Marc Gunther wrote an excellent blog post earlier this week titled Let’s Do Away with CSR that has created much discussion. While I agree with many of the sentiments in Marc’s post, and in the comments by Carol Sanford (the author on whose book “The Responsible Business he bases the post),  I disagree with Marc’s conclusions. 

I think the answer is to put the role Corporate Responsibility Officer or Chief Sustainability Officer on a par with others in the C-suite. This is one of the reasons I have been so excited to have chaired the professional development committee of the CROA for the last year or so.

Professions with clout have an accepted understanding of their role, a body of knowledge, individual membership organization, certification, ethics code and more. In my view the answer to the issues raised in Marc’s post is not to ditch the role, but to strengthen it.  And it is up to those of us in the field to do that. Reproduced below is an introduction I wrote for the CROA’s Guidebook “Structuring and Staffing Corporate Responsibility”. You can also see our first draft of an ethics code for practitioners here.

“Companies divorced from their environment, the communities they operate in, the shareholders they serve, the employees that work for them – will fail in the long term. And that, at the end of the day, is what we as CR practitioners and CROs are here to do: keep the company connected to the community and the environment writ large. The COO keeps things running, the CFO manages profitability, the CIO brings the data together. The CRO keeps the company connected to the environment and to civil society and maintains the company’s license to operate.

CR has many immediate benefits to the business. It identifies external risks, can reduce costs, particularly in the environmental realm where energy efficiency and waste reduction become catalysts for broader efficiency improvements. CR also creates business growth opportunity through, for example, identification of new market opportunities that would otherwise have been overlooked.

But over and above this, the corporate responsibility role is a recognition of the broader role of companies in society, beyond the next quarter’s returns. The shareholder imperative for quarterly returns can sometimes overwhelm focus on longer term and harder to quantify societal and environmental wellbeing. Society and environment are the very resources upon which the company depends. I feel that I, as a CR practitioner, am there to help my company get that balance right.

People sometimes tell me that this is a passing phase; we will get the big issues sorted and integrated into the business and then we won’t need CR managers any more. It is part of the role of CR practitioners to integrate the principles of CR into the business, but, not surprisingly, I beg to differ that this will mark the end of the role.

Two critical characteristics of the role leave me certain that it is here to stay. The CFO embeds financial appreciation into the business. The financial field evolves, new requirements come along which the CFO and their team interprets, disseminates and integrates into their reporting accordingly. Just as for the CFO, so it is with the CR field. On the environmental side we saw pollution concerns of the 80’s and 90’s turn to climate change concerns of this decade, and now rapidly emerging concerns about water scarcity. New issues are going to appear all the time. Companies that remain ahead of this curve will be the ones that remain successful. In my own sector, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) evolving technology and societal priorities result in a dynamic set of social dilemmas such as protection of vulnerable people vs right to free speech, security vs privacy, digital inclusion. Issues evolve, and the CRO’s role is to see them approaching from the horizon and ensure the business is prepared to address them holistically and beyond of the baseline of legal obligation

And, while everyone in the business needs to have a basic appreciation for the risks and opportunities afforded by corporate responsibility issues, they need to know when and where to ask for help. Big corporate responsibility decisions, with high levels of risk, need to be considered by experts in the field – CR practitioners—and approved or otherwise at the appropriate level in the organization.

I am confident that the CR practitioner will add ever more value for the business and for society as time goes on.”