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Birth registration – considered a basic human right provided by government services – was still not working in many countries. One in four children worldwide is not registered. Yet, Zainab Siddiqui, head of sustainability at Telenor Pakistan, had a different idea. In 2013, she initiated the Digital Birth Registration Project in Pakistan in two provinces to replace the existing paper-based approach. Her entrepreneurial leadership was encouraged in Telenor, a global mobile network operator based in Norway, active in 8 markets with over 170 million subscribers. The company was an organization true to its original purpose of “promoting a country’s prosperity” – by “empowering societies and connecting its subscribers to what matters most.” What mattered most could be digital health, digital farming or digital banking services – several of the services that the company had launched over the years. Digital birth registration and its potential follow-on services – such as digital marriage certificates and digital driver’s licenses – were considered good not only for what matters most but also potentially for the bottom line. After several years of successful implementation of the project, Zainab considered how Telenor Pakistan could take on full responsibility for the service from the Pakistani government. How would the company prepare and position itself for the eventual negotiations with the government for this potential growth opportunity?

Better Cotton was founded in 2005 to set standards for cotton production, with a goal of facilitating ethical, environmental and development-friendly agricultural practices. As multiple players come under increasing pressure to address social and environmental issues across their supply chains, Better Cotton aims to engage all actors to work together. The Better Cotton Standard System was developed as a holistic approach to sustainable cotton production that addresses the three pillars of sustainability: environmental, social and economic. The organization works to build capacity by working with local partners to train cotton farmers worldwide in more sustainable farming practices that improve their livelihoods and protect and restore the environment. Its assurance model aims to balance scalability with cost effectiveness. Its Chain of Custody system matches supply and demand by tracing transactions throughout the supply chain. Better Cotton subscribes to a multi-stakeholder governance model, bringing stakeholders together to participate in dialogue, decision making and implementation of responses to joint problems. By seeking input from multiple types of actors involved in a question, the eventual consensual decision gains greater legitimacy, and it can be more effectively implemented than a response by any single actor. Multi-stakeholder governance requires balancing representation with the need for efficiency and effectiveness in developing and implementing strategy. The case allows for a discussion on the extent to which the BetterCotton governance model is aligned with its strategy and mission, and more broadly, how to design governance for multi-stakeholder organizations.

Formatted like a comic-strip, this case showcases how Firmenich achieved resilience and strong sustainability commitments thanks to its family ownership. The case investigates how family ownership spanning across four generations and 125 years, has influenced the company’s core values and brought a long-term perspective to its strategy, which allowed sustainability, diversity, and inclusion on the executives’ agenda many decades before its peers. The case concludes by illustrating how these core foundational values allowed Firmenich to weather the COVID-19 storm by prompting the organization to react very rapidly, in a display of strong resilience. Firmenich is the winner of the 2019 IMD-Pictet Sustainability in Family Business Award.