Ben W. Heineman, Jr, a writer at the Harvard Business Review, recently published an article on how and why corporations need a better approach to public policy.
In this article, he talks about how all companies that operate internationally face a striking challenge in dealing with public policy that is ever-chaging and ever-expanding.
To meet these challenges, according to Heineman, corporations need to replace their defensive, short-term “government relations” tactics, with strategic, forward-looking, balanced approaches.
"Too few are capable of advancing their private interests in a way that also advances genuine public interests, forging alliances beyond other corporate actors to promote genuine “public goods”” said Heineman.
The right approach, says Heineman, needs to start with the CEO’s explicit commitment to strategic and operational processes that include the important public policy dimension.
"The ultimate goal of this corporate approach to public policy is to promote corporate interests in a fashion that also advances the public interest — to create public goods, to balance public regulation and private governance and to eliminate free-riders — when market mechanisms alone are inadequate.” said Heineman.