Corporate Responsibility // CSR Perspective // Seite 3

Best of the Best: Guest Post from Johnson & Johnson

This post was inspired by comments I received on a post about ranking companies on the CSR credentials. I thought it would be interesting to hear from one of the companies that appears high in the CRO rankings and Brian Boyd, VP of Environmental Affairs at Johnson & Johnson (3rd in Newsweek rankings) kindly shares his thoughts on the topic in this guest post.

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Just being realistic, can anyone think of a more complex and all-encompassing “business issue” (and so deftly expressed in one simple word) than the concept we now know as “sustainability”? I can’t.

So it’s …

Best of the Best: A Guest Post from Wal-Mart

At regular intervals through the year I ask my peers to contribute to their thoughts to the blog. They bring a different perspective to the table based on their own experiences and, to me, that is really important for the CSR community. We are, after all, a relatively small peer group and we don’t get together that often to share what we’re doing in our roles and companies. First up is Kim Saylors-Laster, Vice President of Energy at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Kim joined Wal-Mart in 1994 and is currently responsible for all of the electricity and natural gas procurement within …

Best of the Best: The Difference Between CSR and Sustainability (in a picture!)

What makes this post eligible for my best of the best series? Well, it’s my first visual post. I went through a lot of drafts working out how to express my ideas in a visual format. Why, you might ask is this important? Because sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, which can be invaluable for CSR practitioners trying to communicate their message to the C-Suite or the board.

1) Corporate Responsibility

The understanding that (1) business is wholly dependent for its continuing success on people (society) and resources (environment) and (2) that business has a …

Best of the Best: Everything I Know about Corporate Responsibility I Learned from my Dad

This is one of my all-time favorite posts. Originally published on CSR Perspective in June 2011 as a Father’s Day appreciation to my dad, I hope it liked it more than the pasta art I used to give him when I was a little boy!

Now retired, my dad ran a small business for many years, tailoring and selling coats and dresses. He had a retail store with a small workshop behind it in Esher, a small village Southwest of London.

Dad employed perhaps a total of a dozen people at any one time. Half in the store and workshop and …

You Don’t Need to be a Healthcare Company to Care for Health

Recently, I’ve been writing about ethics and how an organization embraces an ethical obligation, even when it seemingly conflicts with the bottom line.

Along these same lines, I’ve been seeing many organizations that have taken active steps to push ahead with a CSR initiative in a way that supports both the stakeholder and the community at large. There is a growing understanding that positive societal and environmental outcomes need to be a part of a company’s mission.

Take Unilever as an example. This month, the company’s food service arm, Unilever Food Solutions, is campaigning among restaurants to cut 100 calories …

Are Measurement Frameworks Sustainable?

Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in the Conference Board’s Citizenship and Sustainability Conference where I was speaking about whether or not our measurement frameworks are sustainable.

We are conditioned from birth to care about scores, from the Apgar score of a newborn, to our SAT, GRE, and LSAT scores, to our quarterly score cards at work. Measurement systems provide focus and the ability to assess outcomes.

You cannot manage what you cannot measure. We need to look for ways to measure the impact and effectiveness of CR&S initiatives and programs. As CR&S practitioners we need to measure to …

When CR and Business Objectives Conflict (contd)

I am on my way home from an excellent conference run by The Ethical Corporation in New York. As I described in my post yesterday, we had a great discussion on the topic of when CR and business objectives conflict. We split up into table groups to share some of our more challenging experiences and examples in a safe space. While in the spirit of the safe space we created I am not going to share any examples that are not already public knowledge, I identified some common categories of action from the examples discussed:

1) Grasp the nettle/bite …

When CR and Business Objectives Conflict

A touchy subject I know. It is all the rage to focus on Creating Shared Value and on building momentum through identifying the positive intersection between corporate responsibility/sustainability and business success. But, while I believe there is plenty of ground to be gained in that area, we are kidding ourselves if we think that it is the whole picture. There are major economic/societal challenges to be solved such as the consumption society and pressure for continued GDP growth, and tactical issues in every company too. I even know that many of my own behaviors are not truly sustainable even though …

Republicans or Democrats – Who Owns Corporate Responsibility ?

Corporate responsibility ecompasses the activities of a company that contribute positively to society (and the environment) beyond the need to make a profit and follow the law. Can either the political left or right claim greater ownership of this concept ?

I used to think, perhaps naively, that the left leaning would be more likely to posit that companies have a broader 3 P’s (people, profit, planet) role and the right leaning would be more likely to have a narrower ‘profit only’ view of the role of companies.

But it is always healthy to turn assumptions on their head and take …

Chinese Urged to Spend More…….and Less !

The juxtaposition of two articles in the Washington Post this Saturday says everything about our the most important dilemma we face in sustainability.

Chinese urged to spend more, save less

This article on page A11 calls on the Chinese to spend more and increase consumption in an effort to spur the global economy.

“Indeed, Batson suggests that the present slowdown could promote a much-heralded rebalancing of China’s economy, away from reliance on increasingly unproductive investment to a healthier consumption-driven model.”

U.S. cut its carbon emissions in 2011 — but China erased the gains

And only a few pages later in …