The challenge of niceness

I've a personal, relatively new challenge that many of you might have also experienced. After over a year of blogging for Justmeans on sustainable development, the past few months have brought several opportunities to blog about CSR and international development via my live blogging at various conferences. Through that, I've had the opportunity to meet and slowly build relationships with individuals working at a variety of companies, producing a wide variety of products. And in the process, I'm confronting a new challenge: how to interact with companies who are producing products that I personally disagree with and would never consume (and would actively discourage others to buy). Especially when the actual people that I'm interfacing with are, well, great. Really great. The kind of people I'd want to have over for dinner, watch my kids (if I had them), talk about future career choices.  They are not sales people. They are working to make these big companies whose products and practices impact people across Africa, Asia and Latin America (the majority of the world's population) at least a little bit better. To use the money and the practices  from major corporations for good - from philanthropy (which is, as we know, not enough) to embedding sustainability into the strategy of a company to creating the social impact assessments that will effect everything else. When we talk about doing projects together, I want to do it - because I see how that project could make a difference and, importantly, because I like them. But are they the cute tiger cubs that hide their mother's ferociousness?

I can't fully get past the product. I'm not just talking about Phillip Morris and Big Tabacco. I'm clear I'm not going to work with them. But take a more complicated, less 'dangerous' product. Take the example of Coke. Big company. Huge impact on international development.  Coke, more than most other organisations, can get its product into every place imaginable. It is hard to find a village in Africa that doesn't have a coke bottle strewn besides it; hard to find a town that doesn't sell coke. Could international development learn from Coke? You bet. From delivery systems to marketing, Coke's capacity is better than most NGOs - including disaster and conflict organisations. And Coke is aiming to be seen as a company that makes a difference and ensures a positive contribution to sustainable development, and many of those ventures are good. If it lobbied governments in the West to get the right money to the right places for climate adaptation (or water, or food security, or any other issue that does, legitimately, effect its sustainability), Western governments might very well listen.

But at the end of the day,  Coke is still Coke. A sugary, caffeine-enhanced substance that is hardly nutritious. Even if one ignore's its past history in international development, the product itself is one I actively try to tell my friends (especially young people) not to drink. I won't have much impact - drinking coke is cool, and my little voice telling my friends not to drink it because it is not good for their body won't do much. But I've seen women farmers in Western Kenya sell their cow's milk in order to buy coke - loosing the valuable nutrition that comes with milk for the addictive substance of refined sugar and caffeine.  For a long time, my response to Coke was to avoid them. I don't drink the stuff. But as I interact with them, I find myself more than willing to work with them - because I can't ignore them, they are too big and too powerful and the impact that I could make by working with Coke is far greater than ignoring them. And the people I've met there are so.... nice. Smart, funny, interesting and a pleasure to work with. Of course, so were the majority of armies who have committed many of the worse atrocities in the world.  But is this taking away my own integrity? How do others dance this dance?