Clean

Chapter 9CATALYZING SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH MULTI-STAKEHOLDER PARTNERSHIPS

Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.

—Michael Jordan ¹

As a member of the New York Stock Exchange, Ecolab enjoys certain privileges. One of those is access to the posh reception and meeting rooms at the exchange. On March 22, 2017 (World Water Day), Christophe Beck and Emilio hosted 65 of their largest customers, including BASF, Coca-Cola, Marriott, and Microsoft, to a half-day forum to announce and describe version 3.0 of Ecolab's Water Risk Monetizer (WRM), a tool that allowed customers to quantify the bottom-line implications of water quality and scarcity for their operations. In his opening remarks, Beck noted that this event represented a critical moment in water stewardship because it was now clear to the business community that water was not a free or taken-for-granted resource. It was a vital business issue; indeed, the top 150 global companies and their supply chains impacted one-third of global freshwater supplies.² Sustainable water management had moved from the backwater to the mainstream.

The ability to participate in, and lead, multi-stakeholder engagements – on display that day in 2017 – is the last of the five critical business processes through which Ecolab implements and achieves a sustainability advantage. (The other four processes include leadership throughout the organization, research and development and product solutions, mergers and acquisitions, ...