Green Mountain Coffee Case Study Essay

Conscientious capitalism underscores the importance of aligning stakeholders’: employees, customers, shareholders, suppliers, community, and the environment, interests into the company’s decisions by refocusing on purpose instead of profit, which incidentally results in a successful bottom line (Sacks, 2009). The operating philosophy of conscientious capitalism incorporates three assumptions: interconnectedness, holistic wealth, and traversing time through multiple generations. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR) has integrated this ethical continuum into their operational strategy, which has led to their current success. Interconnectedness GMCR embodies interconnectedness through their annual summit meetings that employ an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) 4-D model and through their organization’s cultural commitment. At the summit meetings, multiple internal and external company stakeholders convene to strategically plan for the future, assess stakeholder value and contributions to success, as well as reflect on company and industry historical trends, all which promote the positive core of GMCR (Neville, 2008). Interconnectedness is also evident by the embodiment of GMCR’s inaugural five core beliefs: a passion for coffee (recreating Stiller’s first experience of the perfect cup of coffee), financial performance, a destination workplace, ethics, and commitment to social responsibility (Neville, 2008). By engaging the stakeholders, especially with annual trips to the â€Å"origin†, GMCR creates a unified allegiance to social and ethical responsibility that produces positive ethical and financial outcomes for the company. Holistic wealth GMCR epitomizes holistic wealth in the form of value-based management (VBM), which can be defined as an integrated management control system that measures, encourages, and supports the creation of net worth beyond capital accumulation and profit (Beck & Britzelmaier, 2011). One way that GMCR uses VBM to create net worth is through flexible cash flow models provided to coffee farmers. The model entails providing interest-free pecuniary resources to coffee growers preceding the harvest, which secures perpetual payments for the suppliers, invariable income for the farmer’s family, and an uninterrupted coffee flow for GMCR (Neville, 2008). Another example of VBM is GMCR’s utilization of Fair Trade initiatives and family farming contracts that employ direct buying agreements granting farmers fair prices for their crops. By employing these types of social standards as a tradeoff for long-term sustainability, GMCR makes all stakeholders feel valued, which in turn increases their passion for productivity and subsequently GMCR’s bottom line. Traversing time through multiple generations With a global focus on agricultural replenishment and perpetuity, the common emphasis for businesses in this industry has been extending the vivaciousness of crops across multiple generations. Given that 30 coffee trees are required to provide one, three time per day coffee drinker with enough coffee and combined with the fact that the trees have to remain viable for at least 10 years to yield a financially profitable crop, GMCR’s commitment to organic food processes promotes to the concept of multiple generations of time, allowing farmers to pass their crops through generations (Neville, 2008). By trading a traditional business paradigm for one centered on an all-inclusive value-based continuum that encompasses interconnected systems of farmers, stakeholders, land, and visible and invisible time, GMCR is a prime example of how conscientious capitalism can stimulate corporate and financial success.