Why Conduct Strategic Corporate Research?
For much of our history, unions rarely conducted research to prepare for bargaining or organizing drives. Employers were relatively stable, with simple corporate structures. As you can see from the green chart, unions bargained with direct decision-makers, and if talks were unsuccessful, they went out on strike, restricted output, and perhaps utilized a boycott. For example, in the Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, workers struck and by keeping scabs from working, they stopped production and any flow of resources into the firm, which ultimately brought the company to the bargaining table.
But firms today look very different than their counterparts in the 19th and early 20th century. With multiple facilities and complex corporate structures and financing, it is rarely possible to win organizing or bargaining campaigns with simple strikes. As the labor movement rebuilt from the wreckage of deindustrialization and union-busting of the 1980s, it developed more sophisticated ways of fighting back through comprehensive strategic campaigns.
The blue chart outlines the basic structure of a strategic campaign. First, it looks at a broader set of decision-makers far beyond just the CEO. Today, a decision-maker could be a private equity firm or a major stockholder. For example, Hilton Hotels is no longer controlled by the Hilton family but by the private equity group Blackstone, who is the decision maker.
Because today’s firms are so large and complex, strategic campaigns don’t focus on the whole company; instead we look to identify a firm’s profit center and growth plan. Our leverage is strongest on the portions of the firm that generate the most profit. For example, in the campaign to organize Wire Cutter, workers discovered that the majority of the firm’s profit came from links to the products.
In addition, applying leverage on the company’s growth plan has an oversized impact, given the growth plan’s highly public face and the fact that CEOs and management are often evaluated on their ability to execute it. For example, in our research on Apple, we identified that the growth plan is not to sell more iPhones and iPads, but to focus on selling services where the profit margin is much higher.
Finally, the chart identifies the importance of key relationships or secondary targets that firms need to execute their growth plans and grow their profits. Unions have been successful in leveraging these secondary targets, such as suppliers, customers, regulators, and others.
To identify decision-makers, profit centers, growth plans, and secondary targets, it is clear that we need to conduct extensive research on our employers. So let’s get started.
Don’t Start With General Internet Searching
While we are all tempted to jump on the computer and begin looking for information on our target company, general internet searching is a very inefficient way to conduct corporate research. First, the amount of information is overwhelming. Second, search engines direct us to sites that are the most popular, not necessarily the sites which provide us with the information that we are looking for. And finally, you may end up on websites that are not trustworthy or curated.
Start With a Framework to Direct Your Research
Before you start searching for information, it is important to first identify what kinds of information you’re looking for. The image to the left represents our basic research framework, which helps you identify the information you need to build a strategic campaign and allows you to develop a more sophisticated understanding of your firm.
Ok, there is a lot going on here. But don’t panic! Take a minute, grab a coffee or your water bottle, and let’s walk through it together.
First, the chart places the 24 questions at three different levels. The questions on the top allow you to understand the command and control of the firm – the management, board and stockholders. Moving down is the operational level, which helps you to understand how the product(s) or service is produced by workers and sold to customers or clients. Finally, at the bottom of the chart are the outside stakeholders. Corporations operate in a larger milieu. They are beholden to regulators like the EPA and OSHA. They might make political donations. They impact the communities where they are located.
But this website doesn’t just provide a framework for your research – we also provide you with where to get the information you need. Once you have identified what kind of company your target is and move to the appropriate part of the website, you will find all 24 questions. We provide sub-questions to look in more detail on each question and then provide links to where you can find this information. No random hunt and peck web searching is required. Based on many years of doing strategic corporate research, we don’t overwhelm you with a long list of links, but provide just the key website where you will find information quickly.
In the resource section, we also provide a Google Doc that includes all 24 questions and sub-questions. As you begin your research, deposit all the information in the Google Doc, which is a great way to keep track of your work. And if you work in a team – which we strongly suggest you do – everyone on the team can have access to the document at once.
Note that the twenty-four boxes, each representing a line of questioning, are numbered and indicate the order in which to proceed. Starting with the most basic information, working through the questions in order will provide a scaffold on which you will build insight into the firm and its operations.
You might be asking yourself at this point, “Why so many questions? And do we really need to answer them all?” Our answer is, “Ideally, yes!” If we want to build a comprehensive strategic campaign that can win against today’s employers, it is not enough to simply research the CEO, dig up some dirt about the company’s misdeeds, and offer a couple financial statistics. We need information that will help us leverage our power against the employer in ways that will have the biggest impact.
At the same time, we recognize that many campaigns do not have the time or the resources to conduct comprehensive research on all twenty-four questions. Our recommendation is to consider all of them and provide information on as many as you can. While compiling information on all twenty-four questions may seem daunting, with a strong team including a number of rank-and-file workers, it is surprising how quickly it can go.
We and the activists we work with are always surprised by key insights revealed using this framework. By methodically looking at every aspect of the firm and its operations, we remove the blinders of our assumptions and start to see the full picture. And any one of these insights may provide points of leverage that may surprise you.
So, move on to forming your research team, then identify your target, and get started with your research.