Month of December , 2007

Presidential wannabes: No carbon copies on environmental, corporate-responsibility platforms

What if you were picking 2008 presidential candidates based solely on their corporate sustainability, governance, compliance, or CSR platforms? Then you might believe politicians really had firm convictions that won’t buckle under well-applied political pressure. But go ahead and read on anyway.

Climate Counts rates companies’ environmental practices for consumers, investors

Apple is “bursting with pride” to be associated with Nobel Peace Prize-winner Al Gore. “Al has put his heart and soul into…alerting and educating us all on the climate crisis,” the company said in a statement posted to Apple’s website just after the winners were announced. But Gore, a Director on Apple’s board, may be not so proud of the company’s own record on climate change.

Firms stateside, in Europe offer varied approaches to publishing their citizenship updates

As in Europe, substantive reporting on non-financial issues emerged in the U.S. in the late 1980s. Early adopters were those industry sectors, such as oil and gas, chemical and utilities, already experiencing pressure from both regulators and activists. The first reports were typically "single-issue," most commonly focusing on environmental issues. Since the mid-1990s, reports have increasingly evolved into covering a variety of issues: including environmental but also social, community, ethics, and human rights. From the beginnings of reports with purely an environmental focus, the trend today is CSR and sustainability reporting.

Corporate responsibility analysts respond that focus should be on ‘how,’ not ‘why'

You phone Robert Reich, the former U.S. Labor Secretary, at the appointed hour and he asks you to hold on for “half a second” because he’s “in the middle of a sentence.” For two minutes, you hear him pecking away in the background on a computer keyboard, perhaps writing one of the three books he’s working on simultaneously these days. One such Reich-authored book, “Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life,” published a few months ago, has drawn a lot of attention for its slant on corporate social responsibility (CSR), which Reich describes at one juncture in the book as being “as meaningful as cotton candy.”

Transparency International works globally against exploitation, bribery schemes

In 1993, when Peter Eigen, the World Bank’s Director of the Regional Mission for Eastern Africa, felt the international banking institution was refusing to confront corruption, he founded Transparency International. Dedicated to eradicating and building awareness about corruptive practices, which the group defines as those exploiting public power for private gain, Transparency International is a worldwide network of international governments, corporations and individuals. The organization has 95 national chapters.

Mortgage crisis leads many organizations to review foundations of risk-management plans

The subprime mortgage crisis has caused many large investment firms to take substantially higher write-downs than they previously estimated. The situation has been a key contributor to the resignations of several high-profile CEOs. The gravity of the crisis has even caused some people to suggest that additional regulation may be necessary.

As workplace complaints increase, companies struggle for an inclusive environment

The number of workplace religious-diversity-discrimination complaints has increased 50 percent to 2,541 annually in the last nine years, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Always a hot human resources issue, workforce diversity—and particularly race and gender discrimination—have made for big headlines and large lawsuit settlements, but protection against religious discrimination is a younger element of the diversity puzzle that many corporations are just beginning to understand and accommodate. 

Combining new types of enterprise and technologies can lead to market opportunities

Companies seeking to make a difference and a profit would do well to adopt a social business model. Social businesses have a humanitarian mission but are set up to earn a profit in a model superior to traditional philanthropy because it is self-sustaining. Achieving this “convergence” of business and technology is extremely difficult for traditional corporations, and yet our research shows that those who are successful do better financially than their peers.

Showing the bigger picture—including pay-for-performance connections—in compensation reports

It is easy to point to bad examples of executive compensation practices and disclosure. But where are the good examples? The 2007 proxy season unveiled the first executive compensation reports under sweeping new disclosure regulations for publicly traded companies. Meanwhile, three key producers and users of those reports—corporate executives, boards and investors—are still at an early stage in developing a market consensus on best practices. Here is how we believe best practices should—and will—evolve.

To avoid the sins of greenwashing, look between the lines

Corporate responsibility officers frequently find themselves in tough positions. Striving to help their companies improve environmental and social performance, CROs want to promote an organization’s successes while simultaneously preventing others in the company from overstating accomplishments. Unfortunately, as a recent in-store survey of product-specific environmental claims suggests, CROs might need to be a bit more vigilant about the environmental claims being made on product packaging.