There is an increasing number of women who are in leadership roles in sustainability. As part of Women’s History Month, let’s take a look at 10 women who are making strides in sustainability and shaping ethical consumerism. Add women in sustainability that you admire to the list in the comments section.

by Aysu Katun, Green Economy Post

In their book “Women in Green,” authors Kira Gould and Lance Hosey argue that women are more likely than men to support environmental causes through voting, activism and consumer choices. Whether this argument is true or not, there is an increasing number of women who are in leadership roles in sustainability. As part of Women’s History Month, let’s take a look at ten women who are making strides in sustainability and shaping ethical consumerism.

Erin Carlson

As Director of Yahoo! for Good, the company’s Social Responsibility department, Carlson is responsible for leading Yahoo!’s environmental strategy and corporate social responsibility programs. Her primary focus is inspiring Yahoo!’s audience of over 500 million people to be more green in their daily lives through use of Yahoo! products. She helped guide the development of a new Yahoo! Green site to encourage people to take eco-friendly actions and has driven the creation of Yahoo! Earth Day sites since 2005. She also spearheaded Yahoo!’s worldwide initiative to become carbon neutral and rallied grassroots efforts by launching a Green Team of hundreds of employees across the globe.

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Carlson worked at Nike Inc. in Apparel Sustainability and at Business for Social Responsibility as Environment Program Manager.

Karen Flanders

Karen Flanders has 20 years of experience working on sustainability matters having worked domestically and internationally within corporations, NGOs as well as intergovernmental organizations.  She is currently a Senior Associate at The Prince’s Rainforest Project responsbile for corporate outreach. Shea Senior Associate with the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership (CPSL).  Through CPSL, she is a Senior Associate with The Prince’s Rainforest Project, where she is currently working to engage the support of corporate America to call for emergency action to help combat climate change by addressing rainforest destruction.  She is also on the board of the Women’s Network for a Sustainable Future.

Prior to joining CPSL, she served as the director of sustainability for the Coca Cola Company for eight years.  Flanders lived and worked in Europe for 12 years and led European and global advocacy campaigns for WWF – the conservation organization. Fluent in French and Dutch, her affinity for cross-cultural communications dates back to her tenure with a pan-European agency, where she advised corporations such as Mars, L’Oreal and others on European CSR policies.

Hannah Jones

Hannah Jones holds the position of Vice President of Sustainable Business and Innovation at Nike and manages the company’s global corporate responsibility efforts, including responsible competitiveness, community investments, social innovation and considered product innovation. She has been working with Nike since 1998 when bad publicity surrounding labour issues was at its height.

Before joining Nike, Jones served as a consultant to Microsoft and Kimberly-Clark on both companies’ community affairs programs. She also worked as the European manager of Community Service Volunteers Media, an UK-based non-governmental organization, where she led pan-European campaigns centering on youth issues.

Diane MacEachern

Diane MacEachern is a founding member of Green Moms Carnival, a blogging network of mostly moms who reach millions of consumers with their green lifestyle tips, product reviews and shopping suggestions. MacEachern is also the founder & CEO of Big Green Purse and publisher of the award-winning www.biggreenpurse.com; and she is the best-selling author of Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World and Save Our Planet: 750 Everyday Ways You Can Clean Up The Earth. MacEachern is also a regular commentator on Martha Stewart’s Whole Living radio program.

Christina Nicholson

In her current role as Director of Sustainable Development, Christina Nicholson is responsible for driving sustainability as a strategic agenda throughout both corporate and brand activities within Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma brands. She has also joined the Sustainable Furnishings Council (SFC) board of directors.

Her background in finance, sustainable design and marketing make her uniquely qualified for this cross sector challenge and she is making great headway on materials and supply chain, energy use and both internal and external brand communications and education. You can watch a video about some of the actions she is taking at William-Sonoma here.

Bonnie Nixon

Bonnie Nixon and her green team of dedicated sustainability experts are responsible for the short and long term vision, strategy, marketing, messaging and stakeholder relations program for Hewlett Packard.

Over the last decade at HP, Nixon has worked with top level management on environmental, health, safety and social polices and procedures and designed and implemented a world class ethical sourcing and supplier relationship management program.

Prior to joining HP, as an experienced environmental mediator, she has spent more than 24 years working with business, government and non-governmental entities on environmental and social impact assessments and programs.

Dianne Dillon-Ridgley

Environmentalist and Human Rights Activist, Dianne Dillon-Ridgley has worked for thirty years on issues of the environment and sustainability, and gender and CSR, both domestically and internationally. Since 1997 she has been a director at Interface, Inc., global manufacturer of modular carpet and a leader in sustainable design. She was a director at Green Mountain Energy for the first six years and still chairs the Environmental Integrity Committee for the company.

She was appointed by the White House to the US delegation for the Earth Summit in Rio, UNGASS-’97 & WSSD in South Africa, making her the only person to serve on all three US delegations. She was also appointed by former President Clinton to the PCSD, his council on Sustainable Development. In the recent US election she worked for 18 months on the Obama campaign from its earliest days in Iowa and was part of the
P-CAP: Presidential Climate Action Project.

Emma Stewart

Emma Stewart, Ph.D., is currently the Senior Program Lead of Autodesk’s Sustainability Initiative. In this role, she leads the design software company’s efforts to optimize its environmental footprint and model sustainability best practices to its 9 million architect, engineer, manufacturing, and construction customers.

Prior to that, she founded and directed the Environmental R&D Division at Business for Social Responsibility, where her team designed corporate initiatives to analyze and adapt to ‘horizon’ issues such as payments for ecosystem services, water footprinting, carbon offsets and trading, climate lobbying, and sustainable product design.

Elizabeth Sturcken

Elizabeth Sturcken is the Managing Director of the Corporate Partnerships program at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) where she develops and implements joint projects with leading companies to create environmental change.

She is currently leading a team of people working with Wal-Mart to create broad environmental change in areas including climate change, China, seafood, and packaging.

In the past, Sturcken led a FedEx project to develop environmentally advanced heavy-duty delivery vehicles. She also led a project with UPS to create innovative changes in their express delivery packaging, resulting in environmental, business and customer benefits.

Kathrin Winkler

Kathrin Winkler is Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC Corporation, where she is charged with providing vision and leadership in the development and implementation of EMC’s strategy for environmental and social sustainability. In her previous role as Sr. Director for EMC’s hardware engineering group, Kathrin founded the company’s Engineering Green Team and its Design for Environment program, which are driving leadership designs in environmental stewardship and energy efficiency throughout EMC’s product portfolio.

Kathrin joined EMC in 2003 as Director, NAS Product Management. Her past positions included Principal Consultant/Analyst specializing in enterprise management systems and service level architectures at Renaissance Worldwide, Vice President Technical Marketing in a Web services security startup, and Consultant Software Engineer in Network Systems Engineering at Digital Equipment Corporation. In addition to her work at EMC, Kathrin serves as a Director of EcoLogic Development Fund, a non-profit organization dedicated to community-based conservation in Central America and she is on the board of The Green Grid, a consortium of IT companies and professionals seeking to improve energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems around the globe.  She blogs her experiences working with sustainability issues at EMC, on her blog, Interconnected World.

Help us make this list more comprehensive.  What women do you know who are making strides in sustainability?

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Alcoa is company who demonstrates year after year a commitment to dialogue, accountability and transparency, in pursuit of sustainability, and delivers tangible measurable results, but has built a highly criticized smelter in Iceland, which is in conflict with good environmental practice. Does this make them hypocritical or simply a business which delivers more benefit to society via its core activities than the damage it does?

by Elaine Cohen is the Joint CEO of BeyondBusiness Ltd
Martin asked the questions on Twitter. “What do you think of alcoa? hypocrite? trying to do the right thing? CSR leader?” and of course I can never resist a direct invitation to respond.

I was in the middle of writing my response to this post by Amelia Timbers to which he referred, but my reply was getting rather long, so here it is in full uninhibited reporting blog style.

Amelia described how the Aloca Company is a great CSR communicator, progresses great CSR programs and appears to be doing all the right things, with the exception of a highly criticized smelter built in Iceland which apparently was in conflict with good environmental practice. Amelia says: “The reality is that, even at its cleanest Alcoa still may be a top polluter,” and that we should give them credit for trying.

I admit that I didn’t know too much about Alcoa. It’s not one of the companies or sectors I track. However,  Amelia’s post could be written about many companies that are advanced in CSR practices and communications, but, are apparently not perfect. If the only way to achieve no impact is to stop doing business, then we are being unrealistic about what CSR and sustainability means. What we should be aiming for is a business which delivers more benefit to society via its core activities than the damage it does – e.g. a Net Sustainability Gain. Unless we are all prepared to go back to being cavemen (and women), (come to think of it, Fred and Wilma seemed to have a great ole time), we will always have industry which pollutes, uses non-renewable resources and creates inequal economic and social benefits. Even the best of social and environmental life-cycle thinking will not eleminate all the direct impacts of all businesses.

Of course, there are no good tools to calculate the NSG (Net Sustainability Gain) (this is my term – you saw it here first ! – good - eh ?) of a company, so all we can do is make a judgement. Amelia refers to the many awards and high places in sustainability rankings that Alcoa has won, questioning whether this could be an indication of their  CSR standing relative to other companies. But I have long since maintained that sustainability rankings serve the rankers more than the ranked. They are all positive, in  that they highlight some aspect of sustainability performance and serve to drive awareness and competitiion for higher ranking. but by and large, they do not give us a balanced or complete picture. The only ranking from which we can hope to gain true insight  is the calculation of a company’s  total sustainability impact and the advances it is making to improve this, against its own performance. It is not for a business to legislate itself out of business. If aluminium, or tobacco, or alcohol, or gambling  or defence systems are inherently undesirable or unsustainable businesses, Governments should outlaw them. Until they do, what we can expect of such businesses is to do what they do in a way which maximizes their contribution to society and their NSG. (Net Sustainability Gain). The methodology for making such a calculation sounds impossibly complex, though some basic tools exist, such as the GRI performance indicators, SROI tools and so on. But no combination of these today goes quite far enough to bottom out all sustainability performance impacts into one multiple bottom line equation which is meaningful in any way.

You can read the Alcoa 2008 Sustainability Report online. Alcoa has reported on sustainability since 2003, both at global and individual country level. They conduct stakeholder engagement panels and report openly on the feedback they have received. They give voice on their website to over 70 employees of different levels and regions. They have gone from 2% women senior executives to 14% in 10 years. They have reduced absolute carbon emissions by 36% since 1990, and significantly reduced absolute levels of energy and water consumption. Yes, they seem to be doing a lot of the right things and getting a lot of the right results. But, yes, producing aluminium cannot be done without taking something from the planet. Just as none of us can live without doing the same. (Unless, perhaps, we are Fred and Wilma).

As a consultant, I work with many types of companies and sectors, including those who are not the sexiest or the most obvious in terms of sustainability. It’s sometimes a challenge. But, for me, a company who demonstrates year after year a commitment to dialogue, accountability and transparency, in pursuit of its own NSG (Net Sustainability Gain) improvement, and delivers tangible measurable results, earns my respect.

Thank you to Amelia for the inspiration for this post, and to Martin for inviting me to repond. Got more than you bargained for, huh?

The Milgard School of Business Center for Leadership and Social Responsibility is now accepting research papers for the July 15 – 16, 2010 Academic Conference on Social Responsibility.

The conference will allow scholars from multiple disciplines, focusing on different aspects of social responsibility, to showcase the most current research within the disciplines and allow participants to identify points of intersection across disciplines.

Papers are welcomed on a wide range of topics related to social practices of businesses. They may be linked to the conference theme “Connecting Across the Disciplines” or may focus on a specific topic within the broad field of Corporate Social Responsibility such as sustainability, social and environmental accounting, green marketing and strategic CSR.

Submission Guidelines:

• Papers can be submitted in MS Word format to the Center at clsr@uw.edu.
• Papers should not exceed 30 pages of double-spaced text (exclusive of reference and back matter).
• Use standard 1-inch (2.5 cm) margins and 11 or 12 point font.
• Include a title page with all authors’ names, affiliations and contact information.
• Include an abstract of no more than 250 words.
• Number all pages of the manuscript.

A hard copy of the submission guidelines can be found at Call for Papers.

Deadline:

Deadline for submissions is January 31, 2010.
Authors will be notified of decisions by March 15, 2010.

Additional information:

• Those submitting papers will be asked to provide blind peer reviews for one or two papers submitted to the conference.
• The review period will be from early February to early March.
• Submission of a paper indicates at least one author will attend the conference and present the paper if it is accepted.
• Abstracts of all papers presented at the conference will be publicly posted on the conference website.  Full text will be available to attendees only.
• Papers submitted should not be copyrighted except by the author(s) and should not have been accepted for publication in a journal.  The copyrights for all forms of presentation at the conference will remain with the author(s).

For more detailed information, contact:
Dr. Jill Purdy, Academic Director
Email: jpurdy@uw.edu
Phone: (253) 692-5635

Note: Please do not contact the Green Economy Post regarding this opportunity.  We are not affiliated with the sponsoring organizations, and therefore have no additional information. Sometimes the link is changed for the opportunities.  When this happens, go to the home page of the organizers to locate information on the opportunity or contact the organization directly.

Elaine reviews the procurement section of the Ethical Corporation’s latest research publication on How to embed Corporate Responsibility across different parts of your Company and how issues of sustainability and ethics are embedded in the supply chain.

by Elaine Cohen is the Joint CEO of BeyondBusiness Ltd

We have already covered embedding CSR in the Finance Function… this time I will take a look at the procurement section of the Ethical Corporation’s latest research publication on How to embed Corporate Responsibility across different parts of your Company. This is a 100 page report published at end September 2009. It provides an analysis and case studies covering 5 organizational functions: Human Resources, Finance and Accounting, Communications, Procurement and Logistics and Operations. This time, being an ex Supply Chain executive (8 years in Supply Chain function with P&Gin Europe, including several years of Purchasing), I will cover csr in the buying office.

The Ethical Corporation guide highlights examples of how companies address CR challenges in supply chain activities and procurement operations, and how sustainability and ethics are embedded in the supply chain, with reference to codes of conduct and even data sharing and collaboration with competitors (anti-trust regulators permitting!). The section is full of fascinating case studues from HP (target setting in the supply chain), Green and Black’s (engaging NGO’s to develop supply chains), Innocent drinks (contract terms) ,Sedex (supply chain goals) and Pepsico (cooperating with competitors). The report lists some conclusions  – guidelines which all buyers should heed – i cannot list them all (you know why!) , but the first one is be transparent about your suppliers. That’s an interesting point, not something the average buyer thinks about, i suspect. Certainly one which i never considered when i was buying tens of millions of $ of raw materials for P&G products many moons ago.

Think about it. You are the buyer for your Company. Everyone knows who your suppliers are. How risky is transparency ? It’s less risky if you manage it. What if your suppliers are exploiting children in their supply chain? What if they are abusing human rights? What if they are releasing tons of contaminants into a local river ? What if they are involved in bribery and corrupt business dealings ? What if they have been involved in discriminatory behavior? What if they are using illegal raw materials, or operating with unsafe practices in their plant?  I could list hundreds of cases in which corporations have been penalised or incurred cost penalties because of the actions of their suppliers  - Mattel and Hasbro due to illegal practices by Chines toy manufacturers,  Nestle’s issues in sourcing milk from Grace Mugabe at the expense of local farmers, issues for Primark on child labor in the supply chain and many more. What is the risk that these issues come back to haunt you, because this is part of your responsibility for your supply chain. How do you safeguard against this risk?  It’s one thing to have such issues in your supply chain, it’s another if you never even talked to you suppliers, made your expectations of ethical business clear, or inspected them in some way.

As the buyer for your Company, what questions do you ask of your suppliers ? How do you manage the issues that your suppliers can potentially create for your business? This is part of buying CSR due diligence. Transparency is decidedly less risky if you have a policy and practice designed to identify and reduce risk.

This question is not new for the apparel industry, and Levi Strauss was the first apparel brand to establish a supply chain sourcing code and publicly disclose all its suppliers. Since then, many other apparel brands have followed, but other industries such as toys, electronics, computer hardware etc are slow to follow. CSR in the supply chain is a frequent section in CSR reports. Gone are the days when corporations can plead ignorance of what is happening in their supply chains, and gone are the days when stakeholders accept “We didn’t know” as a viable response. So if you are a Purchasing Manager, and you aren’t aware of the risks in your supply chain, my advice is do something about them before they do something about you!

According to a new Acclimatise report backed by IBM, climate change could have a serious impact on the oil and gas industry’s assets, operations and safety.  While most are aware of these risks, only a small proportion of them have taken the necessary steps to address them.

by Janet Palma, the Green Economy Post

A new Acclimatise report backed by IBM,  entitled Global Oil & Gas – The Adaptation Challenge has identified top five impacts of climate change to the oil and gas industry. While  three quarters of the world’s oil and gas companies surveyed believe climate change could impact their business, only 19 percent are taking action as noted in this Acclimatise report.

According to Alan Roberts, IBM’s Industrial Strategy & Change Leader,  oil and gas companies are typically run well, but they have been exposed to problems with their major projects and operations in the past. The following are the top five impacts identified by the report that oil and gas companies may face.

The report titled “Global Oil & Gas – The Adaptation Challenge” is based on the Carbon Disclosure Project’s annual request for investor information that was sent to the world’s largest 128 oil and gas companies globally (based on market capitalization).

The Top Five Industry Impacts of Climate Change

1. Increased Pressure on Water Resources
2. Physical Asset Failure
3. Employee Health and Safety Risks
4. Drop in Value of Financial Assets
5. Damage to Corporate Reputation

Of the companies surveyed, 96% did not realize the risks from potential civil and geo-political unrest stemming from water shortages, poor water quality, drought and flooding and 97% did not recognize the adverse risks for local communities.   Only 6% of respondents indicated they were taking actions to manage disruption to off-site utilities (energy, communications, water and waste treatment). This could be problematic as many existing plants and equipment were designed based on historic climatic conditions and may be damaged from changing environmental conditions.

The survey showed only 1.5% of respondents have incorporated climate change considerations into their health and safety risk assessments, which may compromise employer and public liability.  Insurance costs could potentially rise due to a greater chance of physical plant damage, resulting in changes to the disclosed value of reserves with major financial implications.

Finally, failure to monitor and report the impacts of climate change on social and ecological resources will likely harm a company’s reputation.

What are the Drivers for Change?

According to the report, there are three main drivers for the oil and gas industry to use their ability to innovate and incorporate changes in practice for the common good. As a major business employer the industry contributes to society being both providing for energy needs and jobs. This is still good for the economy, if not always good for the environment. These drivers for change will be influential on the level and rate of innovation.

• Cost/Revenue Drivers – operating costs could increase in response to changes in design standards
• Stakeholder Pressure – Investors/stakeholders are placing pressure on companies to address climate risks and opportunities
• New Regulatory Landscape – greater certainty is needed about future regulatory policies

Of the three drivers, better understanding of regulatory policies will encourage companies to invest in alternatives to fossil fuels and develop cleaner and sustainable energy sources. This corporate social responsibility (CSR) action will result in the increase in trust by both stakeholders, investors and the general public.

What Opportunities are Available for Improvement?

1. Companies should start by conducting a high-level assessment of how climate change can impact their business model.
2. Next the need to analyze the individual areas, such as Non-Market Strategy and Asset Lifecycle Management, that could have the greatest material impact on performance.
3. Finally companies should adapt reporting and performance management to incorporate risks arising from climate change.

Paul Simpson, Chief Operating Officer, Carbon Disclosure Project, said, “This report shows how important it is for the oil and gas sector to plan for a changing climate. Issues such as water shortages and changing weather patterns and temperatures will impact infrastructure, operations, revenues and costs. As a result, investors want to know how oil and gas companies are dealing with these risks and planning for them in the future. This report helps answer those questions.”

To view the full report Global Oil & Gas – The Adaptation Challenge, visit the IBM web site.

The world of corporate communications is changing. With the tools afforded by the internet, and blogging especially, there is a great blurring of private citizen communications and corporate communications that I see will bring great value to corporations and to corporate responsibility.

by Kevin Moss, Head of CSR at BT Americas.

Yesterday’s post, How to Get Your Sustainability Message Noticed in Cyberspace misses the true value of blogging to corporate responsibility.

The world of corporate communications is changing. There used to be a clear line of demarcation between the individual as an executive communicating a corporate message and the individual as a private citizen exchanging personal views. Corporate communications that represent the company position tend to be one to many. Private citizen communications would be two-way but limited to very small audiences.

With the tools afforded by the internet, and blogging especially, there is a great blurring of these two options that I see will bring great value to corporations and to corporate responsibility.

In large organizations, whether for-profit, NGOs or government, the individual connection between the employee and the external stakeholders can be lost. The internet is an equalizer for small to have an equal voice to large. And the internet also has the capacity to serve as the personalizer, allowing executives in large organizations to share their personal views and be more connected as individuals with their stakeholders.

Simply having a company blog open to comments from readers gives a key message on the importance and acceptance of differing viewpoints to that company. When truly an expression of the views of an individual business executive, blogging provides a strong foundation for individual accountability. And through opening him or herself up to a more personal connection with readers I believe the executive blogger (CR practitioner or otherwise) creates an environment in which the views of their external stakeholders are front of mind in their decision-making.

Blogging as a communications tool for CR practitioners is interesting, but blogging as a mechanism to bridge the gap between company executives and stakeholders is a compelling route to ever-improving corporate responsibility.

by Chris Jarvis, Senior Consultant for Realized Worth

If business wants to regain the public’s trust, they’re going to have to be trustworthy, and employees are the key. Here are three basic steps to engage your employees, build social capital, and win stakeholder trust.

This is Part 3 of the three part series “Trust: Why Business Lost It, And How To Win It Back.” Read Part 1 and Part 2: Make Your CSR Believable? How? Create and Leverage Social Capital

Trust: “Can I get a loan?”

Many companies are turning to Corporate Social Responsibility as a strategy to win back the trust of their stakeholders and customers. But there is an irony here. For this strategy to work, it requires the very ingredient it seeks to generate – trust. Let’s consider exactly what a company is proclaiming when they use the phrase “Corporate Social Responsibility” (CSR).

CSR is a form of corporate self-regulation. Businesses promise to obey the law and maintain ethical standards in their activities. They are promising to promote the common good of the communities in which they operate, and proactively curtail any and all functions that may cause harm, whether specifically illegal or not. The popular maxim of People, Planet and Profit is the triple bottom line. Essentially, the company is taking responsibility for their actions and how they impact: a) the environment, b) consumers, c) employees, d) communities, e) various stakeholders, and f) the entire public sphere. It is a pretty significant commitment.

So, why in the world would I trust you with any of this ‘self-imposed’ regulation and prioritization if I don’t trust you in the first place? You cannot prove you are trustworthy by asking people to trust you even more.

If business wants to regain the public’s trust, they’re going to have to be trustworthy. But since they don’t possess enough trust capital in the first place, they’ll have to borrow it from somewhere. It would have been impossible for the financial institutions on Wall Street to generate the capital they needed to operate without an infusion of cash from the government. Similarly, corporations need a line of ‘trust’ credit in order to generate ‘intrinsic trust’.

In Part 2 of this series, Make your CSR believable? How? Create and Leverage Social Capital we made the connection between CSR, Social Capital and trust. Trust is the currency of social capital, and the bond that creates integrity/believability for CSR. But still, the conundrum remains – where to find the trust that CSR needs to increase trustworthiness? We hinted that the answer to this problem lies with the employees. Let’s discover how…

The Three Steps to restore Trust through a CSR strategy

Step 1: Make your CSR believable.

How? Create and Leverage Social Capital through your employees.

Any Corporate Social Responsibility strategy worth it’s salt will include an employee volunteering component (EVP). These EVPs are essential for creating credible CSR programs. Why? It is the employees that make CSR work inside and outside of the company. It doesn’t matter how much waste Wal-Mart reduces – if their managers are not treating employees ethically. And if Wal-Mart’s employees don’t believe in reducing waste during the workday, the company’s effort to reduce packaging material is essentially undermined.

Beyond making CSR strategies work, employees play the pivotal role of Community Ambassador. I recently sat with a Vice President of a major Canadian bank. She shrugged off her institutions efforts in CSR as ‘publicity stunts’. “Frankly, it’s pretty much an after-thought, with some poor guy running around the office trying to collect up all the good work and write a report.” If employees don’t believe their company’s advertising and CSR reports, they will actively undermine all marketing and promotional campaigns.

On the other hand, it is pretty damn hard to contradict employees who believe their company is making the world a better place. Starbucks does a pretty decent job of mobilizing their workforce as ambassadors of a global CSR strategy. (For an indepth look at this concept, check out the article ‘Employee Volunteering and Social Capital: Contributions to Corporate Social Responsibility ‘ by Judy N. Muthuri, Jeremy Moon, Dirk Matten).

Which brings us to the next step….

Step 2: Stop preaching the CSR message; start attracting CSR followers.

How? Use CSR as a social media platform, rather than a marketing tool.

The rise of CSR is inextricably linked to the sweeping popularity of social media. For an accurate and enjoyable synopsis of the major cultural shift social media has introduced, watch the following video:

In order for CSR to be trustworthy, it must have all the elements of transparency. The old media model of one message for the masses invokes exactly the opposite image. CSR thrives within the reciprocal dialogue of social media. But as a marketing tool, utilizing old methods of communication, it tends toward a surreptitious quality.

Social marketing, social media, and cause marketing are terms that we tend to confuse. (Laurie Hix of Brogan and Partners effectively explains these three concepts in a recent blog entry.) Simply put, CSR can use social marketing as part of an overall strategy to benefit the public. For example, promoting recycling or reducing energy use. CSR can also be part of a company’s cause marketing such as raising money and awareness for a specific issue. But social media is a big universe – in which CSR, cause marketing and social marketing all exist.

It would be a mistake to constrict your CSR strategy to fit the limited dimensions of social marketing or cause marketing. Doing this will leave you with a strategy that is distinctly artificial. You need to let it loose inside the universe of social media. Why?

Because CSR is all about trust.

And trust is the currency of Social Capital.

And Social Capital only exists within this model: reciprocal relationships with expected norms and exchanges of information and resources. Old media models deliver about as much reciprocity as the printed page. And in print alone, CSR is very much two dimensional.

So, produce CSR reports, but make them interactive. As Jonathan Ballantine notes in his article, “Building Trust in Corporate Responsibility” CSR is all about stakeholder engagement. Ballantine notes that “Dax Lovegrove of WWF believes committed organizations who genuinely engage in two-way communication with their stakeholders are ‘future proofing’ their business” (read the full article here sustainabilityforum.com) So, open a twitter account and discuss ideas, accomplishments and opportunities for improvement. Above all, bring your employees in on the discussion. If your CSR is legitimate, and your communication/employee training process effective, you’ll gain an army of active followers to your CSR cause, rather than skeptical bystanders.

Step 3: Make your CSR effective.

How? Integrate your strategy with key business objectives, and measure the outcomes.

Many companies still treat their CSR activities as a kind of philanthropy. The idea of philanthropy is important, but it is only a part of CSR, not it’s entirety. CSR is a strategy that requires a management and reporting process. It is company-wide and should be fully integrated into all key areas of business. As I mentioned earlier, effective CSR involves stakeholders in the development of competitive products, processes and services that result in positive outcomes for people, planet and profit. But these outcomes are not only affected by what a company produces, but the manner in which it is produced. We’ve all hear the famous maxim by Marshall McLuhan ‘the medium is the message’. Well, in CSR terms, the process is the product. (Seriously, write that down. Put it up on your wall. Make it your mantra.) If companies relegate CSR to an after-the-fact marketing strategy, or a philanthropic donation throughout the year, they’ve missed the point entirely.

To be a truly socially responsible company, how you do what you do is of utmost importance.

This brings me to one of my most irksome observations: the photo op employee volunteer event. They are well run, and fairly well attended, but offer little to the bottom line. If your employee volunteer program is focused solely on benefiting your community, you are probably wasting everyone’s time, including the communities. Like all CSR activities, employee volunteer programs should be designed to integrate with key business areas, such as HR. How? The best companies are tying the volunteer work of their employees to developmental goals. Then, they take the time to measure the success of these efforts in annual performance reviews. Others are using the opportunity to place young executives on nonprofit boards to increase their leadership competencies. Again, working with the nonprofits to measure the successes of these efforts is essential – and honestly, its just good business sense.

Companies can establish themselves as trustworthy if they do these three things:

1. Outdo Wal-Mart. Utilize employees as key participants and promoters of the companies CSR practices. This will only work if the CSR is a genuine aspect of the companies culture. Hey, if Walmart is starting to figure it out…..
2. Stop Speeching. Create a dialogue with customers and stakeholders about your CSR aspirations, achievements and failures. Transparency and reciprocity are the key here. If that’s not possible, I’m not sure why we’re even talking about restoring trust for your company. You need to be exploring the tactics of the Cold War.
3. Remember: It’s all CSR, stupid. While CSR may be a department in your business, it is not a part of your business. Everything your company does, including everyone the company does business with is CSR. The process is the product.

This is Part 3 of the three part series “Trust: Why Business Lost It, And How To Win It Back.” Read Part 1 and Part 2: Make Your CSR Believable? How? Create and Leverage Social Capital

The standard approach to finance is often the sad antithesis of corporate social responsibility. Most Finance managers have a perception of CSR as simply a cost center and not a revenue generator.Cohen provides an explanation of how there is a basis for the financial function to be a contributor to, and not just a calculator of a company’s CSR program.

by Elaine Cohen is the Joint CEO of BeyondBusiness Ltd

Embedding CSR in …. wait for it … the FINANCE function. Oops! Did I hear that right ? Do CFO’s have a CSR mindset ? Isn’t CSR just a cost center and not a revenue generator? Isn’t that how most CFO’s think? So what’s the deal with embedding CSR in the financial division of the corporation? This post on embedding CSR in the business, is prompted by  Ethical Corporation’s latest research publication on How to Embed Corporate Responsibility Across Different Parts of Your Company , a 100 page report published at end September 2009. It provides an analysis and case studies covering five organizational functions: human resources, finance and accounting, communications, procurement and logistics and operations. I have already blogged about embedding CSR in the procurement function and in the human resources function. Here comes Mr Money’s turn.

I will pause to tell you a story. I was once attending an executive leadership meeting of a company, where an unavoidable 60 redundancies were to be made as part of a cost-reduction exercise. The CFO, on hearing this number of people who would be dismissed, shouted out with glee and said ” Great!! That will almost solve our cost problem.” or words to that effect. The sight of a respected manager of a large business almost jumping with joy at the fact that 60 people were about to lose their livelihoods still makes me feel rather sick. It’s not that I have anything against finance, managers (apart from the fact that they always seem to control what money is not available, rather than what is), but this “people equal costs” approach is the sad antithesis of corporate social responsibility. Story over.

Finance Managers are also employees and share responsibility to be ambassadors of the corporate CSR approach. They  create their share of direct impact through their resources consumption, travel  and waste generation , and participate in corporate volunteering activities (unless it’s month or year end) . The are the authority on managing the company’s money are the first in line to field investor questions and analyst queries. They are the first to understand the financial implications of most corporate risks. So, it seems there is a basis for the financial function to be a contributor to, and not just a calculator of a company’s CSR program.

The Ethical Corporation research report refers to CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants) and IBE (Institute of Business Ethics) who issued a report in 2008 that emphasized the role that ethics will increasingly play in Finance Managers’ jobs, based on a survey they conducted. The report covers issues such as advice for finance professionals on ethics, how accounting and finance functions can improve a Company’s CSR strategy, the opportunities of carbon trading, ethical checks and balances, and the expectations of ethical investors. Richard Ellis of Boots is quoted in the report as saying “Financial departments need to have an interest in measuring non-financial information,” and I agree with him.  (I am sure he will be pleased about THAT.  Though we all know that accounting for long term indirect impacts are a little more complicated than the standard accounting exams most CFOs have passed with flying colors.

The research report touches on integrated reporting which only a handful of CSR reporting companies have adopted. Integrated reporting is an indication of total systems thinking by an organization and serves to elevate the CSR content to the same level of transparency and rigor as the financial content. As the owners of the financial report, the CFO’s cannot ignore this new style content invading their traditional territory.

I thought about the CSR reports i read and review, and recall little about the way the finance function is involved in CSR. The Australian Real Estate Mirvac Group reported in its 2008 Sustainability Report that it had  “established the Climate Change Response Group. This group, which is chaired by Mirvac’s CFO,and includes representatives from corporate risk, sustainability, and all business unit areas is developing Mirvac’s business wide climate change response.” I also recall that CSR at the Spanish group Telefonica is managed by the CFO, though i cannot find this mentioned in their CSR Report for 2008.

Like it or not, finance managers need to embrace CSR as a reality of the business. Like it or not, we will probably find that when they do, we will suddenly have a lot more numbers in our CSR reports. Like it or not, i am now gonna devour my daily tub of  Chunky Monkey before its cost feasibility outweighs its contribution to making the world a better place.

Many companies are turning to Corporate Social Responsibility as a strategy to win back the trust of their stakeholders and customers. It won’t work. Why? Because you don’t become trustworthy by asking people to trust you even more.

by Chris Jarvis, Senior Consultant for Realized Worth

Corporate social responsibility requires trust.

There is an old maxim among sales people, “You don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle.” Undoubtedly, you’ve heard this pithy little saying and for the most part it rings true. The idea is that when people make a purchase, it is not so much about the car, or house, or widget, but rather the presentation and the presenter. Are we buying a car, or are we buying into a brand? According to the maxim, it is the latter.

These days, there is a whole lot of steak….and not much sizzle.

Given recent events, like say, oh I don’t know, the global economic collapse, consumers and investors are viewing corporations with greater scrutiny and even downright skepticism. As we saw in the first part of this series ‘ Trust: Why Business Lost It, and How To Win It Back’, many companies have responded by embracing Corporate Social Responsibility strategies in an effort to establish themselves as good and ethical corporate citizens. CSR is not some newly devised strategy. What is new however, is an economic crises which was caused by the gross excess and multiple fumbles of the financial sector. Now, for better or for worse, we are left with an ideal environment for people to demand and receive change. For business, this change is found in CSR. The effect is wholesale. Harvard Business School has even officially pronounced CSR victorious over all detractors.

Jeff Swartz, CEO of Timberland believes brands with a strong sustainability message are well-positioned for this present crisis. Timberland has been a leader for years in CSR including issues such as: sustainability, responsible supply chains, and “green.” What used to look like a distraction from core business, now appears downright prescient.
(Read more about Timberlands sustainability efforts here.)
(Want to interact with Timberland directly? Visit them on JustMeans.com, a site dedicated to corporate transparency and Corporate Responsibility.)

While CSR may be a wildly popular strategy, is it really a solution to the growing problem of trust? Many companies have taken on sweeping CSR strategies and expended vast sums to institutionalize the practices. Yet, they remain nefarious in the public eye. In fact, CSR activities sometimes heighten suspicion rather than engender trust. But why?

The answer is found in the rather messy concept known as Social Capital.

Trust, the currency of Social Capital

There is no easy definition for social capital. A concept born out of sociology, it is now used by multiple disciplines (economics, organizational behaviour, political science, public health) with numerous interpretations. In simple terms, social capital is the value that accumulates in actual human relationships. There are vast amounts of information, skills, and networks to be found in most relationships. This value is accessed every time individuals or groups gather to ‘do something’ for the greater good by making contributions of skills, information, and connections. Habitat for Humanity generates and spends the equivalent of billions of dollars in social capital every year. The health of a society may be measured in the generation and use of social capital.

CSR is an amazing avenue for companies looking to utilize social capital. When these companies pursue a CSR strategy, they can leverage the networks that will form out of shared social concerns. If they add their their resources, skills and broader connections, they will generate solutions and fundamentally contribute to the value and health of communities in which they operate. Social capital generates from the opportunity, motivation and ability to act. The shape it takes is determined by the networks which exist between the actors, the norms of what is and is not acceptable, and finally, by trust. Trust is the bond that keeps all of these actions and dimensions intact. Without trust, everything grinds to a halt.

So, is CSR the solution – or not? If you are lacking trust (like most business today) it is impossible to employ a tool that requires trust in order to gain trust. That would be like claiming that the solution to getting a chicken is to lay an egg. First, just find a chicken to lay the egg. Wait…what?

The real question is not whether CSR will generate trust in your brand. It will. And it won’t. If you are trusted then yes, CSR will create more trust. If you’re not trusted, CSR will probably only make it worse.

In her article “Where’s the Love”, Christine Arena elaborates:

For example, Halliburton says: “[our] every action is guided by our vision to be welcomed as a good corporate neighbor,” but The Wall Street Journal reports that it is “the company with the worst corporate reputation.” Monsanto promises: “integrity is the foundation for everything we do,” yet Amnesty International and the Organic Consumers Association consider it a “global corporate terrorist.” Allstate Insurance claims that its customers are “in good hands,” while the FBIC counts it as one of the Nation’s “top three worst insurers.” Exxon Mobile insists that it is effectively “taking on the world’s toughest energy challenges,” but Harris Interactive rates it as one of the world’s “least trusted.”
(Read the full article on Apeshpere.com)

So how do you get a chicken if you don’t have any eggs? Simple. Borrow some.

Companies don’t own trust, brands do. A friend of mine, Dennis Bruce, Creative Minds, explained it this way: “A Brand is the real estate a company owns in the minds of it’s stakeholders and customers.” This is why Royal Bank’s brand is only worth 5.4 billion compared to RIM’s (the makers of Blackberry) 13.7 billion. We think a lot more about Blackberries in Canada than we do banks.

However, an established brand does not automatically generate trust. Exxon is an easy example of this. Exxon may own real estate in my mind, but they are bankrupt in social capital. I guess that’s kind of like being house-poor. Some people can afford to buy a house, but not to furnish it, maintain it – essentially, make it a home. Businesses don’t want vacant houses in your mind – they want homes.

We’re left with quite a dilemma. Business lacks trust, CSR creates trust, but not without social capital. Yeah….the outlook seems a bit dire. Thankfully, social capital, is actually within easy reach – and there’s more of it than most businesses know what to do with.

Where? Well, within your very own workplace, of course. The best avenue to social capital is through the communities of your employees. Accessing it can present a bit of a challenge, but not one for which I don’t have an answer.

Next time we’ll look at how to access social capital through employees and borrow eggs to furnish your home…or…..maybe I used one too many metaphors in this blog?

Voting has begun for the Third Annual CR Reporting Awards (CRRA‘10), the only independent global annual awards for corporate responsibility (CR) reporting. The jury consists of an online CR community of 28,500. From now until Friday, 29th January 2010, registered users of CorporateRegister.com can vote online at http://www.corporateregister.com/crra.

The CRRA is managed by CorporateRegister.com, the CR resources website and provider of the world’s largest online directory of CR Reports. The CRRA identify and acknowledge the best CR reports and reward quality disclosure as a contribution to the raising of global reporting standards.

The CRRA’10 solicited reports published over the last year between October 2008 and October 2009. This year, 128 leading international reporting companies from over 40 sectors entered reports across nine categories:

• Best Overall Report
• Best First Time Report
• Best SME Report
• Best Integrated Report
• Best Carbon Disclosure
• Creativity in Communications
• Relevance & Materiality
• Openness & Honesty
• Credibility through Assurance

Voting is open to all 28,500 registered users of CorporateRegister.com. This online community represents a global audience of highly informed stakeholders and CR report readers: corporate CR professionals, CR consultants, CR organisations, government authorities, investors, analysts, NGOs, charities, journalists, academics and students. Free sign-up is available online at www.corporateregister.com. Signing up not only allows participation in voting, but also access to the entire website, along with several additional benefits.

Voters may select up to 5 choices in each award category. Those voters with a first choice for each award category are then entered in the Voters’ Prize draw and can win cash prizes. A total of £2,500 will be awarded to voters.

The CRRA‘10 winners will be announced in March 2010 at an invitation-only event and ceremony in London. There will be one overall award winner per category, with a mention for the first and second runners-up. A comprehensive CRRA’10 report will be freely available from CorporateRegister.com after the awards ceremony in hard copy and as a pdf download.

Last year’s annual awards programme was a great success, with many of the world’s largest companies participating. The 2010 event will repeat this success, with a wide range of companies from well-known multinationals to local SMEs competing across the nine categories.

CorporateRegister.com’s Director, Paul Scott said: “This year’s participation in the CRRA is better than ever. There is certainly no sign of global recession in CR reporting! Many of the world’s foremost companies are participating in these leading CR reporting awards. We look forward to the online community identifying the current reporting leaders and the reports which come top of the pile.”

Contacts

For further information, please contact:

• Andrea Krug, Krug Communications, tel. +44 (0)7740 245 867, email: andrea@krugcomms.com.
• Paul Scott or Jane Ahlering, Corporate Register Ltd, tel. +44 (0)20 7014 33 66, email: info@corporateregister.com.

by Chris Jarvis, Senior Consultant for Realized Worth

There is a serious lack of trust among consumers these days. Citizens of every country are eying large national and multi-national corporations with a narrowed, suspicious gaze. Questions are being asked. Answers demanded. With taxpayers around the world bailing out stupendous failures in the financial, housing, and insurance sectors, there is more than a lack of consumer confidence affecting the market. Frankly, we’re over it. We just don’t trust big business anymore.

This is actually nothing new. I don’t know how many movies I’ve seen where the plot pivots on the malevolence of unscrupulous business oligarchies. But the uniform opinion of distrust, leveraged by the social media tools of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning sites, and blogging seems to have brought us to a tipping point.

It is not just the unwashed masses, gathered with burning torches in the village commons, causing the uproarious clammer. Even some of the most powerful CEOs are beginning to question everything from their own excessive salaries, to the seemingly inevitable excesses of capitalism itself. Kazuo Inamori, the 77 year old founder of Kyocera (KYO), a 13 billion dollar Japanese manufacturer, offers the following statement:

“Profits are created by the hard work and collaboration of the workers and other levels of management. For the top echelon to receive such high compensation, as if they alone were responsible for the profits, is unreasonable. We should possess the consideration and humility to provide all employees who work for the company with an appropriate share of the gains. That is lacking in today’s capitalism or free-market economy, and its absence is responsible for the growing disparity, discrimination and injustice in society.”

Charles Handy, an Irish philosopher specializing in organizational management wrote in his book ‘What’s a Business For’ (2002) this prescient paragraph:

“The markets will empty and share prices will collapse, as ordinary people find other places to put their money–into their houses, maybe, or under their beds. The great virtue of capitalism, that it provides a way for the savings of society to be used for the creation of wealth–will have been eroded. So we will be left to rely increasingly on governments for the creation of our wealth, something that they have always been conspicuously bad at doing…..Trust is fragile. Like a piece of china, once cracked it is never quite the same. And people’s trust in business, and those who lead it, is today cracking.”

I trust you, I just don’t believe you

But what do we mean exactly, when we use the word, “trust”? It isn’t as if we now see corporations as evil and and have consequently stopped buying stuff. Okay, I’ll grant you, consumer confidence isn’t….um….good. According to the January ’09 Conference Board’s U.S. Consumer Confidence Index, the numbers nose-dived to the lowest levels since tracking began back in 1967 (What was going on in 1967? Oh yeah, Vietnam, the cold war, immanent nuclear holocaust and the end of the world.) But, by and large, people still “trust” the products they buy. …Right?

Yes. And no.

Basically, we still trust companies – or at least brands – when it comes to products and services. As far as advertising goes, everything is pretty much the same. When I buy a bottle of laundry soap, I believe I’m getting what’s being advertised. If it is a no-name label, I’m prepared for a level of performance equal to the lower price I’m paying. But if it’s a brand like Tide, for example, I expect a higher level of performance for the price. This type of trust is intact. No one (as far as I know) is trying to link lapsing quality and misleading performance claims to the financial crises.

Issues of trust linked to the global crises are much tougher to quantify. A consumer’s degree of trust is no longer based on questions like, “Did this cleaning product remove the stain?” or, “Is my phone company competent (even though my billing is always wrong)?” Trust now asks intensive questions around topics such as corporate citizenship, community engagement, and ethical management. Trust is about character and behaviors, rather than quality and performance.

Maybe an analogy will help clarify the issue….

Have you ever worked under an unquestionably competent supervisor who was an entirely unlikable person? You respect the success you see in the results of her work, but the last thing you want to do is go for a beer after work. (Not that she’s the type to invite you, anyway.) You’re happy to trust her competence as your boss, but you generally detest her as a person. Why? She’s a jerk.

Well, it’s kind of like that with business and society today. You might trust a brand’s competence, but you sure as hell don’t want to support them with your cash. Why? Because face to face, that brand’s a jerk.

I don’t trust you because you’re trying too hard

Companies are hard-pressed to combat this image. To do so, they have increasingly invested in a strategy known as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). (If you’re not familiar with the term, Mallen Baker offers a good overview.) It’s important to note here that the sustainable practices of CSR are not being implemented solely as marketing or PR strategies. Many companies began the journey toward CSR long before the economic meltdown of the past few months. And even now, numerous companies are espousing practices of reducing waste, packaging, energy consumption and carbon outputs as a matter of conscience as well as good business strategy to trim costs. Despite the financial crunch, companies such as General Electric, Intel, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Wal-Mart are keeping or expanding their CSR commitments.

Unfortunately, in a market where trust has suffered a staggering blow, CSR efforts may add insult to injury. I conducted a small (very unscientific) survey of about 40 business men and women on LinkedIn, Twitter and in-person. The question: Does CSR engender trust toward a business?

The responses were a bit surprising to me – but very interesting (and a little entertaining). They were virtually all a version of a qualified, “No.” Some weighed in a little more positive, some leaned negative, and others were neutral. It looked something like this:

Neutral: “CSR doesn’t inspire trust, but I might think less of a company that’s not doing anything at all.”
Negative: “If it says ‘green,’ I won’t buy it.”
Positive: “If a company has been doing CSR for a long time and proved themselves, I might trust them a little.”

People are skeptical of the very claims that are meant to engender trust in brands. According to BBMG, a brand and marketing agency in New York, “Nearly one in four U.S. consumers say they have, ‘no way of knowing’ if a product is green or actually does what it claims.” BBMG believes this is evidence of a lack of trust in the ‘green’ claims of companies.

Couple this lack of trust with companies that are obviously beginning to do some amazing work as good corporate citizens, and the result is a brand that seems to be suffering from an identity crises. Walmart, for example, is leading retailers in the practice of greening supply chains. According to a study by the same group, BBMG, Walmart was ranked among the most socially responsible companies by respondents. Astoundingly, in the same study, Walmart is also ranked as one of the least responsible companies, along with Exxon Mobile, GM, Food, Shell, McDonald’s.

So is CSR an effective way for companies to increase their trust quotient among consumers and other stakeholders? Absolutely.

There is overwhelming evidence that “green” means profit. Companies that create eco-friendly products and services, reduce waste, carbon, water and energy use are more competitive and incur a significant degree of favor in the market.

Consumers are still buying sustainable lines despite their higher cost. Nielsen Co. data show sales growth of organic food at 5.6% year over year in December from a year ago, though that’s down from the double-digit pace of years past, and its SPINS tracking service showed sales at natural-food stores up 10.9% to $4.2 billion last year. Though growth slowed in the fourth quarter, it was still more than 7% in December, far healthier than the rates at even top-performing grocery retailers such as Walmart or Costco.
Read the full article by Jack Neff on Advertising Age here.

And it isn’t just companies of the West buying into CSR as a strategy for growth and instilling trust among stakeholders. In China, over 190 companies published CSR reports in 2008. That’s phenomenal when you consider that just 2 years previous, the sum total of CSR reports in all of China was 19.

How can I trust you? I don’t even know you

Clearly, there is a big leap between investing in CSR and restoring trust. One does not automatically inspire the other. According to my fairly (okay, completely) unscientific survey, efforts to implement CSR activities may, in some cases, be a detriment to consumer trust. Even among CSR practitioners, just greening your supply chain and publishing a report will not engender trust. This is because trust is fundamentally an emotive decision that is based on relationship, not just information. In fact, trust can exist even when there is an obvious lack of information. (We tend to refer to this as faith.) But trust can never be held without a relational quality.

Over the next three blogs I will suggest some practical and achievable steps to restoring and increasing trust in your brand. The premise: employing an authentic CSR strategy. (Greenwashing will blow up in your face if you follow these steps.)

Step One: Make your CSR believable. How? Create and leverage social capital.

Step Two: Stop preaching the CSR message; start attracting CSR followers. How? Use CSR as a social media platform, rather than a marketing tool.

Step Three: Make your CSR effective. How? Integrate the strategy with key business objectives, and measure the outcomes.

If you have any thoughts or info on the discussion so far, I’d love to hear from you.

by Jennifer Rice, Principal, Fruitful Strategy

As consumer expectations rise and trust in corporations decline, the need for ethical business practices is greater than ever. Yet in a recession, companies seeking to cut costs will likely postpone important CSR initiatives or cut spending in favor of core business initiatives.

But it doesn’t have to be either-or. Companies that consider social and environmental initiatives as potential innovation platforms and brand builders — not expenses — will come out ahead.

The Opportunity Audit helps prioritize and inspire

To aid businesses in evaluating initiatives, (re)allocating resources and exploring white-space opportunities, we’ve developed the Fruitful Opportunity Audit. This tool maps what a company does, not what it says. That means you won’t see cause marketing programs on this audit, mainly because the Brand/Customer quadrant could hypothetically be filled with greenwash. (click to enlarge)

The columns represent the locus of initiative; whether it primarily resides with your suppliers, employees or internal operations, community or customers.

The bottom row shows tablestakes initiatives that most businesses are undertaking regardless of industry. These include basic blocking and tackling like sustainability initiatives in energy, water, waste, IT, supply chain, employee volunteerism, fair labor practices, and so on. Note that it also includes philanthropy efforts that are not directly aligned with the category or brand.

The middle row represents activities that are industry-specific. Now we’re getting into actions that are more strategically in line with your business and therefore could be more effective in reputation-building. Electronics recycling (Community/Customer), industry-related training and job creation (Employee/Community) or Fair Trade efforts among coffee and tea manufacturers (Suppliers) are a few examples.

The top row is where it gets really interesting… this is where you’ll see social-impact initiatives that directly support the brand promise. The most effective initiatives often span most, if not all columns in this row; think Plan A from Marks & Spencer, GE’s Ecomagination, Timberland, Clorox GreenWorks, and specialized ethical brands like Whole Foods and Seventh Generation. Other examples might include Best Buy’s Geek Squad Summer Academy (Community) or Fairmont Hotel’s Green Cuisine (Supplier/Community/Consumer) that aligns with their authentically local brand pillar.

Now is the time to kill sacred cows

If you plot your CSR initiatives on this chart using bubble size to approximate relative spending, you’ll see where most of your dollars are going. Is your chart weighted more heavily at the bottom or the top? If the former, how much could be shifted to brand-building without compromising on the essentials? If the latter, good job; just make sure you’re covering your bases at the bottom to eliminate risk of goodwashing claims.

This process will inevitably generate some controversial discussion around cutting philanthropic programs that aren’t aligned with your brand. NCR, a former client of mine that I helped reposition their brand around self-service technology, supports a wide variety of charities completely unrelated to their business through the NCR Foundation; buried on the last page of their Citizenship Report is a brief mention of how they are improving access to technology for disabled and areas with low literacy. That’s a fantastic example of triple-bottom line innovation driving the brand, but it’s being communicated like an afterthought. Imagine what a powerful ethical brand NCR could build if it reallocated its CSR investments in favor of value creation at the intersection of self-serve technology and social needs. (click to enlarge)

Please note that this is not intended to decrease the amount of funding that any particular non-profit should receive from corporations. Rather, if all corporations were thoughtful about which non-profits to support, then everybody wins. The non-profit could benefit from their corporate partner’s lobbying power and investment in ethical brand-building; the corporation benefits from the strategic alignment with the right non-profits. 1+1=3. The recession is a good opportunity to justify such shifts.

Finding competitive opportunities – a retail example

When you plot your top competitors on the same chart, you’ll start seeing patterns that give insights into opportunity areas for the brand. You might also want to plot related but non-competitive companies on the same chart to bring new ideas to the table. Below is an illustrative example from the retail space; you’ll see that Marks & Spencer in the UK has done a great job creating ethical brand drivers across all columns. Retailers in the US can borrow ideas like branding internal initiatives similar to Plan A. Likewise, M&S could borrow an idea or two from Best Buys’ branded Employee/Community initiatives. (BTW, don’t get hung up on circle size; I don’t have enough info to map to investment levels. Just take it for the illustrative example that it is.) (click to enlarge)

You can push the innovation potential even further by mapping completely unrelated companies or industries for inspiration. For example, what could micro-finance teach the retail industry? If I’m Target, perhaps I combine “enabling individual potential” of Kiva.org with my “design/value” brand promise to create a program that gives design students (or employees!) an opportunity to be discovered, promoted and funded for their product design ideas. That’s a program that spans all four columns of Brand-Builders.

I’m interested in your feedback. Is this a useful framework? What are the roadblocks to adopting this approach in your company? Who would actually drive this… CRO or CMO? CEO? And of course, if you see anything big that I missed in the retail audit, let me know.

Are you a recent graduate discovering how difficult the current market is, unemployed, worried you might soon lose your job or just feel that your career seems stuck in place? Are you thinking that now may be the best time to re-tool your career? Going for a green MBA, now, while the job market is stagnant may be a smart move; both for recent graduates, currently unemployed (or underemployed) professionals as well as for those who want to forge a path into a career in corporate sustainability. But what is a Green MBA, why is it important and what schools are offering them? These are the questions this post delves into.

Why a Green MBA Is Important

More and more companies are taking corporate sustainability and environmental practices seriously. Companies are discovering that an approach to business that factors in sustainability can not only be good for the earth, but can also have a positive impact on the bottom line as well as build the company’s green brand. For example, in an Arthur D. Little survey of 481 companies, 95% of responding executives counted sustainable development as important to their business future.  With the world turning its attention to the environment, companies across the country are spending more time focusing on creating and implementing green programs.  The perfect storm of emerging regulations, increased requirements for reporting and transparency, heightened pressure from investors, energy price volatility and market demands for green products and technologies is driving Sustainability as a business imperative.

This has created a growing need for a new generation of business leaders with a focus on corporate sustainable practices. This is backed up by the CSR Jobs Report, jointly released in 2008 by Net Impact and Ellen Weinreb CSR Recruiting, which found that the number of corporate social responsibility (CSR) job postings has increased by 37 percent in a three-and-a-half-year period, based on an analysis of 1,255 CSR job openings posted between January 2004 and June 2007. The report also found that that demand for CSR MBA level candidates still outpaces supply.

A recent GreenBiz survey of more than 600 companies found that these organizations are increasing their hiring of environmental and sustainability professionals while other departments are contracting. The number of large companies citing open positions and plans to increase staff doubled from 8 percent in late 2008 to 17 percent this summer.  Backing up those figures is a recent survey conducted by CareerBuilder,  which revealed that one-in-ten employers have added green jobs, in the last 12 months.

While hiring has been dismal in all areas, according to Green Dream Jobs and green workforce development consultant Jim Cassio the the green job announcements most frequently posted are those jobs often held by people with green MBAs. The MBA titles that where among the top 20 jobs are: Executive Director, Nonprofit; Project Leader/Manager; Sustainability Program Director/Manager; Marketing Manager/Coordinator; Business/Data Analyst; Research Analyst/Manager; Account Executive/Manager, Sales; Sustainability Analyst/Consultant; and Operations Manager. Despite the bleak job market, energy efficiency companies are hiring and clean tech jobs are starting to replace old jobs that have been lost.

What is a Green MBA?

A Green MBA is basically a Master of Business Administration degree with a focus or concentration on corporate sustainability in addition to the core MBA curriculum. Like traditional MBA’s it is granted after one to two years of graduate-level university study that provides training in the theory and practice of business management with a focus on managing the enterprise in a sustainable fashion. This includes managing the environmental impact of the business, increasing energy efficiency, reducing waste, finding ways to promote sustainable practices in all aspects of the business from product development, to supply chain, production, packaging, distribution and marketing.

The green MBA, also called a “sustainable business degree” teaches an approach to business that changes the focus of business from short term financial gains only, to a long term appreciation of economic, social and natural capital; often called the triple bottom line. The phrase: profits, people and planet also evokes this broader metric for measuring a business’s long term success. The green management philosophy taught seeks to position the enterprise for long term success, by finding ways to use less energy and material, become more efficient, less wasteful and resourceful in how it does business.

The Number of Schools Offering Green MBAs Is Increasing

As interest rises in corporate sustainability an increasing number of universities are offering Master’s of Business Administration degree programs that have a focus on sustainability. These degree programs as well as certificate programs can have several more specific areas of concentration and are also available online for those students who wish to explore this option.  In the past few months, several green MBA programs have been established. They include the Clark University Dual MBA/MA in Environmental Science and Policy; Marylhurst MBA in Sustainable Business; City University of Seattle MBA in Sustainable Business; and the Concordia University Wisconsin MBA with a Concentration in Environmental Studies.

In order to help our readers find a school with the kind of Green MBA Program that they are looking for Green Economy Post has published the Green MBA Program Directory, an up to date comprehensive guide to Green MBA degrees and certificates around the country. It features profiles of over 80 Green MBA, Dual Degree and Certificate Programs from across the United States as well as from institutions offering online Green MBA Programs. This guide is continually updated as we find out about new Green MBA programs. The Green MBA Program Directory currently lists Green MBA programs found in 25 states including: Arizona, California, Colorado, District of Colombia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York,North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.

These increasingly widely available Green MBA programs all seek to develop a core competency in sustainable management and in business management in general. In addition many of these programs also have specific concentrations that range from renewable energy to social and environmental responsibility, sustainable supply chains, marketing in a new economy, environmental accounting, and sustainability and business opportunity.

Conclusion

As ever more corporations begin to focus on strategies to gain competitive advantage through environmentally sustainable practices, such as carbon reduction, energy efficiency and clean technologies and discover that considerable opportunities to save money exist by doing so they will need business leaders who can lead in these efforts and who understand the issues and opportunities that exist. A degree in a Green MBA positions one to become a leader in this exciting transformation of the way business is being conducted around the world. It can help those who are driven to achieve help make this world a better place while they help their enterprises turn a long term sustainable profit.

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by Marc Gunther ~ Business and Sustainability Journalist, Speaker, Writer and Consultant

What are the “greenest” brands in the U.S.? Until we can define “green,” there’s no meaningful way to answer that question. Of course, that doesn’t stop people from having, and expressing, opinions.

Last summer, a group of agencies owned by the giant marketing and communications company WPP – the PR firm Cohn & Wolfe, branding experts Landor Associates and pollster-consultants Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB) – joined with Esty Environmental Partners, a consulting firm run by Yale prof and author Dan Esty, to survey about 5,000 consumers around the world about green products, companies and brands. The agencies hosted a lunch in New York where I moderated a panel (see below) to talk about the survey, called Green Brands, Global Insights.

The survey produced all sorts of interesting results—would you believe that 38 percent of consumers in Brazil are willing to spent 30 percent or more for green products?—but what jumped out at me was the list of the U.S.’s greenest brands. Here goes.

1. Clorox Green Works
2. Burt’s Bees
3. Tom’s of Maine
4. SC Johnson
5. Toyota
6. P&G
7. Wal-Mart
8. Ikea
9. Disney
10. Dove

To which I can only say: I would never, ever have predicted that list.

On the bright side, I’m impressed that some Americans know that SC Johnson and Ikea are among the most environmentally responsible companies in the world, although I wouldn’t have thought of SC Johnson, which makes Windex, Raid and Saran Wrap, as a brand.

Seeing Clorox’s GreenWorks line atop the list doesn’t surprise me. I’m told the company spent $30 million (a figure I can’t confirm) to promote the new brand, so it looms larger in the minds of consumers than, say, Seventh Generation and Method, competitors whose ethos strikes me as deeper green. I’ve never bought a GreenWorks product but I happily spend my money on Seventh Generation and Method.

Toyota presumably gets credit for the Prius, which overshadows its gas-guzzling trucks and minivans.

Wal-Mart, we could argue about. The company would definitely make my list.

The names that surprised me are Disney and Dove.

Disney, it turns out, has a slew of environmental initiatives underway, but few have crossed my radar screen, perhaps because my kids outgrew the Disney world some years ago. The company announced targets earlier this year to reduce emissions, waste and fuel use. Maybe movie-goers give Disney credit for the Wall-E movie, an environmental cautionary tale. On the other hand, Disney operates a couple of cruise ships that spew thousands of tons of greenhouse gases and it sells an awful lot of junk (food and souvenirs) at its theme parks.

Dove is more of a puzzle. Greenpeace International ran a campaign against Dove in 2008 because the company that makes it, Unilever, is said to be the world’s largest consumer of palm oil. Palm oil cultivation is a major cause of deforestation To its credit, Unilever, which has been an environmental leader for a decade or more, agreed to strongly support efforts to halt deforestation. But it’s hard to see how that makes Dove a green brand. It may be that Dove’s path-breaking and praiseworthy Campaign for Real Beauty led consumers to believe that a company that wants to free women from beauty stereotypes is also likely to be “green.”

All of this points to the need for independent standards to help guide consumers–who do care about the issues–through a thicket of environmental claims. Wal-Mart’s sustainability index can’t come soon enough.

Guest Post by Elaine Cohen, Joint CEO of BeyondBusiness Ltd

The purpose of a CSR report is to build trust. By operating transparently and responding openly to stakeholder concerns and aspirations, through a “fair and balanced” presentation of the material issues relating to your organization’s sustainability and corporate responsibility efforts, you build trust. Trust, so that stakeholders can hold your Company’s integrity  in high regard and make educated decisions about whether they want to invest in you, work for you, buy your products or services, supply to you, collaborate with you, complain about you to the regulators, approve your license to operate in their neighborhood or simply recommend you to their friends. But quite often, reports are met with cyncism and mistrust. Why should we believe what is written in CSR reports. And more importantly, why shouldn’t we believe what’s reported?

MANY PEOPLE SAY:

CSR Reports are just a form of marcom or PR – self-gratifying do-gooding self-promotion.

i.e. you cant trust CSR reports and you can’t trust reporting companies. People may be right. CSR reports look like  PR. They are  full of superlatives and positives and superlapositives like that ? It’s a hybrid. Using one word instead of two is sustainable best practice… or bractice. Less typing energy, less server power, less carbissions).

Which is why i find it interesting that so very few PR professionals are actually involved in managing CSR communications in their businesses, or in leading the writing of CSR reports. See some examples from reports published in September 2009:

Corporate Express Austrailia’s 2008 report :  CSR is led by a CSR manager reporting to the CEO. There is a CSR Steering Committee with representation from all functions including the New Zealand person who reports to the Head of Marketing. But there seems to be no dominant PR or comms-related presence.

WestLB AG 2009 report : The Sustainability Department, which is responsible for planning, steering and controlling all sustainability activities, is a part of the Group Development business unit and reports to the Chairman of the Managing Board. Do you detect a mention of Marketing or PR in this structure ? Nope. Me neither.

Teck 2009 Report :The Safety and Sustainability Committee  of the Board of Directors provides policy direction and monitors  environmental, social and safety performance. The Corporate Environment and Risk Management Committee is a senior management committee that sets priorities and direction for EHS programs, tracks performance and measures results. No PR stuff here.

MTR Corporation 2008 Report : The Corporate Responsibility Steering Committee is chaired by the Legal Secretary and members from different parts of the business are on the team. Sounds pretty PR-less.

Now, in an outstanding piece of research by Sherie Winston of Georgetown University, in which she charts the positioning of CSR in a business, 125 CSR jobs were studied and only half had some form of CSR communications content. When hiring CSR people, companies dont’ look for communications specialists. “Few are pure communications jobs, and most fall under administrative, managerial or business development categories.”

Logic might dictate that if companies were intending their CSR reports to be PR brochures, they would have PR people leading their CSR report publication. Does that make sense? I mean, in any business i have ever worked in, the Finance guy counted the profits and the IT person decided when to upgrade my laptop. So why would a PR-motivated CSR report not be led by the PR person, arguably the most competent person to produce PR content ?

Do you have kids ? What happens when someone asks you about your kids? You dont start off by listing all their bad points <(well, unless your kid is Dennis the Menace). You dont spend all your time saying what they don’t do well. You start off by saying how wonderful they are. Perhaps you might throw in the odd comment about the fact they total-lossed your car again last week, but on the whole, you stay with the good stuff. They are not bottom of the class, they are 28th from the top. They are not hyperactive, they have lots of energy. Most mom’s are natural PR agents for their own kids. Mom’s  tell the REAL truth about their kids (my son is two rungs short of a ladder)only  when they are with their closest family members or friends. The people who they trust the most.

And it’s a bit like that with CSR reports. Each report is someone’s kid. No CSR reporter wants to scoop up the dirt when writing about the organization in whose success he has a vested interest. So fair and balanced reporting is acually counter-intuitive, requires a degree of maturity and confidence that most corporations have not yet achieved.

Actually, it requires trust. It requires the organization to trust that the stakeholders who read the report will do so with a fair and balanced mindset, and not look for the first opportunity to beat the company about the head for everything that it admits is not perfect.

and here we have it, the CATCH 22.

To engender trust, you have to show trust though balanced reporting.

But balanced reporting is risky, as stakeholders might react negatively to anything that is less than perfect. If you dont trust them, they wont trust you.  If you don’t trust your stakeholders, your CSR report will always lack authenticity. Because you will always be too scared to present your Company in a balanced way.
Like mommy (above), a corporation will have greater trust in those stakeholders that itis closest to. Those the company has invested time in getting to know, in engaging and dialoging with. The corporation will feel safe in providing with a balanced picture to this greater critical mass of stakeholders.

and here is the PARADOX

Paradoxically, despite the fact that stakeholder engagement is crucial to building trust and therefore balanced, trustworthy reporting, most Companies do not pay much attention to this. We can see this evidenced in the brief one-pagers in most reports which do no more than pay lip-service to stakeholder engagement. Not many corporations realize how core this is to their entire CSR program, and to building trust through CSR reporting.

At this point, you are wondering how Chunky Monkey fits with reporting, catch 22’s and paradoxes (gotcha!) . Here’s the thing: I did a Free Astrology Destiny Reading on Astrology.com for Chunky Monkey , and this is part of what what is says:…… chunky monkey, if you are a business person, you may feel that your employees and customers (especially the loyal, long time ones) are your family and try to take care of them as such. You care about their personal lives and feel for their troubles, and can like a good mother you see them through tough times. Get that ? Chunky Monkey is all about values and stakeholder engagement. Phew. That’s a relief!

Guest post by Simon Propper, Managing Director, Context

I’ll never make a life-coach. My career has evolved by empirical experiment, twists and turns prompted by sometimes random experience – on one occasion an Andrex ad changed my life. And yet, I can’t imagine doing anything else, except perhaps one day building wooden boats in a shed by the sea.

I’m lucky, I found my vocation. But CR is becoming much more mainstream and now appeals to a wider group as a potential career. I receive emailed CV/resumes every day and aim to reply to all of them – I did say ‘aim’ – one of CR reporting’s most useful qualifications. Feel free to chase me.

Opportunities are expanding in major companies, business organizations, NGOs and think tanks, socially responsible investors, academia, regulators and political parties and consultancies (us).

But does CR offer the many interested graduates and mid-life changers prospects of a fulfilling and rewarding career? Here’s a test of your aptitude for the majority of CR positions available today…

1) Do you seek to make a rapid impact on society and the environment?
2) Do you want to be rewarded on a par with other professionals such as lawyers, accountants or marketing executives?
3) Would you expect to interact face to face with CEOs and senior politicians?
4) Do you relish managing a large budget for consulting and agency support?
5) Would you like a glamorous work environment?
6) Would you like to be able to talk about your work at dinner parties

OK enough – you got it already. Most CR jobs are still a ‘No’ to the above. And yet there is something hugely rewarding about chipping away, year in year out, making the arguments and constructing the business cases for better environmental and social performance. Once in a while quite significant breakthroughs are achieved, and if we look back over five years or so with any of our clients, we can all be proud of how far we have come. At least we don’t have to come home and say ‘hey honey (male or female honey) guess what, we put two points on the market share of [insert brand of room deodorizer] in Lichtenstein in May’.

Here are my tips for spotting the better corporate positions (I won’t attempt all the categories here):

1) Look for a short reporting line to the CEO.
2) Check the CEO’s speeches – any on sustainability?
3) Where does the potential position fit in? Be wary of positions in regions other than where the HQ is located because they often have insufficient influence.
4) Is there a contradiction between the core business and sustainability? Check the annual review as well as the CR report.
5) Are there significant sustainability issues? This is the opposite of the previous point. Problems too big or too small can be equally disempowering.
6) Who does the CR team report to and what is the senior decision making body? Look for clarity, seniority and engagement of the powerful operating functions of the company.

Even if this list is imperfect, just asking these questions at interview will single you out as the smartest candidate on the block. It may also precipitate deep career depression in your potential new boss if he or she is laboring eight rungs from the CEO in a different time zone and reporting to the head of janitorial supplies.

It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture when progress is glacial or even backsliding. At Context we have a secret blackboard on the private side of the kitchen wall. Here, in addition to caricatures of Peter Knight and I, is a list of our clients’ achievements and milestones. Steps, not all memorable in themselves, that collectively amount to a body of evidence that a career in CR is worthwhile and rewarding.

So if you are considering a getting into CR ,or corporate sustainability as we now call it, I encourage you to persevere. It’s a broad and challenging field that will motivate and interest for many many years. One word of caution – if you are seeking a husband, it’s not the right place. 70% of CR professionals are women. On second thoughts, I may have just righted that imbalance.

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Guest Post by Elaine Cohen, Joint CEO of BeyondBusiness Ltd

So you wrote a CR report! Big deal! What next? Make it BUZZ.

The thing about writing CSR reports is that they take a helluvalotta energy. The reporting process takes months, involves many internal and external stakeholders, and creates a reporting frenzy in the organization which bypasses none but the most unengaged employees. In theory, that is. Sometimes reporting is an intensive process for a just small group of individuals in the organization. Whatever the format, it’s intense. There’s a build-up. A deadline. Many hurdles to defuse. (is that as mixed metaphor?) Then. It happens. You send the report to print (or upload it to your fancy new html flash mini-site for viewing by the general public) and that’s it. B-I-G sigh of relief. Mop your brow. Stare into space and feel the release. Off to the bar for a celebratory drink. Sit back and wait for the compliments to start flowing in.
I suspect this is how it happens in most organizations. The report is a certain end in itself, an achievement to be recognized, a tangible result of months of effort, challenge and hard, hard work. Once it’s done, a nicely deserved pat-on-the-back can be justified.
Or not.
Because the report is just a milestone . It’s not an end in itself and should not enjoy splendid isolation from csr processes in the business, or from the reporting continuum. For the day you finish work on one report, is the day you start work on the next. So what do you do when you have published your report? Here are 27 things (disclosure: I didn’t count them. But as list journalism is so popular, 27 seemed like a good number – actually I wish it was my age):

Public Relations: This should start before your report is published. Prior to the report publication date, certain facts, figures and stories that are worthy of highlight can be discerned. You could plan a PR build-up to a report publication using focused teasers, so that your PR mileage starts early, publish a headline referring to some worthy achievement soon-to-be revealed in the CSR report, or respond to a current issue in the press by referring to your upcoming report. Once your report is published, you could:

• Hold a press conference
• Issue a press release to ReportAlert.info
• Get your report hosted on CorporateRegister.com
• Tweet it, Retweet it, Retweet Retweets, #FollowFriday it, #EcoMonday it, #SustainabilitySaturday it, Twitpic the cover, you get it. right ?
• Announce it on Justmeans.com, DevelopmentCrossing , CSRwire, LinkedIn, Facebook and anywhere else
• Get it added to the GRI Reports list (if it’s a GRI report)
• Use the GRI’s new report announcement service (if it’s a GRI report)
• Send posts to all the available social media
• Make a short video about the report and post it to YouTube
• Put up a slideshare presentation
• Blog about your report
• Tell your friends and family
• Add a thumbnail of your report cover to all Company business cards

Engage Internal stakeholders: As soon as the report is published (and ideally some time prior to publication) you need to brief your employees. They need to know (a) the report exists and (b) details of the content, so that they can be effective reporting champions in their interface with all external stakeholders including customer and suppliers. There are many ways to do this:

• post a CEO letter on the corporate intranet
• hold communications meetings to present and discuss the report
• send an Executive Summary to all employees
• supply a Q&A brief for assistance in how to respond to feedback received
• share a video presentation for employees by the reporting team to be screened on company plasmas
• hold a report quiz in your intranet and offer a prize for winners.

Whatever the form of internal communication, a key advantage can be gained by seeking employee feedback and generating dialogue, rather than just creating awareness. Seek responses, insights, suggestions for improvement, address issues that arise, and log all interactions for your next report. Make sure your employees know what you expect of them in promoting the report.

Oh, and don’t forget to THANK the employees who contributed to the report. Hold a report party. Order in a few tons of Chunky Monkey. A beer or two. Say thank you.

Engage External stakeholders: As with employees, the more external stakeholders you engage after your report is published, the more trust you will create, the more useful insights you will receive. Group your external stakeholders into meaningful categories (perhaps the ones you engaged in your materiality assessment, if you did this) and select the best way to approach them – personal letters, surveys, on-line polls, panel meetings, one-on-one discussions, initiated discussions on social media sites. Several reporters issue a hard copy to wide groups of stakeholders (sorry environmentalists!) and include a feedback questionnaire. Encourage responses, offer an incentive to provide feedback, a small prize, a daily supply of Chunky Monkey until the next report, for example. Engage your business partners in promoting the report – especially those, such as customers or suppliers, who you may have profiled in the report. They can also be ambassadors for your reporting efforts which support their own PR efforts.

Whatever the form of external activity, a key advantage can be gained by seeking feedback and generating dialogue, rather than just creating awareness. Seek responses, insights, suggestions for improvement, address issues that arise, and log all interactions for your next report. (You may have noticed I repeated that paragraph. Intentionally. Why? I thought it was important and you might have skipped it…. haha ..you cant fool ME!)

On-line presentation: Your online report presentation is critical to creating awareness and generating engagement. One Company who specializes in getting your report effectively on-lined is Nexxar.com. See their recent analysis of on-line visibility, accessibility and interactivity of CR reports. This of course has to be planned and established in advance, but the benefits are gained after the report is published. Make sure you have someone in your team responsible for gathering, collating and analyzing the stats and relevant input from this process. Some reporters include an on-line survey on their HTML site, some have a forum for responses.

Conferences and seminars: Take the opportunity to present your report at the many many international and local conference, workshop and venues where people talk and learn about CR. Talk about the challenges in the reporting process, not just about the report itself. If you are Cadbury, and you give out slabs of Dairy Milk together with your report, you are sure to get strong interest. (it worked with me!)

Reporting awards:

• Enter the CRRA Awards if you are anywhere in the world (it helps to be SOMEwhere).
• Enter the CERES awards if you are in the US, Mexico or Canada.
• Enter the ACCA Awards in the UK and many different countries around the world
• Even if you don’t win, your report gains exposure.

Ensure your report creates positive impact
Finally, if you really want your report to be a BIG HIT and create true positive impact, you need to do something really creative and engaging. Here are some off-the-wall ideas:

• Ask Madonna to do a benefit concert called Like a Virgin – our CR Report
• Give a lottery ticket to each person who sends feedback and see who becomes a millionaire
• Get Disney to produce a movie entitled : Mickey Mouse and the CR report
• Ask Coca Cola to do a special edition CR Report Coke just for your company
• Photoshop Barack Obama engrossed in page 48 of your report and publish to Flickr
• Ask Ophrah Winfrey to do a prime-time show called: My husband betrayed me because of a CR report
• Ask Al Gore to do a CR report roadshow for you called The Convenient Truth
• Have Twitter put up your CR report banner on that page which comes up 24 times a day “there are too many tweets, please try again soon”
• Wrap your corporate Christmas gifts to clients in pages of your report
• Create a CR report meditation room in your head office, and have the Dalai Lama come meditate
• Have McDonalds create a CR Report Happy Meal
• Create an iphone app for your report which places calls to stakeholders reminding them to read it
• Hide a bunch of CR reports in non-obvious places and run a viral cause-marketing campaign promising a modest contribution to Oxfam for each one found
• And you guessed it… Have B&J produce a special edition CR Report Chunky Monkey flavor with extra chunks and fewer monkeys.

And now that you know, I hope to see lots of CR reports BUZZING from here on in….

It appears that Google is getting ever deeper into the sun business. Stating that it is dissatisfied with the general lack of progress on achieving breakthroughs in green technology, the company wants to build better highly reflective and rugged mirrors — as well as the mirror substrate that the reflective surface is mounted on. By reflecting more light and more of the solar spectrum than ordinary mirrors these mirrors have the potential to reduce the cost of solar thermal systems by up to 25 per cent.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are already involved in the solar energy sector as a key investor in several solar technology firms, notably in NanoSolar and Google itself has recently participated in a $115 million round of funding for BrightSource Energy, an Oakland, Calif., solar thermal startup. Google is also invested in eSolar, a utility scale solar thermal startup headquartered in Pasadena, Ca.

Solar Mirrors Are Critically Important

So this latest move should not really surprise; it is a logical progression into the space. The folks at Google realize that one of the critical elements of all solar thermal systems is very high quality mirrors that have the requisite high reflectivity needed to build efficient and lower cost solar thermal systems, whether they are trough based systems, dish type systems, or solar towers using fields of heliostats to focus light energy.

“We’ve been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on,” Google’s green energy czar Bill Weihl said at the Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco.

The cost of the mirrors or heliostats, which focus the sun’s energy on a small area heating some carrier fluid, such as oil or molten salt to very high temperatures, is a major component of the overall capital costs of a solar thermal plant.

Weihl said Google is looking to cut the cost of making heliostats, the fields of mirrors that have to track the sun, by at least a factor of two, “ideally a factor of three or four.”

“Typically what we’re seeing is $2.50 to $4 a watt (for) capital cost,” Weihl said. “So a 250 megawatt installation would be $600 million to a $1 billion. It’s a lot of money.”

In his remarks Weihl also stated his view that it is critical – especially at this early stage – that the federal government fund basic research to encourage breakthrough ideas that can help transform our economy away from fossil fuel dependency.

He said, “I’d like to see $20 billion or $30 billion for 10 yrs (for the sector). That would be fabulous. It’s pretty clear what we have seen isn’t enough.”

Google is also Looking at Solar Powered Gas Turbines

The company is also researching the idea of using gas turbines driven by solar energy instead of natural gas as a means of further bringing down the final per kilowatt hour cost of solar thermal electricity down to grid parity.

“In two to three years we could be demonstrating a significant scale pilot system that would generate a lot of power and would be clearly mass manufacturable at a cost that would give us a levelized cost of electricity that would be in the 5 cents or sub 5 cents a kilowatt hour range,” Weihl said.

Google has shown itself to be quite proactive and progressive on energy efficiency policies. For example its vast datacenters are some of the most energy efficient datacenters out there and they have been exploring ways to keep improving energy efficiency. Google also aggressively recycles its IT hardware. And has covered the roofs of its corporate campus with over 9,000 separate solar panels, amounting to a total of 1.6 megawatts of power, which is 30% of its peak power usage. Note the picture that is paired with this article is of the Google corporate campus and shows the solar panels arrayed on its roofs. If only all other companies of its heft were half as green as Google is showing itself to be the world would be in much better shape than it is today.

In order to stand out from the competition and be successful in the 21st century, companies must establish themselves as progressive, forward-thinking entities that are ready to take on today’s complex challenges. As a result, conducting business in a sustainable and socially-conscious manner, as well as diversity in the workplace are now recognized as key drivers of bottom-line growth and corporate reputation.

With this in mind, Tory Clarke and Larry Griffin, founding partners of Bridge Partners LLC, an executive search firm developed CSR Insights, a network and knowledge-base related to social responsibility leadership.

“It is no longer enough [for businesses] to merely meet demand and make a profit.” says Clarke. “They must now do so in an ethical and responsible fashion, reflecting the needs and perspectives of their customers, employees and investors. This requires strong social responsibility leadership and, increasingly, a seat in the C-suite.”

CSR Insights (http://www.csrinsights.com) supports organizations as they gain an understanding of the skill-sets and experience that are most effective in a successful social responsibility executive, as well as assisting those organizations in identifying candidates for senior social responsibility leadership roles.

CSR Insights also seeks to educate and counsel both current and future social responsibility leaders on the evolution, challenges and requirements of what is an increasingly complex function. Membership is free and Bridge Partners LLC continually drives new content to the website, including exclusive studies, links and resources.  Its aim is to demonstrate to hiring organizations that there is a broad population of talented diverse professionals that populate senior executive levels, with the necessary skills, integrity, experience and understanding of social responsibility, to be effective and impactful leaders within the function.

Guest Post by Kevin Moss, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at BT Americas, and author of the blog, CRS Perspectives.

“Metrics, metrics and more metrics. In many ways metrics drive the success of business. Multiple variables can be condensed to the common denominator of dollars and cents, pounds and pence. Many business failures could have been avoided for want of a business case.

But, the specificity of metrics also allow us to persuade ourselves that there is more science and more certainty than there may really be and that we fully understand the complex interactions of the real world. There are solid business cases behind some of the most spectacular business failures – perhaps those where metrics were allowed to lead decisions rather than inform them.

This dilemma is magnified when viewed through the lens of corporate responsibility.”

This post is an external perspective I was invited to write on the topic of ROI and metrics, for GE’s just published 2008 Citizenship Report “Resetting Responsibilities.”

The rest of the piece follows:

“If we allow them to, metrics can divorce us from the human impact of our decisions. Corporate responsibility addresses exactly those issues that are the biggest challenge for metrics. Corporate responsibility involves taking account of human well being, of impact on communities outside of the normal expertise of the business, of complex interactions, of shared responsibility and of long-term cumulative effects.

But corporate responsibility will be relegated to the fringes if it does not add value to the core business. The biggest impact of most companies on society and on the environment is through the products and services they put into the market. To engage here, we need to be able to articulate compelling and sound rationales of the benefit for the business as well as for the good achieved in the community. And to remain relevant we need to be able to demonstrate this value using the same tools of quantification as the mainstream business, including return on investment.

Perhaps this is amplified most when the return on investment for the business and the benefit for the community are in conflict. Responsible businesses must have the courage to identify, articulate and quantify both sides of that conflict. In these situations though, to implement corporate responsibility fully is to embrace that our decision-making will not be conveniently packaged in a return on investment calculation captured in a spreadsheet and some metrics. As with business as a whole, metrics must not lead our decisions, they must inform them.”

Guest Post by Elaine Cohen, Joint CEO of BeyondBusiness Ltd

They say the best way to beat your adversaries is to get to know them. CSR reports have many adversaries. In an attempt to get to know them, and understand how to better position the valuable process of CSR reporting, here is a list of useful applications of CSR reports which I imagine reporting adversaries could have generated. Of course, you all know that I am a strong advocate of CSR reports, and this list absolutely does not represent my personal views. Absolutely not. No way. Not. No. Anyway, here is their list:

1. Build trust with stakeholders (just in case there is a remote possibility that they don’t trust you)
2. Increase trust with stakeholders (you built it with your first report)
3. Demonstrate to shareholders that you are doing good things with their money (you know what’s best for them)
4. Use as basis for recommendation a bonus for the CSR Manager (you are the CSR manager)
5. Expand CSR reports numbers so that we can be confident that climate will change
6. Use as an audition piece for Shakespeare plays (if they can make a CSR report sound exciting, Shakespeare is a doddle)
7. Indirectly generate business for the carbon offset industry through reporting carbon neutral operations
8. Give journalists something else not to write about
9. Give analysts something else not to analyze
10. Give marcom hotshots something else not to marcom about
11. Give CSR critics a raison d’etre (the French ones)
12. Teach Human Resources that there is more to the business than office parties
13. Provide justification for sitting around while you eat (more) Chunky Monkey
14. Provide case studies for MBA programs (how to present every aspect in the business in the best possible light)
15. Support greenwash (everyone else bashes it , and as Loretta Lyn said: if you can’t be first, or best, be different )
16. Donate spare reports for origami classes (works best in Tokyo)
17. Offer as material for translation practice in language schools (basic level, you only need around 76 core phrases)
18. Use as an entry point into social media (Tweet: we produced a CSR report RT : they produced a CSR report)
19. Use to ensnare willing young graduates who don’t know what working at your company is really like
20. Bundle them all together and put them in your backpack for cross country running training (if you get tired, you can always dump them – far away so no one will know)
21. Provide occupation for your local community (consultants, assurers, stakeholder panel participants) (strong community, strong business, right?)
22. Ensure everyone has lots of reports to fill their bookshelves (full shelves gather less dust)
23. Provide material for investor roadshows (so they won’t notice the size of the executive bonuses)
24. Provide material for girl scouts camps bonfires (nothing burns like a good report, except a bad report)
25. Help your CEO defend accusations of exploitation in your supply chain (report that you audit all your outsourcing factories, it works every time)
26. Support human rights (come on, you HAVE heard that humans have rights…)
27. Justify the existence of the GRI (conferences alone don’t cut it)
28. Demonstrate that your organization is highly creative (distribute your report with an eco-self-destructing mechanism)
29. Provide material for reporting blogs
30. Provide material for reporting blogs
31. Provide material for reporting blogs
32. Provide material for reporting blogs (ok, carried away again)
33. Provide material for my next post: a tutorial on HOW to READ CSR reports

because writing them is one thing, producing them is another, but reading them, well, that’s like eating Chunky Monkey with chopsticks – you can pick out the chunks quite easily, but you have to work really hard to get to the true flavor.

And now we know many of the adversarial arguments relating to CSR reports, I feel much more confident that we will be able to counter these with calm, cool, clear rational justification for this important CSR process and communications tool. Convinced ?

Green roofs, green walls, green parking lots, shade trees, the greening of urban spaces in general, the restoration of urban waterways, wetlands and the re-greening of brownfield areas; can all be thought of as different techniques to nurture a green living skin (or at least a greener skin) over regions of urban development. While there are many important differences between each of these separate techniques as well as their underlying technologies they all share a common overarching goal of bringing an analog of the natural living green skin that characterizes the natural landscape back into our urban areas. They all promote the restoration and re-integration of these heavily populated areas back into the surrounding natural environment.

Promoting the use of green re-surfacing (such as green roofs or the planting of shade trees for example), fostering the expansion of urban green spaces and restoring often neglected and polluted waterways and wetlands to their natural state yields large benefits for water quality, lowered energy and potable water use. It also improves the livability of our cities and reduces their environmental footprint helping to mitigate large global problems such as climate change and water scarcity. Furthermore by reducing the environmental problems associated with the urban environment the green living skin can save lives, improve city dwellers health and save enormous amounts of money that would otherwise be spent on the chronic health problems caused by smog.

Besides the measurable and important benefits of lowered energy consumption, lowered peak energy consumption, reduced storm runoff, increased water quality, reduction in urban smog etc. there are many hard to quantify benefits for human well-being that derive from the aesthetic and psychological impact of a greener environment on a city’s population.

There is also an important health impact; heat waves are dramatic killers and as the global temperatures rise, these heat waves will become longer and more severe. Heat waves not only cause dramatically higher peak energy usage – taxing electric systems to their limits – they can lead to large spikes in serious health problems for vulnerable people in affected areas and have been responsible for thousands of heat related deaths.

Cities that have a Living Skin Are Better Suited to Survive Global Warming

Greener cities will be more adapted to survive the hotter extremes that climate change is guaranteeing they will experience. And furthermore greener cities that are protected by a green living skin will contribute far less to global warming than barren concrete jungles do, both because the green living skin is also a carbon sink and because by saving energy overall and by saving even larger amounts of peak demand energy they will produce much less CO2 than cities that do not embrace this ethic.

Killer heat waves, such as the killer heat wave that struck much of Europe in 2003 and that caused an estimated 70,000 heat-related deaths are going to become increasingly common throughout the world as the long term effects of global warming become ever more pronounced. Cities that protect themselves with a green living skin will fare much better in these extreme weather events than those that do not.

The Urban Heat Island is an Energy Hog

As urban areas have spread out to cover vast regions they have begun to create their own weather. The vast expanses of concrete and asphalt have lead to what is known as the urban heat island effect. Big urban areas average around 3°F warmer than surrounding vegetated rural areas; this effect can rise to higher levels during summer heat waves

A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study for the DOE (Department of Energy) “Energy Saving Potentials and Air Quality Benefits of Urban Heat Island Mitigation” has found that in the United States this increase in air temperature is responsible for 5–10% of urban peak electric demand for a/c use, and as much as 20% of population-weighted smog concentrations in urban areas.

The study ran a computer simulation for the L.A. basin and found that “resurfacing about two-third of the pavements and rooftops with reflective surfaces and planting three trees per house can cool down LA by an average of 2–3K (degrees Kelvin equivalent to 3.6-5.4 °F). This reduction in air temperature will reduce urban smog exposure in the LA basin by roughly the same amount as removing the basin entire on-road vehicle exhaust [my emphasis]. Heat island mitigation is an effective air pollution control strategy, more than paying for itself in cooling energy cost savings.”

This study focused on reflective re-surfacing that has the goal of increasing the albedo or reflectivity of a surface so that more heat is reflected back up into the air and less heat is absorbed. This is complimentary to green living skin re-surfacing and is applicable in areas where it is not feasible to apply a green living surface. For example on road surfaces, high use parking surfaces, or on roofs with a steep incline for example.

For an in depth look at green parking lots see our three part article series on the area of green parking lot design: Green Parking Lots: Part I – The Many Problems with Paving

Protecting our Cities with a Living Green Skin Could Reduce Health Care Costs and Save Lives

The dramatic reduction in urban smog that can be achieved by reducing the urban mean and peak temperatures will make cities much more livable and improve the long term health of city dwellers. Smog related health problems such as asthma, emphysema and chronic bronchitis can become sever in cities such as the L.A. basin and are an increasing problem almost everywhere. These smog related health issues are also very expensive.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District has this to say about the Los Angeles basin or South Coast Region, “A 1989 study funded by AQMD and conducted by Dr. Jane Hall of Cal State Fullerton found that meeting federal clean air standards for ozone and fine particulates in the South Coast region would provide $9.4 billion in health-related benefits each year. The study found that 98% of the four-county basin’s population of 13 million is exposed to unhealthful air, with children especially vulnerable. In addition, 1,600 people die prematurely as a result of exposure to air pollution, according to the study.”

That is an annual saving of almost $10 billion for just a single metro region! Re-surfacing and growing a living skin over the urban areas of the South Coast could be financed from the associated health care saving alone.

In addition to smog related health care problems the overall improvement in urban water quality and especially the significant reduction in the incidences of sewage overflow events will also lead to a better health environment and a reduction in associated health costs. Water pollution is a serious health issue in urban areas and polluted runoff creates a persistent health hazard and degrades the quality of water resources in the ground and in the surface waterways, wetlands and beaches.

How Green Roofs and Green Walls save Energy and Save Money

Promoting the greening of our urban landscape is not only aesthetically pleasing it yields significant economic benefits that directly impact the bottom line and can lower the on-going operating costs for buildings and other urban installations such as parking spaces. For example green roofs and green walls can lower the heating and cooling bills for buildings that incorporate them. During hot summer days a green roof (or sun-facing green wall) forms a buffer zone between the building and the blistering summer sun. By shading the underlying roof (or sun-facing wall), it prevents the building’s structural surfaces from heating up and increasing both the outdoor and indoor air temperatures.

Conversely during cold outdoor conditions prevailing during winter months and during the night hours of Spring and Fall the vegetative living matrix comprised of the bio-mass of the root systems and plant cover that is provided by the green roof or green wall provides an extra layer of insulation outside the structural skin of the building thereby reducing heat loss. The thermal mass of the green skin (roof or wall) also smoothes out the swings between daily minimum and maximum temperatures and this also contributes to over all improvements in the buildings thermal performance. During hard winter conditions when the biomass of a green roof freezes over its insulation value drops.

It is important to state that each single building site will present its own characteristic profile and that therefore energy savings will vary from site to site. But the savings can be very dramatic as was documented in a study by National Research Council of Canada, “Thermal Performance of Green Roofs through Field Evaluation.” This study has shown that green roofs can be very effective at reducing the heat transfer through a roof, thus saving energy. A reduced average daily energy demand of 75 percent test was documented in a test facility with a 400-square-foot green roof. Green roofs accomplish this dramatic reduction in the heat flow into the structures they protect through a combination of shading, insulation, evapotranspiration and thermal mass.

For an in depth analysis of sustainable building design and techniques see our four part article series on the subject: The Green (or Sustainable) Building: Part I – What Is the Green Building DNA?

Can we tame the Concrete Jungle with Urban Forests and Green Roofs?

Our world’s sprawling urban landscapes have been denuded stripped of their natural protective cover and turned into harsh unnatural environments that are susceptible to extreme temperatures and that gobble staggering amounts of energy and water to sustain themselves. The world’s urban areas – and especially the rich industrialized world’s urban areas – contribute a disproportionate share of the world’s global warming gases though their massive energy consumption. They also suck up massive quantities of potable water and because much of their surfaces are hard paved over contribute to polluted storm surge runoff, which taxes and increasingly overloads the surrounding water systems.

We have created these vast cement jungles with very few living surfaces left in their midst. Increasingly we are becoming aware that there is a growing cost associated with this type of urbanity; a cost that is becoming increasingly unsustainable.

Perhaps the time is ripe for a profound rethink and reset in our ideas and philosophic notions of the urban built over space, of our cities and towns; of what these population dense areas should be like and how they should be designed and retro-fitted.

One study estimated that each tree planted in an urban area saves $200 in energy savings alone. That same single tree also makes the spot it graces slightly more livable in many other ways; by providing shade, supporting wildlife, filtering the surrounding air, providing quiet (in fact trees absorb and diffuse sound), helping to mitigate strong winds and so forth. Just imagine what an entire urban forest can do. Just the simple act of planting trees along roadways and other available surfaces can help improve a cities thermal profile and create a much more livable environment in other ways.

Skeptics – who like to define themselves as realists – will speak about the costs of retro-fitting a city with a green living skin and may dismiss the whole idea of a new green urbanity as some kind of New Age fuzzy headed mysticism.

But it is precisely on hard measurable, quantifiable cost metrics that a green urban philosophy can be justified. The cost savings realized by reduced energy expenditures; the huge savings of both lives and annual reduced health costs that arise from the chronic (and very costly) health conditions associated with urban smog; the savings in the needed sewage treatment facilities and water usage. All of these are quantifiable and compelling arguments for adopting a green urban design philosophy.

The aesthetic improvements of the urban space, the fostering of urban habitat and an increased livability for all are icing on the cake. The justifications for taming the concrete jungle and greening our cities rests on solid ground and is becoming increasingly vital to the continued vitality of our cities and urban areas in a world of increasing temperatures and ever higher energy costs.

The Roberts Environmental Center of Claremont McKenna College (CMC) recently released a detailed analysis of the social responsibility reporting efforts of America’s top energy and utilities corporations. The two reports contain a compilation of Pacific Sustainability Index scores evaluating the environmental and social reporting of the 48 U.S. energy and utilities companies on the 2008 Fortune 1000 list.The reports score companies based on the reporting, intent, and performance of environmental and social sustainability efforts. The research, based entirely on material released on the firms’ Web sites, found that two of the smallest firms – Mirant (energy sector) and Pinnacle West Capital (utilities sector) – did the best jobs of describing details of their socially beneficial actions and environmental management. The lowest scores were also shared by small firms – Adams Resources and Energy, Inc., and Atmos Energy Corp. – but there was a good mix of firms of all sizes throughout the range of scoring. In neither sector is size a predictor of good reporting.

“In most sectors we analyze, particularly when large multinationals are included, we do see an effect of firm size on corporate reporting,” said J. Emil Morhardt, Roberts Professor of Environmental Biology at CMC and director of the Roberts Environmental Center. “The larger firms have greater visibility, are likely to be examined by investors and the public more closely, and they have more resources to do the data collection and reporting in the first place.” But, as Morhardt pointed out, “There are always some smaller companies that are proactive in this area, usually those that believe demonstrations of corporate environmental and social responsibility are expected from their customers.”

To create the report’s ranking, Morhardt and his team evaluated each company’s Web site using the Pacific Sustainability Index including sector-specific questions. The index uses a general systematic questionnaire to analyze the quality of sustainability reporting. The selection of questions was based on the most frequently-mentioned topics in almost 1,800 corporate sustainability documents analyzed from 2002 through 2008 by the Roberts Environmental Center. The company’s grades in this report were assigned on a grading curve, giving an A+ to the highest scoring companies and those with scores near it.

“In the current business climate, a demonstration of corporate social responsibility is more important than ever,” continued Morhardt. “What we are analyzing is the quality of that demonstration – how transparent the companies are with respect to their environmental and social issues, and how good a job they are doing resolving any problems they currently have and avoiding future ones.”

The detailed analyses also reveal what social and environmental themes these companies perceive to be most important to the American public today. The research screened Web site content to determine the most frequently reported topics. Companies with environmental achievements tended to tout their accountability and energy efficiency efforts while socially responsible businesses highlighted their superior policies and care for human rights.

To view the complete reports, visit the  Roberts Environmental Center web site.

Scoring Summary
—————                                                               —————-
Energy Sector                                                      Utilities Sector
————-                                                                   —————-

Highest Overall Scores
Mirant                                                                         Pinnacle West Capital
Constellation Energy                                            Wisconsin Energy
American Electric Power                                    Duke Energy

Highest Environmental Reporting Scores
Mirant                                                                        Pinnacle West Capital
Constellation Energy                                          Wisconsin Energy
American Electric Power                                  Pepco Holdings, Inc.

Highest Social Reporting Scores
Mirant                                                                      Pinnacle West Capital
Constellation Energy                                         Duke Energy
Integrys Energy Corp.                                      Wisconsin Energy

Lowest Overall Scores
Adams Resources and Energy                     Atmos Energy Corp.
Ferrellgas Partners                                           Ameren
New Jersey Resources                                    AES Corp.

The Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), the European investors’ forum for collaboration on climate change, recently published its second annual report which audits the investment practices of signatories to the Investor Statement on Climate Change. The report, conducted by Mercer, highlights significant progress on climate change, made in 2008, among asset owners and asset managers, who in total represent €2 trillion in assets under management.  The research shows that institutions are paying greater attention to climate change, with 75% of asset owners and over 80% of asset managers referencing climate change in their investment policies.

Asset owners are placing greater pressure on external managers to take account of climate change, with one in two now questioning their managers as to the process for integration within investment research, decision making and shareholder engagement. This is up from 30% just a year ago. Furthermore, 60% of asset owners specifically consider the extent to which climate change is fully integrated into the investment process when appointing a new manager, and 70% are monitoring their respective managers’ performance on climate change. Despite these positive developments, the number of pension funds instructing their advisors to consider climate change in their recommendations is lower at 40%.

“That institutional asset owners’ play a highly significant role in encouraging change in investment managers has never been in doubt, but what we can see from this research is that a majority of respondents are demonstrating leadership in this area; this a trend which we expect will become more pronounced in the future,”said David Russell, co-head of Responsible Investment at the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS). “Asset owners in the survey are taking ownership of the issue, both acting directly and encouraging their asset managers to consider the risks and opportunities that climate change poses,” he added.

The report indicates that 90% of asset managers are engaging directly with companies on a wide range of climate-related issues, such as senior management responsibilities for climate change, integration into business strategies and improving corporate disclosure. However, investors need to pay more attention to encouraging companies to make absolute emission reductions. In this respect, strong signals that governments are taking this issue seriously would again help to reinforce the message that companies need to prepare themselves for future policy action.

The 3rd annual Opportunity Green Business Conference, on November 7-8, 2009 and hosted by the UCLA Anderson School of Management’s Price Center brings together more than 500 prime movers & shakers and up & coming innovators driving today’s new green economy. It is certainly one of the Los Angeles metro area’s premier annual gatherings in the green economy space and features some of the brightest leaders and innovators at the forefront of the green business revolution.

It offers attendees an opportunity to forge new strategic partnerships and to learn about the latest industry developments in sustainable strategies and best practices helping organizations position themselves for success and explore new opportunities.

Get the inside view on the hottest topics, trends and technologies at the premier green business event focused on creating new opportunities through sustainability.

Featured 2009 Speakers

Marc Alt – president of Marc Alt + Partners, a design, research and brand strategy agency dedicated to sustainable innovation. Current clients include MINI USA, Bloomberg LP, The Green Electronics Council, The Consumer Electronics Association, and Lippincott Mercer.

Alexis Madrigal – Clean Technology Writer is a newsman following energy and science at Wired.com. His work also appears in Dwell, Earth2Tech, and Arcade.

Fridolin Beisert – Associate Professor at the Art Center College of Design is a practicing design professional who also conducts workshops and lectures for global corporations and executive education institutions.

Heidrun Mumper-Drumm – Director of Sustainability Initiatives at the Art Center College of Design is a graphic designer and associate professor whose focus has been on the incorporation of sustainability principles into design education and the design process.

Peter Diamandis is the founder of the X Prize Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is simply “to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.”

Leilani Munter – Race Car Driver & Environmentalist; she can be reached at Carbonfreegirl.com

Julie Gilhart – SVP, Fashion Director Barney’s is director of the most forward-thinking big store in the city

Jonah Sachs – CO-Founder/Creative Director, Free Range Studios his pioneering communications work has helped hundreds of progressive organizations break through the media din with strategic, inspiring messages. He is widely considered a leader in the powerful movement to spread progressive political and social messages through use of the Web.

Chris Hacker – Chief Design Officer at Johnson and Johnson leads all creative processes for brand identity, packaging design and brand imagery at J&J Consumer.

Len Sauers – VP, Global Sustainability at Proctor & Gamble leads the company’s overall sustainability efforts.

Trudy Hardy – Manager of Marketing Communications at Mini Cooper is Manager of Marketing Communications for the MINI brand within BMW.

Auden Schendler – Executive Director, Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company. He worked previously in corporate sustainability at Rocky Mountain Institute

Chris Jordan – Photographic Artist, chrisjordan.com He is an internationally acclaimed artist and cultural activist whose work explores the frightening waste of our mass culture. His compelling, intricately detailed photographs reveal the staggering weight of statistics, inviting the viewer to see every detail as a metaphor for the role of the individual in our hypermodern society.

Boise Thomas – a host on Eco/Planet Green/Discovery Channel an environmentally-focused lifestyle show on Discovery Communications’ new eco-focused channel Planet Green.

Joe Laur – Vice President of Content at Greenopolis a web based social network, media and educational center, marketplace and playground fostering learning and collaborative action on green issues.
Helen Walters – Editor, Innovation and Design Channel for BusinessWeek.com She is also a contributing editor to design magazine Creative Review.

Annie Leonard – Producer, Writer, Founder with The Story of Stuff Annie an expert in international sustainability and environmental health issues, with more than 20 years of experience investigating factories and dumps around the world. Coordinator of the Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption, a funder collaborative working for a sustainable and just world, Annie communicates worldwide about the impact of consumerism and materialism on global economies and international health.

Boards of directors are increasingly paying attention to the risks and opportunities associated with corporate responsibility, sustainability and climate change, according to a new survey commissioned by Deloitte and Corporate Board Member magazine. The survey of 220 directors at U.S. companies with $1 billion or more in revenue highlights the board’s growing role in oversight of corporate responsibility and sustainability (CR&S).   Despite the current economic environment the board’s role is undoubtedly increasing as there is greater awareness of the business risks and opportunities associated with corporate responsibility, sustainability and climate change.  The perfect storm of emerging regulations, increased requirements for reporting and transparency, heightened pressure from investors, energy price volatility and market demands for green products and technologies is driving CR&S as a business imperative.

Almost one-half of directors think their boards and management are committed to addressing CR&S and climate change and Seventy-nine percent of directors responding have a strong or moderate understanding of the business risks associated with CR&S and climate change. Seventy-six percent have a strong or moderate understanding of the business opportunities associated with CR&S and climate change. a d one-half of directors think their companies’ response to CR&S is integrated into business strategy and risk management, while 41 percent report no such integration.

“CR&S is not just about philanthropy or going green — it is about managing risk, generating value and ensuring the long-term viability of an enterprise,”  said Eric Hespenheide, of Deloitte’s Enterprise Sustainability group.  “It includes consideration of the interdependencies between environmental, social and financial performance, including new views on regulation, accountability, transparency, corporate governance and the potential impacts of climate change on business operations. These are all issues that fall under the board’s purview.”

• Additional Findings
• Thirty percent of directors reported that their companies have set goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions; fifty nine percent reported no such commitment.
• Almost one-third of directors think there is growing investor interest in their companies’ response to climate change/business sustainability issues, while 39 percent do not think there is growing interest.
• Thirty-five percent of directors see value in having an environmental audit — measuring greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption.
• Thirty-seven percent of directors favor full-board oversight of CR&S, while another 37 percent indicated oversight should reside in existing board committees, such as risk committees (24 percent), governance committees (24 percent), strategy committees (22 percent) and audit committees (15 percent).
• “These results prove that directors need and want to be engaged on climate change issues and that many of them are getting up to speed,” said Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres and advisor to the survey. “Smart directors will catch the wave of climate opportunities, while others get dragged down in the undertow of unidentified risk.”
• “Investors filed a record number of CR&S and climate change–related shareholder resolutions in 2008 and we expect that trend to continue upward,” added Chris Park of Deloitte’s Enterprise Sustainability group. “Increasingly, institutional and individual shareholders want to know not only if leadership is prepared to manage risks associated with emerging regulations and increased reporting requirements on environmental and social performance. They also want more insight into leadership’s strategy for capitalizing on the CR&S opportunities that will create long-term shareholder value.”
• For in-depth information on the board’s role in CR&S please view “The Responsible and Sustainable Board” white paper, which can be found here: www.deloitte.com/us/responsibleboard.The Director Corporate Responsibility, Sustainability and Climate Change Survey was conducted via email in August 2008 and generated 220 director responses from American companies with $1 billion or more in revenues.  The survey was conducted for Deloitte by Corporate Board Member magazine’s Director Research Panel. Ceres, the largest coalition of investors, companies and environmental organizations on climate change and other sustainability issues, was an advisor on the project.

Coro Strandberg, Principal of Strandberg Consulting, has introduced the Corporate Social Responsibility and Human Resource Management Checklist that identifies ten steps HR professionals can follow to support the integration of CSR into their organization’s business strategy and operations.  A companion document, The Role of Human Resource Management in Corporate Social Responsibility: Issue Brief and Roadmap, provides a how-to guide including practical business-based examples and a business case for CSR integration.

“Embedding CSR/sustainability into an organization is ultimately a change management process,” explains Strandberg. “HR departments help their organizations embrace change and benefit from it. This user-friendly tool equips HR professionals to leverage employee commitment to, and engagement in, their firm’s CSR strategy.”

Employees are key stakeholders in any CSR effort. It is through employee actions and decision-making that many CSR strategies come to life. Human Resource professionals are in a unique position to nurture and foster CSR performance within their organizations. Today HR professionals need to be aware of the positive impact CSR can have on their employees and on their bottom line – not to mention the world around them. This tool will help set the basic framework that they need to develop their strategy, check their progress against best practices, and celebrate their successes.”

Equally applicable to large and small private sector, public sector and non-profit organizations, the Strandberg Consulting Issue Brief and Road Map identifies the following business benefits from employee CSR engagement:

* Increased retention and reduced recruitment and training costs.
* Better able to attract the best and the brightest, especially amongst graduates.
* Cost savings and income produced through improved employee morale and productivity.

The Corporate Social Responsibility and Human Resource Management Checklist and the companion document, The Role of Human Resource Management in Corporate Social Responsibility: Issue Brief and Roadmap, are available free at the Strandberg Consulting web site.

The corporate social responsibility studies and reports we spotlight cover the following topics: attaining sustainable growth through corporate social responsibility; CSR emergence as a crucial instrument for minimizing conflicts with stakeholder; the impact on proactive policies on employees, consumers and diversity and their relationship to the firm’s financial performance; the notion of a socially responsible corporation is potentially an oxymoron because of the naturally conflicted nature of the corporation, using corporate Social Responsibility to Understand the Credit Crisis; a look at whether the modern corporate governance model is sustainable; and the impact of political views on corporate decision-making and corporate social responsibility.

Attaining Sustainable Growth Through Corporate Social Responsibility – Today, more than ever, organizations are focused on environmental and social responsibility as a strategic objective. The survey of senior executives worldwide shows that 60 percent believe that corporate social responsibility (CSR) has increased in importance over the past year. Only 6 percent say it’s a lower priority. To be sustainable, businesses are now embracing a relatively new objective: optimizing their operations to improve environmental and social outcomes in a manner that maximizes overall performance.  As a result, executives face entirely new decisions and must manage an intricate new set of trade-offs. This new objective calls for new information, which many organizations are still missing, by a wide margin. Outperforming organizations, by contrast, have proved to be far better at collecting relevant and timely information from across their ecosystems, including their customers.  These organizations and leaders in CSR point to a path forward – developing new sources of information and new levels of insight for meeting strategic sustainability objectives.

Political Views and Corporate Decision-Making: the Case of Corporate Social Responsibility.  By Amir Rubin, Simon Fraser University – Finance Area – The study establishes a relationship between political beliefs of corporate stakeholders and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of their firms. Companies with a high CSR rating tend to be located in Democratic states, while companies with a low CSR rating tend to be located in Republican states.   Amir Rubin of Simon Fraser University analyzed the 2004 presidential election results of communities in which corporate headquarters are located. The results from the election provide relevant data to analyze the correlation between political views of individual communities and the CSR ratings of firms located in those communities.  Results show that firms with high CSR ratings are more likely to be located in states with Democratic majorities, and firms with low CSR ratings are more likely to be located in states with Republican majorities.  Corporate executives tend to reside near a firm’s headquarters. one can conclude that corporate decision makers would align their policies with the views of their stakeholders in order to reduce conflict and create value for the firm.

Corporate Social Performance, Stakeholder Coalitions, Corporate Governance and Performance – Punit Arora  and Milena T. Petrova of Syracuse University examined the relationship between investment in different corporate social domains and firm performance. The results indicate that proactive policies with respect to employees, consumers and diversity are strongly related to firm’s financial performance. In addition,  results show that commitment-based work practices and higher instructional ownership help firms improve their capacity to benefit from their performance on other corporate social performance domains, while poor shareholders’ rights protection detriments firms’ ability to benefit from their investment in social responsibility domains, which they believe indicates preliminary support for the concept of stakeholder influence capacity.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Shareholder’s Value: An Event Study Analysis - In today’s global economy, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a core component of corporate strategy. Due in part to financial scandals, losses, and the diminished reputation of the affected listed companies, CRS is emerging as a crucial instrument for minimizing conflicts with stakeholders. While corporations are busy adopting and enhancing CSR practices, there is (beyond a very few notable exceptions) no established empirical research on its impact and relevance for the capital market. Our paper investigates this issue by tracing market reactions to corporate entry into and exit from the Domini 400 Social Index (a recognized CSR benchmark) between 1990 and 2004. Our paper highlights two main findings: i) a significant upward trend in absolute values of abnormal returns, irrespective of the event (entry/exit vis-a-vis the index) type; and ii) a significant negative effect on abnormal returns after announcement from the Domini index. The latter effect continues to persist even after controlling for concurring financial distress shocks and stock market seasonality.

Is the Socially Responsible Corporation a Myth? The Good, Bad and Ugly of Corporate Social Responsibility - Despite differences of opinion about the efficacy of the concept of corporate social responsibility there is a general consensus amongst academics, policy makers and practitioners that corporations operate with social sanction that requires that they operate within the norms and mores of the societies in which they exist. In this article,  the author argues that the notion of a socially responsible corporation is potentially an oxymoron because of the naturally conflicted nature of the corporation. This has profound implications for our understanding of corporate social responsibility, what we view as the relevant issues relating to it and how we investigate its role and impact.

Can Corporate Social Responsibility Help Us Understand the Credit Crisis? - The financial crisis that started in the United States in 2007 and which has spread throughout the world has many causes, one of which is the abundance of unethical behaviors on the part of many of those who made the financial decisions, such as regulators, supervisors, managers or employees – and also on the part of a not insignificant number of their clients. In this paper, we will seek to shed light on the crisis’s ethical content and show how the generalized practice of corporate social responsibility within financial institutions could have helped reduce the magnitude of the crisis, perhaps not systemically but definitely in some of the organizations that have been most affected by the crisis. However, to do so, it would have been necessary to apply a particular concept of social responsibility, a responsibility with an ethical basis – or, more specifically, a voluntarily-assumed ethics that was capable of giving rise to self-generated duties among financial decision-makers.

Beyond Shareholder Value: Normative Standards for Sustainable Corporate Governance – This paper explores whether the modern corporate governance model is sustainable. For many, particularly large, corporations, there is a separation between ownership and management, with an emphasis by management on short-term gains at the expense of long-term sustainability. This paper explores the role of corporate directors, particularly vis-à-vis shareholders, from an interdisciplinary perspective, analyzing legal case law as well as legal, management, and finance literature. This paper then explores emerging trends in expanding notions of corporate governance that incorporate concerns beyond just shareholders, recognizing the interrelationship between business and society. It is suggested that in order to remain viable and competitive, corporations need to normalize longer views of sustainability that encompass numerous stakeholders, rather than simply trying to maximize profits during the current quarter.

Who Should Head Up Your Corporate Responsibility Approach?  The Who and Why of Finding Your Head of Corporate Responsibility - They conducted more than 30 detailed interviews with businessmen and women – including CEOs, main board directors responsible for Corporate Responsibility as well as a number of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability directors. Those interviewed are from companies considered leading the way in embedding CR into business practice, who view being responsible as the right thing to do. The study addresses the following: How has the operational approach to CR evolved; backgrounds of CR heads; the rise of a new C-suite board role, such as a Chief Sustainability Officer; and reporting lines of CR heads and key attributes of the CR Director.

The Case Research Journal will publish a special issue on corporate social responsibility and business ethics and have issued a call for cases.  The issue will be guest-edited by Professor Anne T. Lawrence of San Jose State University.    Prof. Lawrence is one of the authors of Business and Society: Corporate Strategy, Public Policy and Ethics.

The domain of the special issue is broadly defined as teaching cases in corporate social responsibility and ethics.

Appropriate topics include (but are not limited to):

• Socially responsible or irresponsible actions by business firms
• Ethical or unethical behavior by individuals or organizations
• Accounting fraud
• Business law and business ethics
• Codes of ethics and ethics policies
• Conflicts of interest
• Corporate citizenship
• Corporate governance
• Corporate social responsibility in a global or comparative context
• Corrupt practices
• Crisis management
• Customer rights
• Employee rights
• Ethical and social aspects of new technologies
• Ethical aspects of corporate environmental impacts
• Ethics in accounting and finance
• Ethics in information systems
• Ethical marketing; deceptive advertising; advertising to children
• Human rights impacts of corporate behavior
• Interactions between firms and nongovernmental organizations
• International issues and ethical concerns
• Political influence by business
• Shareholder rights
• Shareholder activism; socially responsible investment
• Social and environmental auditing
• Social and environmental responsibility in supply chains
• Social entrepreneurship
• Stakeholder dialogue and engagement

Focus and Methods

For this issue, the CRJ will publish only decision or issue-focused cases based on original, primary research.

Focus: Cases should be focused on a decision, issue, or problem facing an individual, an organization, or a group of organizations. After studying the case, students should be able to put themselves into the situation and formulate and defend alternative courses of action.

Methods: Cases should be based on original, primary research. Examples of such research include (but are not limited to):

• Field research in the organization
• Interviews with key decision-makers in the organization
• Interviews with stakeholders impacted by an organizational decision, issue, or problem
• Review of primary materials, such as legal proceedings, congressional testimony, or internal company or stakeholder documents.

The CRJ does not publish cases based solely on secondary sources, such as journalistic accounts. It also does not publish fictionalized, composite, or hypothetical cases. Occasionally, the CRJ publishes papers about case writing and teaching. Such papers will be considered for this issue if they are relevant to the special topic domain.

An Instructor’s Manual (teaching note) must accompany each case submission. See the guidelines here.

Authors are encouraged (but not required) to submit cases to the North American Case Research 2009 Annual Meeting, to be held in Santa Cruz, California at the Chaminade Resort & Spa, on October 29-31, 2009. This will enable authors to receive and respond to feedback on their case prior to submission to the special issue. At the time of submission, at least one author must be a member of NACRA.

For further information regarding this issue or a potential submission, please contact:

Anne T. Lawrence, Guest Editor for the Special Issue
lawren_a@cob.sjsu.edu or (408) 924-3586

Tupper Cawsey, Editor, Case Research Journal
tcawsey@nacra.net or (519) 747-9147

Deadline:  December 1, 2009, for publication in 2010.

Multinational firms are under pressure from multiple stakeholders to be socially and environmentally responsible. According to the Stern report issued by the U.K. government, The Economist, and the philosopher Joseph DesJardins, ecological sustainability could become the central social responsibility challenge for business. Thus, managers must be able to determine how their organizations can become more ecologically sustainable, socially responsible, and economically competitive.

This trend also raises profound research questions, crossing numerous fields in business administration and several social science disciplines. From a theoretical standpoint, it is interesting to note that researchers have attempted to model the antecedents and consequences of “responsible” behavior at the individual, organizational, industry, national, and societal levels. However, the theoretical literatures on this phenomenon are parallel and independent, which hinders our ability to understand the managerial and policy implications of corporate social responsibility and sustainability.

Two key research questions are: (1) how can social and environmental responsibility be implemented more effectively through integrated market and non-market strategies? and (2) how can the various business sub-disciplines (e.g., human resource management, management information systems, organizational behavior, marketing, and accounting) contribute to our understanding of the determinants of superior financial, social, and environmental performance?

Our objective in this special issue is to synthesize these parallel literatures and topical areas, in an effort to examine prudent, integrated management of financial, social, and environmental pressures. Unfortunately, key issues regarding frameworks, measurement, and empirical methods of social responsibility and sustainability have not yet been resolved because existing research has been too fragmented or focused at one particular level of analysis. For example, much research has been pursued at the firm level dealing with such issues as the relationship between corporate social performance and firm financial performance. However, less research has involved theories and variables at the individual level (e.g., factors pertaining to individual decision makers), or how such variables might relate to organizational-level phenomena (e.g., corporate social performance or sustainability).

This special issue will promote the concept of theoretical metatriangulation, as expressed in previous articles on theory building in the Academy of Management Review. Contributions from strategic management, organizational behavior, human resource management, organizational theory, economics, political science, sociology, moral philosophy, and other disciplines are encouraged.

Some research questions that might be addressed in this special issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

· What does it mean for an organization to be socially responsible and environmentally sustainable in the international arena? What is the social responsibility of global business? How can large, multinational companies become more sustainable? How do definitions of corporate responsibility and sustainability differ across countries?

· What adjustments in corporate structure, governance, reporting relationships, or incentives might facilitate the integration of financial, social, and environmental domains of business activities?

· Why might socially and environmentally responsible companies perform better or worse financially than organizations that show little concern for their social and ecological environments? What are the moderating and mediating factors that affect these relationships?

· Can socially responsible organizations actually change societies? How might organizational commitments to ecological sustainability change societies or individual attitudes?

· How can theories of social identity, (ethical) decision making, and pro-social/positive organizational behavior contribute to more comprehensive causal models in this area?

· How are corporate social responsibility and sustainability related to leadership qualities and other characteristics of top executives, or systems pertaining to them (such as executive pay structures)?

· What is the best way to measure and evaluate social and environmental performance?

· What are the relationships between corporate social responsibility, environmental sustainability, firm reputation, and organizational culture/identity?

· How can theories of sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and integrative social contracts inform each other for mutual theoretical benefit—in domestic and international arenas?

· What are the human resource management implications of corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability?

· Is consumer demand for corporate social responsibility driven by the same factors as consumer demand for corporate environmental sustainability? What does this demand imply for organizations’ strategic positioning?

Paper Procedure: Submissions to the Special Issue should be sent electronically to Professor Marc Orlitzky at moo3@psu.edu, Professor Donald Siegel , and Professor David Waldman before June 1st, 2009. The format of the papers must follow Business and Society guidelines.

We also propose to hold a Special Issue Workshop, where each paper that is presented will be reviewed and discussed by one of the special issue editors. While all submitted papers will go through the regular double-blind journal review process, we believe that a face-to-face encounter at such a workshop will result in better papers. Participation in the workshop will not be a necessary condition for acceptance into the Special Issue, but we will strongly encourage all potential authors to attend the workshop. In this regard, we have secured funding for the workshop, enough to cover housing and meals for invited authors (one per paper). The final set of papers would then be selected from those resubmitted after the workshop.

Sponsor: University at Albany, State University of New York

Deadlines/Timetable

The tentative timetable for the special issue is:

June 1, 2009: Paper submitted electronically to co-editors

July 30th, 2009: Authors notified if their paper is chosen for special issue workshop

Late September 2009: Special Issue Workshop (with assigned discussants) to be held at the University at Albany, SUNY

January 1, 2010: Revised papers due (incorporating discussant and external reviewer comments)

Deadline: June 1, 2009

Issue Date: June 1, 2009

Contact Info: Marc Orlitzky
Phone: (814) 949-5772