#Apple CSR #Strategy – #Risk risk risk

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Triple Pundit has just published a strong critique of Apple’s approach to corporate social responsibility.

The leadership point is especially telling (see my post earlier today), but in general what this sharp series of points suggests to me is that with the passing of the baton a fresh approach is being explored that has yet to find its feet.

Any company so dependent for its high profits on its reputation should be first in line to address all of these concerns and others also. It should also consider, seems to me, whether taking over Foxconn or developing a joint venture in which it was the senior partner might nor prove a more aligned and coherent way of addressing the huge issues that its reliance on Chinese manufacturing has begun to raise. To be able to address these issues within rather than outside the organizational boundary would shift their status and character in a way that could only help Apple going forward.

5 Reasons Why Apple’s CSR Strategy Doesn’t Work.

The #CSR Business: Alignment and Transparency in C21

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

In the old (pre-Murdoch) days, The Times of London, which then had a fair claim to be the world’s premier newspaper, promoted itself for years with the tagline, “When The Times speaks, the world listens.” But in the 1960s when I first began reading it the entire front page was still filled with classified ads. The world has moved on. As has (sad to say) The Times.

Pride of place now has been unambiguously ceded to the New York Times, though The Economist, which describes itself still as a “newspaper,” could on a broader definition make a claim.

So when The Economist tackles a subject, even in its often quizzical way, it means it matters.

A piece on “corporate social responsibility” is therefore worth noting. It doesn’t add much to the discussion, but recognizes big shifts from when it was regarded as merely a reputational snow job. I’ve written more about this, including the significance of Michael Porter’s intervention and the concept of Shared Value, in my CSR column for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (http://bclc.uschamber.com/profile/nigel-m-de-s-cameron).

My sense is that CSR is presently a thoroughly transitional form. This explains the somewhat disordered situation of the CSR community as (let us say) a quasi-profession. The Chamber’s Business Civic Leadership Center and the CSR professional association recently collaborated in a report that noted the lack of institutionalization (training, standards, and so forth). Seems to me that this is not a problem as the whole effort is in transition; indeed, the idea of deciding in high school that when you grow up you want to be a CSR VP suggests a category mistake.

CSR is a nettlesome enterprise in the nature of the case, catalytic in respect of mainstream, old-time, bottom-line businesses; indirectly also in the social enterprise direction; and as a whole a component in a set of fast-moving parts as we are drawn into fresh models of capitalism in a culture sensitized to issues of social good – with brands scrambling for credibility and ever-more transparent windows replacing the opaque screens that used to shield all but the product and the marketing ploys chosen by the Ad Men to present it.

As I have noted elsewhere, I think we need not to be naive in our adoption of Porter’s Shared Value concept as if tomorrow afternoon altruism and the pursuit of profit will have come into perfect alignment. But the tendency is there. Slow but, I do suspect, sure. The values market is increasingly asserting itself as a frame for the more conventional market, and the integration of the two will become progressively more plain with the passage of time and the growth of transparency-hungry technologies.

#SocialEntrepreneurship, #CSR, and the #Imagination

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

I was delighted to join the Ideation conference in Chicago earlier this week, and can do no better than link with @tonyshen’s 22 learnings which sum up the impact of a series of terrific presentations from some of the most brilliant people in the social enterprise scene and its environs (link below). Charles Lee and my friend J. R Kerr curated a winner.

What fascinates me is how many moving parts we have in the values/business arena. Social enterprise (SE) itself covers a range of nonprofit and profit-seeking efforts in which social good is the goal, or a substantive part thereof. Then we have corporate social responsibility (CSR). Here our point of departure is within traditional companies, who seek to deliver social good (not my favorite expression, but let’s use it anyway) either to assuage the conscience and meet the charitable interests of the company/founder, or to spruce their brand, or at a more fundamental level align mission with other than directly profitable goals; or, as in Phase 3, to build “shared value,” as Michael Porter has called it, in which these goals are in the long term precisely aligned. A more modest but similar case was made in the report commissioned from McKinsey by the Committee for Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, which despite its somewhat Victorian name was founded by Paul Newman and operates the key network on CSR within the Fortune 500 CEOs. (Pursue that at corporatephilanthropy.org – the report is a great read.)

The logic of “shared value,” as I pointed out in a commentary for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is the end of CSR. No more “triple bottom line,” just a bottom line. Porter’s proposal has been seen as outlandishly optimistic by some, but his essay offers a thought-piece that I believe we need to wrestle with as we look ahead at how sustainable value will be built in the emerging social-cultural-economic matrix of C21. Ironically, the most prominent funding of social good, by far, is coming from the Gates-Buffet-Soros old school of Carnegie-style philanthropy – giving away the riches won through business. So all three types of are operating in parallel.

But there’s a third category that needs to be noted in this meta-conversation: the need for innovative financing and governance models to be devised in response to the vastly innovative technological (and social) developments of the digital revolution.

Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia offers (so far as I am aware) the only major project of the digital era that has struck out in another direction than IPO-dom. We need more. Google should have. Facebook should. The pressures of the market are not necessarily the ideal environment for the development of visionary, values-driven efforts. As Mark Zuckerberg wears his hoodie to Wall Street, we may well wonder why something as radically innovative as Facebook is beholden to the funding and governance system that sustains the enterprises of the “old economy.” That is, can innovation not run right through the system? Ahem, alignment?

Seems to me that we have here 3 more silos: social enterprise in various shapes; the three-fold CSR package; and innovative, generally digitally-driven, companies. We need above all a meta-convo that will bring these efforts round one table to focus these brilliant, diverse, projects for social good – and, in most cases, also for profitability.

The future? Moore’s Law, social media, globalization – these and other inexorable forces are re-shaping the landscape. It would be fun to work on some scenarios for 10 years’ time.

My take on Michael Porter’s proposal on Shared Value: http://bclc.uschamber.com/blog/2011-06-30/one-our-greatest-business-gurus-redefines-capitalism-perhaps

22 Hacks & Perspectives for Social Entrepreneurs | MOVEMENT 121.

Rupert #Murdoch ‘s Unfolding Disaster #CSR

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

How to Hit an Iceberg: Rupert Murdoch’s Unfolding Disaster

Reposted from 7/28 2011

As events have unfolded in the News of the World scandal I have kept being reminded of a phrase that explains much of the appeal of that (now defunct) newspaper: the fascination of the horrible. Really grim things can grip. That’s 50% of the key to “tabloid” newspapers and their stories. (The other half is celebs; and when celebs hit scandals, tabloid sales get supersized.) It is a delicious irony that the most celebrated scandal-sheet on the planet has fallen rapid victim to just the kind of story it has always loved to report. The fact that it also saw itself as a campaigning newspaper – crusading on the side of truth and goodness as it drove up sales –further seasons the feast. There’s nothing more grimly gripping on the planet than a loud-mouthed and out-and-out hypocrite.

We don’t know where this will end, and neither do Mr. Murdoch, his executives, shareholders, and those who wish him well or ill. What we do know is that we are looking at a corporate empire under threat. We don’t have to speculate about the potential use by U.S. prosecutors of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (which makes bringing foreign officials, like British cops, a particularly nasty federal offence) to note the potential impact of public sentiment on a corporate empire. Or, in other words, of values on value. We may find it curious that the public seemed to care little for the hacking of celebrities’ cellphones – which was round one of the scandal – but was thrown into rage by the use of that same news-gathering technique on a victim of crime. But for the very reason that the British public is a vast consumer of “tabloid” news its appetites are fed by sensation and sentiment. Sentiment has swung with a vengeance. Murdoch’s big move to control the key satellite broadcaster has been condemned by all political leaders. The police have placed several of his top execs on notice that they are being investigated. He and his team are being invited to be quizzed by parliamentarians. And here in the United States, Congress is waiting in the wings.

What’s the moral? Well, first, look at the impact of technology. Before there were mobile phones all we had were clunky answering machines. Now there are great vats of highly sensitive and potentially valuable private information digitally accessible from any telephone in the world – if you punch in the right sequence of digits. Asymmetries are breaking out all over. Low-level people under pressure for stories break the rules. High-level people may pay the price and market value may be destroyed. What’s the moral? Simple, really: the leveraging that emerging technologies are bringing to business make it far more important for values to be aligned throughout the organization than they were before. Dumpster-diving for discarded correspondence is one thing; pumping 4,000 names into a spreadsheet, bribing the Head of State’s security detail, eavesdropping on the victims of crime and terror, and hacking the phones of cops who are investigating, is quite another. That’s the power of the handset in the hand of the representative of an organization that, at some level, has been shown to be corrupt.

Sure, you can argue that every organization has bad apples. In the nature of the case scandal-focused journalism operates on the edge. The boundaries overstepped did not look so big at the time. All correct. But some lessons learned. First, bad apples are now far more toxic to organizations than they used to be – because of the combination of technological leverage and reputational damage so devastatingly demonstrated here. When all is said and done, the little nexus of private detectives and journalists at the heart of this story may end up destroying billions of dollars of shareholder value. Second, the edgier the effort – whether sensationalist publishing or, say, healthcare systems where physicians can be rewarded for the denial of care – the more central the need for unambiguous, enforced values to pervade the organization from head to toe. Third, just as corporate leaders are now post-Enron required to sign off on the accounts, they need to sign off on the values that pervade their entities. Not because Sarbanes-Oxley requires it, but for an even more pressing reason: their building sustainable value for investors does. We don’t need a SOX for values. We already have one. It’s called the bottom line.

Go figure. And watch News International’s value in weeks to come.

First posted on the US Chamber of Commerce BLCL site.

Unilever’s #CSR #Sustainability Marketing Push

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Unilever plans corporate sustainability ads | News | Marketing Week.

It’s an old principle that if you don’t actually keep your good deeds entirely to yourself, at least don’t flaunt them all over the place. (Jesus said quite a lot about that.) In general, companies have been cautious about claiming too much for their efforts in philanthropy and corporate social responsibility (CSR), partly as they have often borne not a lot of relationship with their brand (with the move to CSR this has shifted somewhat), partly because they can draw critical attention (hard this: you want to be noticed but not too much).

It’s not new for a major corporation to try greening its image, though the example we all remember is (ahem) Beyond Petroleum, Lord Browne’s effort to reposition BP as one of the good guys, which finally blew up in the Gulf.

Yet the context is shifting fast, as brands get weaker, transparency strengthens, uppity customers engage in energetic social media, and a new premium is placed on alignment between social mores and the values of the each stage of the value chain. Apple has recognized this in its rather bold move with Fair Labor and Foxconn (smart business move to contain social risk to the planet’s leading and most profitable brand, though with its own hazards).

So Unilever’s decision to push sustainability into its advertising is notable. It will encourage scrutiny of its claims and more generally of the company behind them (CSR is, at the end of the day, like all values efforts, indivisible). It also sends a message to the gazillion workers at all levels in the corporation that the C Suite is serious about this re-messaging and what needs to lie behind it. And it offers a good example, as Susan McPherson @susanmcp1 of Fenton has noted on Twitter, of the steady mainstreaming evident in CSR.

More on this theme in my columns for the U.S. Chamber – http://bclc.uschamber.com/profile/nigel-m-de-s-cameron