Corporate Social Opportunity!: Seven Steps to Make Corporate Social Responsibility Work for Your Business (Paperback)

We argue that this means that means that instead of Corporate Responsibility being treated as a bolt-on to business operations, it must be built-in to business purpose and strategy. We see CSR as an exciting source of creativity and innovation that can lead to innovation in products and services, access to new markets, and building new business models (how products are conceived, developed, marketed, distributed, financed, staffed etc) – the corporate social opportunities of the book’s title. We see corporate social opportunities as commercially attractive activities which also advance environmental and/or social sustainability.

As we have started to talk about CSO, we are excited to find more and more examples. Cemex, is the third largest cement company in the world, based in Mexico. Creative thinking has led them to invent a concrete mix with added anti-bacterial agent which means that when used for flooring in low cost housing projects for poorer communities, dwellings have built-in health protection; when used in hospitals and clinics, the treated concrete not only helps kill germs but also means less, expensive (and potentially polluting) cleaning agents have to be used. Vodafone have just established a whole new product and marketing department to explore products which have both commercial and social benefit.

A company may strike lucky and hit upon a specific CSO by accident. But if it is going to make a regular habit of finding profitable business activities which also advance environmental and social sustainability, it requires drills and tools such as open stakeholder dialogue and engagement that recognises the unique skills, capacities and capabilities of non-traditional corporate partners, invites their active collaboration and respects and rewards their contribution. And it requires values-based leadership that holds no truck with short-term expediency that undercuts relationships with consumers, suppliers and communities. In other words, the commitment has to be authentic – you can’t fake it!

Why should businesses which are authentic and have genuinely integrated CSR into their core and embedded it through the organisation, be better at finding and systemically exploiting CSOs? A commitment to responsible business and sustainable development creates more pressure to find new solutions — it makes the business more receptive to ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking. It makes the company more receptive to approaches from NGOs, governments and academia with ideas for collaboration. A company genuinely practising Corporate Responsibility is more likely to have eclectic and effective stakeholder engagement processes in place — so stakeholders will have better understanding of the company’s interests and areas of expertise and where it might be particularly open to new ideas. Outsiders will be more likely to have the company on their radar screen as a potential collaborator and consider it more open to what at first might seem ‘zany, crazy ideas.’ The company is less likely to have a ‘not invented here’ mentality — rather, it will engage in what Tom Peters called ‘creative swiping’, being open to ideas not just from other businesses but also from other sectors. There will be a corporate culture that is not only willing to work with others but also widely known and respected so that outsiders want to work with it. It is more likely to have the right mind-sets for fair and equitable collaboration with other sectors and partners. By understanding sustainability it will be more alert to opportunities as an integral part of keeping costs down and value up.

In Corporate Social Opportunity we have developed the Seven Step Model we originally presented in Everybody’s Business. To do so, we interviewed CEOs and other business leaders; used results from the Corporate Responsibility Index and developed a series of diagnostic tools and processes to help companies move from the "why" of corporate responsibility to the "how" and beyond. These diagnostic planning tools, all framed within the seven-step model, provide a practical guide to help business leaders and understand how to assess the impact of CSR on their core business strategy and operations and help them identify and prioritise between subsequent options and resulting business opportunities.

The seven steps we cover are: identify triggers, scope what matters, make the business case, commit to action, integrate and gather resources, engage stakeholders, and measure and report.

We have divided the book into two parts. In the first part, we explain each step in depth, illustrating with real-life examples. One reviewer has described this approach as "perhaps one of the strongest aspects of the book, as it provides a road map through what would otherwise be un-navigated territory for many readers." In the second part, we take a different tack to illustrate the seven steps in practice: we have invented a fictitious food company and describe its journey through the entire seven-step process. This approach provides a completely different kind of roadmap, one that scripts an entire hypothetical scenario instead of piecing together a collage of isolated real-world snapshots.

We include process forms that can act as blueprints for practitioners seeking to transform corporate social responsibility initiatives from risk mitigation exercises into corporate social opportunities. Greenleaf Publishing has posted blank versions of these process forms on its website to accompany the book in providing a complete toolset for encouraging CSO practice.

We hope that Corporate Social Opportunity will be read as much as a book about Business Strategy and Innovation as it is seen as a book about Corporate Social Responsibility. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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