I am speaking at the 4^th Sustainable Supply Chain Summit in San Francisco at the end of October so I have started trying to synthesize some of my thoughts on supply chain issues in preparation for preparing my presentation.

When I first joined the CR field a few years back, I had a very enlightening conversation with the VP of Sustainability at a major retail brand. The company is recognized as a sustainability leader.

I was probing to what extent this company, as a customer of BT’s, took BT’s corporate sustainability credentials into account in vendor decisions.

In conversation we identified three classes of vendor:

Sustainability of topmost importance – Vendors that provide products that will be visible and probably sold, with vendor branding, to the customer’s customer in the store.

Sustainability of secondary importance – vendors that provide products that will visible in the store but not vendor branded (furniture, fixtures, ingredients, etc.)

Sustainability of a low priority – vendors whose products or services support the company but are neither branded nor visible in the store. In the case of this customer, that included the ICT products that BT sold.

I see the logic of this approach. I think it is driven by the activist organizations that have focused their brand awareness on what the consumer customer takes home with them.  Consumers would be horrified if the jeans they are wearing were made by enforced child labor, or the paper in their home printer comes from an old growth forest. But they are probably far less concerned about who made the blinds in the store windows or the shelving on which the product is displayed.

But I have increasingly come to think that this makes the same mistake that many companies made when they ignored their supply chain completely because it was out of sight and not within their perceived legal responsibility.

Materiality is very important. Being responsive to stakeholders is important too, but we should not allow either to become blinkers.

One of the core skills of a corporate responsibility practitioner should be to look outside of the box and beyond the horizon so we can address the next issue before it becomes a problem.  Paying no attention to the sustainability credentials of the vendors your customers cannot see will lead to a fall sooner or later.