Building Corporate Social Responsibility

This does not diminish in any way the importance of striving for sustainability, nor does it mean that a sustainable manufacturing process makes no contribution to security. In fact, by virtue of striving to meet societal needs, sustainability addresses terrorism at its roots. Therefore, it is vitally important when proceeding down the road to sustainability to consider the basic needs of those who would wish us harm, because meeting these needs may well turn potential foes into, if not friends, people we can coexist with. 

In Tomorrow s Company s paper, Redefining CSR, the London-based think tank offers one of the simplest and clearest definitions of corporate social responsibility 

The best companies do not confine their practices only within laws and regulations that govern their business, but instead prefer to encourage employees to stretch their thinking to go beyond the minimum legal and regulatory requirements. To these companies, explains Goyder, CSR is a natural and practical expression of values for which they have always stood and will continue to earn the public s trust. Every behavior flows naturally from the company s purpose and values.  

Before investing the time and resources required to adopt proactive and more responsible practices, corporate managers often want to know the business case -how such changes will increase shareholder value. To some managers the business case is intuitive, for others it is thought to rely more on the vagaries of intangible factors and is therefore elusive. 

Companies make money in essentially two ways - they either increase revenue and/or reduce costs. On the revenue side, the business case for CSR is more difficult to quantify reliably, for too many factors influence a company s performance. The general economic climate, industry conditions and market demands, volume discounts to distributors to clear out inventory, and acquisitions all affect revenue, but none has anything do with a company s CSR. Similarly, with stock price, while CSR companies may be more attractive to socially responsible investors (SRI), their corporate responsibility is only one of a half dozen or more factors that influence the buying decisions of money managers and stock analysts. 

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Was the water decline due to drought or overuse There was, and continues to be, a raging debate in the Indian court systems. It has dragged on for years. As a result, the brand image was tarnished. As the case moved through the Indian court systems, the Coca-Cola Company became laser-focused on building corporate social responsibility systems to avoid a similar issue in another market. 

Special Features Workplace and environmental performance criteria. ICCR is the first major standard of corporate social responsibility movement to build a portfolio of holdings based on CSR criteria. The combined portfolio value now exceeds 110 billion. 

As a result, they have stumbled forward. As companies have outsourced the supply chain, they have had to build inter-enterprise processes to ensure that they are able to achieve better levels of quality, customer service, and corporate social responsibility through their network as they did when all functions reported through their organization. As a result, the focus of the supply chain has become outside-in. 

In the process of writing this book in a center seat on a flight, I had a discussion with a physician. 1 was writing intently, and it piqued his interest. When I explained the premise of the manuscript, he commented, Isn t corporate social responsibility an oxymoron " He then laughed and retorted that he was not sure what was the greater obstacle, the "ox" or the "moron." I smiled. Building the responsible supply chain is certainly a paradigm shift. 

In the evolution, the vertical silos of supply become connected through horizontal processes. The most common horizontal processes are revenue management, sales and operations planning (S OP), supplier development, and corporate social responsibility (CSR). (This transition is covered in great detail in Chapter 5.) These horizontal processes become connectors for the end-to-end value network. They align the traditional supply processes of source, make, and deliver against a business strategy. When companies successfully build market-driven value networks, demand and supply volatility can be traded off bidirectionally... 

The supply chain leader sees CSR as an opportunity, while the supply chain laggard complains about the burden of corporate social responsibility initiatives for its supply chain. For all, it is an opportunity to build value networks brick by brick. 

Is based on consolidating a culture of risk prevention, through combining a variety of political instruments - legislation, the social dialogue, progressive measitres and best practices, corporate social responsibility and economic incentives - and on building partnerships between all the players on the safety and health scene. 

Under the generic name of socially responsible investment, there are actually a multitude of different philosophies ethics, sustainable development, materiality of extra-financial factors, etc. These various approaches differ as regards both the criteria and analytical tools used to assess corporate behaviour and performance, and the techniques used to build portfolios. 

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