Why It's Time to Kill Corporate Responsibility

18 Jun 2010 – Jennifer Biringer

In a meeting with a new potential client last week I was confronted with a challenge: what to call a new program that will guide the company’s new corporate responsibility (CR) strategy. My answer? Don’t form a separate department at all.

The rationale behind CR programs, strategies, department and staff, and conferences of course is to develop the groundswell necessary to give a movement traction. Give something a name and it becomes reality the thinking goes. And yet, we currently see ‘CR leaders’ – those who have been tolling away at the CR game for the better part of a decade or more – have not truly succeeded in embedding sustainability principles into corporate business models. Instead CR has become the proverbial step-child, even if that step-child has enjoyed recent attention.

This is not a new idea, but one which I think we are finally ready to embrace. ‘Responsibility’ connotes obligation, which is usually not a sufficient motivator for the sort of transformative change we need in order to achieve more socially and environmentally prosperous societies. Even sustainability may not do the trick – the idea of merely sustaining ourselves brings an image of treading water in my mind. Instead, we need to be thinking more in terms of regenerative systems – ones that not only meet social needs and work within ecological system boundaries but also produce a bounty to be shared. But I would not vote for a Regenerative Systems department either.

Instead, we will likely start seeing more ‘CR staff’ being embedded directly into core business units – reporting to CEOs, working within procurement, brand teams, and in government relations. Still absolutely essential but providing new forms of integrated guidance based in core business understanding, the structural changes would be significant. We would see companies taking on initiatives and reporting on these in their annual reports, and receiving accolades not as a ‘CR leaders’, but as a companies that are recreating themselves based on business need. Wal-Mart offers one example – having tackled sustainability issues with a clear business case and iteratively expanding efforts over time, all while more or less shirking the broader CR agenda. But future regenerative businesses will go much further than the efforts of Wal-Mart (which have to date mostly focused on gaining efficiencies). They will recognize that business need will increasingly be tied much more tightly than before to the social and ecological contexts that surround them and on which they rely. They will be more in tuned to these needs and use these as inspiration to design new platforms to service the world and themselves.