CSR Blogs

It’s been a heck of a year for the Ladies. We have declared ourselves at war – with the status quo and with the state of our second-class citizenship in politics, business, finance, religion, social, sexual and civil rights.

Recently, I spoke with the manager of a large telecommunications company in the US. The company publicly boasts a healthy and active employee volunteering program, claiming a 200% growth in participation over the past 4 years. Needless to say, I wanted to learn more about it.

During the call, I discovered several things:

1. The company offers NO paid time for volunteering.

Remember the kids who took apart broken machines--tape recorders, telephones, cuisinarts--in order to experiment with building machines? I knew one who invented a tooth fairy detector. Well, if those child inventors want to tinker when they get to college and graduate school, The Lemelson Foundation wants to make sure that they have the help they need to create new technologies that will save lives and preserve the environment.

Who is Julian Assange: An ethical capitalist, a protagonist for corporate social responsibility, a new-age Gandhian, or an anarchist and a menace to society?

Take a look, for example, at this from his interview with Forbes: "You could call it the ecosystem of corruption. But it's also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that's not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they're fulfilling their own self-interest. The way they talk about it."

Imagine sitting around your holiday table discussing which project each member of the family chose for theirGlobalGiving contribution. Because you gave each of them a gift card for $25, and they went online to choose from a plethora of options. Or, imagine giving gift cards to your employees, and they're sitting around a pizza at lunch discussing the projects they chose.

"Alice, I'm at the airport heading to Chicago to my first board meeting. What do I need to know?" asked my friend Paul last week. Paul's a successful Wall Street executive, 42, who recently joined the national board of a major nonprofit. I knew that Paul had already participated in a board orientation. And we had discussed his board service a couple of times. This call was for last minute pointers.

What would you do if you suddenly found yourself with $1 million and a directive to give half away and keep the other half?

Vikram Pandit, CEO of the once dead-in-the-water global banking firm Citigroup has staged a comeback that is sure to be the envy of his financial industry colleagues. So greatly is he admired that only a few months ago he was named Euromoney’s “Banker of the Year.” That’s not a joke. Why? Because, “He did a pretty good job,” states Euromoney.

Often when we talk about corporate social responsibility, we assume people are talking about “the big dogs” – companies like Proctor and Gamble, Nestle, Coca-Cola, and of course Walmart.

And certainly these powerhouses dictate a lot of what gets discussed, watched, and measured, if only because of their sheer scale and impact on the global business community.

But what about companies that don’t fit into the same tiers as these big players? What does sustainability or CSR look like for small and medium-sized businesses?

“Purpose is now the fifth P of marketing. It’s a vital addition to the age-old marketing mix of product, price, place, and promotion,” said Mitch Markson, chief creative officer, Edelman, and the founder of Edelman goodpurpose.