A CROs Accountability & Financial Impact Pulse Survey.

 White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel famously declared, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”  Although the recession appears to be ending as we approach Q4 of 2009, many corporations are still confronting market environments that threaten their core values. In the recently published 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis, Harvard Business School Professor Bill George—former CEO of Medtronic and best-selling author of Finding Your True North—contends that the economic calamity of 2008-09 was ultimately caused by a failure of corporate leadaership. Interested in positive lessons to counterbalance those failings, CRO magazine presents this exclusive excerpt from George’s impressive work to help guide our readers through whatever maelstroms they might confront—now or in the future.

 No Trix, Plenty of Chex

More than a lucky charm, General Mills sees CSR as an extension of its healthy foods branding.

Corporate social responsibility is not only the right thing for companies to do, but it also benefits business. Here’s a closer look at how General Mills approaches this global commitment.

This second-annual CRO’s Responsible CEO of the Year Award is different than any other business honor. First, it recognizes individual CEO expertise in articulating the common good and then convincing thousands of others to make a good business out of it. Second, it’s a trophy for leadership in progress, because perfection in Corporate Responsibility is a goal that’s always moving just beyond our grasp. And third, it reflects the professional chauvinism of the corporate responsibility-obsessed editorial team at CRO Magazine, the only publication solely focused on the four professional domains in Corporate Responsibility—GRC, sustainability, CSR and philanthropy.

Since President Obama’s November 2008 election victory, CRO Magazine publisher Jay Whitehead and Amit Chatterjee, CEO of environmental and energy management software company Hara, have agreed that the U.S. is moving quickly toward pricing a ton of CO2 emissions, creating an urgent need for a how-to-compete guide for corporate leaders.  So the pair collaborated on the first CO2-centric corporate competitive roadmap, The Post-Carbon Economy, the First Edition of which appears in August (SOFICO Books, www.postcarboneconomybook.com). 

Molson Coors Brewing Company earlier this year entered into a strategic collaboration with Circle of Blue in support of their mutual and long-term commitment to protecting global fresh water supplies. The collaboration's first initiative was to launch an independent survey of public awareness and concern for fresh water issues in 25 countries around the world, with a deeper evaluation of attitudes about fresh water conservation in a smaller subset of seven countries.

CRO Association Board of Governors in CRO Magazine Cover Story
 
Meet the 16 industry leaders who make up the Corporate Responsibility Officer Association Board of Governors in an up-close-and-personal roundtable. They represent practitioners, providers and influencers.  Organizations represented include IBM, BT, Eaton, FedEx, Phillips Van Heusen, KPMG, SAP,  Crowe Horwath, Harvard University, Miami University of Ohio, George Washington University, the Business Civic Leadership Council of the US Chamber of Commerce, Domtar Paper and Hara. 
 

When someone next asks you to define “corporate transparency,” show them this:

The 10th Annual CRO 100 Best Corporate Citizens List (pdf)

Why? Three reasons. First, CRO’s 10th annual 100 Best List (compiled by IW Financial and edited by CRO) is completely based on publicly available information. That means the list’s sources are public places accessible to anyone researching Russell 1000® companies—non-secure websites, government and regulatory sources, investment publications and NGO databases.

Second, the methodology used to compile this year’s 100 Best list was debated and voted on in open session by 27 leading corporate responsibility practitioners representing nine major industry segments October 2008 at the CRO Conference in Chicago.

And lastly, for the first time ever, each listed company was asked to review the underlying data in advance of this publication to make sure no publicly available citation was overlooked. Of the 1,011 data edit requests we got back from the listees, 28.3 percent were validated and resulted in data changes. The result? Our most transparent 100 Best list.

Watch the video here

And previously, 100 Best Corporate Citizens Featured on Fox Business News: