CSR International

Be the Change – But first Be Yourself

2012-02-07T07:52:00.000-08:00

By Dr Wayne Visser

Part of the Quest for CSR 2.0 Blog Series for CSR Wire

What do we know about the role of individuals as CSR change agents? Intuitively, we resonate with adages such as Gandhi's 'be the change you want to see in the world,' or Margaret Mead's famous quote: 'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever does.' But beyond these clichés, what do we really know about change in the context of CSR?

As part of my PhD research, I interviewed a range of CSR professionals – managers, consultants, academics and NGO representatives working on corporate social, environmental and ethical issues. As expected, I found that the desire to create change recurs as a consistent theme.

But the way in which CSR professionals make change happen, and the satisfaction they derive as a result, differs considerably.

Change Motivators

For some, as one might guess, values play an important role. In particular, corporate responsibility is seen as a way to align work with personal values. For example, one manager I interviewed says: 'It's the inner drive, it's the way I am put together, my value system, my belief system … it's my Christian belief, my ethical approach.' Another explains that it is important to have 'inspirational leadership and people who align with your value sets.'

For many CSR professionals, motivation comes from the fact that sustainability and responsibility are dynamic, complex and challenging concepts. 'The satisfaction is huge,” says one corporate responsibility manager, 'because there is no day that is the same when you get into your office. It's always changing, it's always different.' Another reflects that corporate responsibility 'painted a much bigger picture' and is 'just as holistic as you want it to be. It requires a far broader vision.'

These two factors – values alignment and the CSR concept – are fairly crosscutting motivators. However, it is also possible to distinguish four fairly distinctive types of CSR professionals, based on how they derive satisfaction from their work.

In practice, every individual draws on all four types, but the centre of gravity rests with one, representing the mode of operating in which that individual feels most comfortable, fulfilled or satisfied.

Four Types of CSR Change Agents

1. The Expert

Experts find their motivation though engaging with projects or systems, giving expert input, focusing on technical excellence, seeking uniqueness through specialisation, and pride in problem solving abilities.

To illustrate, one such CSR professional explains: 'There were a couple of projects that I did find very exciting … It was very exciting to get all the bits and pieces in place, then commission them and see them starting to work.' Another Expert says: 'I usually get that sense of meaning in work when I've finished a product, say like an Environmental Report and you see, geez I've really put in a lot and here it is. Or you have had a series of community consultations and you now have the results.'

2. The Facilitator

Common themes among Facilitators are the derivation of motivation from transferring knowledge and skills, focusing on people development, creating opportunities for staff, changing the attitudes or perceptions of individuals, and paying attention to team building.

For example, one such CSR professional says: 'If you enjoy working with people, this is a sort of functional role that you have direct interaction, you can see people being empowered, having increased knowledge, and you can see what that eventually leads to.' Another Facilitator explains: 'The part of my work that I've enjoyed most is training, where I get the opportunity to work with a group of people – to interact with people at a very personal level. You can see how things start to get clear for them, in terms of understanding issues and how that applies to what they do.'

3. The Catalyst

For Catalysts, motivation is associated with initiating change, giving strategic direction, influencing leadership, tracking organisational performance, and having a big picture perspective.

One such CSR professional claims: 'The type of work that I'm doing is … giving direction in terms of where the company is going. So it can become almost a life purpose to try and steer the company in a direction that you believe personally is right as well.' Another says: 'I like getting things changed. My time is spent trying to influence people. The real interesting thing is to try and get managing directors, plant managers, business leaders, and sales guys to think differently and to change what they do.'

4. The Activist

For Activists, motivation comes from being aware of broader social and environmental issues, feeling part of the community, making a contribution to poverty eradication, fighting for a just cause, and leaving a legacy of improved conditions in society.

One CSR professional says: 'It's also about the issue of being poor. It actually touches you. You see these people have been living in appalling conditions, the shacks, the drinking water is so dirty, or there's no running water at all, you see those kind of things, it hits you, and you think: What can you do?'

Another confesses: 'I think my purpose here is to help others in some way and leave a legacy for my kids to follow. I could leave a legacy behind where I actually set up a school or a campus for disadvantaged people, taking street kids out and doing something, building homes for single parents.'

Going Beyond the Business Case for CSR

One of the underlying messages of my CSR change agency research is that companies stand to gain a lot by going beyond the business case for CSR, by justifying sustainability and responsibility efforts on the basis of values – or by appealing to the deep satisfaction that working on CSR issues can inspire.

Taking this position – in addition to, rather than instead of, the business case – will enable companies to tap into a powerful source of motivation, namely the meaning that CSR professionals (and in all likelihood many other employees) derive from the alignment of values with work.

Best Governance Research of 2011 - Free Download

2012-01-25T03:23:00.000-08:00

This compilation includes 48 study/survey summaries. Register/login for the free download:

http://www.csrinternational.org/2012/01/25/best-governance-research-of-2011/

Dr Wayne Visser

CEO, CSR International

Best Environmental Research of 2011 - Free dowload

2012-01-25T03:21:00.000-08:00

This compilation includes 48 study/survey summaries. Register/login for the free download:

http://www.csrinternational.org/2012/01/19/best-environmental-research-of-2011/

Dr Wayne Visser

CEO, CSR International

Changing the World - One Leader at a Time

2012-01-18T08:10:00.000-08:00

By Dr Wayne Visser

Quest for CSR 2.0 Series No.12

We face a crisis of leadership. Our global challenges loom large and clear, but we seem to lack leaders who can make change happen at a scale and speed that match the size and urgency of the problems we face. In an attempt to understand this leadership impasse, I’ve done some research with the University of Cambridge’s Programme for Sustainability Leadership on how change happens. In this blog, I’ll briefly outline some of our conclusions.

Let’s start with what kind of change we’re talking about. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, observes that companies that went from being ‘good to great’ did not rely on revolutions, dramatic change programs or wrenching restructurings. ‘Rather, the process resembled relentlessly pushing a giant flywheel in one direction, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.’

So we’re talking about catalyzing and scaling up change. And for this change to be successful, leaders need to foster and entrench new values, culture, incentives, rules and resources. In Accenture and the UN Global Compact’s 2010 survey, 54 percent of CEOs felt that a cultural tipping point on sustainability is only a decade away—and 80 percent believe it will occur within 15 years, so perhaps we are nearing a moment of infectious change. Meanwhile, at the organizational level, leaders must catalyze change for sustainability through a suite of actions, including innovation, empowerment, accountability, closed-loop practices and collaboration.

We found that effective sustainability leaders are good at promoting creativity in business models, technology, products and services that address social and environmental challenges. Sustainability leaders also implement structures and processes for good governance, transparency and stakeholder engagement.

Accountability does not have to be all about structures and controls however. Collins believes great leaders foster a culture of discipline, saying “When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls.” According to Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of G.E., “Enron and 9/11 marked the end of an era of individual freedom and the beginning of personal responsibility. You lead today by building teams and placing others first. It’s not about you.”

The best sustainability leaders adopt principles of cradle-to-cradle production, internalizing externalities and extending these principles to the supply chain. Sustainability leaders also build formal cross-sector partnerships, as well as innovative and inclusive collaborative processes such as social networking (Web 2.0). Betty Sue Flowers, co-author of Presence, poses the challenge as a question, saying, “We know a lot about heroic action because that’s in the past of leadership. But how do you have leadership in groups across boundaries, multi-nationally?”

At the people level, leaders catalyze change for sustainability by providing a compelling vision, encouraging long term thinking, making strategic investments and promoting intergenerational equity. Immelt says “every leader needs to clearly explain the top three things the organization is working on. If you can’t, then you’re not leading well.”

Ray Anderson, the late CEO of Interface, saw this as a process of inclusion, saying, “For Interface, sustainability is broader than before: sustainability reaches out to embrace people, processes, products, place, the planet and profits—we now know that none can long be afforded allegiance at the expense of the others.”

Sustainability leaders have to deep knowledge and skills and provide opportunities and resources for appropriate action. This embraces Robert Greenleaf’s notion of servant leadership. He explains that “It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The best test is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?”

Transformational sustainability leaders also focus on creating a culture and structure that provides peer support and encouragement and recognizes achievement. Immelt says, “Today, it’s employment at will. Nobody’s here who doesn’t want to be here. So it’s critical to understand people, to always be fair, and to want the best in them.”

In the end, I believe the best leaders are effective storytellers. And they realize that we need a new collective story. As I wrote in Beyond Reasonable Greed, “each time the world changes – when civilizations rise and fall, when new scientific theories challenge our understanding of the universe, when technological innovation reinvents our lifestyle, when political revolution breaks down the old structures of society, or when a global crisis threatens to destroy our planet – humanity is forced to let go of some of its most cherished beliefs in order to create a new mythology to guide its collective psyche.”

We are at just such a fulcrum of change, and the beliefs we need to challenge and modify are many. Maybe it is our belief in the beneficence of the “invisible hand” of the market. Or our belief that a global political deal is all we need to solve the climate crisis. Or that that business has the power to act unilaterally in bringing about a more sustainable and responsible future.

If my experience of living through the political changes in South Africa has taught me anything, it is that change is systemic. It happens because of millions of small actions by millions of people all over the world, some coordinated, some diffuse. Yes, change also happens because of bold leadership, but it always needs an enabling environment, a society or an organization that is ready to change.

Change is something organic. It is worth remembering that the largest living thing in the world is a honey mushroom in Oregon – an interconnected fungus measuring 3.5 miles across. It is said to be 2,400 years old and takes up 2,200 acres (1,665 football fields), with the small mushrooms visible above ground representing only a tiny proportion of its real girth and substance. I think change is something like that too: spread out, interconnected, growing where the ground is most fertile ground and often invisible.

Source

Welcome to this international dialogue, Quest for CSR 2.0, with Dr Wayne Visser, pioneering author, academic and social entrepreneur. The dialogue, hosted by CSRwire Talkback, is based on his groundbreaking book, The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. For the next several weeks, Dr Visser will summarize the main points and key lessons of each chapter of his book, exploring why CSR 1.0 has failed, the 5 Ages and Stages of CSR, the 5 Principles of CSR 2.0 and how to make change happen. Readers will be invited to share their views on each posting. This exciting new series is co-published by CSRwire and CSR International.

Original link on CSRwire

Best CSR Research of 2011 - Free download

2012-01-12T08:05:00.000-08:00

Download "Best CSR Research of 2011" for free - a compilation of 70 research
report summaries.

Login/Register to access at:
http://www.csrinternational.org/2012/01/12/csr-research-digest-2011-compilation/

My thanks for our Research Associate, Karina Toonekurg, who compiled these
research digests over the past 12 months.

Enjoy!
Dr Wayne Visser
CEO, CSR International

Sustainable by Design? Lessons in Circularity from Seventh Generation

2011-12-23T09:21:00.001-08:00

By Dr. Wayne Visser

Quest for CSR 2.0 Series No.11

The CSR 2.0 principle of circularity has roots in life cycle assessment, cleaner production, sustainable consumption and cradle to cradle concepts. In The Age of Responsibility, I explore various well-known multinational examples, from Interface’s carpets and Nike’s Considered Design shoes to Coca-Cola’s water neutral initiative and Tesco’s carbon neutral programme.

But there are also smaller, more nimble companies, like Seventh Generation, that are able to go much further, much faster. What can we learn from these companies that are intentionally sustainable ‘by design’?

Seventh Generation, an American household cleaning products business started more than 20 years ago by Jeffrey Hollender, took inspiration for its name and philosophy from the Iroquois Confederacy (a council of Native American Indian tribes), which included the admonition that ‘in our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.’ From the beginning, this meant thinking in a circular way about the impact of their products.

To begin with, this meant swimming upstream. “When Seventh Generation told executives at the old Fort Howard Paper Company that we wanted to market bathroom tissue made from unbleached recycled fibre, they laughed,” recalls Hollender. Despite such early resistance, however, Seventh Generation has remained steadfast in its commitment to ‘becoming the world's most trusted brand of authentic, safe, and environmentally-responsible products for a healthy home.’ And indeed, now has an impressive catalogue of cradle to cradle designed products, and has been doing extremely well, showing strong growth even through the recession.

However, ensuring that Seventh Generation lives up to their promise of authenticity is something that requires constant vigilance. For example, in March 2008, the company was ‘exposed’ by the Organic Consumers Association for having detectable levels of the contaminate 1,4-dioxane in their dish liquid. In fact, Seventh Generation’s product was declared the safest of those available and they had been working with suppliers for more than five years to remove it. They have since eliminated the contaminant completely, but as Hollender later declared: “Our effort was simply not good enough. Our real mistake was to exclude consumers and key stakeholders from our ongoing dialogue about dioxane. In short, we flunked the transparency test.”

Of course, the very foundation of transparency is information and the most basic kind is a full list of product ingredients, which, unbelievably, is not required by US law for household products. Consequently, Seventh Generation launched a Show What’s Inside initiative, which included an educational website and an online Label Reading Guide, downloadable directly to shoppers’ cell phones, which helped them interpret labels at the point of purchase, especially any associated risks.

As Hollender and Bill Breen report in their book, The Responsibility Revolution, not long after, SC Johnson launched a cloned version called What’s Inside. “That’s just what we had hoped for,” declared Hollender and Breen. “When a $7.5 billion giant like SC Johnson puts its brawn behind ingredient disclosure, it’s likely that the rest of the industry will follow, regardless of what the regulators do.”

Despite its green image, Seventh Generation knows that it needs to create virtuous cycles in its social as well as its environmental impacts. As a result, in 2009, the company joined Women's Action to Gain Economic Security (WAGES) – an organisation committed to building worker-owned, cooperatively-structured, eco-friendly, residential cleaning businesses in San Francisco – to launch Home Green Home, WAGES' fourth worker-owned cooperative. This unique social enterprise serves the city of San Francisco and is creating healthy, dignified jobs for women in an industry known for long hours and low pay. The women who own and work in the business earn wages that average 50 percent more than their non-coop counterparts, and receive health care and paid vacation benefits.

In the future, Seventh Generation and WAGES hope to expand the innovative practice beyond San Francisco. Hollender is under no illusions about how far we collectively still have to go. In his Foreword to The Age of Responsibility, he confesses that:

“Corporate responsibility in its present incarnation has been an enormous disappointment at best. It has not lifted people out of poverty. It has not protected the environment. It has not boosted community wellbeing. It has been too little, too late and at most has succeeded in getting some companies to aspire to simply do less damage than they did before. Instead of changing the world, corporate responsibility merely evolved into a baseline requirement in every company’s license to operate. Where it succeeded, it only managed to slow the rate of decay, which is hardly enough to do much more than maintain the status quo.”

And yet, he remains optimistic. “Though much has changed in the last 25 years, one thing hasn’t: Business is still the only force with the reach and resources to do what needs to be done as quickly and efficiently as possible. The hour may be late and the clock loudly ticking but the story of responsible business is not over yet. There’s still room for a happy ending. And the time has come for us to write it for ourselves.”

It is examples like these and many others that show that the principle of circularity is not wishful thinking, but a practical strategy for achieving sustainability and responsibility, economically, socially and environmentally. And together with the other principles of CSR 2.0 or Transformative CSR – creativity, scalability, responsiveness and glocality (touched on in the previous blogs) – these inspiring innovations and bold actions are ushering in the new Age of Responsibility and with it, a new kind of ‘susponsible’ capitalism.

Without a doubt, however, achieving this vision requires change on a scale and urgency that has seldom been witnessed in human history. So the question remains, how do we make change happen? I’ll examine the myriad answers to this in my forthcoming blogs, recommencing in January.

Source

Welcome to this international dialogue, Quest for CSR 2.0, with Dr Wayne Visser, pioneering author, academic and social entrepreneur. The dialogue, hosted by CSRwire Talkback, is based on his groundbreaking book, The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. For the next several weeks, Dr Visser will summarize the main points and key lessons of each chapter of his book, exploring why CSR 1.0 has failed, the 5 Ages and Stages of CSR, the 5 Principles of CSR 2.0 and how to make change happen. Readers will be invited to share their views on each posting. This exciting new series is co-published by CSRwire and CSR International.

Original link on CSRwire

Myths About CSR in Developing Countries

2011-12-14T00:38:00.000-08:00

By Wayne Visser

Part of the Quest for CSR 2.0 series.

Are concepts and models of corporate social responsibility (CSR) developed in the West appropriate for developing countries?

I decided to first tackle this question by setting out what I believe to be Seven Popular Myths about CSR in developing countries. Most of these myths exist as a result of the feeding frenzy that inevitably occurs every time the media has hunted down and sunk its teeth into one or other juicy story of corporate exploitation. They, however, become sustainable because they are spread by whole legions of largely well-intentioned people who have vested interests in promoting their particular brand of the truth about CSR.

The Seven Myths:

Economic growth is not compatible with CSR.
Multinationals are the biggest CSR sinners.
Multinationals are the biggest CSR saviours.
Developing countries are anti-multinational.
Developed countries lead on CSR.
Codes can ensure CSR in developing countries.
CSR is the same the world over.

Let’s look at these myths each briefly in turn.

Myth 1: Economic growth is not compatible with CSR: What the Index for Sustainable Economic Welfare and Genuine Progress Index show is that GDP growth and quality of life move in parallel until social and environmental costs begin to outweigh economic benefits. According to this ‘threshold hypothesis’ – coined by Chilean barefoot economist, Manfred Max-Neef – most developing countries have yet to reach this divergence threshold. For them, economic growth and the expansion of business activities is still one of the most effective ways to achieve improved social development, while environmental impacts are increasingly being tackled through leapfrog clean technologies.

Myth 2: Multinationals are the biggest CSR sinners: On the ground in most countries, multinationals are generally powerful forces for good, through their investment in local economies, creation of jobs, upgrading of infrastructure, provision of basic services and involvement in community development and environmental conservation. There are always exceptions, of course, and these should be named and shamed. But they shouldn’t overshadow the overall positive role of big companies in developing countries. The cumulative social and environmental impacts of smaller companies, which operate below the radar of the media and out of reach of the arm of the law, are typically far larger than that of the high profile multinationals.

Myth 3: Multinationals are the biggest CSR saviours: Not only do large companies have limited influence over government policy, but most multinationals, despite large capital investments, provide only a minuscule proportion of the total employment in developing countries. The real potential saviours are small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs), including social enterprises, which are labour intensive and better placed to affect local economic development. If the social and environmental impacts of these SMMEs can be improved, the knock on benefits will be proportionally much greater than anything that multinationals could achieve on their own. This is why the work CSR for SMEs by Anahuac University in Mexico and Forum Empresa in Latin America is so encouraging and important.

Myth 4: Developing countries are anti-multinational: Developing countries are often caught in a no-man’s land of under-development in a competitive, monetized, global economy, and the sooner they can modernise and integrate, the better for them. Most often, developing country communities welcome multinationals and their CSR initiatives. This is not the same as saying the developing world should repeat the past mistakes of the developed countries, such as highly polluting industrialisation, nor that multinationals should not be required to be responsible and held accountable. But we should not deny developing countries the dignity of choice, whether it be Unilever products or Coca Cola, both of which have made significant progress on CSR in recent years.

Myth 5: Developed countries lead on CSR: There are countless examples of how developing countries are proving themselves highly adept at delivering the so-called triple bottom line of sustainability, namely balanced and integrated social, economic and environmental benefits. It is actually not surprising, since in developing countries, these three spheres are seldom separable – economic development almost inevitably results in social upliftment and environmental improvement, and vice versa. Whether it is South Africa’s King Code, which encourages integrated sustainability reporting, or A Little World, which uses mobile phone and biometric scanners to bring micro-banking services to the poor in India, a lot of the innovation in CSR is taking place in developing countries.

Myth 6: Codes can ensure CSR in developing countries: The past few years have seen a mushrooming of corporate responsibility codes, standards and guidelines, which developing countries are keen to adopt, if only to satisfy their Western partners. This standardisation trend is both inevitable and necessary in a globalising world—which is desperately searching for an alternative to command-and-control style business regulation in order to satisfy the governance and accountability void which still exists. But this codification tends to measure CSR activities, rather than CSR impacts on the ground. Developing countries need to move rapidly through this Strategic CSR approach in an Age of Management to a more transformative CSR approach in an Age of Responsibility.

Myth 7: CSR is the same the world over: One of the biggest fallacies is that, in a globalised world, CSR can somehow conform to a unitary model. Of course, we need universal principles, like the Global Compact, and perhaps even process frameworks, like ISO 14001. But standardised performance metrics, like those of the Global Reporting Initiative and the numerous sustainability funds and indexes, start to tread on shaky ground. The tendency is for developed country priorities – such as energy and climate change – to receive emphasis and for northern NGO agendas to dominate.

The antitdote to these CSR myths for developing countries is glocality – one of the five principles of CSR 2.0. The term ‘glocal’ – a portmanteau of global and local – is said to come from the Japanese worddochakuka, which simply means global localisation. Or more simply, ‘think global, act local’. The question is, do we see glocality in action, or do we just see corporations in developing countries mimicking the practices of the West?

Source

Original link on CSRwire

The Future Faces of CSR Activism

2011-12-10T02:20:00.000-08:00

By Dr. Wayne Visser

Quest for CSR 2.0 Series No.9

The third principle of Transformative CSR, or CSR 2.0, is responsiveness. (We explored creativityand scalability in the last two posts). Some of the most important players in the responsiveness game – especially through cross-sector partnerships – are civil society organizations (CSOs, which I prefer rather than the term NGOs). Reflecting on how this sector is changing in the face of increased calls for responsiveness, I have distinguished 10 ‘Paths to the Future’ for CSR activism. I believe that CSOs acting in the CSR space will increasingly be:

Platforms for transparency – Undertaking investigative exposes & hosting disclosure forums;
Brokers of volunteerism – Providing project opportunities for employee volunteers;
Champions of CSR – Raising awareness and increasing public pressure for CSR;
Advisors of business – Offering consulting services to business on responsibility;
Agents of government – Working with or on behalf of regulatory authorities;
Reformers of policy – Pressuring for government policy reforms to incentivise CSR;
Makers of standards – Developing voluntary standards & inviting business compliance;
Channels for taxes – Receiving and deploying specially earmarked tax revenues;
Partners in solutions – Partnering with business/government to tackle specific issues; and
Catalysts for creativity – Creating social enterprises & supporting social entrepreneurs.

Let’s explore these ‘future faces’ of CSR activism in a little more detail below, drawing on examples from around the world of CSOs emerging roles.

Platforms for transparency – The role of CSOs as agitators for, and agents of, greater transparency seems set to continue. For example, in Senegal, Benin, and Guinea, CSO intervention has been critical in the development of a free press. And in India, Karmayog allows citizens to report specific instances of bribery and corruption on a live, public website.

Brokers of volunteerism – As companies increasingly see the benefits of volunteerism (greater job satisfaction, productivity, commitment and loyalty), CSOs are increasingly becoming people-brokers, as sources of projects for employee volunteers. For example, the Voluntary Workcamps Association of Ghana (VOLU) coordinates volunteers to help with the construction of schools, reforestation and AIDS campaigning.

Champions of CSR – While some CSOs remain sceptical about CSR, in many countries they are the main agents for promoting CSR. For example, in Iran, a group of CSOs have joined forces with the UNDP to promote CSR through targeted training for managers under the umbrella of the UN MDGs. And in Senegal, CSR awareness has grown mainly due to a CSO called La Lumière in Kédougou.

Advisors of business – A combination of genuine expertise, valuable perspectives and a crunch on funding means that many CSOs are turning to consultancy, working with and advising companies not only on specific social and environmental issues, but also more generally on sustainability and responsibility. For example, in Hungary, as opposed to the traditional role of watchdog, many CSOs engage in consultancy on CSR.

Agents of government – The phenomena of GONGOs (government organised NGOs), GINGOs (government-inspired NGOs), GRINGOs (government regulated/run and initiated NGOs) and PANGOs (party-affiliated NGOs) are becoming more widespread, no longer just seen in China. Even where governments are not setting up or running the CSOs, they are supporting them as key catalysts. For example, Belgian CSOs receive €3 government funding for every €1 they raised themselves.

Reformers of policy – Realizing that the ‘rules of the game’ need to change, CSOs are increasingly getting involved in legal reform. For example, in Indonesia, it was largely due to rising pressure from CSOs that the Law No. 40/2007 concerning Limited Liability Companies was introduced to make CSR mandatory.

Makers of standards – In an effort to raise the bar on voluntary action by companies, many CSOs are developing their own social and environmental codes and standards, then inviting business to comply with them. For example, in Israel, the Public Trust Organisation established The Public Trust Code, covering advertising, transparency, disclosure, service and product guarantees, honesty in contracts and privacy of information.

Channels for taxes – In some countries, the effectiveness of CSOs has earned them the ability to source tax dollars directly. For example, in Mexico, the FECHAC (Federation of the Chihuahuan Industry) is a CSO, set up after devastating floods in 1990, that is funded through a special annual tax on more than 38,000 industries. And in Romania, the 2% Law (in terms of the Fiscal Code) allows citizens to redirect 2% of personal income tax to a CSO.

Partners in solutions – Not only are CSOs collaborating with business more and more, but also with governments and multilateral agencies. For example, in South Korea, ‘Cross Sector Alliance’ is one of 5 approaches to CSR being promoted, while in Africa the New Nigeria Foundation provides a platform for mobilizing non-traditional resources through public-private partnerships. In Turkey, TUSEV promotes linkages between domestic and international CSOs and encourages CSR by putting foreign and domestic firms in contact with appropriate CSOs.

Catalysts for creativity – CSOs are increasingly expected to provide solutions, not just point out the problems, especially by launching or supporting social enterprises. For example, in Bangladesh, BRAC (formerly Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) has been crucial in the microcredit movement, and in Singapore, the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) has 12 social enterprises and 4 related organisations that are owned by more than 500,000 workers.

However the future unfolds, it is clear that CSOs will be a significant player in the new landscape of responsible governance and accountability, both as a counter-balancing force and a partner to governments and business. In fact, I believe CSOs will be the responsive glue that holds society together in the turbulent years ahead.

Source

Original link on CSRwire

Could Less Consumer Choice Be A Good Thing?

2011-12-09T02:18:00.000-08:00

By Dr. Wayne Visser

Quest for CSR 2.0 Series No.8

So you buy fair-trade or eco-friendly products, and you think that is a good thing, right? Think again. What if so-called ‘ethical consumers’ are the very ones standing between us a sustainable future?

I’m crazy, right? Maybe, but here is why I say it. By creating a premium-priced, niche market for ‘ethical consumption’, companies have been able to present a responsible front to the world, while leaving the vast majority of their products – which are, by implication, less ethical, less responsible, less sustainable – unquestioned and unchanged. At the same time, a small group of usually well-to-do Western consumers have been able to ease their conscience by feeling that they are making a positive difference.

Now let me be clear. I am not against organic or fair-trade or eco-friendly products per se. That wouldbe insane. Clearly, there are groups of producers – usually poor farmers in the Third World – that have benefited from these initiatives. What I am against is the voluntary nature and premium pricing of sustainable and responsible products. The combination of these two factors has ensured that, with one or two exceptions, these products have never gone to scale. As compared with the total and ongoing impacts of mainstream shopping habits, ethical consumption, laudable as it is, has remained marginal at best and totally insignificant at worst.

The UK’s Sustainable Consumption Roundtable says, ‘we know that there is a considerable gap – the so-called ‘value-action gap – between people’s attitudes, which are often pro-environmental, and their everyday behaviors’. We know the ‘value-action’ gap is partly explained by price and availability of alternatives, but there’s something else. Context matters as well.

To illustrate this, Timothy Devinney, author of The Myth of the Ethical Consumer, reports on a very interesting experiment he conducted while researching his book. The experiment took place at a coffee shop in central Sydney, Australia, over a period of several weeks. This coffee shop displayed a large and prominent sign indicating the products available, their prices and active specials. To this was added, quite obtrusively, another special, indicating: We have Fair Trade coffee! No extra charge. Just ask.

Here’s what he found. Unprompted, with only the sign to notify them of the availability of the ‘ethical’ alternative, less than 1% of customers bothered to ask for Fair Trade coffee, even though it was free. “When they prompted customers with a reminder that the ‘ethical’ alternative was available, the number of customers opting for the Fair Trade option rose to 30%. They then went a step further and took the customer’s privacy away: each time the clerk prompted a customer with the Fair Trade option, we ensured there was someone standing next to that person at the counter. In this situation, the number of ‘ethical consumers’ rose to 70%.”

This is a hugely important lesson: If we want to achieve scalability of sustainable and responsible products and services, we cannot leave it to the passive choices of customers. Context is critical, and a little bit of peer pressure goes a long way. But do we really want to resort to public embarrassment to achieve scalability?

The alternative is the trend towards ‘choice editing’. The idea of choice editing is likely to get free-market fundamentalists all in a tizz, but the fact is that manufacturers and retailers choice edit all the time – for example on quality, price, aesthetics and brand. The only difference is now we are asking them to add sustainability and responsibility to their list of criteria.

So who is doing choice editing? Well, outdoor clothing company Patagonia converted to 100% organic cotton in 1996, frozen foods retailer Iceland banned genetically modified food in 1997 and carpet manufacturer Interface has been using only renewable (green tariff) energy since 1998, so it’s not a new idea. The difference is now some of the big manufacturers and retailers are coming on board. For example, Unilever has committed to sourcing 100% of agricultural raw materials sustainably, Sainsbury’s only stocks Fairtrade bananas and Walmart has adopted an organic cotton and sustainable fish strategy.

Let’s look at Walmart in a little more detail to illustrate the point. Walmart set a target to purchase all of its wild-caught fresh and frozen fish for the U.S. market from Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)-certified fisheries by the end 2011. They are also working work with Global Aquaculture Alliance (GAA) and Aquaculture Certification Council (ACC) to certify that all foreign shrimp suppliers adhere to Best Aquaculture Practices standards in the U.S and by 2009, they were already halfway there.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, George Chamberlain, president of the Aquaculture Alliance puts the move in perspective: “The endorsement drew attention; Wal-Mart buys more shrimp than any other U.S. company, importing 20,000 tons annually – about 3.4% of U.S. shrimp imports. With Wal-Mart's nod, we went from trying to convince individual facilities to become certified to having long waiting lines.”

Walmart also made a commitment to phase out chemically-treated textile crops. By 2008, Wal-Mart was the largest buyer of organic cotton, with more than 10 million pounds purchased annually. They are also the world’s largest purchaser of conversion cotton – cotton grown without chemicals, but waiting to be certified as organic. Former CEO, Lee Scott, was under no illusions about the ripple effects when he made the strategic choice-editing decision: “Cotton farmers can now invest in organic farming because they have the certainty and stability of a major buyer. Through leadership and purchasing power, all of us can create new markets for sustainable products and services. We can drive innovation. We can build acceptance. All we need is the will to step out and make the difference.”

The question is, since not everyone has the size and economies of scale of Walmart, should we pin our hopes on voluntary choice editing? Or should we be lobbying for a different, and arguably more effective, form of choice editing, namely good, old-fashioned government regulation? The state regulates to ensure the health and safety of products, so why not for sustainability as well?

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The Creative Destruction Revolution

2011-12-08T02:16:00.000-08:00

By Dr. Wayne Visser

Quest for CSR 2.0 Series No.7

One of the key theories on creativity is creative destruction. The concept is most associated with Joseph Schumpeter, following his 1942 bookCapitalism, Socialism and Democracy, in which he described creative destruction as ‘the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one ... [The process] must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction; it cannot be understood on the hypothesis that there is a perennial lull.’

The idea, of course, is much older. In Hinduism, the goddess Shiva is simultaneously the creator and destroyer of worlds. In modern times, the German sociologist Werner Sombart described the process in 1913, saying ‘from destruction a new spirit of creation arises; the scarcity of wood and the needs of everyday life ... forced the discovery or invention of substitutes for wood, forced the use of coal for heating, forced the invention of coke for the production of iron.’ Even Marx and Engels had a go at describing the process in their Communist Manifesto, stating that ‘constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. ... All that is solid melts into air.’

The idea of melting solids is very similar to the metaphor used by sustainability and social enterprise thought-leader, John Elkington, to explain the disruptive changes going on in the world. In an interview with him, he explained: “What happens in an earthquake? The land become thixotropic; what was solid suddenly becomes almost semi-liquid. I think we are headed towards a period where the global economy goes into a sort of thixotropic state. Key parts of our economies and societies are on a doomed path really, and I think that’s unavoidable. I think we’re heading into a period of creative destruction on a scale that really we haven't seen for a very long time, and there are all sorts of factors that feed into it—the entry of the Chinese and Indians into the global market, quite apart from things like climate change and new technology.”

As to what this means for business, Elkington believes that “all of these pressures are going to mobilise a set of dynamics which are unpredictable and profoundly disruptive to incumbent companies, so some companies will disappear. I think most companies that we currently know will not be around in 15 – 20 years, which is almost an inconceivable statement. But periodically this happens and there’s a radical bleeding of the landscape. We’ll find this sort of reassembly going on. Over a period of time we’re going to have some fairly different products, technologies, business models coming back into the West, and I think it’s going to be quite exciting, but quite disruptive.”

We see all kinds of examples of creative destruction in corporate sustainability and responsibility. For virtually the whole of the 20th century, the biggest companies in the world were the oil and motor giants – companies like Exxon, BP, General Motors and Toyota. But the 21st century, with growing concerns over energy security and climate change on the one hand and the rising geo-political and economic power of the East on the other, are ushering in a new era. Already in 2006, the richest man in China was reported to be Shi Shengrong, CEO of the solar company Suntech, and the richest women, Zhang Yin, made her fortune from recycling. A 2010 report published by the Pew Environmental Center found that in 2009, China invested $34.6 billion in the clean energy economy, while the United States only invested $18.6 billion.

This explosive growth was brought home to me when, at an event of the Women In Sustainability Action (WISA) in Shanghai where I was speaking in June 2010, I got talking to a supplier of wind turbines to Europe. Simply put, he cannot keep up with the demand. He is turning customers away because there is already 12 months of orders in the pipeline. Even Germany, an early leader in the clean-technology space, can no longer compete with China in this sunrise industry. It is no coincidence that while Obama’s energy reform bill was being scuppered by the U.S. Congress, Malaysia was creating an Energy, Green Technology and Water Ministry. And while the British company BP was virtually on its knees, in May 2010, the Korean company, Samsung, unveiled an eye-watering investment plan to ‘future-proof’ the company by sinking $21 billion into its green technology and healthcare businesses. It claimed the investment would generate $44 billion in annual sales and 45,000 new jobs by 2020.

Make no mistake – creative destruction is happening. The only question is which companies will survive the sustainability and responsibility purge and surge?

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What can Web 2.0 teach us about CSR?

2011-12-07T02:12:00.000-08:00

By Dr. Wayne Visser

Quest for CSR 2.0 Series No.6

By May 2008, it was clear to me the evolutionary concept of Web 2.0 held many lessons for corporate social responsibility. At the time, I declared: "The field of what is variously known as CSR, sustainability, corporate citizenship and business ethics is ushering in a new era in the relationship between business and society. Simply put, we are shifting from the old concept of CSR – the classic notion of ‘Corporate Social Responsibility,’ which I call CSR 1.0 – to a new, integrated conception – CSR 2.0, which can be more accurately labelled ‘Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility.’"

The allusion to Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is no coincidence. The transformation of the Internet through the emergence of social media networks, user-generated content and open source approaches is a fitting metaphor for the changes business is experiencing as it begins to redefine its role in society. Let's look at some of the similarities.

Web 1.0

A flat world just beginning to connect itself and finding a new medium to push out information and plug advertising.
Saw the rise to prominence of innovators like Netscape, but these were quickly out-muscled by giants like Microsoft with its Internet Explorer.
Focused largely on the standardised hardware and software of the PC as its delivery platform, rather than multi-level applications.

CSR 1.0

A vehicle for companies to establish relationships with communities, channel philanthropic contributions and manage their image.
Included many start-up pioneers like Traidcraft, but has ultimately turned into a product for large multinationals like Wal-Mart.
Travelled down the road of "one size fits all" standardization, through codes, standards and guidelines to shape its offering.

Web 2.0

Being defined by watchwords like "collective intelligence," "collaborative networks" and "user participation."
Tools include social media, knowledge syndication and beta testing.
Is as much a state of being as a technical advance – it is a new philosophy or way of seeing the world differently.

CSR 2.0

Being defined by "global commons," "innovative partnerships" and "stakeholder involvement."
Mechanisms include diverse stakeholder panels, real-time transparent reporting and new-wave social entrepreneurship.
Is recognising a shift in power from centralised to decentralised; a change in scale from few and big to many and small; and a change in application from single and exclusive to multiple and shared.

So what will some of these shifts look like? In my view, the shifts will happen at two levels. At a macro-level, there will be a change in CSR’s ontological assumptions or ways of seeing the world. At a micro-level, there will be a change in CSR’s methodological practices or ways of being in the world.

Macro Shifts

The macro-level changes can be described as follows: Paternalistic relationships between companies and the community based on philanthropy will give way to more equal partnerships. Defensive, minimalist responses to social and environmental issues are replaced with proactive strategies and investment in growing responsibility markets, such as clean technology. Reputation-conscious public-relations approaches to CSR are no longer credible and so companies are judged on actual social, environmental and ethical performance (are things getting better on the ground in absolute, cumulative terms?).

Although CSR specialists still have a role to play, each dimension of CSR 2.0 performance is embedded and integrated into the core operations of companies. Standardized approaches remain useful as guides to consensus, but CSR finds diversified expression and implementation at very local levels. CSR solutions, including responsible products and services, go from niche ‘nice-to-haves’ to mass-market ‘must-haves.’ And the whole concept of CSR loses its Western conceptual and operational dominance, giving way to a more culturally diverse and internationally applied concept.

Micro Shifts

How might these shifting principles manifest as CSR practices? Supporting these meta-level changes, the anticipated micro-level changes can be described as follows: CSR will no longer manifest as luxury products and services (as with current green and fair-trade options), but as affordable solutions for those who most need quality of life improvements. Investment in self-sustaining social enterprises will be favored over cheque-book charity. CSR indexes, which rank the same large companies over and over (often revealing contradictions between indexes) will make way for CSR rating systems, which turn social, environmental, ethical and economic performance into corporate scores (A+, B-, etc., not dissimilar to credit ratings), which analysts and others can usefully employ to compare and integrate into their decision making.

Reliance on CSR departments will disappear or disperse, as performance across responsibility and sustainability dimensions are increasingly built into corporate performance appraisal and market incentive systems. Self-selecting ethical consumers will become irrelevant, as CSR 2.0 companies begin to choice-edit; i.e., cease offering implicitly ‘less ethical’ product ranges, thus allowing guilt-free shopping.

Post-use liability for products will become obsolete, as the service-lease and take-back economy goes mainstream. Annual CSR reporting will be replaced by online, real-time CSR performance data flows. Feeding into these live communications will be Web 2.0 connected social networks, instead of periodic meetings of rather cumbersome stakeholder panels. And typical CSR 1.0 management systems standards like ISO 14001 will be less credible than new performance standards, such as those emerging in climate change that set absolute limits and thresholds.

As our world becomes more connected and global challenges like climate change and poverty loom ever larger, businesses that still practice CSR 1.0 will (like their Web 1.0 counterparts) be rapidly left behind. Highly conscientised and networked stakeholders will expose them and gradually withdraw their social licence to operate. By contrast, companies that embrace the CSR 2.0 era will be those that collaboratively find innovative ways tackle our global challenges and be rewarded in the marketplace as a result.

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Can We Break the Spell of CSR Curses?

2011-11-06T09:29:00.000-08:00

By Dr. Wayne Visser

Quest for CSR 2.0 Series No.5

Looking back, we can see that the 1990s were the decade of CSR codes and standards – from EMAS and ISO 14001 to SA 8000 and the Global Reporting Initiative. But these were just a warm up act compared to the last 10 years, when we have seen codes proliferate in virtually every area of sustainability and responsibility and all major industry sectors. So much so that in the A to Z of Corporate Social Responsibility, we included over 100 such codes, guidelines and standards – and that was just a selection of what it out there.

This spawning of CSR codes and standards is typical of Strategic CSR, emerging from the Age of Management. At its heart, this is the drive to relate CSR activities to the company’s core business (like Coca-Cola's focus on water management) by turning these into formal management systems, with cycles of CSR policy development, goal and target setting, programme implementation, auditing and reporting. All good and well, but where does this leave us?

My belief is that Strategic CSR – like its predecessors Defensive, Charitable and Promotional CSR - has brought us to a point of crisis. Specifically, all these approaches are failing to turn around our most serious global problems – the very issues CSR purports to be concerned with – and may even be distracting us from the real issue, which is business’s role causal role in the social and environmental crises we face. This failure is due to what I have called the three Curses of CSR 1.0, namely that it is incremental, peripheral and uneconomic. Let’s look at these briefly in turn.

Curse 1: Incremental CSR

One of the great revolutions of the 1970s was total quality management, conceived by American statistician W. Edwards Deming and perfected by the Japanese before being exported around the world as ISO 9001. At the very core of Deming’s TQM model and the ISO standard is continual improvement, a principle that has now become ubiquitous in all management system approaches to performance. It is no surprise, therefore, that the most popular environmental management standard, ISO 14001, is built on the same principle.

There is nothing wrong with continuous improvement per se. On the contrary, it has brought safety and reliability to the very products and services that we associate with modern quality of life. But when we use it as the primary approach to tackling our social, environmental and ethical challenges, it fails on two critical counts: speed and scale. The incremental approach to CSR, while replete with evidence of micro-scale, gradual improvements, has completely and utterly failed to make any impact on the massive sustainability crises that we face, many of which are getting worse at a pace that far outstrips any futile CSR-led attempts at amelioration.

Curse 2: Peripheral CSR

Ask any CSR manager what their greatest frustration is and they will tell you: lack of top management commitment. Translated, this means that CSR is, at best, a peripheral function in most companies. There may be a CSR manager, a CSR department even, a CSR report and a public commitment to any number of CSR codes and standards. But these do little to mask the underlying truth that shareholder-driven capitalism is rampant and its obsession with short-term financial measures of progress is contradictory in almost every way to the long-term, stakeholder approach needed for high-impact CSR.

So what we are left with is an approach to CSR which allows each company to set their own voluntary objectives and targets, which appear responsible, but lack the scale and urgency needed to reverse our social and environmental crises. CSR remains peripheral in another sense as well, because it is only a handful of big-branded companies that find themselves in the CSR spotlight. What about the millions of small and medium sized enterprises. By and large, CSR passes them by, despite their collectively bigger impacts.

Curse 3: Uneconomic CSR

Which brings us to Curse 3. If there was ever a monotonously repetitive, stuck record in CSR debates, it is the one about the so-called ‘business case’ for CSR. That is because CSR managers and consultants, and even the occasional saintly CEO, are desperate to find compelling evidence that ‘doing good is good for business’, i.e. CSR pays. The lack of corroborative research seems to be no impediment for these desperados endlessly incanting the motto of the business case, as if it were an entirely self-evident fact.

The rather more ‘inconvenient truth’ is that CSR sometimes pays, in specific circumstances, but more often does not. Of course there are low-hanging fruit – like eco-efficiencies around waste and energy – but these only go so far. Most of the hard-core CSR changes that are needed to reverse the misery of poverty and the sixth mass extinction of species currently underway require strategic change and massive investment. They may very well be lucrative in the long term, economically rational over a generation or two, but we have already established that the financial markets don’t work like that; at least, not yet.

The way I see it, that leaves us with three options for taking CSR forward, which I like to think of as the Parrot, Ostrich and Phoenix scenarios.

The Way of Parrot is to tell it like it is: recognise the limitations of CSR and admit to its primary role as a business tactic for reputation management. The Way of the Ostrich is the status quo: pretend that CSR is working and that more of the same will be enough. The Way of the Phoenix is the transformative agenda: reconceptualise CSR as a radical or revolutionary concept that challenges the intransigent business and economic model and offers genuine solutions to our global challenges. The Way of the Phoenix is what I call Systemic CSR, or Transformative CSR, or CSR 2.0, and is what we are just starting to see rising from the ashes of the previous ages, as we enter a new Age of Responsibility. This rather more positive agenda is what I will explore for the remainder of this blog series.

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Exposing the CSR Pretenders

2011-11-05T09:26:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Wayne Visser

Quest for CSR 2.0 Series No.4

Industrialism created a limitless appetite for resource exploitation, and modem science provided the ethical and cognitive license to make such exploitation possible, acceptable, and desirable. – Vandana Shiva

Can Big Tobacco ever be responsible? British American Tobacco (BAT) have engaged in extensive stakeholder consultation exercises and, since 2001, their businesses in more than 40 markets have produced Social Reports, many of which have won awards from organisations as diverse as the United Nations Environment Programme, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants. BAT has also been ranked in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, the FTSE Ethical Bonus Index and Business in the Community (BITC) Corporate Responsibility Index, and they funded Nottingham University’s International Centre for CSR.

Yet this is the industry where, in 1994, the CEOs of 7 of America’s largest tobacco companies[1] testified before the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment of Congress, all denying that cigarettes are addictive. They lied under oath. And this is the business that, according to the World Health Organization, kills more than AIDS, legal drugs, illegal drugs, road accidents, murder and suicide combined.’ Of everyone alive today, 500 million will eventually be killed by smoking, and while 0.1 billion people died from tobacco use in the 20^th century, ten times as many will die in the 21st century. Isn’t responsible tobacco an oxymoron?

Of course, it’s not just Big Tobacco. What about Big Oil? This is the industry that set up and funded the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) to lobby against the emerging consensus of climate science and policy development until it was embarrassed into disbanding in 2002. A 2007 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, entitled Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air, documented how ExxonMobil adopted the tobacco industry’s disinformation tactics, as well as some of the same organisations and personnel, to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue. According to the report, ExxonMobil funnelled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organisations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.

Or what about BP? In 2000, the company reportedly spent $7 million in researching the new ‘Beyond Petroleum’ Helios brand and $25 million on a campaign to support the brand change. Greenpeace concluded at the time that ‘this is a triumph of style over substance. BP spent more on their logo this year than they did on renewable energy last year’. Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil (2008), is similarly sceptical, claiming that at its peak, BP was spending 4% of its total capital and exploratory budget on renewable energy and that this has since declined. That’s even before we factor in the Texas City refinery explosion in 2005, or the catastrophic Gulf spill in 2010, or BP’s ongoing investments in the Alberta tar sands. Isn’t sustainable oil a contradiction?

While many of these examples – and I could cite countless more, from automotive, agricultural, chemicals and other industries – are a little more than the familiar toxic mix of old-fashioned dirty lobby tactics, many companies today in engage in far more subtle and seemingly plausible campaigns of misdirection – investing in environmental management systems, producing sustainability reports, and performing supply chain audits. Each of these actions is, on its own merits, laudable and to be encouraged; applauded even. But all too often, they are used as a smokescreen to mask the more damaging impacts and irresponsible practices of business.

Behind these actions lies a pervasive driver. According to the UN Global Compact and Accenture’s 2010 CEO survey, three corporate attributes – brand, trust and reputation – were consistently cited by CEOs as their primary reason for acting on sustainability. Simply put, CSR or sustainability are seen as a means of promotion in an Age of Marketing. As we saw in the BP case, ‘greenwash’ has become one of the popular labels applied to this kind of PR-driven misdirection by companies on environmental issues.

The word was coined by environmentalist David Bellamy in the 1980s and plays off of the concept of ‘whitewashing’ – literally painting over the cracks to cover up inherent faults. In 1999, the Oxford English Dictionary added the term, defining it as: ‘Disinformation disseminated by an organisation, so as to present an environmentally responsible public image; a public image of environmental responsibility promulgated by or for an organisation, but perceived as being unfounded or intentionally misleading.’

Jose Lopez, EVP of Operations of Nestle admits that ‘there is probably out there an environment for pretenders, for the greenwashers. It’s going to get harder and harder to tell apart the greenwasher from the real guy. The reason is, we have a lot of information on what constitutes good sustainability practice,’ i.e. it’s easier to copy apparently credible behaviour.

One classic example was an advert run by Shell which has a picture of a factory with flowers coming out of the smoke-stacks and claiming: ‘We use our waste CO2 to grow flowers’. There was a grain of truth in the claim, as in the Netherlands the company did capture CO2 and use it in floral hothouses. However, since Shell only used 0.325% of its CO2 output in this way, the Advertising Standards Authority banned the advert, following complaints.

As a result of this kind of greenwash, the UK’s Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) Code, enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority, created a clause for environmental claims in 1995. Since 1998, it has also published a non-binding ‘Green Claims Code’, advising advertisers on how best to make good claims. Despite this, greenwashing complaints, the majority of which are upheld, continue to rise year-on-year. One rather fun, yet informative, publication is ‘The Greenwash Guide’ by Futerra.

Of course, this kind of PR-spin does not only apply to environmental issues. After the launch of the UN Global Compact, companies started to be accused of ‘bluewash’ – a reference to the blue of the UN logo and business using association with the United Nations to appear more responsible than they really are. Likewise, although I haven’t heard the term, I can imagine the ‘redwash’ brush being applied to companies claiming social, community or labour responsibility that masks their real negative impacts on society.

Let’s be clear, I’m not into corporate witch hunts or evil empire theories, but isn’t it time we stop giving credit to industries and practices that tick superficial CSR and sustainability boxes, while doing little or nothing to change the underlying irresponsibility and unsustainability of their industries? Many companies are stuck in an Age of Marketing, with promotional CSR as their modus operandi, and it’s time that we exposed them, so that we can separate the CSR pretenders from the ‘real mccoys’.

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[1] Philip Morris U.S.A., RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company, U.S. Tobacco, American Tobacco Company, Lorillard Tobacco Company, Liggett Group, Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company

Is Philanthropy a Smokescreen?

2011-11-04T09:20:00.000-07:00

By Dr. Wayne Visser

Quest for CSR 2.0 Series No.3

“I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man, according to the dictates of my conscience.” —John D. Rockefeller Sr.

The Rockefeller story is a good one to introduce the Age of Philanthropy, not only because of John D.’s iconic status as a tycoon and philanthropist, but also because his life and views on charity embody much of the philanthropic attitudes that still prevail today in business. At the heart of the Age – and its chief agent, Charitable CSR – is the notion of giving back to society. Rather interestingly, this presupposes that you have taken something away in the first place. Charitable CSR embodies the principle of sharing the fruits of success, irrespective of the path taken to achieve that success. It is the idea of post-wealth generosity, of making lots of money first and then dedicating oneself to the task of how best to distribute those riches, by way of leaving a legacy.

In 1970, the respected US economist Milton Friedman published an article in the New York Times Magazine (13 September) entitled ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profits’. In it, he called the ‘doctrine of social responsibility’ a ‘fundamentally subversive doctrine in a free society’ and argued that ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits, so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud’. As such, he came to define one end of the spectrum of opinion on CSR: the purist, stockholder (or shareholder) view, a view which was once again given an airing in the Wall Street Journals’ ‘The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility’ article on 23 August 2010. Despite his hard-line view, Friedman does allow some concessions, saying:

“It may well be in the long run interest of a corporation that is a major employer in a small community to devote resources to providing amenities to that community or to improving its government. That may make it easier to attract desirable employees, it may reduce the wage bill or lessen losses from pilferage and sabotage or have other worthwhile effects. Or it may be that, given the laws about the deductibility of corporate charitable contributions, the stockholders can contribute more to charities they favour by having the corporation make the gift than by doing it themselves, since they can in that way contribute an amount that would otherwise have been paid as corporate taxes.”

Although Friedman calls this ‘hypocritical window-dressing’ when done under ‘the cloak of social responsibility’, he concedes that these practices may be justified if they contribute to shareholders’ interests. Hence, he is setting out an early version of what today is more popularly called ‘strategic philanthropy’ – the practice of social responsibility only when it is aligned with corporate profitability. Three decades later, academics Michael Porter and Michael Kramer have given this concept more structure and credibility – and with considerably less malice directed towards CSR. In their 2002 Harvard Business Review article, ‘The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy’, Porter and Kramer argue that:

“Increasingly, philanthropy is used as a form of public relations or advertising, promoting a company’s image through high-profile sponsorships. But there is a more truly strategic way to think about philanthropy. Corporations can use their charitable efforts to improve their competitive context – the quality of the business environment in the locations where they operate. Using philanthropy to enhance competitive context aligns social and economic goals and improves a company’s long-term business prospects. Addressing context enables a company not only to give money but also leverage its capabilities and relationships in support of charitable causes.”

Without a doubt, strategic philanthropy represents an evolution of more ad-hoc approaches to charity, and there will always be a place for philanthropy in responding to the most urgent and desperate unmet needs of society. Even so, we have to question the appropriateness and effectiveness of philanthropy in addressing the root causes of our biggest global challenges, which have more to do with the Achilles heel of Western capitalism itself, namely the environmentally unsustainable and socially inequitable growth and lifestyles that it spawns. How, for example, does so-called ‘philanthrocapitalism’ address the Western consumption, production and trade practices that are wreaking havoc with the world’s ecosystems and many of the world’s poorest communities? By and large, it doesn’t.

I believe ‘giving back’ after the fact is just a smokescreen, notwithstanding the generosity that it shows and the benefits that result. Would you agree?

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Is Greed Still Good?

2011-11-03T09:17:00.001-07:00

By Dr. Wayne Visser

Quest for CSR 2.0 Series No.2

If CSR isn’t working, could it be because it pales into insignificance in the face of a much more pervasive force at work in business and society, namely greed? After all, “greed is good!” So declared the fictional character Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film, Wallstreet. “Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind.” I wonder if today, nearly 25 years and a $7 trillion global financial meltdown later, we are finally ready to lay this powerful myth to rest?

We have lived through an Age of Greed and come out the other side bruised and battered, disillusioned and angry. But are we any wiser? Ever since the first financial derivatives were traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1972 and the casino economy really got going, it seems like ‘greed is good’ and ‘bigger is better’ became the dual mottos underpinning (at least one popular version of) the American Dream. The ‘invisible hand’ of the market went largely unquestioned, despite its self-pleasuring habit. Incentives – like Wall Street profits, traders’ bonuses and CEO pay – became perverse, leading not only to unbelievable wealth in the hands of a few, but ultimately to global financial catastrophe.

With the world still reeling from the ensuing global recession, and threatening to slip into the ‘double-dip’ doldrums, I find myself compelled to ask many difficult questions: Was this, as Lehman Brothers trader Larry McDonald suggests in his book of the same name, just ‘a colossal failure of common sense’? Was it the greed of ‘bad apples’ like Lehman’s CEO Dick Fuld, or the banks and their insatiable bonus-driven traders? Or was it the pervasive culture of greed in Wall Street as a whole? What about the greed of politicians and governments who were happy to benefit from growth-on-steroids? And what about Main Street? Wasn’t the public – we, the people – more than happy to greedily lap up those subprime loans?

All this begs the larger question: Is capitalism itself fundamentally flawed? Are we really talking about endemic greed, built into the free-market system – a system which not only allowed, but encouraged the fantasy of double-digit profit growth and an endless bull market? Will capitalism, with its short-term, cost-externalization, shareholder-value focus always tend towards greed, at the expense of people and the planet? Will the scenario of ‘overshoot and collapse’ that was computer modelled in the 1972 ‘Limits to Growth’ report (and reaffirmed in revisions 20 and 30 years later) still come to pass? Has Karl Marx been vindicated in his critique (albeit not in his solution) that, by design, capitalism causes wealth and power to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands?

Perhaps the trillion-dollar question for me is not whether capitalism per se acts like a cancer gene of greed in society, but whether there are different types of capitalism, some of which are more benign than others. To date, the world has by and large been following the Western, Anglo-Saxon model of shareholder-driven capitalism, and perhaps this is the version that is morally bankrupt and systemically flawed.

Interestingly, a 2010 Pew poll of the American ‘millennial generation’ (currently aged between 18 and 30) showed that just 43% still describe capitalism as positive, while the same percentage now describe socialism as positive. Management guru Charles Handy seems to agree. Speaking to me, he confessed:

I’ve always had my doubts about shareholder capitalism, because we keep talking about the shareholders as being owners of the business, but most of them haven’t a clue what business they’re in. They are basically punters with no particular interest in the horse that they’re backing, as long as it wins.

If we can learn one thing from the Age of Greed, it is that we have immense power to make change happen on a monumental scale, and with lightning speed. Greed has proved to be a high octane fuel in the rocket engine of globalization. But ultimately, it was an economic missile without a moral guidance system. I am under no illusions that the Age of Responsibility will vanquish greed. No doubt, the selfish gene will continue to spark our evolution. And yet, if we are successful, the Age of Responsibility will provide capitalism with that much-needed moral compass and Transformative CSR (more about that later in this series) will provide business with a mission-critical social purpose.

So what do you think, can we collectively give up our greed addiction?

Source

Original link on CSRwire

The Death of CSR

2011-10-09T11:37:00.000-07:00

By Wayne Visser

CSR 2.0 Quest Series, No. 1

My opening questions to you are: Has CSR failed? And if it has, should we kill it off before it misleads and distracts too many people from the changes we really need business to make? Or can we reinvent the concept and the practice of CSR?

First let me say what I understand by CSR. I take CSR to stand for Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility, rather than Corporate Social Responsibility, but feel free use whichever proxy label you are most comfortable with. My definition is as follows:

CSR is the way in which business consistently creates shared value in society through economic development, good governance, stakeholder responsiveness and environmental improvement.

Put another way:

CSR is an integrated, systemic approach by business that builds, rather than erodes or destroys, economic, social, human and natural capital.

Given this understanding, my usual starting point for any discussion on CSR is to argue that it has failed. In my book, The Age of Responsibility, I provide the data and arguments to back up this audacious claim. But the logic is simple and compelling. A doctor judges his/her success by whether the patient is getting better (healthier) or worse (sicker). Similarly, we should judge the success of CSR by whether our communities and ecosystems are getting better or worse. And while at the micro level – in terms of specific CSR projects and practices – we can show many improvements, at the macro level almost every indicator of our social, environmental and ethical health is in decline.

I am not alone in my assessment. Indeed, Paul Hawken stated in The Ecology of Commerce in 1993 that ‘If every company on the planet were to adopt the best environmental practice of the ‘‘leading’’ companies, the world would still be moving toward sure degradation and collapse.’ Unfortunately, this is still true nearly 20 years later. Jeffrey Hollender, co-founder and former CEO of Seventh Generation, agrees, saying: ‘I believe that the vast majority of companies fail to be ‘‘good’’ corporate citizens, Seventh Generation included. Most sustainability and corporate responsibility programs are about being less bad rather than good. They are about selective and compartmentalized ‘‘programs’’ rather than holistic and systemic change.’

In fact, there is no shortage of critics of CSR. For example, in 2004, Christian Aid issued a report called ‘Behind the Mask: The Real Face of CSR’, in which they argue that ‘CSR is a completely inadequate response to the sometimes devastating impact that multinational companies can have in an ever-more globalized world – and it is actually used to mask that impact.’ A more recent example was an article in the Wall Street Journal (23 August 2010) called ‘The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility’, which claims that ‘the idea that companies have a responsibility to act in the public interest and will profit from doing so is fundamentally flawed.’

This is not the place to deconstruct these polemics. Suffice to say that they raise some of the same concerns I have – especially about the limits of voluntary action and the ‘misdirection’ that CSR sometimes represents. But I also disagree with many of their propositions – such as the notion that CSR is always a deliberate strategy to mislead, or that government regulation is the only solution to social and environmental problems.

Be that as it may, there are a number of ways to respond to my assertion that CSR has failed. One is to disagree with the facts and to suggest that things are getting better, not worse, as do the likes of Bjørn Lomborg in his Skeptical Environmentalist (2001). That is his and your prerogative. However, I find the evidence – some of which is presented below and which is widely available from credible sources like the United Nations-both compelling and convincing.

Second, you might argue that solving these complex social, environmental and ethical problems is not the mandate of CSR, nor within its capacity to achieve. My response is that while business certainly cannot tackle our global challenges alone, unless CSR is actually about solving the problems and reversing the negative trends,what is the point? CSRthen becomes little more than an altruistic conscience-easer at best; a manipulative image-management tool at worst.

My approach – and the essence of the book – is to say that while CSR as it has been practised in the past has failed, that doesn’t mean that a different kind of CSR – one which addresses its limitations and reforms its nature – is destined to fail in the future. What do you think? Are my arguments unjustified?

Source

Original link on CSRwire

Circularity: Towards Sustainable Consumption & Production

2011-09-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

By Dr Wayne Visser

Towards the end of the 1980s, a concept called ‘industrial ecology’ emerged. It was popularized in 1989 in a Scientific American article by Robert Frosch and Nicholas E. Gallopoulos, in which they declared: ‘Why would not our industrial system behave like an ecosystem, where the wastes of a species may be resource to another species? Why would not the outputs of an industry be the inputs of another, thus reducing use of raw materials, pollution, and saving on waste treatment?’ Hence, the idea of industrial ecology is that businesses should not only look at the life cycle impacts as individual entities, but rather look for ways in which to link up with other businesses to minimise their impacts. For example, there is a Danish industrial park in the city of Kalundborg where a power plant, oil refinery, pharmaceutical plant, plasterboard factory, enzyme manufacturer, waste management company and the city itself all link together to share and utilise resources, by-products, energy and waste heat.

Another concept that was gaining popularity around the same time was ‘cleaner production’, which resulted in the UNEP Declaration on Cleaner Production in 1998. Later, this evolved into the concept of ‘sustainable consumption and production’, which was defined at the UN’s 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development as an approach ‘to promote social and economic development within the carrying capacity of ecosystems by addressing and, where appropriate, de-linking economic growth and environmental degradation through improving efficiency and sustainability in the use of resources and production processes and reducing resource degradation, pollution and waste.’

The University of Cambridge Business Primer on Sustainable Consumption and Production (2007) gives an example to underscore the importance of creating more sustainable industrial processes. On average, the report says, a gold wedding ring weighs 6,000 kilograms. The enormous discrepancy between the actual retail product and the remaining weight is explained by accounting for all the materials used and the waste created during the production life cycle of the ring. The gap between a gold ring’s actual, physical weight and its ‘resource weight’ highlights the scale of physical and financial impacts that are associated with the creation of apparently simple, everyday products. The report concludes that ‘the increased cost that results from the difference between sustainable and unsustainable production is not good for anyone. It is not sustainable financially – such low resource efficiency is wasteful and inefficient. And it is not sustainable socially or environmentally – hazardous or damaging waste products are produced systematically, and resources are increasingly depleted.’

Recognising this challenge, the EU government has begun working with business to create ‘product roadmapping’ as a way of systematising what might otherwise be a more organic, haphazard approach to developing products and the policies that support them. ‘Integrated Product Policy’ (IPP) is how government describes conducting life cycle assessments with a view to potential policy interventions. The IPP of the EU, adopted in 2003, aims at reducing the environmental impact of products, instead of specific industries or processes. Two familiar products with diverse impacts were chosen by the EU to demonstrate IPP. One was a mobile phone, put forward by Nokia; the second, a teak garden chair proposed by Europe’s largest retailer, Carrefour. The result of the exercise showed that, for Nokia, energy consumption is the greatest impact, both during manufacture of components and during use – when chargers left on ‘no-load’ consume electricity constantly. It was estimated that, if 10% of worldwide subscribers unplug their chargers once their phone is fully charged, enough energy would be saved to supply 60,000 European homes for one year.

Source

This is an extract from Chapter 10 of The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. For more information and ongoing updates, follow the The Age of Responsibility Blog

CSR Wire review of The Age of Responsibility

2011-06-15T03:22:00.002-07:00

A Review of 'The Age of Responsibility' by Wayne Visser

Review by CSRwire Contributing Writer Elaine Cohen

The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business is possibly Wayne Visser's greatest work yet. It is deeply reflective of the state of the world, society, business and people who change our lives. It is as much an intimately personal account of Wayne's evolving relationship with Corporate Sustainability & Responsibility as it is a guide to the way these concepts have emerged to drive practices - which have in some ways made a positive difference in the world, but failed spectacularly in other ways to harness the power of capitalism into a force for positive impact.

In many ways Wayne's view of the state of CSR today is rather depressing. Wayne writes: "At worst, CSR in its most primitive form may be a smokescreen covering up systematically irresponsible behaviour. At best, even the most evolved CSR practices might be just a band-aid applied to a gaping wound that is haemorrhaging the lifeblood of the economy, society and the planet." At another level, it is quite uplifting: "We are on the brink of the post-industrial revolution and we need to decide whether we will be accomplices in slowing that transition, or catalysts in speeding us towards a better future."The core message, however, is that CSR as we know it has failed to create a demonstrable improvement in the quality of social, economic and ecological life. For CSR to succeed, it needs to transform itself into something new, CSR 2.0.

Wayne Visser's 9th book on CSR, The Age of Responsibility, is cleverly structured walking us through the "Ages and Stages" of the CSR movement. There are five ages according to the author:

The Age of Greed: characterized by "bigger is better" and shareholder rule in which unfettered growth is fueled by the concept that "greed is good" and that corporations who make more money (for shareholders) actually benefit society.

The Age of Philanthropy: characterized by the concept that business should give back to society, personified by John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and categorized byMatthew Bishop and Michael Green as "philanthrocapitalism."

The Age of Marketing: characterized by the concept that reputation and brand matter most, leading to CSR for PR gains, with a good measure of greenwashing thrown in.

The Age of Management: characterized by the alignment of CSR with business strategy and adoption of voluntary codes and industry standards. Embedding CSR is the name of the game.

The Age of Responsibility: characterized by what Wayne Visser calls "CSR 2.0, or Systemic CSR, based on a new set of principles." The Age of Responsibility has been heralded by iconic leaders such as Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, Ray Anderson of Interface and Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia. CSR 2.0 also makes use of the new social media era as business begins to "redefine its role in society."

CSR 2.0 is based on five principles - creativity, scalability, responsiveness, glocality and circularity. Each principle is explained in turn and a host of examples are provided to ensure we understand it can be done. Vodafone's M-PESA service for mobile-phone banking in Africa is an example of creativity.Tata's Nano car and Wal-Mart's conversion to organic cotton are scalable initiatives; while GSK, the pharma giant, showed responsiveness by creating a patent pool for developing drugs for neglected diseases. Glocality is about ensuring the right local solutions, such as the experience of SC Johnson in Kenya who reformulated cleaning products to adapt to local consumer conditions. Circularity takes us in the direction of cradle-to-cradle and examples can be seen from Patagonia, Nike and Timberland, as well as Tesco's promise to be carbon neutral by 2050.

Getting to CSR 2.0 requires inspired, committed and capable people who understand their role in leading change to make the new promise of CSR 2.0 a reality. The final part of The Age of Responsibility is a lesson on change and includes a Change Matrix which plots the many change agents who have emerged to date to advance CSR and several change models that can assist our thinking as we aspire to make it happen.

Wayne Visser distils four types of CSR change agents within the community of CSR professionals: the Expert (whose motivators are projects, systems and technical excellence); the Facilitator (who shares knowledge and creates opportunities); the Catalyst (who initiates change and gives strategic direction) and the Activist (whose motivation is related to broader social and environmental issues in the world). The point is that motivation for change in business organizations comes in different forms and driving change successfully requires recognition of individual motivators and organizational context. At the heart of it all are individuals and their actions.

What is rather unique and appealing about this book is that it is not simply an erudite chronicle of the evolution of CSR together with a nicely packaged solution to all CSR's inadequacies. The appeal is the sense you are actually working through the dilemmas and challenges at each step of the way with the author, who ultimately asks whether working in Corporate Sustainability & Responsibility is a good answer to his life's question: Is advancing CSR truly a worthy enough cause for us to devote our energies to? Or is it a hollow shell that provides capitalism with a softer face but doesn't make any substantive difference to the way businesses work?

From Wayne's early beginnings as a strategy analyst with Cap Gemini, through leadership with KPMG's Sustainability Services in South Africa and then back to academia to pursue a Ph.D., Visser has grappled with the manifestations of the ages and stages of CSR in a way that reflects his deep sense of personal responsibility to make a difference. This journey has led him to develop a vision of a new CSR, which is more holistic and "judged by its success in improvements in the overall socio-cultural, economic and ecological system." In the forward to the book, the Age of Responsibility protagonist Jeffrey Hollender writes: "The hour may be late and the clock loudly ticking, but the story of responsible business is not over yet. There's still room for a happy ending. And the time has come to write it for ourselves."

We should all read this book. We are all potential change agents. We are all part of the problem and part of the solution. We are all living in World 2.0, where CSR 2.0 can become a reality. We are all likely catalysts in the Age of Responsibility.

About Elaine Cohen

Elaine Cohen is a Sustainability Consultant and Reporter at Beyond Business and blogger on sustainability reporting and author of CSR for HR: A necessary business partnership to advance responsible business practices.

This commentary is written by a valued member of the CSRwire contributing writers' community and expresses this author's views alone.

CSR & Pharmaceuticals: Big Pharma on Trial - Part 2

2011-06-08T00:11:00.000-07:00

By Wayne Visser

This blog follows on from Part 1

It is nearly ten years later and the pharmaceutical companies are still trying to rebuild their reputations. As Mail & Guardian journalist Qudsiya Karrim reported for Inside Story in 2010: The past decade has been a public relations nightmare for big pharmaceutical companies – and deservedly so, their critics say. Activists and nongovernment organizations the world over have slated Big Pharma for putting profits ahead of people and vigorously enforcing their intellectual property rights, preventing many from gaining access to life-saving medication. It’s an ugly story told repeatedly – in the media, over dinner, at AIDS conferences and during university seminars – and it has earned the pharmaceutical industry an unmatched notoriety.

But have they learned their lesson? The latest and possibly most responsive action has been from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Early in 2009, CEO Andrew Witty announced a major reform in their corporate policy on drug affordability and accessibility. In particular, he said GSK will cut its prices for all drugs in the 50 least developed countries to no more than 25% of the levels in the UK and US – and less if possible – and make drugs more affordable in middle-income countries such as Brazil and India. In addition, GSK will reinvest 20% of any profits it makes in the least developed countries in hospitals, clinics and staff and invite scientists from other companies,

NGOs or governments to join the hunt for tropical disease treatments at its dedicated institute at Tres Cantos, Spain. Many NGOs remain sceptical. Michelle Childs, director of policy and advocacy for Medecins Sans Frontieres, says that in China, GSK charges over $3,000 for the antiretroviral Lamivudine in the absence of generic competition, while in Thailand, by comparison, another pharmaceutical company, Abbott, offers the Lopinavir/Ritonavir co-formulation for $500. And as for reinvesting profits, Catherine Tomlinson of the Treatment Action Campaign says, ‘Wouldn’t it simply be better to slash profits and allow for countries themselves to invest in improving health infrastructure? The GSK argument is circular: We charge so much money so that we can give you some of your own money back!’

The most interesting and radical move, however, is that Witty committed GSK to put any chemicals or processes over which it has intellectual property rights that are relevant to finding drugs for neglected diseases into a ‘patent pool’, so they can be explored by other researchers. Explaining this move, Witty said, ‘I think it’s the first time anybody’s really come out and said we’re prepared to start talking to people about pooling our patents to try to facilitate innovation in areas where, so far, there hasn’t been much progress.’ He went on to say, ‘Some people might be surprised it’s coming from a pharma company. Obviously people see us as very defensive of intellectual property, quite rightly, and we will be, but in this area of neglected diseases we just think this is a place where we can carve out a space and see whether or not we can stimulate a different behaviour.’

On this score, some critics have been cautiously supportive. ‘He is breaking the mould in validating the concept of patent pools’, said the head of Oxfam’s medicines campaign, Rohit Malpani. ‘That has been out there as an idea and no company has done anything about it. It is a big step forward. It is welcome that he is inviting other companies to take this on and have a race to the top instead of a race to the bottom.’

About the blogger

Dr Wayne Visser is the Founder & Director of CSR International and the author of 9 books on CSR, the most recent of which is The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. He researches, writes, trains and teaches corporate sustainability & responsibility around the world, including at Cambridge University, Magna Carta College, Oxford and La Trobe Graduate Business School, Melbourne.

Source

This is an extract from Chapter 9 of The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business For more information and ongoing updates, follow the The Age of Responsibility Blog

Copyright 2011 Wayne Visser

CSR & Pharmaceuticals: Big Pharma on Trial - Part 1

2011-06-03T01:44:00.000-07:00

By Wayne Visser

Let’s take a look at one of the biggest crises the world still faces: HIV/AIDS. According to the November 2009 UNAIDS report, more than 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981. The number of people living with HIV has risen from around 8 million in 1990 to 33 million today, and is still growing. Around 67% of people living with HIV are in sub-Saharan Africa and Africa has over 14 million AIDS orphans. At the end of 2008, women accounted for 50% of all adults living with HIV worldwide. In developing and transitional countries, 9.5 million people are in immediate need of life-saving AIDS drugs; of these, only 4 million (42%) are receiving the drugs.

The topic of drugs presents a good case study in responsiveness (and the lack thereof). In 2001, Oxfam launched a campaign called ‘Cut the Cost’, challenging the pharmaceutical industry to address responsible drug pricing. In the same year, the Indian pharmaceutical company Cipla cut the annual price of anti-retroviral AIDS drugs to Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) to $350, as compared with the global industry standard of $1,000, and the Western market price of $10,400. Cipla also announced its intention to allow the South African government to sell eight of its generic AIDS drugs, the patents for which were held by other companies.

MSF put pressure on the five major pharmaceutical companies involved in the UNAIDS Accelerating Access Initiative to match Cipla’s benchmark. And to some extent, they responded. Merck cut the price of its HIV/AIDS treatments for developing countries, including offering Crixivan at $600 and Stocrin at $500. Pfizer offered to supply antifungal medicine at no charge to HIV/AIDS patients in 50 AIDS stricken countries. Bristol-Myers Squibb announced that it would not prevent generic-drug makers from selling low-cost versions of one of its HIV drugs (Zerit) in Africa. And Glaxo-SmithKline granted a voluntary licence to South African generics producer Aspen, allowing them to share the rights to GSK’s drugs (AZT, 3TC and Combivir) without charge.

So far so good. Apparently the drug companies are quite responsive. Why then, in 2001 (at the same time that they were doing all these good things), did 39 of the largest international pharmaceutical companies take the South African government to court over plans to introduce legislation aimed at easing access to AIDS drugs, arguing that it would infringe their patents and contravene the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement? Justin Forsyth, Oxfam Policy Director, said at the time, ‘This court case demonstrates how powerful drug companies are bullying poor countries just so they can protect their patent rights on lifesaving medicines.’

The pharmaceutical companies quickly realized that they had created a monster. Tens of thousands of people marched in protest all over the world, and 300,000 people from over 130 countries signed a petition against the action. Eventually, following public pressure, as well as pressure from the South African government and the European Parliament, Big Pharma dropped the case. Fanning the flames of public discontent, John le Carr_e’s 2001 book The Constant Gardener and the 2005 film adaptation depicted drug companies as corrupt profiteers. And so began the industry’s PR damage control campaign. ‘This is not about profits and patents’, said John L. McGoldrick, Executive Vice President at Bristol-Myers Squibb, ‘We seek no profits on AIDS drugs in Africa, and we will not let our patents be an obstacle.’

Part 2 to follow soon ...

About the blogger

Dr Wayne Visser is the Founder & Director of CSR International and the author of 9 books on CSR, the most recent of which is The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. He researches, writes, trains and teaches corporate sustainability & responsibility around the world, including at Cambridge University, Magna Carta College, Oxford and La Trobe Graduate Business School, Melbourne.

Source

This is an extract from Chapter 9 of The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business For more information and ongoing updates, follow the The Age of Responsibility Blog

Promoting CSR Among the World's Brightest Youth

2011-05-15T23:48:00.000-07:00

It is often corporate social responsibility failings, rather than successes, which get the most publicity. However, occasionally successful entrepreneurs, such as Catherine B. Reynolds, break through the cloud of negative media and show that inspiring social and environmentally responsible thinking among our youth is a battle worth fighting and winning.

This goes beyond universities requiring business majors to take courses on business ethics and corporate social responsibility. The Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation has begun to reward students for their research and work in the field of corporate social responsibility in two ways: 1) through invitations to her Academy of Achievement Summit; and 2) by providing scholarships through the Catherine B Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship.

The annual Academy of Achievement Summit, which is the intellectual equivalent of the Oscars, helps promote a variety of sustainable practices comprising corporate social responsibility standards. The organization (Academy of Achievement) invites a few dozen of the most notable names in politics, art, and business. Former attendees include Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, Steven Spielberg, and CEOs of various companies. The best part: the summit holds events and discussions, in which some of the most renowned business leaders and politicians mingle and discuss issues with hand picked student attendees and young professionals.

These 70 students, usually from various backgrounds and countries, have been leaders in their respective fields, and they are nominated by the administration of their respective universities They are interested in leading initiatives in various fields, and they get to discuss their ideas about environmentalism, business ethics, and politics with some of the most successful leaders in their field.

The Catherine Reynolds Foundation also offers scholarship for NYU graduate and undergraduate students pursuing studies in social entrepreneurship. In addition to providing scholarships, the foundation also allows students to participate in a variety of panels dealing with corporate social responsibility. Towards the end of the program, the students are able to compete in a social venture competition, where the program provides winners with capital for their business idea.

This foundation, and Catherine B. Reynolds in particular, should be emulated by other wealthy individuals wanting to increase social entrepreneurship and corporate responsibility among young professionals. Indeed a similar inspiring initiative already exists: eBay founder Jeff Skoll’s Centre Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University, along with his World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship and Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship. Through leadership initiatives like these, we can make CSR the norm, instilled from a young age. If we succeed, we are less likely to see deviations from responsible, accountable practices.

About the Guest Blogger

Pamelia Brown specializes in writing about associates degree. Questions and comments can be sent to: pamelia.brown@gmail.com.

New Generation of Socially Responsible Employees Head Our Way (Guest Blog)

2011-05-04T01:00:00.000-07:00

Guest Blog by Mariana Ashley

Paul Light, of NYU's Wagner School of Public Service, recently wrote a very impressive article at his blog at The Washington Post about how business schools and programs can serve as an excellent starting point for teaching students—the future of business—about the importance of social responsibility. Essentially, you could call his article a 'call to arms,' in that Light is attempting to inspire his readers, many of whom most likely count themselves to be his colleagues in business schools across the country, to consider requiring their students to pass courses concerning social impact.

Light notably closes the article with the following statement: "Making social impact part of every student's curriculum would send the signal that social impact is an essential skill for any destination, while telling students that changing the world is part of a life well live."

Light does address some possible counterarguments: he remarks that such an expanded requirement means that other, perhaps more traditional courses would have to be bumped; he recognizes that many programs have already incorporated courses on ethical business practices and corporate responsibility into their curricula as electives; and he points out that students interested in corporate social responsibility are also interested in, well, having a career that pays the bills.

In other words, he is aware of the difficulties that such a 'call to arms' creates for his readership.

But this doesn't keep him from making the call, of course, though it does severely limit his ability to set out a significant plan that other schools might implement should they want to follow his lead. Instead, Light points to what he perceives to be exemplary prototypes of this new impulse in business programs: NU's Kellogg School of Management and his own Wagner School, which are both "great steps" in the right direction.

So what, then, does this mean for the CSR movement? Well, should this impulse in business programs take root and grow healthily, it means that those concerned in fostering a sense of social responsibility among their companies will have a much better and more successful project due to the receptiveness of their audience. And, most likely, this same audience will also provide a great resource, bringing their own fresh ideas to that same project. Corporations would do well to seek out the most talented job candidates who have graduated from these and similar programs, as they will certainly be the next generation to lead the charge in the name of corporate social responsibility.

About the Blogger

Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.

CSR in Nigeria

2011-04-25T02:28:00.000-07:00

By Wayne Visser

A few thoughts after my trip to Lagos last month ...

I am not naive enough to believe that CSR heralds a new dawn for Nigeria. The general consensus was that most companies are stuck in the Ages of Philanthropy and Marketing. Nevertheless, CSR has the potential to advance transparency and to create a platform to discuss the ethics of business and government. It also has the potential to be corrupted, which sadly is already happening in some instances where corporate sponsorship of government ‘CSR projects’ is practiced as an indirect form of bribery.

Shell Nigeria's reputation seems as sullied as ever, 15 years after the Ken Saro Wiwa fiasco. It seems like a viscous cycle of destructive relations. According to Tony Attah, Manager of Sustainable Development and Community Relations, 90% of the oil spills in 2009/10 were as a result of saboteurs, vandals and those trying to steal oil from the pipelines. Also, the Nigerian government takes more than 90% of the earnings of the business through taxes, royalties and their own equities (it has a 55% equity stake in the company).

Of course, there are examples of good practice, such as the Global MOUs between companies and communities, and conservation projects like the Chevron preserved urban forest which I visited. Yet even here, one senses that these are fragile fortifications against a relentless tide of oil-slicked growth and car-jammed urbanisation. I was there during the scheduled first weekend of elections, but these were postponed due to printed ballot papers not arriving in time. The Nigerians take it all in their stride, as if fighting the behemoth of inefficiency is as futile as cursing the manic traffic.

One encouraging initiative is the Social Enterprise Reporting Awards (SERA), run by Trucontact. It was refreshing to see reporting where a level of verification (including site visits) takes place, and where the UN Millennium Development Goals are used as criteria to judge "CSR Projects". On request, I helped to redesign the questionnaire for 2011 (initially, literally on the back of a serviette/napkin, although we worked on it in more detail later), so that the awards will start measuring Strategic CSR, rather than the current Philanthropic & Promotional CSR focus. Judging against Transformative CSR (CSR 2.0) may be a little ambitious at this stage.

If all goes according to plan, I will be back in Lagos around 15-17 June to speak at the 1st Africa Roundtable Conference on CSR and November, and again in November to deliver more CSR training hosted by Trucontact. Meanwhile, I wish this complex, intriguing, vital country well. After all, as my poem puts it, Lagos Lives.

Top 40 Sustainability Books of 2010 - Part 2

2011-04-20T07:19:00.000-07:00

Cambridge Top 40 Sustainability Books of 2010

1. Accounting for Sustainability (Anthony Hopwood, Jeffrey Unerman & Jessica Frie

2. Adaptation to Climate Change in Southern Africa (Steffen Bauer & Imme Scholz)

3. A Blueprint for a Safer Planet (Nicholas Stern)

4. Building Social Business (Muhammad Yunus)

5. Cents and Sustainability (Michael H. Smith, Karlson ‘Charlie’ Hargroves & Cheryl Desh)

6. The Climate Files (Fred Pearce)

7. Corporate Community Involvement (Nick Lakin & Veronica Scheubel)

8. CSR for HR (Cohen)

9. CSR Strategies (Sri Urip)

10. Dynamic Sustainabilities (Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones & Andy Stirling)

11. The Economics of Climate Change in China (FAN Gang, Nicholas Stern, Ottmar Edenhofer, XU Shanda, Klas Eklund, Frank Ackerman, Lailai LI and Karl Hallding)

12. Factor Five (Ernst von Weizsacker, Karlson 'Charlie' Hargroves, Michael H. Smith, Cheryl Desha & Peter Stasinopoulos)

13. Freefall (Joseph E. Stiglitz)

14. Globalizing Responsibility (Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke & Alice Malpass)

15. Finders Keepers? (Terence Daintit)

16. Harmony (HRH The Prince of Wales, Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly)

17. How Bad Are Bananas? (Mike Berners-Lee)

18. Innovative CSR (Céline Louche, Samuel O. Idowu & Walter Leal Filho)

19. Integrated Sustainable Design of Buildings (Paul Appleby)

20. Nature and Culture (Sarah Pilgrim and Jules Prett)

21. The New Pioneers (Tania Ellis)

22. The New Rules of Green Marketing (Jacquelyn A. Ottman)

23. Next Generation Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid (Ted London & Stuart L. Hart)

24. Our Choice (Al Gore)

25. Peoplequake (Fred Pearce)

26. The Positive Deviant (Sara Parkin)

27. The Power of Sustainable Thinking (Bob Doppelt)

28. Prosperity Without Growth (Tim Jackson)

29. Requiem for a Species (Clive Hamilton)

30. Responsible Business (Manfred Pohl & Nick Tolhurst)

31. The Responsibility Revolution (Jeffrey Hollender & Bill Breen)

32. Smart Solutions to Climate Change (Bjorn Lomborg)

33. The Spirit Level (Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett)

34. Sustainability Education (Paula Jones, David Selby & Stephen Sterlin

35. Sustainability in Austerity (Philip Monaghan)

36. The Sustainable MBA (Giselle Weybrecht)

37. Tackling Wicked Problems (Valerie A. Brown, John A. Harris & Jacqueline Y. Russell

38. Too Smart for Our Own Good (Craig Dilworth)

39. The Top 50 Sustainability Books (Wayne Visser & CPSL)

40. The World Guide to CSR (Wayne Visser & Nick Tolhurst)

Top 40 Sustainability Books for 2010 - Part 1

2011-04-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

By Wayne Visser

In 2009, I worked on a project for the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability (CPSL) which resulted in the publication of The Top 50 Sustainability Books[1]. The book draws together some of the best thinking over the last 50 years and more on the most pressing social and environmental challenges we face as a society.

For The State of Sustainability Leadership Report 2011 just published by the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability, I took a fresh new look at books, this time focusing on 2010. The Cambridge Top 40 Sustainability Books of 2010 list was compiled by CPSL with input from its Senior Associates. We selected those books which we believe are most relevant for today’s leaders. Comparing this list to our Top 50 books, we can observe a number of changes:

The ‘All Time Top 50’ list included a fairly balanced coverage of social and environmental issues. By contrast the ‘2010 Top 40’ list is heavily skewed towards environmental challenges, and dominate by climate change.
The Top 50 contained numerous treatise on capitalism and globalisation, while the Top 40 (in the wake of the financial crisis) has shifted almost exclusively to a focus on the economy.
The Top 40 also has a much stronger emphasis on business responses and creating change. In fact, it is altogether a more pragmatic list, with titles that contain words like ‘plan’, ‘how to’, ‘strategy’ and ‘guide’. This shift to action-orientation is a positive development, as is the increase in the number of female authors (28%, as compared with 17% for the Top 50), although the gender imbalance remains worryingly low.

Among the books on our Top 40 list that have been creating a real buzz are Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level and The Prince of Wales’s Harmony. Jackson’s book revives a much older debate about ‘economics for a finite planet’, led since the 1970s by the likes of former World Bank economist Herman Daly (Steady State Economics and Beyond Growth). Jackson restates the challenge starkly: "Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must." While others like Jonathon Porritt (in Capitalism as if the World Matters) argue for ‘smart growth’ instead of ‘dumb growth’, the global financial crisis has given Jackson’s more uncompromising zero-growth position a renewed resonance.

Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level, subtitled ‘Why More Equal Societies Always Do Better’, is a highly complementary companion to Jackson’s book. Using a plethora of data and analysis, the authors build a case that countries should focus on equity rather than growth in order to create healthy societies. In countries of equal overall wealth, argue Wilkinson and Pickett, less equal societies suffer more social ills – shorter, unhealthier and unhappier lives; higher rates of teenage pregnancy, violence, obesity, imprisonment and addiction; poorer relationships between socio-economic classes; and higher environmental impacts through resource consumption. The book has created some controversy, and some dispute the authors’ arguments. Nevertheless, its message is timely and urgent.

Harmony is an entirely different book, which looks at social and ecological problems through a more aesthetic and philosophical lens. The Prince of Wales, together with Tony Juniper & Ian Skelly, range far and wide across the intellectual and practical territory of sustainability, questioning many widely held beliefs and modern assumptions about nature and society. The book reveals The Prince’s deeply held perspectives on the interconnectedness of life, and illustrates how this can be (and is being) applied to secure a more sustainable future. Far from being retrogressive or Luddite in its approach, this beautifully presented and data-rich book proposes combing the best of modern science and technology with the wisdom of traditional ways, in order to restore the balance between humans and nature.

Harmony has now been made into a documentary film, which premiered on NBC in November 2010. It follows the great tradition of other educational films over the past ten years, such as The Corporation (2003), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The 11th Hour (2007) and The Age of Stupid (2009), to mention but a few. In 2010, two new films that continued this tradition were Carbon Nation, which is described as “an optimistic (and witty) discovery of what people are already doing, what we as a nation [America] could be doing and what the world needs to do to prevent (or at least slow down) the impending climate crisis”[2], and GasLand, which is an investigative documentary about the “trail of secrets, lies and contamination”[3] behind the natural gas drilling boom in the United States.

I look forward to hearing your views and suggestions about what books and films are pushing the envelope in 2011.

[1] Visser, W. & CPSL (2009) The Top 50 Sustainability Books. Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing.

[2] IMDB, The Internet Movie Database – www.imdb.com

[3] http://www.gaslandthemovie.com

The State of CSR in Australia (Guest Blog)

2011-04-20T06:49:00.000-07:00

Guest Blog by Leeora Black

When we began analysing the responses to our State of CSR Annual Review 2010-2011, one of the things that most struck me was the ambiguous signals that Australian businesses are giving about the role of CSR in their organisations.

On the one hand, it’s clear – and very heartening – to see that more organisations are seeing value from CSR that goes beyond reputation and risk management. Businesses are seeing applications of CSR contributing to real value creation through new ways of working (e.g. saving costs through utilising more cost-effective resources, more efficient supply chains, employee work flow), new products and services and new business models – with the latter helping develop new markets and enhance existing market opportunities.

But on the other hand, most of the almost 500 managers and executives who responded to our survey said that getting organisational buy-in is the biggest single obstacle to their success with CSR.

Clearly, there is still something at the core of many organisations that says they don’t get it. What’s going on here? Why has senior organisational management still not fully comprehended that the opportunities flowing from CSR require full strategic consideration?

I think the issue lies with the nature of the CSR function itself: probably the most cross-functional, cross-silo business discipline to emerge so far in the history of management. It requires a profound level of cross-business functionality and integration to be effective. This is a real challenge to most companies, which are founded on vertical accountabilities.

There are opportunities for change, however.

Organisations typically change because changes are forced upon them from outside. This could be a catastrophic event (a natural disaster impacting on their business, a corporate scandal à la Enron); it could be a profound change in the business environment (such as via the introduction of a carbon tax); or it could be changing requirements from their stakeholders.

Businesses experience these impacts to varying degrees and in different ways. In Australia, some organisations may be impacted by all three. However, I see the most widespread impact coming from the changing expectations of stakeholders. They are becoming more sophisticated in their expectations of organisations, and this extends to their expectations of how CSR is operationalised in businesses.

Just as awareness of ‘greenwashing’ has expanded, many stakeholders are all too aware of whether a business treats its CSR activities as an opportunity for risk minimisation or reputation enhancement at the expense of genuine collaboration and value creation.
Our report’s research emphasises stakeholder engagement is the key capability for organisations to deliver enhanced CSR performance, with its positive business flow-on effects.

There are three reasons why this should translate into a more integrated strategic role for CSR:

1. Issues raised by external stakeholders will increasingly be aimed at the strategic intent, rather than the local impact, of the business.

2. Stakeholders can often drive innovation through working with businesses to address issues of mutual interest. For example, Procter and Gamble has opened up its innovation process to people outside the organisation and expects to reap $3 billion in annual sales growth as a result.

3. There will be fewer ‘low hanging fruit’ for organisations to harvest in business improvement processes. At the same time, increasing regulation will drive a need to innovate to reduce costs. CSR holds the promise of helping to solve this problem.
Change is part of business and successful ones adapt and move forward. The adoption of a more comprehensive approach to CSR will help achieve this.

How do you think CSR can help organisations adapt to change?

Dr Leeora Black is Managing Director of the Australian Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (ACCSR). The question of how to manage large and complex organisations for responsible business outcomes is a major focus of her consulting work. Why not visit the ACCSR Blog at http://www.csrconnected.com.au/?

The CSR 2.0 Principle of Scalability - The Limits of Ethical Consumerism

2011-04-19T06:45:00.000-07:00

What makes Wal-Mart such a good example of scalability is not just its size, but the principles underlying its actions, such as mainstreaming sustainability, measuring total impacts, empowering customers, working with suppliers and setting audacious goals. The lesson of history is that the ‘ethical consumer’ is the enemy of progress!

That may seem like a crazy thing to say, but here is why I say it. Simply put, by creating a premium-priced, niche market for ‘ethical consumption’ (whether it be organic, fairtrade or eco-friendly), companies have been able to present a responsible front to the world, while leaving the vast majority of their products – which are, by implication, less than ethical – unquestioned and unchanged. At the same time, a small group of usually well-to-do Western consumers have been able to ease their conscience by feeling that they are making a positive difference.

Now let me be clear. I am not against organic or fairtrade or ecofriendly products per se. That would be insane. Clearly, there are groups of producers – usually poor farmers in the Third World – that have benefited from these initiatives. What I am against is the voluntary nature and premium pricing of sustainable and responsible products. The combination of these two factors has ensured that, with one or two exceptions, these products have never gone to scale. As compared with the total and ongoing impacts of mainstream shopping habits, ethical consumption, laudable as it is, has remained marginal at best and totally insignificant at worst.

Let’s look at some of the facts. The UK Soil Associate launched the world’s first organic standard in 1967 and Germany launched its Blue Angel eco-label in 1978. The first fairtrade coffee, introduced by the Max Havelaar Foundation, was in 1988, and the Rainforest Alliance launched its SmartWood certification in 1989. So we have had more than 40 years of ethical consumption. And where has that left us? Well, certainly, it is a growing trend. In the UK, where the proportion of ethical consumers is among the highest in the world, a survey of 4,000 consumers by PwC found that shoppers buying Fairtrade products rose from 20% in 2005 to 50% in 2008 and organic food purchasing increased from 22% to 43% over the same period.

However, this £300bn sector accounted for just 4% of the UK retail market in 2008 and only 60% of basic grocery products had sustainable alternatives, falling to 40% for some sub categories, such as clothing and non-food items. According to the PwC survey, the high prices associated with fairtrade and organic products remained the main inhibitor to further growth. On average, the price premium for environmentally and ethically-friendly products – taken across 75 items at the UK's top six grocers – was 45%. Almost 50% of those shoppers surveyed said they were unwilling or unable to pay this premium, claiming that on average they were not willing to pay a premium in excess of 20% for greener alternatives.

How then do we explain polls, like the one done in 2009 by the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation among 14,500 people across 15 countries, which found that more than half said they were ‘active ethical consumers’? Well, as all professional market researchers will tell you, these figures are horribly skewed due to what’s called the ‘socially acceptable response bias’. You are basically asking people if they are ethical, or if they care about poor farmers in the Third World, or if they are okay with trashing the planet. What would you answer? The simple fact is that, as he UK’s Sustainable Consumption Roundtable says, ‘we know that there is a considerable gap – the so-called ‘value-action gap – between people’s attitudes, which are often pro-environmental, and their everyday behaviours.’

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This is an extract from Chapter 8 of The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. For more information and ongoing updates, follow the The Age of Responsibility Blog

CSR International website - Malware attack & Update

2011-04-06T04:03:00.001-07:00

The CSR International site has been taken offline to sort out the Malware
attack. My apologies for the inconvenience. We hope to be back live soon.

There are some exciting new developments in the pipeline, including the ability
of members to interact, post on the website and join a professional institute
...

So watch this space ...

Wayne Visser
Founder & CEO

Informative 5-star review on Amazon of "The Age of Responsibility"

2011-04-06T04:00:00.000-07:00

5.0 out of 5 stars - A fine and fascinating book, 1 April 2011

By Dr Mike (UK) (Amazon TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Link to review online

I have read quite a lot about the recent financial collapse and feared that this would be yet another overview and analysis of these events. However, I was pleased to find that it was much more than that.

The first part of the book is a summary of various ways that firms conduct themselves. the author sees these as evolutionary stages, but whether or not you agree with that is irrelevant, because you can read without that assumption.

Stage one is Greed. The firm works solely for its own profit, and this is justified by the trickle-down theory of wealth, which, from the examples given, appears not to be working too well. There are some obscene case studies here, such as Barings, Enron, Lehman Brothers, WorldCom and even the Dutch East India Company. Although executive greed is generally mentioned here, the same greed pervades the whole company structure, financial markets and banking too.

Stage two is Philanthropy, and is exemplified by Carnegie, Rockefeller, Buffet and Bill Gates giving most of their personal fortunes back to society. This exemplifies the trickle-down theory of wealth, but is at the cost of what their companies have done to society and the environment in the first place. Also, of course, too few companies or individuals do what Gates has done: most hang on to their wealth or distribute it only to their higher ranking employees.

Stage three is Marketing. One has only to look at oil, gas and tobacco to see examples "greenwashing" the worst exploits of a company to make it appear that all is well and good. Lobbying is the primary tool used.

Stage four is Management. Cadbury is an example of a firm that put welfare and sustainability at the forefront and to challenge the supremacy of shareholders in governing the direction a firm takes.

Stage five is Responsibility. Here a company tries to build sustainability into itself, as in Interface.

The author then builds a new model for Corporate Sustainable Responsibility (CSR 2.0) which builds on the mistakes inherent in the original CSR (CSR 1.0). This uses ideas such as Creativity, Scalability, Responsiveness, Glocality (think global, act local) and Circularity.

The whole book is buzzing with ideas, and would be worth buying just for the ten case histories examined in detail. Whether you are a die-hard capitalist or communist you will, I think, get a lot out of reading this book. It is all too easy to distort the message of capitalism and over simplify the issues of wealth distribution, pollution and sustainability into the mantra "capitalism works". Yes, it creates wealth, but society has to moderate its worst excesses just as it needs to do that for any individual in society. After all, a company has rights, by law, and should therefore have responsibilities too.

This is one of the best books I have read in the past year. Thoroughly recommended!

CSR and Disaster Risk Reduction – Part 2 (guest blog)

2011-03-17T02:16:00.000-07:00

Guest Blog by Ian Doyle

In part one of my reflection on CSR and natural disasters, I reflected on how business has a role to play in minimising the vulnerability of the communities in which they operate. In part two, I reflect on how disaster risk reduction can actually be a vehicle for business to contribute to sustainable development by addressing the systemic causes that expose communities to natural hazard risk.

The outfall from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption in Iceland in 2010 was a good example. In the three days after the eruption and the subsequent grounding of aircraft, 5000 farm workers in Kenya had been temporarily laid-off due to the lack of market access.[1] Whilst Tesco was able to organise an alternative delivery route through Spain, it raises the question of the viability of trade arrangements that create such dependencies.[2]

In the case of a supermarket chain, greater corporate responsibility could involve a strategy that strengthens local markets to provide food for the local population. This would represent an investment in the supply chain rather than an opportunity to cut costs. By taking such an approach, the unpredictability of natural disasters can be tempered as there is greater supply chain capacity to respond when calamity strikes.

Furthermore, such an approach could actually avoid some disasters altogether. While a business continuity plan for fast-onset disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions can minimise the impact of a catastrophe, slow-onset disasters such as drought need not necessarily create humanitarian crises.

An Interpares study on community-based food security systems showed how poor communities in the Medak district, a semi-arid region in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and also part of India’s “hunger belt”, were unaffected by the 2001-2002 drought.[3] By growing grain that is adapted to a low-rainfall climate and through the establishment of a community grain fund that enables food sovereignty in lean times, the communities had no need of external assistance during the emergency. What this demonstrates is that while the drought was unavoidable, the appropriate management of resources can strengthen communities as well as reducing their vulnerability in the event of a potential disaster.

While there was no corporate involvement in the above example, companies that align their core business practices for the purposes of social development may be able to develop disaster risk reduction solutions that go beyond risk minimisation. For instance, a food services company could partner with a community to support traditional farmer methods that maintain land sovereignty and are adapted to arid climates. Rather than an emergency relief approach that is reactionary, by addressing the systemic issues that expose vulnerable communities to risk in the event of disaster, communities can be strengthened to avoid tragedy all together.”

About the blogger

Lifeworth Consulting associate (www.lifeworth.com/consult), Ian Doyle, has based this blog on Lifeworth’s pro-bono work with the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), and his forthcoming article co-authored with professor Jem Bendell in issue 41 of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship.

Sources

[1] Nick Wadhams. ‘Iceland volcano: Kenya’s farmers losing $1.3m a day in flights chaos’. Le Guardian Online. 18 April 2010.

[2] BBC News. ‘Volcanic ash: Tesco delivers Kenyan produce via Spain’. BBC News Online. 20 April 2010.

[3] Interpares. ‘Community-bassed Food Security Systems: Local Solutions for Ending Chronic Hunger and Promoting Rural Development’. Online. 2004.

CSR and Disaster Risk Reduction - Part 1 (Guest Blog)

2011-03-12T01:16:00.000-08:00

Guest Blog by Ian Doyle

One aspect of social media (see previous blogs) relates to disaster risk reduction. Wayne Visser, in his book The Age of Responsibility provided examples of “crowdsourcing” through social media platforms such as Peoplefinder in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and “Mission 4636” following the Haiti earthquake that proved to be effective tools in responding to requests for help and in locating missing persons.[1]

Social media is also providing important access to information in the wake of disasters. [2] This was exemplified by the Japan earthquake yesterday. With Japanese telecommunications affected by the seismic activity, but the internet still working, Twitter and Facebook were the most effective way to get news out. Therefore disaster risk reduction is one field where social media enterprise could contribute as part of its corporate social responsibility.

Interestingly, the Japan earthquake also reminds us of how companies other than social media enterprise can respond to disasters. Google for instance, ‘advertised’ this warning on its search engine page in response to the earthquake, thus becoming a global emergency alert system, stating:

“Tsunami Alert for New Zealand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Hawaii and others. Waves expected over the next few hours caused by 8.9 earthquake in Japan.” And just hours later, updated it to: “Tsunami Alert Waves expected across the Pacific region, caused by 8.9 earthquake in Japan,” and then “Resources related to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.”

The importance of business taking an active role in disaster risk reduction is becoming more and more relevant. As developing countries are most affected by natural disasters and many corporations have transferred their production facilities to these regions, it stands to reason that businesses start to reflect on their societal role in the event of a catastrophe.[3] How business is addressing disaster risk reduction overall is thus another part of corporate responsibility that companies need to consider.

The key to successful disaster reduction is to reduce the vulnerability of communities exposed to natural hazards and better be able to cope during, and recover after the event. More recently, this has been addressed through business continuity management plans. Business continuity is the activity performed by an organisation to ensure that critical business functions will be available when there are disruptions.[4]

But because disaster risk reduction aims to strengthen community responses in the event of disaster, it requires companies to think about how their business continuity plans impact society. For instance, if business expediency is the priority, a business continuity plan could entail dropping a supplier if supplies are temporarily disrupted, effectively depriving the supplier of much needed resources to be functional again. Such a plan would be contrary to sustainable development. If business is going to play its role in decreasing the vulnerability of communities that are exposed to natural hazards, particularly in developing countries, disaster preparedness needs to be understood within the context of sustainable development, which will be explored in part two of this reflection.

Part 2 to follow ....

About the blogger

Sources

[1] Visser, W. (2011) The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business, London: Wiley

[2] Imogen Wall, ‘After disaster: information for life’, Open Democracy Online. 26 October 2008.

[3] Alyson Warhurst. ‘Disaster Prevention: A Role for Business’. Provention Consortium Online. August 2006.

[4] ICOR : Business Continuity Management. See also, David Honour. ‘Defining Business Continuity’, Continuity Central Online. 29 September 2006.

Yogesh Chauhan on "The Age of Responsibility"

2011-03-07T04:03:00.000-08:00

A challenging and thought provoking book. In an age when corporate responsibility is a must for most large businesses, Wayne Visser reminds us that global environmental and social pressures show little sign of receding. He asks: are we as practitioners complacent, or worse, part of the problem? There is hope and optimism but only if we are brave and bold enough to re-engineer corporate responsibility. Read on...

Yogesh Chauhan, Chairman of the Corporate Responsibility Group and BBC Chief Adviser Corporate Responsibility.

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The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business, by Wayne Visser is available from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and other leading book retailers (ISBN-10: 0470688572, ISBN-13: 978-0470688571).

The Age of Marketing: Using smoke and mirrors

2011-03-03T03:47:00.000-08:00

By Wayne Visser

The tobacco industry is a past master in the art of marketing-led deception. For decades, as research on the negative health impacts of smoking piled up, the industry sponsored a campaign of disinformation and deception. Let’s start with what we know about tobacco. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), ‘no other consumer product is as dangerous, or kills as many people. Tobacco kills more than AIDS, legal drugs, illegal drugs, road accidents, murder and suicide combined.’ Of everyone alive today, 500 million will eventually be killed by smoking, and while 0.1 billion people died from tobacco use in the 20th century, ten times as many will die from the same cause in the 21st century.

This is not simply a health issue, but also an economic crisis. In America alone, smoking costs the economy $76 billion in health costs and lost productivity. Smoking-related diseases account for 6% of all health costs in the USA and, on average, a smoker takes 6.16 days of sick leave, as compared with 3.86 for non-smokers. Of all the trash collected in the USA in 1996, cigarette butts accounted for 20%. There are indirect costs as well. Every year 1 million fires are started by children using cigarette lighters. In 1997, China’s worst forest fire was caused by cigarettes and killed 300 people, as well as making 5,000 homeless and destroying 1.3 million hectares of land. In 2000, fires caused by smoking reportedly cost $27 billion and killed 300,000 people.

The debate about the ethics of industry-sponsored research and the practice of misdirection by Big Tobacco reached its zenith when, in 1994, the CEOs of seven of America’s largest tobacco companies16 testified before the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment of Congress, all denying that cigarettes are addictive. They all lied under oath. Two years later, an investigative article in Vanity Fair entitled ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ told the true story of Jeffrey Wigand, a research chemist working for the tobacco company, who planned to go on the 60 Minutes TV show to expose the lies and deception of the industry, including the CEOs that he labelled ‘The Seven Dwarves’. The story was later turned into the 1996 movie The Insider starring Russell Crowe as Wigand, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards (including Best Picture, Actor and Director) and five Golden Globes. Asked in an interview to separate fact from fiction in the movie, Wigand replied:

Was I followed by an ex-FBI agent in the employ of Brown &Williamson? Yes. Was there a bullet found in my mailbox in January 1996? Yes. Did someone threaten to harm my family if I told the truth about the inner workings of the tobacco company I worked for? Yes. Did the tobacco industry attempt to undermine my integrity with a 500 page smear campaign? Yes.

The industry took another public relations hit in 2005, with the release of the movie, Thank You for Smoking. It is a satirical comedy that follows the machinations of Big Tobacco’s chief spokesman Nick Naylor, who engages in PR-spin on behalf of cigarettes while trying to remain a role model for his 12-year-old son. Among the more amusing black humour scenes is one where Naylor and his friends – a firearm lobbyist and an alcohol lobbyist – meet every week and jokingly call themselves the ‘Merchants of Death’ or ‘The MOD Squad’.

Of course, Hollywood represents the lighter end of a far more serious and significant anti-tobacco lobby that has built momentum over the past two decades. We have simultaneously seen a United Nations WHO campaign and numerous governments passing legislation restricting smoking in public places and banning nearly all forms of tobacco advertising. The tobacco companies themselves have been scrambling to regain their lost credibility and to present a more responsible face, seemingly with some success.

For example, companies like British American Tobacco (BAT) have engaged in extensive stakeholder consultation exercises and, since 2001, their businesses in more than 40 markets have produced Social Reports, many of which have won awards from organizations as diverse as the United Nations Environment Programme, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants. BAT has also been ranked in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, the FTSE Ethical Bonus Index and Business in the Community (BITC) Corporate Responsibility Index, and they funded Nottingham University’s International Centre for CSR. If these accolades and associations are to be believed, ‘responsible tobacco’ is not an oxymoron after all.

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This is an extract from Chapter 3 of The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. For more information and ongoing updates, follow the The Age of Responsibility Blog

CSR and Social Media – Part 2

2011-03-02T02:26:00.000-08:00

By Wayne Visser

In my last blog on CSR and Social Media, I wrote about social media still being a “double-edged sword” for CSR. Besides the risks, however, there are also massive opportunities. For instance, the Internet is empowering small traders, promoting greater equity in the supply chain, strongly aided by the new generation of web-enabled mobile phones. China Mobile’s Nongxintong – or farming information service – launched four years ago, which allows 20 million farmers to stay up to date on commodity prices. Other innovations include the Geo Fair Trade research project, which is devising a geotraceability tool for the Fair Trade sector as a way of re-personalising ethics in the Fairtrade supply chain. Meanwhile, Patagonia’s forsaking of GRI-style sustainability reporting in favour on their online Footprint Chronicles®, which map the impacts of their products through the supply chain, perhaps gives a glimpse into the future of transparency.

Looking at the broader trends, a Harvard Business School paper argues that Web 2.0 is causing a distinct shift – from Accountability 1.0 to Accountability 2.0 (Bauer & Murninghan, 2010). Accountability 1.0 is marked by one-way proclamations, campaigns, and PR communications. Companies and stakeholders talk at each other more than with each other. Because it is more about speaking than listening, Accountability 1.0 processes sometimes unintentionally fuel antagonism, confrontation, and mistrust between companies and stakeholders. Accountability 2.0 rests on the assumption of two-way communication, cooperation, and mutual engagement. Accountability 2.0 allows actors in the accountability ecosystem to disagree over substantive issues while engaging in respectful dialogue that seeks mutual understanding and more consensus-oriented solutions.

This is similar to the shift from CSR 1.0 to CSR 2.0, which I first proposed in May 2008, and which explored in more detail in my new book, The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. In 2010, I wrote, “the transformation of the internet through the emergence of social media networks, user-generated content and open source approaches is a fitting metaphor for the changes business is experiencing as it begins to redefine its role in society.” I argue that CSR 1.0, which tends to be defensive, philanthropic, promotional and management-oriented, suffers from the limitations of being incremental, peripheral and uneconomic. By contrast, CSR 2.0, which I also call ‘systemic CSR’ or ‘radical CSR’, is a more holistic approach, based on the principles of creativity, scalability, responsiveness, glocality and circularity, which tackles the roots of our unsustainable and irresponsible production and consumption practices.

References

Baue, B. and Murninghan, M. (2010) The Accountability Web: Weaving corporate accountability and interactive technology,Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 58, May.

Visser, W. (2010) The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business, Journal of Business Systems, Governance and Ethics 5(3): 7-22. November, Special Issue on Responsibility for Social and Environmental Issues.

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Note: This blog is partly based on research and writing done for the forthcoming edition of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship.

Michael Blowfield on "The Age of Responsibility"

2011-03-01T03:15:00.000-08:00

Amongst the advocates of CSR as an innovative management approach, Wayne Visser is a well-known voice. This new book states more clearly than most why CSR should not be dismissed, but would benefit from some serious rethinking.

-- Michael Blowfied, Senior Research Fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University and author of Corporate Responsibility

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The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business, by Wayne Visser is available from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and other leading book retailers (ISBN-10: 0470688572, ISBN-13: 978-0470688571).

CSR and Social Media – Part 1

2011-02-28T03:01:00.000-08:00

By Wayne Visser

In my previous blog on CSR and WikiLeaks, I suggested that social media may be a new platform for social activism. There are some, like Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell, who are sceptical. In his article for The New Yorker, subtitled “Why the revolution will not be Tweeted”, he argues that “the drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy.”

WikiLeaks is just one face of a broader movement of the explosion of social media as a new platform for communication, stakeholder engagement and transparency. We now have companies like GoodGuide providing sustainability ratings for over 60,000 products in the U.S., all accessible at the point of purchase simply by using a free iPhone barcode scanning application. We have JustMeans providing a social networking platform that allows self-declared stakeholders to “follow” a company through the site, providing not only access to their published CSR information, but also providing a conduit for feedback. Justmeans and CRD Analytics have also launched an innovative platform to provide companies with the capability to verify the accuracy and completeness of their ESG Data Set. And we have a new company, OpenEyeWorld, which provides a “crowdsourcing” tool for companies to consult with sustainability experts from around the world.

However, like any new tool, social media is still a double edged sword for companies trying to turn it their advantage in the sphere of corporate citizenship. An already classic case is that of Greenpeace’s anti-Kit-Kat chocolate campaign, which went viral in March 2010 across the social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. The 60 second Greenpeace video, which was at the heart of their campaign, shows a bored office worker biting into a Kit-Kat, and as he does so, it turns into the finger of an orang-utan and ‘crunch!’ the blood spills down his chin and over his clean white shirt. One estimate by Scott Douglas on Prezi calculated that within 4 days the Greenpeace report and shock-video may have reached half a million people through social media like Twitter and Facebook. This viral effect was seemingly boosted by Nestle’s attempt on its Facebook page to censor comments made by its critics (including activists who had changed their Facebook profile pictures to a defamed logo of Nestle, which said ‘Killer’ instead).

The fact that Nestle took swift action by dropping the accused Indonesian supplier and that their hands are effective tied by a lack of available sustainable palm oil did little to quell the angry reactions of online activists. Greenpeace later called off the campaign, which Nestle Executive Vice President for Operations, Jose Lopez, says was achieved “by putting on the table a very technical view of the issues we are talking about. We’ve demonstrated that we have a logic, a path and a process that drives continuous improvement into topics of high concern, which in this case is deforestation” (Courtice, 2010). Nestle’s successful resolution, however, does not take away the fact that social media is a tricky area for companies to master.

References

Courtice, P. (2010). Interview of Jose Lopez by Polly Courtice, Director of the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, 17 June 2010.

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Note: This blog is partly based on research and writing done for the forthcoming edition of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship.

Part 3 - Foreword by Jeffrey Hollender for “The Age of Responsibility”

2011-02-24T03:24:00.000-08:00

Though much has changed in the last 25 years, one thing hasn’t: business is still the only force with the reach and resources to do what needs to be done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

After watching America’s political process devolve in recent years into what is essentially an oversized argument punctuated by self-serving bursts of alarming obstructionism, it’s clear that government is not the answer. Real leadership in Washington and other political capitals has long since been replaced by fearful strategic triangulation that replaces big ideas and bold action with anemic incremental change.

Nor are NGOs an effective alternative. There are too many of them too narrowly focused and too often at odds with each other. Even when added up, the non-profit world simply hasn’t the authority, influence, or financial base to engineer change on a mass scale.

That leaves business as the only force in today’s world that’s got it all: a universal presence, an ability to get things done quickly and on as little as a CEO’s say-so, and the economic clout required to engineer widespread systemic change with remarkable speed. Business is our best and indeed last hope, and it’s time to put that hope to the test.

As this book wisely notes, change is no longer a matter of choice. Our present trajectory tells us it’s coming whether we want it to or not. The only question is what form this change is going to take. If the corporate community fails to adopt and embrace meaningful CR, those changes will be grim indeed, and the world that will emerge may very possibly be too environmentally degraded and socially unstable for business to survive at all.

Business needs CR as much as the world itself does. This book is how we get to that better future. The journey starts with Visser’s critical dissection of the role that business has played in the development of the many challenges we face and the first-generation failures of the CR movement to prevent them. It’s as key an instructive moment as the movement has ever had, and we will do well to heed the important lessons this analysis brings to the table.

Yet it’s when Visser looks at where we go from here that the book you are holding offers its biggest payoff. Upon seeing that the first iteration of CR was not enough, we could easily be left wondering what to do next. Having once given it our all, what’s left to give? In Visser’s view, the answer is plenty, and I agree. Rather than be frustrated by our previous lack of meaningful success, this roadmap to a more sane and just future offers ideas to get excited about. Visser’s vision of what a new brand of CR could and should look like and his exploration of the kind of businesses it would breed is the medicine the movement has been seeking. It’s at once a way out and way forward. We would be foolish in the extreme not to take it to heart and put it to work.

Over twenty years ago, a handful of individuals at a ragged assortment of companies tried to start a revolution. You’re holding the book that can finish it. Take what it knows and use this wisdom to set your own business on the path to a better and more profitable place. Whether you’re a CEO in a corner office or a worker on the line, read it, learn it, and spread its gospel as far and wide as you can. The hour may be late and the clock loudly ticking, but the story of responsible business is not over yet. There’s still room for a happy ending. And the time has come for us to write it for ourselves.

Jeffrey Hollender is former CEO and co-founder of Seventh Generation, and co-author of The Responsibility Revolution

How to Order

Direct from the publisher's website - available 18 February 2011
From Amazon (UK) - available 18 February 2011
From Amazon (USA) - available 19 April 2011

Part 2 - Foreword by Jeffrey Hollender for “The Age of Responsibility”

2011-02-22T02:13:00.000-08:00

So what happened?

The short answer is not enough. As the CR movement spread to the corporate mainstream, it lost its focus. What started as a relatively simple set of goals to protect the environment and human rights degenerated into a philanthropic free-for-all in which causes proliferated and an ever-expanding array of do-good choices and options presented itself to business management teams who were already on confusing ground. Corporate executives who saw the need for CR failed to adequately help their staffs translate their vision into action, and public expectations about what was truly important were misunderstood or not understood at all. The resulting disconnect between what was needed and what actually got done neutered too many promising efforts.

At the same time, countless companies did what companies do: They created an office or a department to deal with CR and told it to grow CR initiatives. But this compartmentalized approach had the effect of decoupling innumerable CR agendas from their company’s actually daily workings and left programs trapped “inside the box” where nothing meaningful could happen.

In other cases, companies simply co-opted CR for their own purposes. This “greenwashing” was all about hype and appearance rather than honesty and action, and too many firms simply sought CR window dressing to help them look better in an increasingly informed world. They released fancy reports with pretty pictures. They had their CEOs photographed at CR conferences and summits. They purchased smaller more legitimately responsible companies for their halo effect and little more. But very rarely did they walk their talk.

Ironically, forces like these resulted in the one thing that CR supporters and naysayers can agree on: Corporate responsibility in its present incarnation has been an enormous disappointment at best. It has not lifted people out of poverty. It has not protected the environment. It has not boosted community wellbeing. It has been too little, too late and at most has succeeded in getting some companies to aspire to simply do less damage than they did before. Instead of changing the world, CR merely evolved into a baseline requirement in every company’s license to operate. Where it succeeded, it only managed to slow the rate of decay, which is hardly enough to do much more than maintain the status quo.

This, say CR’s detractors, is proof that the movement’s fundamental ideal—that a business can remake itself so as to create an overwhelming net benefit for society and the environment in addition to its own bottom line—is not a valid model for moving forward and tackling the extremely big issues we now need to address.

But that’s wrong, and in this book, Wayne Visser shows us not only why but where we go from here. CR remains a valid approach ripe with promise and possibility. Yet as Visser quite importantly notes, this reaffirmation is dependent on the emergence of a new form of CR that takes a far more holistic view of its work and seeks not to affect piecemeal change but to engineer a series of systemic corrections that wisely recognize that since all our problems are connected our solutions must be, too. The job of CR advocates is to pull these new values into every last corner of the world’s companies in order to impact each process and decision, and deliver a return on purpose as well as a return on investment.

Jeffrey Hollender is former CEO and co-founder of Seventh Generation, and co-author of The Responsibility Revolution

How to Order

Direct from the publisher's website - available 18 February 2011
From Amazon (UK) - available 18 February 2011
From Amazon (USA) - available 19 April 2011

Part 1 - Foreword by Jeffrey Hollender for “The Age of Responsibility”

2011-02-19T01:51:00.001-08:00

Seeing Farther, Going Further

In the beginning, responsible businesses were going to save the world. I remember because I was there. It was the late 1980s, and a new brand of socially and environmentally benevolent companies were emerging on the corporate landscape. The Body Shop, Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia, and my own company, Seventh Generation, to name just a few, were out not only to make money but to fundamentally change the way things worked doing it.

Driven by equal parts societal need and personal desire, and an ethos carried on patchouli smoke from the late 1960s, these companies were founded by entrepreneurs who confronted the regressive bent of the Reagan era with a determination to create a different operating model for the business community. This new paradigm would reconcile the historic conflict between corporate profits and cultural progress by selling products and services whose creation took every possible precaution to safeguard the environment and respect the rights and dignity of the people responsible for bringing them to market.

Those were heady days. We thought we could save the world and earn a living doing it. The idea seemed obvious and its execution relatively straightforward. And though the things

were

we were doing had largely never been tried, every time one of them worked, the possibilities appeared even more endless than before. By the time of the big 20^th anniversary of Earth Day in 1990, it was clear that corporate responsibility was a concept whose time had come. People the world over were eager for an evolutionary change from business-as-usual and the harm it was causing, and we were sure that it was only matter of time before the rest of the corporate world beat a path to our doorstep

Indeed, the business community did come knocking. Flash forward two decades, and it’s rare to find a company of any appreciable size that doesn’t offer a corporate responsibility (CR) report or tout some kind of progressive initiative. There are CR officers sitting in executive suites around the world and conferences on the subject well attended by Fortune 500 companies. Touchy-feely ad campaigns and self congratulatory press conferences abound. And some days it seems like nearly every product label has something to say about the change the goods within are helping to create.

Yet by virtually every measure, the world is in worse shape than it’s ever been. Our atmosphere is overburdened with dangerous levels of greenhouse gases. Our planet’s biodiversity and its ecosystems are under siege. Growing numbers of people are living in increasing poverty. Deadly toxins pollute our land and our bodies, yet health care remains a distant dream for far too many. We’re running out of water. We’re running out of natural resources. And we’re running out of time.

Jeffrey Hollender is former CEO and co-founder of Seventh Generation, and co-author of The Responsibility Revolution

The Age of Responsibility Launches in the UK

2011-02-19T01:31:00.000-08:00

By Wayne Visser

My book launched in the UK yesterday. If anyone wants to request a review copy, email me on wayne@csrinternational.org.

Back cover text

Business is doing more than ever before to tackle issues like climate change, poverty, human rights and corruption. So why are things are getting worse, not better? Why are environmental and social trends still headed in the wrong direction?

Wayne Visser argues that traditional approaches have failed, leaving business stuck in the Ages of Greed, Philanthropy, Marketing and Management. Using Web 2.0 as a metaphor, he shows how business needs to radically transform if we are to ever reach a true Age of Responsibility. The required systemic approach is dubbed CSR 2.0 and characterised by five key principles: creativity, scalability, responsiveness, glocality and circularity.

Citing more than 300 cases to illustrate ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’ of corporate sustainability and responsibility, the book describes how the new DNA of business is fast being decoded in the areas of value creation, good governance, societal contribution and environmental integrity.

Having set out a compelling vision of the future, The Age of Responsibility describes how to get there by exploring change at the societal, organisational and individual level. Readers are left not only informed, but also inspired to make a difference.

This book is the most challenging and exciting account of the future of business that you’re likely to read all year.

Book details

Title: The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business
Author: Wayne Visser
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 978-0-470-68857-1
Hardcover, 408 pages
February 2011

About the Author

Wayne Visser is Founder and Director of the think-tank CSR International and the author/editor of twelve books, including nine on the role of business in society. In addition, he is a Senior Associate at the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, Professor of Sustainability at Magna Carta College, Oxford, and Adjunct Professor in CSR at the La Trobe Graduate School of Management in Australia.

How to Order

Direct from the publisher’s website – available 18 February 2011

From Amazon (UK) – available 18 February 2011

From Amazon (USA) – available 19 April 2011

Alberta Tar Sands (Guest Blog)

2011-02-18T05:23:00.000-08:00

Guest blog by Dr. John Blewitt

The tar sands development in Alberta, Canada, is highly controversial and clearly very destructive of the environment. Boreal forest land is being clearcut in order to apply an industrial process that will extract bitumen from oil and so make countless millions of dollars for the oil companies, offer useful tax revenue to the Canadian authorities and satisfy our relentlessly consumerist society with what it needs to sustain its unsustainable ways of living and working – oil. The social, economic and political consequences of the industrial processes being operated are clearly evident in two recent films: Dirty Oil directed by Leslie Iwerks and Petroplis directed by Peter Mettler from Greenpeace Canada. Both films have been made available on DVD by Dogwoof.

At issue in both of these excellent if disturbing films is the nature of the dominant economic system (capitalism) which requires constant growth to survive and the willingness or otherwise of governments and corporations to act in a socially and ecologically responsible manner. There are huge question marks here that are not adequately answered by the coverage the tar sands development generally gets in the mainstream media. The really big ones are about the nature of the corporate and capitalist systems remain largely unasked although a great deal of indisputable evidence about the adverse ecological, social, economic, social and health effects of the development has been presented by Greenpeace Canada and indeed in the two movies mentioned above.

In looking at these films, particularly Petropolis, it seems to me if it is possible for capitalism to be green it, and for that matter all of us, must abandon its addiction to oil. There are renewable technologies available. We dont have to produce and consume so much. It doesn’t make us happier or healthier. So why do it? Why can’t we stop? If we don’t then it is quite likely that ecological destruction, climate change and so on will, to continue the narcotics metaphor, force us to go ‘cold turkey’. Perhaps it would be better for us to go into cultural and economic rehab now before that other possibility becomes an inevitability.

About the blogger

John Blewitt is Director of Lifelong Learning at Aston University (United Kingdom). He is responsible for leading the Lifelong Learning Network Consortium in Sustainable Communities, Urban Regeneration and Environmental Technologies and is co-leader of the MSc Social Responsibility and Sustainability. He is a member of the IUCN Commission on Communication and Education. Recent books include: Understanding Sustainable Development (Earthscan, 2008), and Media, Ecology and Conservation (Green Books, 2010).

Source

http://www.greenconduct.com

The Age of Philanthropy: The Wheels of Wealth

2011-02-15T23:42:00.000-08:00

By Wayne Visser

The Rockefeller story is a

good one to introduce the Age of Philanthropy, not only because of John D. Rockefeller’s iconic status as a tycoon and philanthropist, but also because his life and views on charity embody much of the philanthropic attitudes that still prevail today in business. At the heart

of the Age – and its chief agent, Charitable CSR – is the notion of giving back to society. Rather interestingly, this presupposes that you have taken something away in the first place. Charitable CSR embodies the principle of sharing the fruits of success, irrespective of the path taken to achieve that success. It is the idea of post-wealth generosity, of making lots of money first and then dedicating oneself to the task of how best to distribute those riches, by way of leaving a legacy.

Of course, the ideals of charity and philanthropy pre-date Rockefeller. Like greed, charity is probably as old as humanity itself. And right from the beginning, there is an element of enlightened self-interest. For example, in the Hindu religious text, the Rig Veda (1,500–900 BC), we are told: ‘If it is expected of every rich man to satisfy the poor implorer, let the rich person have a distant vision (for a rich man of today may not remain rich tomorrow). Remember that riches revolve from one man to another, as revolve the wheels of a chariot.’ Similarly, in the Upanishads, another of the Hindu scriptures, it states: ‘Like in a well, the more you fetch, the more water oozes. The more you give the more you get. This generosity is mandatory to every individual. Hurry to promise or pledge to help.’

Turning to the Far East, Confucius (551–479 BC) said: ‘When wealth is centralized, the people are dispersed. When wealth is distributed, the people are brought together.’ Hence, ‘a man of humanity is one who, in seeking to establish himself, finds a foothold for others and who, desiring attainment for himself, helps others to attain’. When asked, ‘Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?’ he replied, ‘Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.’

This so-called Golden Rule, which we find in all the world’s major religions, has come to represent the very essence of charity. In fact, the word charity derives from the Latin caritas, which means preciousness, dearness, or high price. In Christian theology, caritas became the standard Latin translation for the Greek word agape, meaning an unlimited loving kindness to all others. Hence, in St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, we read, in the King James Version of the Bible, of ‘faith, hope and charity’. Of course, it is not only giving that is important, but also the nature of giving. There is a Jewish proverb that says: ‘What you give for the cause of charity in health is gold; what you give in sickness is silver; what you give after death is lead.’

Islam also has a strong tradition of charity. Zakat, or alms-giving for the purposes of alleviating poverty and helping those less fortunate, is one of the Five Pillars of Islam. The practice is generally in the form of an annual tithe or tax of 2.5% of an individual’s wealth (although the percentage can vary by country and tradition), including money made through business, savings and income. The zak_at must also be above an agreed minimum (called nisab), which is said to be around $2,640 or the equivalent in any other currency. As important as the collection of zakat is in a community, its fair distribution among the needy is even more important. Another form of charitable action by Muslims is sadaqah, which literally means ‘righteousness’ and refers to the voluntary giving of alms or charity. These ancient traditions are considered to be a personal responsibility for all Muslims, practised out of love for humanity, to ease the economic hardship of others and eliminate inequality.

There are numerous other religious and cultural variations on the theme. Philanthropy in Latin America typically revolves around asistencialismo, which is charitable giving for poverty alleviation. In Eastern Europe, Bulgarian communities have, over the years, raised donations to build churches, schools and cultural centres called chitalishta. In India, Gandhi’s trusteeship concept has been adapted and applied to welfare acts. In Mexico, the Raramori, who still live in the mountains of the state of Chihuahua, use the expression korima, which means ‘to share’ resources in times of stress. In Southern Africa, ubuntu is the practice of humanism based on the collectivist notion that ‘I am a person through other people’. And so on, all around the world.

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This is an extract from Chapter 3 of The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. For more information and ongoing updates, follow the The Age of Responsibility Blog

Copyright 2010 Wayne Visser

Deborah Leipziger on "The Age of Responsibility"

2011-02-14T16:27:00.000-08:00

The Age of Responsibility will change the way you think about CSR, allowing you to discard myths and to work towards a systemic view of CSR. Wayne Visser holds up a mirror to the CSR community and to business and society itself, providing a brilliant lens with which to see our past and envision a new future. Visser projects a new type of CSR he terms "CSR 2.0". The Age of Responsibility is a call to arms: inspiring, engaging and visionary.

- Deborah Leipziger, author of The Corporate Responsibility Code Book and SA8000: The Definitive Guide to the New Social Standard

Video: Roberto Salazar on CSR and Stakeholder Dialogue in Ecuador

2011-02-14T16:08:00.000-08:00

Roberto Salazar is CEO of Hexagon Consultores. In this interview with Dr Wayne Visser, Director of CSR International, he talks about the state of CSR and the role of stakeholder dialogue in Ecuador. The interview took place in the cloud forest reserve in Mindo at Septimo Paraiso on 2 October 2010.

Brad Googins on "The Age of Responsibility"

2011-02-09T19:29:00.000-08:00

High marks for Wayne Visser who brings us a book that both challenges the conventional state of CSR in very fresh and bold fashion, and offers a provocative new vision of CSR 2.0.

What is most energizing about this book is that it provides a well documented historical and analytical framework on the progression of CSR over the past century. But in analyzing the current state of CSR, it recognizes that despite amazing achievements and progress, CSR has to leap frog into a new world, one that recognizes the new DNA of business, and one that calls for a CSR 2.0 that goes far beyond the models that currently exist.

The new Principles of CSR 2.0 that Visser puts at the heart of this book provide the business community and the CSR world a new path for incorporating the complexity of the social and environmental issues that confront today’s corporation, a CSR that can serve as a more transformative force for economic and social sustainability.

What a refreshing and creative read! There are few books that can cut to the chase and provide a thoughtful analysis of the current state of CSR while at the same time opening up a vision for tomorrow. This is a contribution to the CSR world that is long overdue and most welcome.

- Brad Googins, Associate Professor in Organisation Studies at the Carroll School of Management, and former Director of the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship

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The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business, by Wayne Visser is available from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and other leading book retailers (ISBN-10: 0470688572, ISBN-13: 978-0470688571).

The False Promise of Ethical Consumerism: Why "Green" Products Obstruct CSR 2.0

2011-02-08T17:33:00.000-08:00

Guest Blog by Katheryn Rivas

As Corporate Social Responsibility, with all its divergent meanings and applications, burgeons into a more common practice, companies have traditionally taken up the call of CSR in part from the growing pressure of investors and consumers who are now more "ethically aware". In other words, consumers, who have become more educated about the ways in which unrestrained global capitalism affects the environment, demand that the companies who produce their products do so in a more responsible manner. Of course, this is all well and good, as corporations must be responsive to their investors. Simply put, it's good business. After all, the customer is always right.

In the past decade we've seen an enormous proliferation of products that are touted as "green". While there is no one standard, regulated definition of green or eco-friendly, it's a label that is taken to mean a number of things. The product may be "fair trade certified", meaning it meets agreed-upon standards for ethically responsible labor practices, or it may have not been tested on animals, or maybe it contains no chemical additives, and so on.

Corporate Social Responsibility, as noted in Wayne Visser’s new book, The Age of Responsibility, must occur on a much more systemic level. This is how a real impact is made. Not by churning out "eco-friendly" products and marketing the heck out of them. Of course, CSR requires communication between each business and its respective investors and customers. And rendering transparent a business’s internal processes and how they effect our social and environmental worlds is a central component of CSR. But turning this communication (which has the potential to be substantive, co-creating dialogue between businesses and their customers) into a marketing gimmick essential cheapens and mocks the goals that drive our cause.

If a difference is really to be made, let’s stop treating investors and consumers as passive children. Let’s stop trying to convince them that they are really involving themselves in solutions to the world’s problems by consuming products, no matter how ethically the product is made. A business products should be marketed and purchased because they provide real value to the person who consumes them. No matter how well-intentioned, inserting this too facile message that "if you buy our product, you buy into the workings of a better, more just world" only serves to confuse the aims of CSR.

As Visser has noted, ultimately, the purpose of business is to serve society. Making a positive contribution to society is the essence of CSR 2.0--not just a marginal afterthought." If this is true, if the purpose of business is truly to serve society, then marketing social and environmental initiatives vis a vis products is a hypocrisy of the highest order. The Age of Marketing is over. It’s time for CSR to step up its game and move beyond green washing.

About the author

This guest contribution was submitted by Katheryn Rivas, who specializes in writing about online universities. Questions and comments can be sent to: katherynrivas87@gmail.com.

The Age of Greed

2011-02-04T22:30:00.000-08:00

By Wayne Visser

In my view, the Age of Greed began when the first financial derivatives were traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1972 and peaked when Lehman’s collapse in 2008. It was a time when ‘greed is good’ and ‘bigger is better’ were the dual-mottos that seemed to underpin the American Dream. The invisible hand of the market went unquestioned. Incentives – like Wall Street profits and traders’ bonuses – were perverse, leading not only to unbelievable wealth in the hands of a few speculators, but ultimately to global financial catastrophe.

The word ‘greed’ – from the old English grædig – has etymological roots that relate to ‘hunger’ and ‘eagerness’. This is similar to the older word, avarice, coming from Old French and Latin (avere), meaning ‘to crave or long for’. Those are characteristics that Larry had in spades. The Greek word for greed – philargyros, literally ‘money-loving’ – also has a familiar ring in the Lehman's story. The trouble is that capitalism in general, and the American Dream in particular, has tended to interpret this as a healthy trait. Traders at Lehman Brothers didn’t believe he was being unethical, or doing anything wrong. They were playing the game – extremely well – and being rewarded handsomely.

Perhaps we would do well to revive the German root of the word for greed (habsüchtig), which means ‘to have a sickness or disease’, for greed acts like a cancer in society, an essentially healthy cell in the body, which becomes selfish and ultimately destroys its host. The enabling environment is as important as the greedy cell itself. After all, as I argued in my book, Beyond Reasonable Greed, a certain measure of selfishness is natural, but it needs to be moderated by norms, rules and cultural taboos that keep its destructive tendencies in check.

It is worth reminding ourselves what the consequences of those destructive tendencies can mean in the lives of millions of ordinary people. The financial cost of cleaning up after the global financial crisis – which ultimately gets translated into a tax burden on the public – was estimated by the IMF in August 2009 at £7.1 trillion, enough to finance a £1,779 handout for every man, woman and child on the planet. The gargantuan sum includes capital injections pumped into banks in order to prevent them from collapse, the cost of soaking up so-called toxic assets, guarantees over debt and liquidity support from central banks.

And then there is the human cost of unemployment. In January 2010, the International Labour Organisation released figures showing that global unemployment rate for 2009 was 6.6%, which translates into 212 million people, an increase of almost 34 million over the number of unemployed in 2007. In the US alone over 100,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy in 2008 and 2009. At the same time, the World Bank estimates that the financial crisis will left an additional 50 million people in extreme poverty in 2009 and some 64 million in 2010 relative to a no-crisis scenario, principally in sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern and South-Eastern Asia.

The Age of Greed was not something ‘out there’. It was not the preserve of a few rogue traders. We were all caught up in its web. It is in fact a multi-level phenomenon, incorporating executive greed, banking greed, financial market greed, corporate greed and ultimately the greed embedded in the capitalist system. These different facets of greed are each explored in turn in the sections to follow ...

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This is an extract from Chapter 2 of The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business

For more information and ongoing updates, follow the The Age of Responsibility Blog

CSR in South Africa (Guest Blog)

2011-02-03T16:24:00.000-08:00

Guest Blog by Mervyn E. King

In the broadest sense, CSR refers to the role of business in society. It entails how business is governed and how it contributes to a just and sustainable society.

In South Africa, the concept and rationale of CSR are strongly informed by the King Code on Corporate Governance. Now in its third edition, the King Report was the first report on corporate governance that embraced the concepts of stakeholder engagement, ethics and environmental management and actively encouraged an inclusive approach to these issues.

Through the King Report, confidence is placed in the entrenchment of African values into corporate governance, of which ubuntu (African humanism) is the most evident. The notion of ubuntu resonates with the reciprocal nature of CSR in South Africa, making it a dominant culture driver of CSR.

Priority issues include:

HIV and AIDS - South African is currently at the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic and the disease is affecting all aspects of South African society. Prevalence rates have increased from 0.7% among 15 – 49 year olds in 1990 to 18% at the end of 2007.
Skills development and job creation - South Africa's unemployment rate is around 24% and unemployment remains the country’s greatest economic challenge. Job creation and skills are consequently a major national development objective to address poverty and develop the economy.
Energy - Energy issues are high on the political agenda ever since the January 2008 energy crisis and subsequent blackouts, during which more than 20% of South Africa’s electricity-generating capacity was out of commission. Plans to address the power supply crisis are summarised in a policy document issued by the Department of Minerals and Energy.

Among the most interesting trends is that the latest version of the King Code (King III) strongly argues in favour of external assurance of sustainability reports becoming a mandatory requirement.

National legislation significantly informs the nature of CSR as the government has legislated several social issues in management and in the workplace since the democratic dispensation in 1994. Nonetheless, implementation and enforcement are challenging, even to the extent that compliance in some instances is treated as “an issue of business voluntarism”.

The following case studies illustrate different approaches to CSR in South Africa:

Pick ‘n Pay - CSR practices are perceived as informal, unsystematic or even “whimsical”, as they are directed by the paternalistic “whim of the company chief executive or chair”.
AngloGold Ashanti - CSR is based on systematic decision-making guided by institutional policies. Operationally, CSR is approached as a professional area that requires good management. The mining company, AngloGold Ashanti, epitomises this type of CSR which, although not new, is significantly influenced by mandatory guidelines such as the Mining Charter and other codes aimed at standardisation and accountability.
BHP Billiton (SA) - This company aims at integrating CSR into all business strategies and processes. BHP Billiton (SA) is emerging as a leader and innovator in institutionalising CSR.

A review of the 17 accredited MBA programmes in SA revealed that CSR is minimally integrated into core course curricula (Hamann et al 2006).

Source

Based on extracts from the chapter on South African by Mervyn E. King (Chairman of the King Committee on Corporate Governance in South Africa and of the Global Reporting Initiative) and Derick de Jongh (Director of the Centre for Responsible Leadership, University of Pretoria), in The World Guide to CSR (Greenleaf, 2010).

Vandana Shiva on "The Age of Responsibility"

2011-01-25T14:43:00.001-08:00

A world based on rights without responsibility can only lead to destruction. And when the rights are unbridled rights of giant corporations they trample on the earth and people. Wayne Visser's The Age of Responsibility calls for a vital shift from rights to responsibility. It is a must read for all.

- Vandana Shiva, author of Earth Democracy and Soil Not Oil and board member of the International Forum on Globalization

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The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business, by Wayne Visser is available from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and other leading book retailers (ISBN-10: 0470688572, ISBN-13: 978-0470688571).

Redefining CSR

2011-01-24T15:10:00.000-08:00

[An extract from Chapter 1 of The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business by Wayne Visser]

Responsibility is the choice we make to respond with care. This book, then, is a way of taking stock. What choices have we made – in the way we live our lives, in the way we do our work and in the way we run our businesses? How have we responded to the needs of our day – especially the social, environmental and ethical crises we face? And have our actions been taken with care – have we cared about our impacts on others?

I must admit to being slightly surprised (and a little dismayed) to find myself, 10 years after my first book, Beyond Reasonable Greed, still singing a similar refrain. I am once again arguing that business needs to ‘shapeshift’, to fundamentally rethink the purpose of business and to put into practice a genuinely sustainable and responsible ethos. There are fundamental differences though. Today, many of the problems are worse, more urgent and backed by more solid scientific evidence. In the interim, there has been a geopolitical shift away from the West, with the potential for more questioning of neoliberal economics and shareholder-driven capitalism. There are also more corporate corpses on the slab, allowing us to examine the nature of our greed disease. At the same time, awareness about our public social and environmental crises is much higher, and there are more genuine corporate sustainability and responsibility pioneers that provide living proof of what health and wellbeing could mean for business and society.

The fact is that now we know better what bad corporate magic looks like and the devastating consequences of practicing it. But we also know that magic spells can be broken by revealing the sleight of hand at work. It is my hope that by sharing some of the insights gained from the past 20 years of CSR wonder and trickery, we can move beyond magic to real responsibility – responsibility of the kind that makes a tangible, positive, sustained impact on the lives of the world’s poor and excluded and that visibly turns the tide on our wholesale destruction of ecosystems and species.

But I am getting ahead of myself. First let me say what I understand by CSR. I take CSR to stand for Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility, rather than Corporate Social Responsibility, but feel free use whichever proxy label you are most comfortable with. My definition is as follows: CSR is the way in which business consistently creates shared value in society through economic development, good governance, stakeholder responsiveness and environmental improvement.

Put another way, CSR is an integrated, systemic approach by business that builds, rather than erodes or destroys, economic, social, human and natural capital.

Given this understanding, my usual starting point for any discussion on CSR is to argue that it has failed. I will provide the data and arguments to back up this audacious claim in the paragraphs, pages and chapters that follow. ...

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This is an extract from Chapter 1 of The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business
For more information and ongoing updates, follow the The Age of Responsibility Blog

Copyright 2010 Wayne Visser

CSR in Russia (Guest Blog)

2011-01-23T15:17:00.000-08:00

Guest Blog by Alexey Kostin

Russian leading companies, by embarking on major projects in the field of CSR and sustainable development, are moving to address two goals at the same time – gaining a socially responsible image domestically and bringing themselves closer to the level of international leaders. ”Social charity” or philanthropy is only one part of the social “pillar” of CSR, which in Russia often has a pronounced image-enhancing nature.

CSR in Russia is most developed in the following areas: personnel development, workplace health and safety, corporate philanthropy and related PR-support. Less development has occurred in the areas of corporate governance, quality, safety, and cross-sector partnerships, especially with government. The most neglected areas of CSR are environmental policies, clean manufacturing, resource conservation, supply chain responsibility and ethical consumerism.

For about twenty of the largest Russian companies, CSR is becoming a component of corporate governance rather than merely a part of public relations. This is what is new about CSR in Russia: companies are increasingly complying with international practice and with “soft” international standards, specifically those proposed by GRI and AA1000 SES. However, the majority of Russian companies are still lacking compliance international standards in social and environmental responsibility.

According to the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs’ (RUIE) Register,by the end of 2010 only 91 companies published non-financial reports since 2001. Approximately one third of those reports used methods and indicators from the voluntary international “mild” standards, such as GRI and AA1000S.

At a governmental level in Russia there is no legislation or even officially approved public frameworks of CSR. It develops exclusively on a basis of companies’ voluntary initiatives and activities. In 2004 a Social Charter of Russian Business was initiated by the Russian business community and has been signed by 230 companies and organisations. This code is quite similar to the UN Global Compact’s principles and stimulates the participants to follow progressive CSR principles.

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Alexey Kostin, PhD, is Executive Director, of the Corporate Social Responsibility – Russian Centre. This blog is a modified extract from his chapter in The World Guide to CSR, edited by Wayne Visser and Nick Tolhurst.

Philip Kotler on "The Age of Responsibility"

2011-01-19T17:32:00.000-08:00

Guest comment on Wayne Visser's "The Age of Responsibility" by Philip Kotler, S. C. Johnson and Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and author ofCorporate Social Responsibility:

"Your new book deserves to become an instant classic. It brings together so many ideas, writings, and stages in the development of CSR. It is a liberal education on the relation of business to society. I hope that it is read not only by companies but becomes a required reading in business schools to prepare business students for a higher level of thinking about their future role and impact. I am happy to endorse the book: A most impressive book! I will recommend it to every company to figure out why they are practicing CSR and how to really practice it to make a difference to their profits, people, and the planet."

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The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business, by Wayne Visser is available from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and other leading book retailers (ISBN-10: 0470688572, ISBN-13: 978-0470688571).

WikiLeaks and CSR - The Era of Radical Transparency

2011-01-17T17:54:00.000-08:00

By Wayne Visser

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, a Web 2.0 style whistle blowing site founded in 2006, has this week received a set of leaked documents that threaten to expose illicit activities of the clandestine Swiss banking industry. This is the latest chapter in the WikiLeaks saga, which has been one of the most explosive and significant CSR (and political) stories of recent times.

Without question, WikiLeaks has raised the debate on transparency, responsibility and the role of new media to a whole new level. There are major implications in two related, but distinct areas: whistle blowing and activism. It also raises questions about the sometimes blurry line between legality and ethics, the big-bully tactics of major corporations, and the accountability of whistleblowing organisations.

Whistle blowing - the act of raising concern (usually by anonymously leaking incriminating evidence) about alleged illegal or unethical activities by individuals or organisations - is widely regarded as improving transparency and being in the public interest. Hence, most countries have legislation to protect whistleblowers. In the U.S., this practice dates back to the Lloyd-La Follette Act of 1912, and was most recently reinforced and strengthened through the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Some argue that Wikileaks has simply continued the honourable tradition of whistleblowing, and raised it to another level, appropriate to the open access age of the Internet – part of what Daniel Goleman, author of Ecological Intelligence, calls "radical transparency" (although he used it more in a supply chain context).

For instance, in September 2009, WikiLeaks posted a leaked internal report from Trafigura, a commodities multinational, exposing it for dumping hazardous waste in Côte d’Ivoire. The site has also been threatening since 2009 to release damaging information about the Bank of America, and caused their stock price to fall by 3% when it made the announcement. In a July 2010 TED interview, Assange claimed to have damaging inside information from BP as well.

Unsurprisingly, companies (and governments) are extremely nervous – even hostile – about the activities of Wikileaks. The issue came to a head in 2010 with ‘megaleak’ releases to The Guardian, New York Times and others of over 92,000 classified documents on the War in Afghanistan (released in July), around 390,000 previously secret US military field reports on the Iraq war (released in October) and more than 250,000 cables from more than 250 U.S. embassies around the world (released in November). When the U.S. government declared these releases ‘illegal’, several companies with commercial ties to WikiLeaks, notably Mastercard and Paypal, froze their transactions, resulting in a funding crisis for WikiLeaks.

What happened next revealed the new face of activism in the 21^st century. Using methods that The Economist calls “guerrilla transparency” and which have been dubbed by the media as “hacktivism”, attempts by governments and commercial partners to shut Wikileaks down or cut off its financial oxygen led to a rapid proliferation of mirror sites – more than 700 in one week, according to The Economist – and counter-attacks by hacker groups like Anonymous. One of the tactics of these groups is to bombard the websites of organisations that are perceived to be obstructing WikiLeaks with online requests, thus causing them to crash. In the case of Mastercard, one such orchestrated DDoS (distributed denial of service) campaign by Operation Payback was successful.

Whatever we think of the merits or demerits of these tactics, one thing is clear: WikiLeaks has blown the debate about transparency wide open, raising many more questions than it answers. For instance, what is the role of CSR when one leak about a corporate malpractice can destroy years of conscientious work on corporate citizenship? Will this new generation of online whistleblowing – whether by WikiLeaks or others – increase transparency, or will it simply cause governments and companies to clam up even tighter; to invest more in data security and counter-hacking measures? And if they do react defensively, will this result in what Assange called an unwittingly self-imposed “secrecy tax”, whereby those organisations with the most to hide end up being less competitive as a result of their security-related expenditures?

In the brave new Wikileaks world, CSR laggard companies will clam up and adopt a seige mentality. They will bog down their staff with crippling red tape under the guise of better risk management and more secure document controls. By contrast, CSR leaders will see this as an opportunity to be pro-actively and proudly transparent. They will continue to invest in open engagement with stakeholders, while encouraging employees to safely raise concerns internally before going public with their complaints. CSR leaders know that in a WikiLeaks world, the only effective defence is to create a caring workplace where there are no disgruntled employees seeking revenge, and an ethical culture that has no dirty secrets waiting to be exposed.
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Note: This blog is partly based on research and writing done for the forthcoming edition of the Journal of Corporate Citizenship.

John Elkington on "The Age of Responsibility"

2011-01-14T02:24:00.000-08:00

CSR 1.0 did remarkably well through the latest Great Recession, despite having precariously little to say on the big issues of the day and no ready-to-go blueprint for economic transformation. As a result, we are seeing a massive reboot going in the CSR industry – and Wayne Visser is a consistently reliable guide to (and champion of) the emerging CSR 2.0 mindsets and practices.

- John Elkington, Co-Founder and Director of Volans Ventures and co-author of The Power of Unreasonable People

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Oil on Troubled Waters (Guest Blog)

2011-01-13T07:13:00.000-08:00

Guest Blog by Adrian Henriques

Why has the oil industry produced its own sustainability reporting guidelines – apparently leaving the GRI to its own devices?

The international oil industry has produced a new version of its sustainability reporting guidelines. This comes in the middle of the GRI oil sector supplement development. While the industry guidelines acknowledge the GRI – and even discuss how it differs – this is not a helpful step.

Some of the key problems with the new version of the oil industry guidelines include not addressing the major impact of oil: burning it. In the words of the external stakeholder panel:
“it does not provide more emphasis on the need for the industry to report on actions taken to reconcile the twin challenges of energy security and climate change. One notable example is greenhouse gas emissions related to the use of petroleum product”.

In addition, reporting on tax expenses is reduced to commentary, without the need to produce hard figures. And transparency over taxation is one of the most important ways to tackle corruption. In this sense, taxation is a crucial indicator of development impact.

Despite all this, the guidelines are described as the formulation of an “industry consensus on the most material sustainability issues and the associated choice of consistent indicators and reporting elements”. Well, they definitely represent an industry consensus, but could not be presented as any kind of cross-stakeholder view.

Even the industry’s own Stakeholder Panel is asking them to co-operate with the GRI.

Source

Adrian Henriques is a commentator on corporate accountability. He is the author of ‘Corporate Impact’ and ‘Corporate Truth’. He also works with companies, NGOs and other organisations on issues of sustainability and transparency.

Reposted from Green Conduct

Archie Carroll on "The Age of Responsibility"

2011-01-11T02:20:00.000-08:00

The Age of Responsibility is an important book that should be studied carefully by all those seriously interested in the past, present and future of CSR. For me, the most noteworthy contribution is his “ages and stages” of CSR. Visser identifies five overlapping economic periods and classifies their stages of CSR, modus operandi, key enablers, and stakeholder targets. In forward-looking fashion, he crafts five insightful principles of CSR 2.0 and presents his DNA Model of CSR 2.0 which integrates knowledge and sets forth a more inclusive view of CSR. This book is a significant contribution to the theory and practice of CSR and it will be valued by academics and practitioners alike. I strongly recommend it.

- Archie B. Carroll, Professor of Management Emeritus, Terry College of Business and author of Business and Society

Joel Bakan on The Age of Responsibility

2011-01-04T09:22:00.000-08:00

Wayne Visser's The Age of Responsibility elegantly and persuasively demonstrates the limits and failures of traditional CSR and also the kinds of reforms needed to create conditions for genuine corporate responsibility. Rich with insight, information and analyses, and highly readable for its excellent writing and poignant stories, the book is a crucial contribution to understanding where we are with CSR and what we need to do to move forward.

- Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (book and documentary film)

Video: The Age of Responsibility by Wayne Visser

2011-01-01T04:13:00.000-08:00

What does "responsibility" really mean? This is an extract from my new book, The Age of Responsibility. I hope you find it interesting and inspiring. If the words resonate, feel free to share it with your friends. And watch this space for more videos.

Read the full text

Video: Jeff Hamaoui on Social Innovation & Cross-Sector Partnerships

2010-12-20T03:14:00.000-08:00

Jeff Hamaoui is Founder & President of Cazneau. In this interview with Dr Wayne Visser, Director of CSR International, he talks about the need for forging cross-sector partnerships in order to make social innovation possible. The interview took place in San Francisco on 16 September 2010.

CSR in Finland

2010-12-20T03:06:00.000-08:00

Guest blog by Arno Kourula

Finland is a highly developed and educated northern European republic and European Union member country with approximately 5.2 million inhabitants. Since the second World War, Finland has transformed from a farm and forest economy to a diversified modern industrial economy. In this Nordic welfare state, public institutions have traditionally played a significant role in providing a societal safety net and levelling inequalities.

Since the recession of the early 1990s, the country has increasingly opened its financial markets, the energy and telecommunications sectors have internationalized and been privatized, and a large information and communication technology sector has developed lead by Nokia. According to international rankings, the country is one of the least corrupt and of the most competitive nations in the world.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has traditionally been largely implicit in nature, meaning that the state is assumed to take care of social issues and there has not been as strong a philanthropic tradition as in many countries. Nonetheless, a more explicit form of CSR has emerged, although gradually and unevenly. CSR has expanded from quality and environmental management trends towards a more comprehensive understanding of sustainability. Finnish companies have been relatively progressive in CSR and they perceive it as a potential competitive advantage.

Current priority issues in the area include employment practices, ethical consumption, the environment and climate change, competitiveness and cultural adaptation (i.e. operations of Finnish companies abroad). Compared with other European countries, Finland scores high on CSR aspects, such as sustainability reporting, explicit value statements, codes of conduct, adoption of management standards, membership in CSR organisations and networks, and participation in socially responsible investment. In the 2007 State of Responsible Competitiveness evaluation by AccountAbility, Finland is in 3rd place globally.

A key driver for Finnish CSR is legislation and government representatives tend to hold the view that the primary role of the state is to provide a legal framework within which business operates. The government emphasises the voluntary aspect of CSR in its public policy and has not been very keen on promoting Finland as a CSR frontrunner. Key pieces of legislation related to employment, accounting, social security and environmental protection form the baseline for corporate social responsibility. The Finnish government also promotes key international initiatives such as the OECD guidelines, UN Global Compact, and ILO principles.

Key CSR organizations in Finland include the the Committee on Social and Corporate Responsibility (a multistakeholder roundtable organized by the Ministry for Employment and the Economy), the Confederation of Finnish Industries, Finnish Business and Society (an enterprise network) and the Central Chamber of Commerce (ICC Finland).

While most universities in Finland offer courses related to CSR, institutions with larger programs on CSR both in teaching and research include Aalto University, Hanken School of Economics, Turku School of Economics, University of Jyväskylä, and the University of Tampere. All in all, Finland is an interesting case of relatively high adoption of CSR with best practices of CSR initiatives implemented by companies such as Nokia and Kesko.

Source

Based on extracts from the chapter on Finland by Arno Kourula, Project Manager at Aalto University School of Economics, in The World Guide to CSR (Greenleaf, 2010).

The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business

2010-12-13T02:03:00.000-08:00

By Wayne Visser

I wanted to share details of a new article of mine, "The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business", just published in the Journal of Business Systems, Governance and Ethics. It distils the essence of my forthcoming book of the same title (out on 18 February 2011) and is downloadable as a Pdf below.

Abstract

This paper argues that CSR, as a business, governance and ethics system, has failed. This assumes that success or failure is measured in terms of the net impact (positive or negative) of business on society and the environment. The paper contends that a different kind of CSR is needed if we are to reverse the current direction of many of the world’s most pressing social, environmental and ethical trends. The first part of the paper reviews business’s historical progress over the Ages and Stages of CSR: moving through the Ages of Greed, Philanthropy, Marketing and Management, using defensive, charitable, promotional and strategic CSR approaches respectively. The second part of the paper examines the Three Curses of Modern CSR (incremental, peripheral and uneconomic), before exploring what CSR might look like in an emerging Age of Responsibility. This new CSR – called systemic or radical CSR, or CSR 2.0 – is based on five principles (creativity, scalability, responsiveness, glocality and circularity) and forms the basis for a new DNA model ofresponsible business, built around the four elements of value creation, good governance, societal contribution and environmental integrity.

Reference

Visser, W. (2010) The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business, Journal of Business Systems, Governance and Ethics 5(3): 7-22. November, Special Issue on Responsibility for Social and Environmental Issues.

Download

Free download available here.

CSR in Malaysia

2010-12-08T01:26:00.000-08:00

By Roger Haw Boon Hong

CSR is not a freshly minted idea to Malaysians; the term might be new to some, but not the concept. CSR principles epitomise the fundamental religious and social values that have held together the very fabric of Malaysian society for millennia.

There are some priorities issues have been covered in this context such as community and social welfare aspects, education, environment, workplace practices, culture and heritage. For instance, over 1,000 community and social welfare projects were implemented in 2008, compared to 350 projects in 1998. Studies have shown that the number of students who obtained scholarships for pursuing various levels of education has increased by 300% within the ten year period 1995–2005.

Since 2000, almost 55% of companies in Malaysia have prioritised environmental protection plans in their projects, as compared to only 10–15% in 1980. According to ASRIA’s studies carried out in 2008, 47% of companies in Malaysia are practising good workplace ethics to create a vibrant, healthy environment for their employees. In 1980, only 5% of corporations were willing to support cultural and heritage projects or events, compared to 35% today.

The Ansted Social Responsibility International Award (ASRIA) has helped to raise awareness about the need for business to be legitimate in the eyes of the public. It seems that the number of listed companies reporting environmental information has increased from 30 in 1999 to 138 in 2007. Disclosure of social performance has risen similarly, from 28 companies in 2002 to 43 in 2003. CSR is not only a large company phenomenon. In 2008, 58% of small companies contributed to society ‘in a big way’, as compared to 18% in 1998, a 40% increase within a ten-year period.

A series of prestigious awards such as ASRIA, MESRA, the Prime Minister’s CSR Awards and StarBiz-ICR Malaysia Corporate Responsibility Awards have been recognising companies that have made a difference to the communities in which they operate through their CSR programmes. The percentage of media reporting on CSR has increased from 35% to 45% between 1980 and 2003, and from 45% to 87% between 2004 and 2008.

In the 2007 budget, the government announced that all listed companies are required to disclose CSR activities in their annual financial reports, including their employment composition by race and gender, as well as programmes undertaken to develop domestic vendors. Recognising that the private sector has been successful in implementing CSR projects for the benefit of low-income groups, the government has established a CSR fund, with an initial sum of MYR50 million (USD15 million), to jointly finance selected CSR projects.

Businesses in Malaysia do not operate in a vacuum. They work with multiple suppliers and customers, who in turn have their own sets of suppliers and customers. The listed companies also have to answer to investors. These are parties who can persuade a company to buy into the concept of CSR. Nowadays, the majority of companies in Malaysia have started to put CSR into practice, while many NGOs have been supporting those responsible companies.

Source

This blog is based on the Malaysia chapter in The World Guide to CSR (Greenleaf, 2010) by Roger Haw Boon Hong. Roger is Professor in Corporate Social Responsibility at Ansted University and Founder and Chairman of the Ansted Social Responsibility International Award (ASRIA).

Video: Ellen Weinreb on Trends in the Sustainability Jobs Market

2010-12-07T06:02:00.000-08:00

Ellen Weinreb is Founder of Sustainability Jobs. In this interview with Dr Wayne Visser, Director of CSR International, she discusses the sustainability jobs market. The interview took place in San Francisco on 16 September 2010.

The Era of "Leading Big" on CSR Dawns: Unilever's Sustainable Living Plan

2010-11-26T04:34:00.001-08:00

By Wayne Visser

“This world has tremendous challenges. The challenges of poverty, of water, of global warming, climate change. And businesses like ours have a role to play in that. And frankly, to me, that's very appealing.” So said Unilever CEO, Paul Polman, in a 2009 interview with McKinsey. He went on to say, “We have every day, in our business, about two billion consumers that use our brands, and so [there is] a tremendous opportunity. And if we do the right thing, we can actually make major progress in society.”

This drive to make a major difference seems, if anything, to have got bigger over the past year. At least, that’s the impression you get from Unilever’s new Sustainable Living Plan, which it launched last week. In it, they committed to double the size of the company, while halving the environmental footprint of their products, sourcing 100% of their agricultural ingredients sustainably by 2015 and helping 1 billion people out of poverty.

Commitments like that are what Sandy Ogg, Chief HR Officer for Unilever, calls “leading big”. Speaking to Polly Courtice, Director of the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership earlier this year, he said, “There’s so much going on now in the world that if you don’t have amplification and time compression, then it doesn’t rumble. So I call that leading big. You can’t let it drool or dribble out into an organisation like ours and expect to have any impact.”

Jim Collins, author of Built to Last and Good to Great, calls it having a BHAG – a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. And Unilever is certainly not the first. In 1994, Interface’s CEO Ray Anderson committed to become the first "restorative” company in the world (giving back more than they take) and by 1996, outdoor clothing company Patagonia was only using organic cotton. More recently, Wal-Mart has committed to zero waste and 100% renewable energy; Coca-Cola has pledged to become water neutral; and Tesco plans to become carbon neutral.

The fact of the matter is that without “leading big” on sustainability and responsibility, CSR efforts no longer have any real credibility. That’s because there is overwhelming data to show that past efforts – CSR 1.0 approaches – have failed to reverse problems like biodiversity loss, carbon emissions, income inequality and corruption. Instead, continued unsustainable and irresponsible production and consumption has meant business is still more part of the problem than the solution.

“Leading big” is absolutely essential if we are break this pattern of CSR ineffectiveness. When people ask what CSR 2.0 really means, there are two ways to answer. One is to say that it is about a more systemic approach to CSR, one that tackles the roots of the problem, by applying the principles of creativity, scalability, responsiveness, glocality and circularity to the DNA of the business, namely through value creation, good governance, societal contribution and environmental integrity.

The second answer, which is far simpler and no less true, is to say that the dual ‘acid test’ of CSR 2.0 is admission and ambition. Companies have to be prepared to face up (and ‘fess’ up) to their impacts; to admit that they are still a long way from being truly sustainable and responsible; even to concede that they are part of the problem. And then companies have to show their ambition, their willingness to set bold, audacious targets that will reverse the negative social and environmental trends.

In today’s world of low-trust and information overload, only bold leadership on CSR will inspire action and build credibility. Unilever and others are pointing the way and deserve our congratulations and support. They also require our unrelenting scrutiny, to ensure that “leading big” is not simply “talking big”, but rather “acting big” – making real change happen at scale and at pace.

Reflection on "What the Green Movement Got Wrong"

2010-11-05T04:07:00.001-07:00

By Wayne Visser

Last night, the UK’s Channel 4 showed a documentary called ‘What the Green Movement Got Wrong’. In some ways, it reminded me of The Apprentice – designed to spark conflict and generate publicity, but having very little to do with inconvenient reality. And of course, it succeeded. The live debate that followed drew indignant responses from the likes of Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and George Monbiot. And while I shared some of their frustration, I am rather less inclined to trash the show.

The fact of the matter is that it raised some important questions about the ‘greens’ (although only the media still uses such an outdated label). Do they rely more on ideology and emotions than science and economics? Have they been right in their belligerent opposition to nuclear and GMOs? Is their distrust in corporations and new technology really justified? Do they slip into the trap of caring more about ‘green things’ than people, especially poor people in developing countries? For example, did they resist the use of DDT to control malaria?

Well, first we have to ask, who are ‘they’? The documentary lumped these mysterious ‘greens’ into one amorphous mass, creating the impression that it is a cogent and unified movement. Paul Hawken, in Blessed Unrest, estimates that there are over 2 million organisations around the world working on issues of social justice and environmental sustainability. What are the chances that they agree on anything, let alone the contentious issues of nuclear energy and GMOs?

The truth is that every movement, including sustainability and responsibility, has the full spectrum of players, from conservatives and Luddites to liberals and techno-optimists. There are those who believe that business and the market are the yellow brick road to utopia, and those who believe that only government policy can take us ‘over the rainbow’. There are pro-nuke and anti-nuke, pro-GMO and anti-GMO and all sorts of liquorice flavours in between.

Leaving the quality of the documentary aside (it was one-sided and contained various factual errors), the freedom to debate the issues is critical. If there’s one thing that drives me mad, it’s the demonization of anyone who happens to disagree with the crowd – and let’s be honest, the sustainability and responsibility ‘crowd’ does suffer from group-think mentality on many issues. Ideology, preconceived ideas and entrenched positions are stronger than most will admit.

My point is that debate is good. Dialogue is even better, but that requires listening, rather than defending dug-in bunker-mentality views. Dialogue is never going to happen in the bright lights of entertainment TV. But we do have a chance now, in the aftermath, to dialogue. The question is, are we mature enough to do so. When last did you change your mind on a key sustainability or justice issue? Are we prepared to practice what we preach about stakeholder engagement?

It was clear that Channel 4 had no intention of being either fair or transparent. As Craig Bennett from Friends of the Earth pointed out during the live debate, they requested that they be interviewed so as to include their views in the documentary, but Channel 4 refused. No surprise there. Channel 4 is not about balanced programming, it is about poking the hornet’s nest to boost viewers and ratings; a sort of documentary version of Jerry Springer if you like.

In the final analysis, the documentary and the debate that followed belong to the last century. The world – and the sustainability and responsibility movement – has long since moved on from simplistic black or white, green or red, market or state, pro or anti thinking. We are in the era of complexity, of hybrid technologies and cross-sector partnerships, of multi-level governance and multi-stage CSR. We must resist the tabloid-style return to cardboard caricatures and melodramatic mudslinging.

Reflection on "What the Green Movement Got Wrong"

2010-11-05T04:07:00.000-07:00

By Wayne Visser

The fact of the matter is that it raised some important questions about the ‘greens’ (although only the media still uses such an outdated label). Do they rely more on ideology and emotions than science and economics? Have they been right in their belligerent opposition to nuclear and NGOs? Is their distrust in corporations and new technology really justified? Do they slip into the trap of caring more about ‘green things’ than people, especially poor people in developing countries?