interested in showing solidarity. They have a connection to the broader global community, but they don’t necessarily have a direct or immediate bottom line concern.

So we look at each of our member companies on their own terms—understand what their needs are, what their exposure is, what their connection to the issues or communities might be—and then help them develop a strategy for themselves, and help them develop a workplan for the next 12 or 24 months, help them understand what kind of targets they should be setting for their own programs, and what kind of tools need to be in place in order to measure their progress. We understand that a cookie-cutter approach isn’t going to work. So we try to tailor our engagement with each company on its own terms.

Q: You’ve said that the future can look very different with respect to the pandemics.
A: Right. If our grandchildren ask us twenty years from now where we were when people were dying and what did we do to keep the next generation HIV negative: “Did you do what you could? Did you use every resource you could muster?” If they ask that question and we don’t have an answer, I think it’s going to be a sad day. I’d much rather that the next generation ask us, “How did you win that fight?”

» Questions or comments? Send us feedback about the new strategy.