How Young People Are Changing Multinationals

Originally posted on eurorscgpr.com/blog.

“Multinational corporations have too much power.” It’s a meme that has been around since the Vietnam era, when bra-burning, festival-going hippies chanted about the evil deeds of “the corporations.” Today, however, it’s no radical fringe expressing the view, and it’s no simplistic view they’re expressing.

In the newly released Global Youth Study, 64 percent of the 23-to-28-year-old respondents answered that “global corporations have too much power,” putting the view squarely within the mainstream. Young people from all corners of the globe also believe there’s an ethics gap in the way multinational corporations behave.

This means the opinion—which today has solidified into a value—is not to be ignored. Because not only are these young people powerful voices within their communities, but they’re also consumers. The age range of these respondents represents a large segment of the millennial generation (roughly, the people born between 1981 and 2000), a group estimated to earn more than $200 billion a year, of which they spend about $127 billion in the U.S. alone.

With this generation’s population vastly outstripping that of its predecessor, Generation X, it’s not just spending power but also ability to influence others that matters, especially as they’re armed with the power of social media and narrowcast communications. While the anti-corporate effusions of the Flower Power generation could have been chalked up to negative and irrelevant ranting, the exhortations of today’s youth for companies to clean up their acts is socially significant and underpinned by ethical meaning.

Eighty-one percent of young people from the One Young World Global Youth Study report that corporations “must behave in an ethical way.” With the belief that multinationals possess excessive power, these young people have issued the injunction to principled behavior because they believe companies currently don’t behave ethically enough.

With well over half (56 percent) of those surveyed saying global business “can connect with people on a local level,” there is a sturdy notion that change is not only possible, and badly needed, but also that the situation is reversible.

The inaugural summit of One Young World, the global leadership forum bringing together hundreds of young people from all the world’s 192 countries, in addition to such world leaders as Kofi Annan, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus to help guide the proceedings, is a firm representation of the change that’s already occurring.

At One Young World, young delegates representing their home countries will debate and discuss major global challenges, such as corporate social responsibility. But, crucially, the summit itself is made possible through the sponsorship and efforts of companies like HP, Starbucks, Hilton and American Express. In a sense, these firms see the writing on the wall and are responding, transforming themselves from “multinational corporations” into global companies.

But, as many of the One Young World delegates can attest, the change is not just cosmetic. Young people are increasingly calling the shots as rising executives within global firms. They see an opportunity to improve business and the quality of their work environments, and they’re making that change happen.

Delegates such as Gabriela de la Garza Tijerina, who works for PepsiCo as an environmental sustainability manager in Mexico, are making such changes directly. And as young people increasingly sift out products not just with price and quality in mind, but also based on ethical metrics they apply to brands, they’re manifesting their values in the real world.

The One Young World Inaugural Summit, which takes place in London on Feb. 8-10, 2010, will provide a place for this movement toward global corporate responsibility to coalesce. The proceedings of the plenary session devoted to this topic will be streamed (along with the other half-dozen sessions) on oneyoungworld.com. The results of the Global Youth Study—an extensive 38-country online survey of 15,844 people age 23 to 28 fielded by SurveyShack in association with YouGovStone between July 2008 and December 2009—will feed into the summit.

With so much of the world passionately focused on global corporate responsibility, the upcoming debate and vote on a resolution by representatives of the world’s youth is a seminal moment in the world’s social history that’s not to be missed.