All Posts Tagged With: "csr"
Planning for 2035
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), which is the statistical agency of the U.S. Department of Energy, reported today that world energy consumption is expected to increase by nearly 50% by 2035. Asia in general and China and India in particular will account for most of the increase. Together, they accounted for 20% of total world energy consumption in 2007. Their combined energy use more than doubles by 2035 while world energy consumption by the U.S. would decline from 21% in 2007 to 16% in 2035, although actual consumption would increase.
Where is that energy going to come from? Who will control the sources? How much will it cost? How will it affect your organization? How will it affect consumer needs, governments, healthcare, and education? Since the increase will be steady for the next 25 years, the impact will be felt along the way and not just in 2035. Your strategic planning process should consider that impact.
Of course, any increase in energy usage means an increase in carbon dioxide emissions, which is a key cause of global warming. The EIA predicts such emissions will jump by 43%.
How will global warming affect your organization? How will it affect your customers, employees, and suppliers? Your strategic planning process should consider this, too.
The EIA’s report is based on the assumption that current policies are unchanged. That seems to be a safe bet, at least until we’re faced with an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario. Based on its recent history, the U.S. government will drag its heels until…
26May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedAnother Case of Corporate Irresponsibility
How can a major oil company that is drawing oil from a mile below the water’s surface not plan for a disastrous oil spill? They never thought it would happen. BP’s own documents said that the likelihood of such an accident occurring was “virtually impossible.” And since it was virtually impossible, BP decided to save a half-million dollars on a remote-control shutoff valve that two oil-producing countries, Brazil and Norway, require—a valve that would have stopped the spill that is inexorably creeping toward the Gulf coast.
As if that wasn’t enough, BP fought efforts to change the voluntary self-regulation laws. The oil industry opposed mandates for the remote-control shutoff switch. And BP has a history of environmental and safety violations and fines including a criminal violation of the Clean Water Act on the North Slope ($20 million fine), a leaky pipeline in Alaska ($20 million fine), and the largest OSHA fine in history for failing to correct safety problems at its Texas City, Texas, refinery ($87 million). Only a company that is making obscene profits can risk ignoring environmental and safety problems that could incur multimillion-dollar penalties.
In the Leadership category of the Baldrige Criteria, these questions are asked:
- How do you consider societal well-being and benefit as part of your strategy and daily operations?
- How do you consider the well-being of environmental, social, and economic systems to which your organization does or may contribute?
Based on results, BP apparently believes that profits trump the well-being of the environmental, social, and economic systems their oil…
4May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedDo You Know Your Externalities?
The drumbeat for corporate social responsibility continues to grow. The Harvard Business Review has initiated a debate about “the lack of coherence in most firms’ attempts to be socially responsible.” Click here to read the article that launches the debate.
According to HBR, leaders need to think in terms of externalities, which is the “effect of a purchase or use decision by one set of parties on others who did not have a choice and whose interests were not taken into account.” In other words, take ownership of your impact.
The Baldrige Criteria ask how you do that through questions in the Leadership category:
- How do you consider societal well-being and benefit as part of your strategy and daily operations?
- How do you consider the well-being of environmental, social, and economic systems to which your organization does or may contribute?
These are birth-to-grave questions about the design, production, delivery, service, and destruction/recycling of your products, facilities, and equipment. Or, if you don’t manufacture anything, of your operations. You answer the questions as part of strategic planning and your design processes and you manage and measure your performance as part of process management.
The first step is to identify your externalities. The best time to do that is during the design stage, when you can modify the design to reduce your impact, but even if that window has closed, you still need to determine what your externalities are. Only then can you start to take ownership of your impact.
To read more about corporate social responsibility, click on these…
20Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSustainability: A Business Imperative
If your organization isn’t on the environmental responsibility bandwagon yet, what are you waiting for? Last year Wal-Mart announced plans to investigate more than 100,000 suppliers with a Sustainability Index. Now, according to Fast Company, “IBM is following Wal-Mart’s lead by asking its 28,000 suppliers in 60 countries to establish environmental goals and measure energy conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste management/recycling practices.” (“IBM to Suppliers: Embrace Sustainability…Or Else,” Ariel Schwartz, April 14, 2010)
The Baldrige Criteria ask how you consider societal well-being and benefit as part of your operations, including the environmental systems to which you contribute. As with everything in the Baldrige model, acting on your environmental responsibility requires well-defined and deployed processes that align with your mission and vision and support sustainability and long-term success.
IBM seeks the same systemic approach by its suppliers. According to Wayne Balta, IBM’s VP for corporate environmental affairs and product safety, “We want them all to build long-term sustainability in a way that is integral to their routine operations, not as an add-on fix.”
The Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program (VACSP) Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center, which won the Baldrige Award in 2009, is a small organization of approximately 112 people that supports and manages drug-related activities in clinical trials. In its application summary, it describes how it considers societal well-being and sustainability:
15Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued“As a small organization, the Center has a culture of improvement, including a strong commitment to conserving natural resources and to environmental stewardship. The Center maintains a constant focus on process improvement and…
New Guidelines for Social Responsibility
“Organizations around the world, and their stakeholders, are becoming increasingly aware of the need for and benefits of socially responsible behavior. The aim of social responsibility is to contribute to sustainable development.”
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has been working on ISO 26000: Guidance on Social Responsibility since 2005. The quote above is part of the introduction in a draft of ISO 26000 available online here.
The guidelines address trends, characteristics, and principles of social responsibility, guidance on core subjects (organizational governance, human rights, labor practices, the environment, fair operating practices, consumer issues, and community involvement and development), and how to integrate social responsibility in an organization.
ISO emphasizes that the guidelines are not meant as a management system standard or intended for certification purposes or regulatory or contractual use. Instead, ISO 26000:
- Provides guidance on the underlying principles of social responsibility
- Is intended to be useful to all types of organizations
- Is intended for use by those beginning to address social responsibility as well as those more experienced with its implementation
Ninety-one countries and 42 organizations are participating in the development of ISO 26000. The goal is to finalize and publish it as an International Standard in late 2010. As the organization notes in a brochure about the guidelines (available here -pdf), “The future ISO 26000 will distill a globally relevant understanding of what social responsibility is and what organizations need to do to operate in a socially responsible way.”
To learn more about ISO 26000, visit the Social Responsibility Web site here.
To read about corporate social responsibility,…
27Jan2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedA New Bottom Line for Schools – and the Rest of Us
Business thinking has corrupted our schools, according to Anthony Cody, a teacher and teacher-coach in Oakland, California. In an article posted December 3rd on Teacher magazine, Cody notes that business people saw a shocking flaw in our education system: “There was no bottom line. Unlike a business, schools had no balance sheet at the end of the year—no ‘metrics,’ no way to directly compare one school to another. No way to tell which school was a good return on our investment, and which was wasting the public’s money.”
To fix the flaw, a profit-minded accountability movement pushed for clear standards and tests to measure performance on those standards, and No Child Left Behind emerged.
It will not work. “As a culture and a species,” Cody writes, “we have too many problems that cannot be solved by a one-dimensional view of profit and loss.”
The truth is, focusing solely on revenue and profitability as the single bottom line for business doesn’t work, either. It’s why the balanced scorecard was born. It’s why the triple bottom line—giving environmental and social considerations equal weight to financial ones—has gained traction. And it’s a big reason we’re in the mess we’re in today with global warming and a broken healthcare system and greedy financial institutions and income that, for most Americans, hasn’t gotten much better in years. When all that matters is profit, nothing else matters.
Business thinking has corrupted education. It’s corrupted healthcare. It’s even corrupted business. New thinking is needed. “We must not trade our judgment and our…
3Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedNew Study of Corporate Citizenship
A new study by the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship found that two-thirds of company leaders believe ethical and values-based leadership in the executive office is an important factor in difficult economic times. Leaders also cited effective corporate governance practices (61%) and more effective industry self-regulatory policies and initiatives (58%) as important factors.
All three of these factors are addressed in the second half of the Leadership Category in the Baldrige Criteria. Companies that want to improve in these areas can ask and answer the questions in Item 1.2 (here) and read how Baldrige Award winners respond (award application summaries here).
The study shows that more companies are doing more than just talking about corporate citizenship. Forty percent of the respondents assign a team or individual to work on corporate citizenship issues, up from 26% in 2007. More companies are setting policies for corporate citizenship and integrating it with their business planning processes.
The study also found that more large companies are “establishing corporate citizenship management policies and practices to ensure citizenship is integrated into the core business.”
As the study concludes: “Increasingly, customers, employees, business partners, and government demand that corporations take an active role in social, environmental, and community concerns. That’s why strategic corporate citizenship is more than good business—it’s a business essential.”
You can read a summary of the survey here.
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