Often on CSR Perspective, I’ve written about the role of corporate social responsibility and its true meaning. Just last week, I posted a video of my colleagues at BT discussing how they define CSR.   It goes beyond philanthropy and corporate giving. It’s primary purpose should not be to protect a company’s reputation when it gets caught doing something wrong. Ultimately, it has to be integrated and tied into the core of the business. So I find it interesting when I see my peers having the same conversations.  I was recently reading Kathrin Winkler’s blog and saw that she recently had a similar conversation about the role of sustainability.  See what she had to say here:

There was an article in the Boston Globe about what EMC and other New England headquartered global companies were doing to ensure the safety of our employees in Egypt during the uprising.

I knew what was going on because our Chief Security Officer put updates at least daily on our internal web site.  And of course, once the Internet was “turned on” (isn’t that a strange imagery for something as diffuse as the Internet?), I was able to converse directly with the woman who is our sustainability champion in Cairo.

So when I happened into a conversation where a group was wondering how our folks were faring, I mentioned that EMC was working to ensure the safety of our Egyptian employees, as well as making sure that their basic needs – such as availability of food – were being met.  And, of course, using our technology and business continuity processes to prevent disruption to customers being serviced out of our Cairo Center of Excellence.

The response by one individual was to look up at me, smile, and say “now that’s a whole different definition of “sustainability”, isn’t it?”.

Talk about flipping a switch! The light came on, the mouth opened, and out came “NO! It’s exactly what sustainability is about!”

Think about it … Dow Jones says a sustainable business “mitigates risk and embraces opportunities deriving from economic, social, and environmental developments.”  What happened in Egypt was quite the social development!

Further – while I’m not an expert on the root causes or triggers of the uprising – it’s pretty clear that economic opportunity,  access to education, health, and human rights, underpinned by issues of environmental justice such as land productivity and water – were at its heart.

Well-being of our colleagues, our customers, and our community in Egypt clearly impacted companies that do business in Northern Africa. And the businesses in turn were able to impact the lives of those in the midst of the fray.

And last, but absolutely not least, is that business has created a context in which many individuals around the globe have established personal ties that are binding together a global community and converting our appreciation for events such as this from the academic to the visceral.

When I woke up this morning, the email on top of my inbox queue was breathtaking. It started this way: “My dearest Kathrin. We did it, we did it, finally after 30 years.”

Now, that’s what I call sustainability!

Read more from Kathrin on her blog, Interconnected World.