RIP Bob Shapiro: Lessons From The Bio-Backlash

How tickling this shark didn’t work—and what I learned in the process

It’s hard today to recall the revulsion that GM foods triggered in many Europeans

As it happens, I liked Bob Shapiro, whose obituary appears in The (London) Times today. Having seen that obit, I then Googled my way to the New York Times obituary, which is both better and has the virtue of being accessible.

A remarkable man, by any standards, Bob played folk music with Joan Baez and gave pro-bono legal support to people like Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. But his experiences during the “Biotech Backlash” of the 1990s underscore the perils of pioneering new markets.

I have covered that “but” in some detail across books like Cannibals With Forks (1997), The Chrysalis Economy (2001) and Tickling Sharks (2024), among other things drawing on an after-the-fact I interview I did with Bob, to try to understand why Monsanto had been unable to hear our warnings about the growing resistance to biotechnology—framed, among other things, as “Frankenfoods”—in Europe.

The fact that I liked the man (who encouraged one-and-all to call him Bob) may seem to be irrelevant here, but if you make a living tickling sharks, it helps to have at least some sympathy with at least some the sharks you are trying to tickle.

And when Bob, as the then CEO of Monsanto, tried to engage my then company, SustainAbility, back in the mid-Nineties, it was a key factor in my decision to engage. He also proved to be one of the most thoughtful CEOs I have ever worked with.

“Sustainability” comes in different wavelengths

But after eighteen months of work, we unilaterally decided to resign—after consulting with our team and Council—and did so publicly.

One result was that when I was invited in by Bill Ford of the Ford Motor Company some months after the resignation, his second question to me explored the question of what it would take, if we did develop a relationship with Ford, for us to get to the point of wanting to resign it.

One problem on the Monsanto front, at least in my mind, was that Bob may have thought that he was fully aligned with the growing need to deliver sustainability—but pursued his biotech vision way beyond where many sustainability advocates were comfortable.

Because biotech potentially enabled us to cut water, energy and (critically) pesticide usage in crop production, he thought that products like glyphosate (a Monsanto product aka Roundup) were automatically “sustainable.” It also aligned with the growing interest in replacing “atoms” (or materials) with “bits” (or information).

He was early to spot the value of “no-till” farming methods (good in terms of soil health and stability) but chose to ignore the fact that some people were very far from comfortable with the fact that no-till approaches often depend on Roundup, which has since suffered an extremely turbulent market ride.

When Bayer, which I had also worked with at different points over the decades, later acquired Monsanto, the resulting litigation caused a massive dent in the German company’s financial bottom line—and in its reputation. Bayer’s view of recent events is covered here. Whereas an alternative view can be found here.

Either way, the issue for Bayer is very unlikely to go away any time soon. Indeed, the company has just warned that it may stop making the product unless it is protected from future litigation.

The back story

The back story of how Bob turned up at Monsanto, having previously been at Searle, where he had led the charge with the massively successful low-calorie sweetener NutraSweet, is nicely summarized by the New York Times:

Searle was bought by Monsanto in 1985. Mr. Shapiro was named president of the parent company in 1993 and chief executive in 1995, as Monsanto transitioned from mostly manufacturing chemicals to making drugs and genetically modified seeds, fertilizer and food additives.

Mr. Shapiro and his colleagues insisted that biotechnology products created by the company reduced the need for pesticides and weed control, expanded the food supply and reduced the amount of land needed to farm.

When Mr. Shapiro became Monsanto’s chief executive, “he carried the company’s already serious commitment to biotechnology to a whole new level, both psychologically and financially,” Rachel Schurman and William A. Munro wrote in “Fighting for the Future of Food: Activists Versus Agribusiness in the Struggle Over Biotechnology” (2010).

At the time, we were involved in this debate in several ways, and you might say on several sides, among other things working closely with Greenpeace on its Greenpeace Business series of conferences. As the NYT obituary notes:

In a video address to the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace in 1999, Mr. Shapiro acknowledged: “Our confidence in this technology and our enthusiasm for it has, I think, widely been seen, and understandably so, as condescension or indeed arrogance. Because we thought it was our job to persuade, too often we forgot to listen.”

What has corporate governance got to do with environmentalists?

Looking back, our stakeholder work was an attempt by Bob and Monsanto to listen, but in the end they couldn’t afford to hear what we then told them.

No question, there was also a clash of ideologies. At one point in Cannibals With Forks, I recalled one startled Monsanto executive asking me: “What has corporate governance got to do with environmentalists?” And I would later have an even more energetic exchange with a top corporate lawyer at Ford.

I wonder what both lawyers, if still alive and kicking, will have made of the subsequent ESG movement? I suspect that both would have been Trump voters.

Looking back, what had first attracted people like me to Bob’s way of thinking was a Harvard Business Reviewprofile which seemed to signal a profound shift in Monsanto’s thinking, from pollution prevention to sustainable development. “Businesses grounded in the old model will become obsolete and die,” he was quoted as saying.

And then he went on to say:

At Monsanto, we’re trying to invent some new businesses around the concept of environmental sustainability. We may not know exactly what those businesses will look like, but we’re willing to place some bets because the world cannot avoid needing sustainability in the long run.

He underscored the reality that market and corporate transformations demand cultural shifts. “Someone asked me recently,” he said, “whether this was a top-down exercise or a bottom-up exercise?” His reply:

Those don’t sound very helpful concepts to me. This is about us. What do we want to do? Companies aren’t machines any more. We have thousands of independent agents trying to self-coordinate because it is in their interest to do so.”

Some years after our resignation from our Monsanto contract, I approached Bob to see whether he was willing to discuss what had gone wrong—and why? His friendly, candid and thoughtful responses were included in my 2001 book, The Chrysalis Economy.

Bayer’s acquisition of Monsanto was one of those “are-you-really-really-sure” stories

Changing the cast of characters

When we began to exchange, Bob’s first question to me was why I had felt it necessary to resign? Why, he wondered, hadn’t I talked to him before abandoning all hope for Monsanto?

The answer was that I had flown to the company’s St Louise headquarters precisely to see him—and warn him that we thought his company was hurtling into a brick wall in Europe. But as I arrived, I was told that he had been called away to brief Wall Street analysts on the just-announced collapse in Monsanto’s merger plans with American Home Products.

Understandable, but a diary conflict that powerfully underscored the difficulties that even the best-intentioned CEOs experience in trying to keep on top of their sustainability agendas.

Instead, I was passed on to Hugh Grant (another one), who then headed Monsanto’s global food business. Indeed, my decision to have SustainAbility resign was triggered by this very exchange, where Grant (who would later become Chairman & CEO) proved to know little or nothing about our work.

What price Bob’s “This is about us” comment referenced above?

Nor was I the only one who had lost faith in Monsanto’s transformation process. Paul Hawken, then of the US Natural Step Foundation, was another. “Both you and Paul reached a set of pessimistic conclusions about what ‘Monsanto’ was,” Bob lamented, “how it thought and what it was likely to do.”

A strategic mistake?

He went on to explain his view in a way that I think many business leaders aiming for “transformation” could still learn from:

Those conclusions, as far as I could tell, were based largely on contact with Monsanto people who were thinking and behaving in ways that were inconsistent with what I had declared to be Monsanto’s policy. I know there a few people like that. There were also a great many others whose hearts and commitments were in the right place.

The problem, Bob went on to say, may have been that you and others (including some people within the company) may have assumed (a) that I knew what some of our people were saying and doing and (b) that I must therefore agree with them. What may have been apparent was that, on this front, as on several others, I was trying to create radical change in Monsanto. To do that, I had to get out in front of the organization to inspire those why were ready to be inspired—and to confront those who preferred the old ways.

In all these areas, I expected—and got—resistance. But this approach worked pretty well when I was able to get good information as to how things were going. I was often able to change people’s behaviors or, when necessary, to change the cast of characters. But when I didn’t get good feedback as to resistance or inappropriate behavior, I obviously wasn’t in a position to do much about it.

All true, of course. But perhaps Bob’s experience underscores the need for business leaders involved in transformation initiatives to constantly reach out to all those involved—and to invite views that might not otherwise make it through the corporate hierarchy?

So, I asked him whether embracing sustainable development had been a strategic mistake? “I don’t think so,” he said:

The logic is still compelling: one way or another, global demand for sustainable technologies (e.g. information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology) must and will translate into economic imperatives. I don’t think it was a mistake to try to help develop some of these technologies nor a mistake to say that was what we were up to.

I will confess, however, that at the time I didn’t understand the extent to which a corporation with the audacity to reject the idea that there’s a fundamental inconsistency between sustainability and profits would enrage parts of the NGO community.

No corporate despoilers, no need for NGOs?

The interview went on in some detail, as described in The Chrysalis Economy, but one thing was clear. Bob, unlike me, saw NGOs as terrified that if business got onto the right side of history, they (the NGOs) would lose their raison d’être. Indeed, as he put it, “no corporate despoilers, no need for NGOs.”

There may be something to this, but I think the problem was much more fundamental. Different definitions of sustainability were in play, including what some called “weak” and “strong” versions.

In fact, some 20 years later, the reason why I attempted the “product recall” for my triple bottom line concept, again through the Harvard Business Review, was that I saw an ongoing dilution of strong definitions of both sustainability and the triple bottom line by weaker ones.

When, toward the end of our exchange, I asked Bob what he would do differently knowing what he now knew, he considered the question, then replied:

If there was a next time, I’d have a much earlier dialogue with a wide range of interested parties of interested parties in the scientific, academic, governmental and NGO communities.

As you know, Monsanto did tend to assume that if we simply followed the official regulatory processes and provided the required scientific evidence demonstrating safety, and so on, that society at large would respect the decisions arrived at through these processes. In most parts of the world, on most issues, that assumption holds true.

So, another thing business leaders aiming for transformation must recall, or learn, is to learn from any previous mistakes—their own or those made by others in other areas. As I also knew, having been tangentially involved in that saga too, Monsanto had made precisely the same mistake with its launch of recombinant bovine somatrotopin (BST), aka bovine growth hormone, in Europe.

They believed the lawyers who insisted that all would be well on the night—that they knew how to fix Brussels.

The Times obituary, which had caught my eye this morning, ended with Bob being quoted as follows: There’s going to have to be a new balance struck.” Indeed. But that new balance requires all parties to align their transformed positions with emerging global realities, not simply shave a few corners off their existing, entrenched positions.

Some lessons learned

Clearly, it’s too late to dig further into Bob’s own views, but here are some conclusions I now draw based on our join experience and shared exchanges. (And it may also be worth noting here that he cleared the text for the 2011 book.)

1. Don’t believe everything your lawyers tell you about how to get new products and technologies into the market.

2. Be very sure that your understanding of any emergent agenda you choose to embrace is shared by those pioneering and championing it. The best way to persuade people is not to bulldoze them, but to listen first to what they think and have to say—and to understand properly what you hear in the process.

3. Beware of overclaiming about internal consensus when external stakeholders could encounter very different perspectives and realities in their interactions with your organization.

4. Ensure that communications with your strategic change partners are active and continuous, rather than passive and episodic. Be prepared to hear and respond to challenging inputs.

5. Don’t let the technology run away with you. Bob often conflated new technologies (among them information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology) with sustainability. Big mistake, potentially. Huge.

6. Learn from your mistakes. If, like the Brazilian mining company Vale, you have a dam burst that kills many people, you have no right to claim that a later and much bigger dam burst was a “Black Swan.”

7. Whatever technology you are promoting, beware stock market expectations and valuations. When I asked Bob why he and his team couldn’t hear what we were trying to tell them, he said that “Wall Street multiples”—and the resulting market valuations—had locked them into certain pathways that they simply could not shift in time.

8. As an external change catalyst, don’t assume that a leader who thinks strategically sees the same future world you do, whatever they may have said in media like the Harvard Business Review.

9. And if you are trying to drive transformation in a business or market from outside, beware of assuming that just because you are impressed by a leader, they have the will and ability to drive the changes you aspire to.

Markets can be harsh, even brutal, task mistresses—particularly when they are blind to emerging systemic risks and opportunities.

So, go in peace, Bob. You tried. Your heart was very much in the right place. Whatever the outcome, it was good to share some parts of the journey.

And thank you, too, for your rare candor on what it takes to be a leader in tomorrow’s markets.

John Elkington is Founder & Global Ambassador at Volans. His personal website can be accessed here. His evolving Countercurrent website, which now hosts his writing and speaking activities, can be found here.

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