Category: commentary

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CORE Conference

At the CORE (COrporate REsponsibility) Conference today there were many good ideas. A central part of the CORE campaign is a call for mandatory corporate responsibility reporting. There were many reasons given why a voluntary approach won’t work. But for me the most compelling idea was the need to recognise a “right to information”. This would complement a duty on companies to provide it. After all, if companies should respect our rights – and that duty is only enforceable with knowledge of what they are doing – then there must also be a right to that information.

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Charities Aid Foundation Conference

Attended the CAF Conference on Corporates and Communties yesterday. Corporate Community Investment is becoming quite a business in many senses. So much so that the old fashioned moral righteousness is being edged out – which could be a shame! It’s clearly a good idea for companies to see what sort of a business case there is for investing in ways that provide a win-win. But Mark Kramer, for example, declared that he found the idea of companies having a duty to invest in communites ‘difficult’.

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Teaching business sustainability

I seem to be increasingly asked to teach or develop courses on aspects of sustainability these days. So I looked at Chris Galea’s book.

Why is so much sustainabiltiy training so intellectual? It seems to me that emotional resisitance to change – or commitment to the current order is the central problem. Only Molly Brown and Joanna Macy’s chapter in the book seem to come near to the problem.

How can a proper ‘ecopsychology’ be integrated into the business world?

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Corporate Virtue is its Own Reward

The Co-Op has admitted it made mistakes in the way it has been managing its corner shops – and this, rather than increased competition, led to poor sales. Instead of knocking the Co-Op, the conclusion in this Guardian article is that it is likely to recover commercially from its problems sooner as the result of its honesty, compared with Sainsbury’s which is not being so honest.

Why do most companies persist with the more usual, PR-based, approach to corporate disclosure, which is to insist that everything is just about perfect just about all the time…?

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What is the responsibility of a company in a time of war?

Do companies have a special responsibility in a time of war? Or should they simply keep their heads down, hoping to make a bit of money – or just get out?