Month of March , 2008

TheCRO.com, which is affiliated with CRO (Corporate Responsibility Officer) magazine, implemented a content partnership with the U.K.'s CorporateRegister.com that gives visitors to TheCRO.com access to the globe's largest database of corporate responsibility and sustainability reports.

As environmental demands increase, companies must change efforts from opportunistic to efficient

U.S.-based companies are increasingly feeling the pressure to adopt corporate responsibility from far and near. From afar, European and Asian countries continue to enact stringent regulations that will inevitably be emulated here. Closer to home, many state governments are taking the lead in requiring the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and aggressively addressing other issues of corporate responsibility. As these pressures mount, it’s not just fines and other sanctions that will be at stake, but your company’s reputation, competitiveness and profitability.

Prudential Foundation’s Gabriella Morris doesn’t shy away from shining ‘a light on disparity’

Gabriella Morris, the President of the Prudential Foundation, describes herself as “basically an introvert,” and I suspect her friends and colleagues might get a big chuckle out of that self-characterization. After all, when asked at the start of an interview what differentiates the Prudential Foundation from other corporate philanthropies, Morris quickly says in jest: “I’m here.” Morris has been “here” at Prudential Financial since 1985 and she’s presided over the Prudential Foundation since 1994. Like the Prudential Foundation itself, Morris is not at all shy or defensive about the foundation’s community involvement, even in what some might consider edgy arenas.

As roles evolve, CROs become ‘stewards of strategic decisions’

Today’s companies are challenged to find socially responsible, sustainable ways of doing business that benefit their employees, communities and the environment—while simultaneously enriching their shareholders. And businesses across a variety of industries are proving that it can be done.

Companies avoiding the negatives of political and civil involvement need to positively engage and assess

Governments have the primary—but not sole—responsibility in human rights. This idea is increasingly accepted as fact, but it is just the starting point for immense interpretative exercises by human rights activists, academics, a specially appointed representative of the U.N. Secretary General and many others who are trying to draw practical conclusions regarding the role of the private sector. Companies, in turn, seem to be caught unaware.

Cynthia Cooper’s new book on WorldCom details inside story of firm’s historic fall

Cynthia Cooper would not buckle under the pressure. In 2002, Cooper was Vice President of Internal Audit at WorldCom when she uncovered company officials’ use of something other than generally accepted accounting principles. Time magazine named Cooper one of its “Persons of the Year 2002.”

Following is an excerpt from her new book, “Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower” (Wiley). The excerpt from Chapter 23, “The Confrontation,” revolves around an audit committee meeting with CFO Scott Sullivan, Cooper and others on June 20, 2002.

     

CRO Magazine and Sirota Survey Intelligence have joined forces to launch a trendsetting survey to measure baseline data on Corporate Responsibility from practitioners and from the solution providers’ perspectives.

The responses will be kept confidential and secure and only group data will be presented at the upcoming March 27 CRO conference in NYC, on TheCRO.com and in the magazine.

Please respond by Tuesday March 11, 2008.

The survey is anonymous and will take only about five minutes. Clicking on the links below will bring you directly to the survey.

Practitioners: http://survey.sirota.com/Cro/Practitioners/Survey/

Providers: http://survey.sirota.com/Cro/Providers/Survey/

Many of the top business schools in the country have announced plans to move into the sustainability and/or corporate responsibility space with programs relevant to these emerging corporate trends.

Schools on CRO’s Top 10 Executive Training Programs in Corporate Responsibility 2008, however, are ahead of the curve, having already integrated the fundamentals of this growing movement in their open enrollment programs, and offering the necessary resources to companies wishing to expand their knowledge in the subject through custom courses.