CSR is spreading around the world, but in different guises
“THE British
brand of corporate responsibility is seen as the gold standard,” says Julia
Cleverdon, chief executive of Business in the Community, which for 25 years has
been championing the cause in
By contrast,
when American firms get serious about CSR—Wal-Mart on
sustainability, for example—the execution is generally impressive. The Japanese,
for their part, see the roots of CSR in the
traditions of Japanese business, such as
shobaido (the way of doing business) and
shonindo (the way of the
merchant), and Japanese firms pay a lot of attention to the environment and to
relations with local communities. The lead on CSR
could even shift from the rich world to the big emerging markets, each with its
own traditions and priorities.
For global
companies this means that a one-size-fits-all approach to corporate
responsibility may not work. What is right for Europe may not be appropriate for
Do it right
Jan 17th 2008
Corporate
responsibility is largely a matter of enlightened self-interest
THE
CSR industry, as we have seen, is in rude health.
Company after company has been shaken into adopting a CSR
policy: it is almost unthinkable today for a big global corporation to be
without one. Climate change has added further impetus. Investors are taking an
ever greater interest. New and surprising sorts of co-operation are springing
up: with NGOs, with competitors, with other
companies. The message is moving across supply chains and spreading around the
world. Illustration by Ian Whadcock
What has helped
to make all this possible is globalisation—which has also been responsible for
much of the general wealth-creation through which companies, let it not be
forgotten, make their main contribution to society. A sudden bout of
protectionism, which is by no means out of the question, could put it at risk.
So activists who press for various forms of protection should be careful what
they wish for. An economic recession would also be bad news for the
CSR industry, parts of which might be seen as a
luxury companies could live without.
But assuming
that corporate goodness continues to flourish, how will things evolve? The next
wave, some believe, will be one of disruptive innovation, featuring a new breed
of “social entrepreneur” that will take over from the established big companies
as the driving force. Mr Benioff of
salesforce.com reckons that social
entrepreneurs have “cracked the code” of the next generation of corporate
responsibility: it will be for-profit and self-sustaining. Mr Benioff himself
plumbed philanthropy into his company right from the start by committing 1% of
equity, profits and employees' time as a contribution to the community.
The
extraordinary wealth-creation of recent years has produced a large number of
extremely rich people, many of them from the software and finance industries,
who are interested in a new kind of philanthropy: a smart, capitalist kind. It
involves using money for maximum impact by investing in potentially disruptive
technologies (in the environmental field, for example) and in social enterprises
that can be scaled up as required.
This kind of
enterprise has several advantages over established big business. It has focus,
rather than being a sideline, as CSR often is for
large companies. It involves people who are using their own money and are
interested in measurable results: “real good” not “feelgood”. It brings
financial rigour as well as an appetite for risk, and it can teach the big
companies a thing or two about how to measure the success of social investments.
|
