Just Good Business: The Strategic Guide to Aligning Corporate Responsibility and Brand - Hardcover

McElhaney, Kellie A.

 
9781576754412: Just Good Business: The Strategic Guide to Aligning Corporate Responsibility and Brand
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1576754413 ISBN 13: 9781576754412
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) can help companies build customer loyalty, recruit and retain employees, and stand out in a crowded marketplace. But to be most effective, CSR must be intimately connected to the corporate brand—it must reinforce a company’s unique identity and be an integral part of how a company tells its story. How can your company make the most of this potential competitive advantage and business strategy?

Kellie McElhaney, one of the world’s leading experts on CSR strategy, offers a detailed process for seamlessly integrating your CSR efforts into your overall business objectives. “My goal,” she writes, “is not to tell you how to force your CSR strategy to be more authentic. My goal is actually to help you develop a CSR strategy that is authentic because of its natural linkage to your company’s mission, vision, and values.”

Just Good Business lays out a framework of seven principles that help you develop CSR initiatives that make good business sense and tell the world about them in ways that are compelling and memorable. McElhaney offers a wealth of practical advice on implementation, including how to measure the results of your CSR.

McElhaney draws on over ten years of previously unpublished CSR consulting engagements inside companies grappling with developing strategically aligned CSR initiatives. The book’s case vignettes, examples, best practices, and strategic recommendations span a host of industries and sectors and draw upon her work with leading corporations, such as McDonald’s, Nokia, Levi Strauss, Digicel, Birkenstock, Gap Inc., HP, and Pepperidge Farm.

Savvy companies carefully manage their brand in every area. CSR shouldn’t be any different. Just Good Business offers a detailed blueprint that any company can use to ensure that its CSR strategy delivers significant, quantifiable, bottom-line benefits.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kellie McElhaney is the John C. Whitehead Distinguished Faculty Fellow in Corporate Responsibility and founding director of the Center for Responsible Business at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. She developed and launched the center in January 2003. She consults to many Fortune 500 companies and was named a 2005 Faculty Pioneer for Institutional Leadership in the Aspen Institute’s biennial report Beyond Grey Pinstripes.

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WHY CSR? WHY NOW?

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

—Anne Frank

If you doubt the impact that corporate responsibility strategy—even if incremental—can have on a big business’s bottom line, consider the example of vending machines at Wal-Mart. After receiving employer-provided training on sustainability, Darrell Meyers, an associate (employee) in a North Carolina Wal-Mart store submitted a suggestion to remove light bulbs from the company’s vending machines. Removing the light bulbs—which stayed lit 24/7 and needed to be replaced from time to time by maintenance workers—would help prevent wasting energy while saving the company money. As it turned out, Darrell’s thinking was right on target. When his idea percolated up to Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, someone ran the numbers and estimated that Darrell’s suggestion would save the company more than $1 million a year.

Guess what? You’ll be hard pressed today to find a vending machine in any Wal-Mart store or office anywhere that has a functioning light bulb in it.

This book is about corporate strategy and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and how you can leverage the power of branding and communication to ensure that your company’s CSR efforts are noticed by the public, including customers, sponsors, partners, suppliers, employees, and shareholders. Remember: a lot of CSR is out there in the business world, but not a lot of it is effective CSR. And even of the limited amount of effective CSR strategy that exists, no company has yet captured the market on effectively communicating it in such a way as to maximize business value. Most companies are scared to death to communicate their CSR.

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In fact, many companies have been and are doing more—not less— in the world today to improve education, health care, and environmental protection, to name but a few key areas of social focus. The problem, however, is that they are not talking about it, and they are not telling their stories when recruiting new employees, branding new and existing products, or entering new markets. The result is that the average consumer, employee, government regulator, or supplier has no idea what if anything the company is doing when it comes to corporate social responsibility. They therefore cannot factor the company’s CSR efforts into their choices when deciding what product to buy, where to work, or how to invest.

If this book has power, it is in convincing you that you can and should brand and communicate your CSR. Corporate social responsibility can help firms—particularly those in highly commoditized industry segments such as consumer products or banking and financial services— to differentiate their brand and stand out above the noise when price, quality, and convenience are relatively equal. This positive impact creates a competitive advantage for these firms both when markets are up and when they’re down.

However, you cannot move to branding your company’s CSR until you first agree on a definition of CSR and name it and second—and perhaps more importantly—develop an integrated CSR strategy with substance and business impact.


Exactly What Is CSR and What Should You Call It?

Unsurprisingly for a field that was catapulted so quickly from irrelevance to center stage, there is scant understanding of and agreement on what CSR is—and what it is not. CSR might simply be defined as “using the power of business to create a better world” (the definition offered by the global leadership network Net Impact). In my own work, I think of CSR in terms of corporate strategy, and I advocate that firms use CSR as part of their portfolio of business strategies. To that end, since 1998—and for the purposes of this book—I have developed and use the following definition of strategic corporate social responsibility: a business strategy that is integrated with core business objectives and core competencies of the firm and from the outset is designed to create business value and positive social change, and is embedded in day-to-day business culture and operations.

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The lack of a be-all and end-all definition of corporate social responsibility is no excuse for a company not to engage in CSR. Companies must consider the definitions given here—and others—and then quickly start by defining the term for themselves. If CSR is to be treated as a part of an effective corporate strategy, then its definition would be, by definition, unique to each firm based on that company’s objectives, risks, opportunities, and competencies. In my experience, this is most definitely the case.

One challenge to nailing down a definition of CSR within organizations is that the concept of corporate social responsibility itself goes by many different names. What is called corporate social responsibility in one organization might be given the label spiritual capitalism in another. Below is a list of the most common labels used by companies in referring to the things they do involving CSR:


corporate responsibility
sustainable development
sustainability
environment, social, and governance (ESG)
social enterprise
global citizenship
corporate citizenship
values-driven business
natural capitalism
spiritual capitalism
compassionate capitalism
people, planet, profits
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I personally try to dissuade leaders from wasting a lot of time deciding on a name for their own CSR efforts. I advocate only that they indeed call it something, give it a name and use it consistently; that they define it for themselves as a company; and that they develop and execute a business strategy around the name, communicate it, and brand it.

As you read through the chapters that follow, please keep the strategic aspect of corporate social responsibility in mind. To me, this is ultimately what gives CSR its power to not only change the world for the better but to improve the company’s bottom line. An effective CSR strategy can do all that while enhancing employee loyalty, productivity, and retention; while granting a company license to operate in new countries and markets; while giving a product or service a competitive advantage; and while giving a company a sticky brand story to tell in the marketplace. If you don’t demand that both your CSR goals and your financial goals be achieved in parallel and together, then your corporate social responsibility program will likely be unsustainable in the long run. As soon as you have a down quarter, your CSR resources will be the first to be cut.


Why CSR Now?

I used to stay awake at night wondering if CSR was really as mainstreamed in the wide world as it was in my professional life. As someone who specializes in the field, it’s easy to mistakenly believe that the entire world revolves around the object of my professional affection. That feeling grew particularly nagging when I moved to Berkeley, as so many things that are top of mind in Berkeley (tree sitters trying to keep a football field from being expanded is just one recent example) rarely hit the rest of the world’s screen of top priorities. I knew from my voracious bedtime reading (that is, nonacademic reading) that issues of corporate responsibility graced every major magazine cover in this country during the course of 2007, and have continued to do so in 2008.

But it wasn’t until I accidentally picked up an issue of a particular magazine one day that I become 100 percent convinced that CSR’s time had finally come and that it had hit the mainstream. Why was I so convinced? Because the...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1576754413
ISBN 13 
9781576754412
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
208
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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139b-14
Tallinn
11317
Estland

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