CSR

CSR

1. Source of opportunity, innovation, competitive advantage

   • Some companies do not know what to do
     • Some responses have been neither strategic nor operational but cosmetic (PR, media)
       • Perceiving social responsibility as building shared value rather than as damage control or as a PR campaign will require dramatically different thinking in business

2. Risk of not complying

   • Lost of brand loyalty
     • Vehemence of stakeholder not necessarily signifies importance of issue
   • Attacks by activist/ boycott

3. Arguments for

   • Moral obligation
   • Sustainability
   • License to operate
   • Reputation
     • Companies who try to please stakeholders often find themselves coming up with ST defensive reactions which typically have minimal value to society & strategic benefit for company

4. Should benefit both society AND business to be successful

   • Essential guide for CSR is not whether a cause is worthy but whether it presents an opportunity to create shared value - benefit society, valuable to business

5. 3 categories of social issues

   • Generic social issues
   • Value chain social issues
   • Social dimension of competitive context

6. Creating a corporate social agenda

   • Looks beyond community expectations to opportunities to achieve both social and economic benefits
   • Strategic CSR
     • Most significant impact
     • Greatest business benefits
     • Moves beyond responsive CSR
     • About doing things differently from competitors in a way that lowers costs or better service a particular set of customer needs
     • Opportunities for shared values
       • Unlocks shared value by investing in social aspects of context that strengthen company competitiveness
         • The success of the company and the success of the community becomes mutually reinforcing
       • More closely tied a social issue is to the company’s business, the greater the opportunity to leverage the firm’s resources and capabilities, and benefit society
       • Addressing social issues by creating shared value will lead to self-sustaining solutions that do not depend on private or government subsidies
       • Not only able to foster economic and social development but to change the way companies and society think about each other
     • Organisations that make the right choices and build focused, proactive, and integrated social initiatives in concert with their core strategies will increasingly distance themselves from the pack
   • Responsive CSR
     • Acting as a good corporate citizen
       • Creates goodwill
       • Improve relations with govt/ other important institutions
     • Mitigating existing/ anticipated adverse effects from business activities
       • An operational challenge