The Times, Jul 2008
There’s nothing like an economic downturn for sharpening thinking. Because when times are tight and budgets are being cut, every investment and outlay has to really and truly prove its worth. It’s a great way of separating the wheat from the chafe.
Which is exactly what the discipline of corporate responsibility needs.
Because everything that’s done in its name that is poorly thought-through, non-strategic and superficial will be eliminated. If it’s just a ‘nice-to-have’ it’s not going to happen any longer.
And, in the long term, we’ll be left with corporate responsibility done right.
We’ll be left with an effective and ever-increasingly essential business process which enables companies to identify which social and environmental issues matter most to their particular business and work out how to address them.
The financial services sector is a great case in point.
An effective CR process for any financial services organisation in the past couple of years would, through systematic research with all core stakeholders, have identified a handful of key social, environmental and ethical issues which posed a risk to the business. Right up at the top? Responsible lending. Defined as how the organisation determines who to lend to and how much to lend (concerned consumers rank objective financial advice above all else in our survey this month). You certainly wouldn’t have seen anything about charitable donations in the top tier, and even carbon footprints would have come somewhere further down the list.
Fast-forward to today and the writing is emphatically on the wall.
When push comes to shove and the crunch hits, the value of real corporate responsibility actually becomes more, rather than less obvious and essential.
So just as social and environmental risks – and opportunities - certainly aren’t going anywhere (just ask any manufacturer of 4x4s), nor is effective corporate responsibility.
It’s the superficial puffery and fluff that will be left as a relic of flabbier economic times.
