If only I had waited a few months to comment on CSR and The Economist
…as I read through another Economist special report on corporate social responsibility last week, I realized my November post pretty much summarizes my feelings about the new survey too. The “trendiest” layer of CSR – that which seeks to maximize opportunities to create value for good performance in environmental, social and governance issues – is trendy for a reason.
Unfortunately, some still ask the question: Does CSR work? If you take out the “social” – as I prefer – and say “Does corporate responsibility work?” it becomes a different question. Of course it works. More people are thinking about environmental, social and governance responsibilities and risk. While The Economist, rightly, is still pessimistic about those companies “spending other people’s money”, CSR is improving management systems. This certainly can’t be bad.
The concluding piece, Do it Right, was most interesting, but they brushed over some terms that need more attention. The next wave of corporate goodness “will be one of disruptive innovation”, featuring a new breed of ’social entrepreneur’ that will take over from the established big companies as a driving force.” Sounds like buzz-word dropping.
Disruptive innovation has been explored by others, and not exactly in the CSR category, though I can see the connections, especially to climate change. Social entrepreneur is still a term that needs a definition (and the link attempts to do give it one). I take the basic point from this last story that there is more “entrepreneur”-like energy going into how we think about, quantify and report on a bottom line that isn’t about financial indicators. Indeed, the entrepreneurial model of tackling social and environmental problems is likely to stir up the CSR world”. It is also stirring up the financial world. Again, this certainly can’t be bad.
