Video / Articles by Patrick Dixon - 24 million requests in year - 11 million visitors - Conference Speech/Event?
Sustainable
Business and Profitability:
The Future of Corporate
and Social Responsibility - and how the right business ethics can earn you money. Can ethical behavior translate into profitable success?
"Fund management risk - many retail funds sold by people who don't believe in them"
Video of event for fund managers - many fund managers I talk to at events do not recomment their own retail funds to family or friends and are doubtful about future performance compared to simple tracker funds. Potential for major reputational risk.
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You can have the greatest strategy
in the world but if your vision of the future is wrong you just
land up travelling even faster
in the wrong direction. A prime example of this is the current
revolution in corporate ethics and social responsibility, which
is changing major board policies of many multinationals – why,
and where is it all going? (Notes on presentation at a business
school on Corporate and Social Responsibility - see slides).
Bad news can hit any corporation like a tornado, ripping the guts
out of the business, shattering market confidence, scandalising
customers and causing outrage in the general public. The media
are obsessed not so much with success or failure as exposing wrongdoing – and
as we have seen, any corporation discovered to be acting in an
immoral way is likely to be hounded out of business, sometimes
even if it tries hard to change its ways. And as if that was not
enough, it is far harder to get a good news story reported than
a scandal, and so most general news about corporations is negative.
This is the sensitive climate in which corporations are now feeling
their way over the issue of corporate and social responsibility.
In the last century, corporations could relegate this area to a
couple of paragraphs in an annual report, paying little more than
lip service to matters many board members considered peripheral
to the business. The view was that corporate values and community
projects don’t sell products and don’t increase profits,
so are unimportant. However, that is to miss the point: corporate
ethics and social responsibility are the insurance policies every
corporation needs to have to protect against the mushroom cloud
of fallout when (as inevitably happens) someone or something goes
badly adrift.
Conclusion: Whether you “believe” in it or not, CSR
is a corporate survival issue
2) Goalposts are changing
Future consumers are already demanding a far wider sense of corporate
purpose than making shareholders wealthy. Values are changing faster
than corporations can respond. Actions which would have been praised
as smart a couple of years ago will put people into prison in future.
Corporate and social responsibility is more than compliance with
current regulations, which are always based on past history. 100%
compliance is no protection against future attack. You can meet
every requirement
today
and still land up in trouble tomorrow. That's because the lesson
of history is that people tomorrow will judge you by tomorrow's
standards when they examine
your past.
We need to take a broader “future” view,
leading the way, anticipating new legislation, moving ahead of
the rest, making history not only with our products but also with
our values. We also need to adopt common values that work across
cultures and nationalities.
Conclusion: CSR means going further than compliance with current
regulations or best practice – need for powerful vision and
highest values
3) How to motivate, encourage and inspire
Ask what your colleagues about the work they do for nothing – you
will learn more about them in 3 minutes than in 3 years in the
same team.
There is a huge, almost universal desire to make a different, do
something worthwhile, put something back… This same passion
invades the workplace and the marketplace: a desire to build a
better world,
in some small way. 60% in US each year give average 200 hours a
year to great causes, 43% in UK and similar percentages in most
other nations. And most of the rest have done so in the past or
will in future. Why? Corporate and social responsibility connects
the passion people feel for causes outside of work with what they
do at work.
Connect with all the passions
people have and they will follow you to the ends of the earth,
buy your products
and
services with pride and may even be willing to work with you for
next to nothing.
It is all part of the same revolution that is
also focussed on work-life balance, now a major career objective,
different
from
10 years ago.
Example: Non-profits and corporations adopting “causes” at
work.
Conclusion: CSR not only protects us from media attack, but also
makes us feel good about ourselves, about the things we buy and
who we work for. This force is powerful enough to overturn international
laws as well as all corporate strategies.
The fundamental requirement
for future corporations will be to demonstrate how you build a
better world: not just for shareholders, but also for customers,
consumers, colleagues and communities as well as for yourself and
those you care for. To be convincing to a cynical world, CSR must
be something that “comes from the heart”, a core value
that the corporation truly “believes in” and is totally
committed to, “part of the air we breathe”.
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Blogs - web / video diaries on trends / management by Dr Patrick Dixon
Video / Articles by Patrick Dixon - 24 million requests in year - 11 million visitors - Conference Speech/Event? 
