Month of January , 2007

 A new online column from the CEO of The CRO, Jay Whitehead

In 2005, The Corporate Executive Board executed the largest-ever comprehensive study of something called “employee engagement.”   Long the holy grail of corporate HR leaders, a heavily-engaged workforce has been thought to be the ultimate competitive advantage.  There are countless stories of an underdog army or sports team or company whose peoples’ highly-energized attitudes have resulted in victory over a superior rival.  The fact is, in business, sports and war, engagement separates winners from losers.

Survey finds largest U.S. companies doing “poor job” disclosing climate change risks.

Arguing that the nation’s publicly-held companies “should elevate climate change as a corporate priority and communicate openly with investors about their strategies and responses,” the environmental network group Ceres and the socially responsible mutual fund company Calvert released a report harshly critical of climate change disclosure at most top-tier companies.

A new online column from the CEO of The CRO, Jay Whitehead

If you are IBM or Citigroup or any of the world’s 50 most highly capitalized companies, your finance, investor relations, human resources, corporate social responsibility, citizenship, communications and marketing functions are asked to complete 300 to 1,000 surveys, questionnaires or regulatory reports every year. Most of the time, big companies comply with these requests; sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes not.

 A new online column from the CEO of The CRO, Jay Whitehead

As somebody whose professional life started in 1981, I clearly recall a frenzy around companies creating “mission statements.”  It got to the point in the mid-1990s that dot-coms with failing business models were raising tens of millions for having nothing more than a well-written statement in their lobby. Despite all the goofiness around mission statements, one company’s has always seemed to me to be more fun than any other.  That company is Mattel.

A new online column from the CEO of The CRO, Jay Whitehead

As I made my way through recent meetings with Corporate Responsibility industry leaders in London, Brussels and Paris, I noticed an elephant in the room. But nobody wanted to talk about it. Call the elephant “workforce pandering.”

Today, companies in every major EU country—the UK, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy—are now involved in mud wrestling matches with new “responsible” workforce-related regulations. Truth is that these new workforce restrictions are hindering companies’ ability to serve any group of stakeholders other than employees.

A new online column from the CEO of The CRO, Jay Whitehead

On two post-Christmas trips to Paris, Brussels, and London to meet with captains of Corporate Responsibility, I had a chance to marvel at both the miracle and mess of the legal harmonization process now underway in the recently-expanded European Union. 

A new online column from the CEO of The CRO, Jay Whitehead

In IBM’s stylishly Spartan Thames-side HQ in London, I recently sat with Celia Moore, IBM’s European corporate citizenship. I was there to share Moore’s front-line views of the state of Corporate Responsibility in the newly-expanded European Union. With Bulgaria and Romania, the EU is now a 27-country club. Moore, a corporate stateswoman with equal parts polish, expertise and energy, is a leader in the established thought-leadership group Business in the Community, which was formed several years ago under the auspices of the EU itself. When I asked her opinion of the issues at the top of her Corporate Responsibility agenda, she immediately said it was the environment.

A new online column from the CEO of The CRO, Jay Whitehead

For those of you who were awake and employed in the 1990s, you’ll remember that Customer Relationship Management, CRM, was the hottest date at the corporate computing dance. Siebel Systems, Salesforce.com, and more than 100 other applications and services grew up to answer the multi-billion-dollar demand to manage customer and prospective customer information. As a result of the availability of these powerful applications, “customer relationship management” became a bona fide profession. Enterprise computing leaders SAP and Oracle went hard into the segment, and SAP for one developed a very large line of business around CRM.

A new online column from the CEO of The CRO, Jay Whitehead

If you have yet to meet Fred Cook, CEO of multinational PR firm Golin Harris, you might want to put it on your to-do list. Don’t get me wrong. Fred is not bigger-than-life like his fellow Chicagoans Michael Jordan or Mike Ditka. In fact, he does not sport the broad shoulders of a power forward or tight end. He has more the whippet-like stature of a marathon runner. It’s not even that he’s as loud as his city-mates Harry Carey or Dick Butkus. In fact, Fred is rather soft-spoken, even quiet.