Ice Cream Social: The Struggle for The Soul of Ben and Jerry's

Reading Write-up

Ice Cream Social

The Struggle for the Soul of Ben & Jerry’s

Juan G. Cartajena

MGMT 535E International Management

Eller Evening MBA

University of Arizona

Reading Write-up  – Ice Cream Social: The Struggle for the Soul of Ben & Jerry’s

Strategy

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield founded Ben & Jerry’s with the idea of becoming a strong socially responsible organization that would push the environmental agenda using their unique approach to doing business.  Ben and Jerry believe in what they called the “Three part mission”; Social Mission, Economic Mission, and Product mission.  The very particular thing about their business is that all three components of their mission are to be equally important. They aspire to provide the best ice cream using the best ingredients while operating on a sustainable financial basis of profitable growth in order to be able to be able to play a central role in the society by initiating innovative ways to improve the quality of life locally, nationally and internationally.  However, through the years Ben and Jerry went through several different management eras.  A first period (1978-1993) led by the Founders heavily focused on the product and social mission, a second period (1994-1999) led by Bob Holland and Perry Odak mostly focused on the economic mission, a third period (2000-2004) led by Yves Couette focused on the social and economic mission and a final period (2005-2010) led by Walt Freese focused again on the social and economic mission (Bayle-Cordier, Mirvi & Moingeon, 2006).  Through all those changes it became evident that Ben & Jerry’s vision of being a leader in corporate social responsibility was not a matter of only economics, product quality or social identity.  Special focused on any of the individual elements of the mission would greatly affect the other two.  In simple words, if the product lacks of quality, there are no sales, which equals no resources for social activism. To be able to operate under high environmental and social standards the product and economic areas should be very well balanced.  I believe that in the particular case of Ben & Jerry’s the lack of expertise in the financials, process and planning departments during the early days proved to be the major obstacle to their social and environmental dreams.

Innovation

Ben Cohen was definitively the main character behind what makes Ben & Jerry’s a pioneer in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) arena.  His true passion and dislike of the mainstream way of doing business created this powerful identity in front of consumers and inside Ben & Jerry’s that despite the number of failures, nobody could ever say that at any point he betrayed his mission, his speech.  Through the years the two aspects that Ben Cohen remained fully committed were the product quality and the social aspect of his company.  Unfortunately when that passion for innovation, extreme attention to quality, and wanting to change the world are not in sync with the financials all three elements of the mission ended up suffering.  I would not say that having Ben in charge was at all a mistake, but he should have remained connected to the social and innovation portion of the business and let others to take care of the financials and processes.  Ben had no idea what was going on financially within the company (Edmonson, 2014).  His obsession for micromanagement and habit of constantly change his mind were the main reasons to, for the first time in 1994, bring professional managers to the company.  An experimenter can quickly go from being the main asset to the company to being the main threat.  Building a strong well balanced leadership team was the constant battle inside Ben and Jerry’s, a battle that ultimate they lost and led to the Unilever acquisition in 2000.