“[I am] enormously impressed with Apple CEO Tim Cook for his strong words on climate change deniers, and demanding business should have benefits for people and the planet, beyond just profit,” Richard Branson blogs for Virgin.
“Conservative think tank the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) – Apple shareholders – criticised Cook for pursuing sustainability programs, questioned the impact of combating climate change on the bottom line, and demanded return on investment on all environmental initiatives,” Branson writes. “Tim took a crucial stand: he told shareholders who oppose Apple’s commitment to sustainability to ‘get out of the stock.'”
“He also commented on how doing business sustainably can actually improve the bottom line. This is something we strongly believe in at The B Team, which is working hard to encourage better ways of doing business for the wellbeing of people and the planet,” Branson writes. “We wholeheartedly support him.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: For the sake of accuracy, what Cook actually said was reported by The Loop‘s Jim Dalrymple last week:
No, I wouldn’t be willing to say that because we do things for other reasons than profit motives. We do things because they are right and just and that is who we are. That’s who we are as a company. I don’t… when I think about human rights, I don’t think about an ROI. When I think about making our products accessible for the people that can’t see or to help a kid with autism, I don’t think about a bloody ROI, and by the same token, I don’t think about helping our environment from an ROI point of view. It’s not how I look at it. My simple point was if you did only look at it in that way for the Maiden data center, the same decisions would have been made and so there are cases where you can see these two spheres connecting but I’m not going to say that that’s all I’m going to do by any means. I don’t look at it that way. Just to be very straightforward with you, if that’s a hard line for you, if you only want me to make things, make decisions that have a clear ROI, then you should get out of the stock just to be plain and simple… Thank you. I think it’s so important to remember that the Apple brand stands for something and you can’t take each piece of it and say, “This has a 20% ROI and this has a 15, and you shouldn’t have given this $100 million to education,” and all this kind of stuff. That’s not the way we look at it. It’s not who we are as people.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “AlanAudio” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Why Tim Cook doesn’t care about ‘the bloody ROI’ – March 7, 2014
If Tim Cook does not care about the ‘bloody ROI’, does he care about the bloody stock price? – March 4, 2014
Apple’s Tim Cook and his dilemma over sustainability and climate change – March 3, 2014
Tim Cook gets angry over shareholder proposal for environmental spending transparency, says those who disagree should get out of Apple stock – March 1, 2014
