State of US CSR conference, June 28-29 New York

Readers, excuse the advert, but the blog is free so commercially-related messages are sometimes inevitable. This may also be of interest I hope.

If you are based in the US, and would like to meet some of the leading players in sustainable business, we're bringing them together on June 28-29 to debate some of the most important topics.

• How to embed CSR in your organisation with a focus on getting buy in from employees that yields real behaviour change

• How to work with NGOs, industry associations and even competitors to enhance CSR and sustainability

• What Rio+20 meant for business: Significant announcements and trends will be analysed

• How to make progress towards a robust and ethically sourced supply in the wake of Dodd Frank Act and California Transparency in Supply Chains law.

• The business case in numbers for social investment and community outreach: The material benefit of social investment initiatives such as education investment in the local community

• How to start to engage consumers on sustainability and deliver real behaviour change

On June 28-29 in New York, We'll be discussing all this with some of the leading figures in US responsible business, such as:

Dave Stangis, VP of CSR and Sustainability, Campbell Soup
Cristina Amorim, VP of Environmental Health Safety and Citizenship, Life Technologies
Mark Newton, VP Corporate Responsibility, Timberland
Kindley Walsh Lawlor, VP of Social and Environmental Responsibility, GAP
Beth Shiroishi, VP of Sustainability & Philanthropy, AT&T
Gabi Zedlmayer, VP, Sustainability and Social Innovation, HP
Kathryn C. Brown, SVP Public Policy Development and Corporate Responsibility, Verizon

Find out more, here.

I hope some of you can join us.

What role for randomized testing in corporate social policy?

In this new book, "Uncontrolled", Jim Manzi suggests spending a lot more time testing social policies in controlled groups.

His argument is that Government fails to do this and so bases most decisions on guesstimates. Decisions that we all pay for the implementation and consequences of.

Manzi suggests, uncontroversially, that some businesses, in places, have mastered testing in certain areas.

Here's some of the Amazon description of the book:

"Jim Manzi argues that various methods have been attempted - except for controlled experimentation. Experiments provide the feedback loop that allows us, in certain limited ways, to identify error in our beliefs as a first step to correcting them.

This technique goes by many names in different contexts (randomized control trials, etc).

Randomized trials have shown, for example, that work requirements for welfare recipients have succeeded like nothing else in encouraging employment, that charter school vouchers have been successful in increasing educational attainment for underprivileged children, and that community policing has worked to reduce crime, but also that programmes which might be politically attractive, can often fail to attain their intended objectives.

Business leaders can also use experiments to test decisions in a controlled, low-risk environment before investing precious resources in large-scale changes"

Which makes me wonder whether this book might make valuable reading for executives in charge of social policy and corporate responsibility spending in large companies.

How much is randomized testing used in working out how community spend is best utilised, for example?

With large company spending on social and ever more localized financial policies going up in the current climate (and unlikely to decline), perhaps some testing might be in order?

My understanding is that current spending is not tested for and against in this way, in most large companies.

Using randomized testing is just another example of where standard smart business practices should be applied to social responsibility management.

I'll track the book down and report back if I can. Hopefully a podcast with the author is a possibility. More on it is here.

Any interest in an online course on sustainable business / CSR?

I'm thinking of setting up an online course on corporate responsibility, with guest speakers and experts from around the world taking part.

The content would be based on both the practical training / briefings that I do with large companies on a regular basis, and on my academic teaching at Birkbeck, University of London, where I teach working postgraduate students about corporate responsibility for nine weeks a year, plus research supervision.

I'm trying to work out what it would be worth to readers. Some questions for you all:

1) How much would you pay, say for a nine week online course, which was live on the web for three hours a week and then archived to listen to / read about at your leisure?

It would cover the full range of topics in CSR/sustainability: History of CR/Sustainability, stakeholder engagement, climate change, human rights, investment, etc, with one topic being tackled per week and lots of time for discussion.

It would be VERY focused on the latest developments and best corporate practices.

I'm thinking something like £50-99 for students, £99-150 for NGOs, and £250-350 for companies. Thoughts?

2) Would you pay for a monthly online briefing on the latest news and events in the field? Again it would have guest expert speakers, and it would be available at an annual fee. It would be perhaps webinar style, probably about an hour long, with Q&A time built in.

It could also be quarterly, but I get the feeling that four times a year is too few.

If that is of interest, what would it be worth to you? £200 per year, £500 per year?

It's hard to price these things, but I'd like to hear your thoughts in terms of interest and what kind of budget you'd assign to this.

Thanks for all and any comments, privately to my Gmail at tobiaswebb@gmail.com or as a comment on the blog.

Toby

CSR communications training in Brussels, May 24-25 2012

I'm leading a highly practical workshop explaining the do's and don'ts of internal and external communication on social responsibility in a few weeks time in Brussels.

I hope you can join us. It's very reasonably priced too. More the two days of training here.

The two day workshop will cover: Internal communications (Board/Managers), Employees, Media, NGOs and Suppliers.

The focus is on what the leading companies do, and how they measure and manage the issues.

The 20 or so company attendees will also spend much of the time working together in small groups to solve practical problems and dilemmas.

The objective is to provide practical ideas on how to best address the challenges of communication on social responsibility.

A lot of the attendees, but not all, will be retailers from around the EU.

More on the workshops, and how to register, is here.

Consumer activism, food prices and net trust in institutions

What, you may ask, have consumer activism, food prices and net trust in institutions got to do with each other?

Not that much, in many ways. But I think they are all nevertheless pretty interesting to look at and think about. Thanks to GlobeScan for the images/research.

(If you are reading this by email you may need to click on the post URL to view these, sometimes images are blocked in email)

After 1000 blog posts on corporate responsibility what have I learned?

This is the 1001th published post on this blog on sustainable/ethical business.

Counting guest posters, about 950 of them are mine.

What have I learned since the first post in October 2006?

Given the milestone, I thought I should try and write something slightly less trite than usual. At that, I may have failed, but here it is anyhow, the 1001st blog post. Cue the trumpets...

(If you look at the first post, you can see the blog was supposed to be a collaborative effort amongst writers around the world for Ethical Corporation. These days it's mostly just me, and a bit of Ethical Corp's indefatigable China editor, Paul French. I wonder if the failure of its joint approach says anything about the challenges of multi-stakeholder work. Maybe. Maybe not)

Anyhow, here's my quick-fire random thoughts, in the usual feverish fashion, about some of what I've tried to learn:

1. That communication is everything, but is so under-valued.
2. That if anything you say, write or infer can be misunderstood, it often will be.
3. That I should never assume anything.
4. That all you learn, as you learn, is how little you know, and can ever know. That spurs me on, oddly.
5. That speaking and writing in simple, plain English is incredibly important and often feels increasingly rare.
6. That good copy reads like you'd speak it, if only one was that articulate. 
7. That you have to check data/sources, just as you'd get three cost quotes. Stories are often just that.
8. That whilst first impressions count, they can easily be wrong.
9. That CEOs are not scary people: Just smart charmers or technocrats often with a vision that lifts them above others, or a track record of caution.
10. That everything in this field is more complicated than you think.
11. That reading ethics philosophy doesn't help understand what to do with the dilemmas that CSR throws up as much as you'd think.
12. That I don't enjoy managing people. Trying to enthuse them yes, but micro-management, no.
13. That the only thing that is sometimes consistent is a lack of consistency.
14. That Joesph Heller really did understand all the contradictions thrown up by capitalism and democracy when he wrote the world's greatest novel, Catch-22. 
15.  That being an eco/socio pessimist just makes you sad. If you can't be optimistic, you can at least be positive about solutions and our eventual ability to learn and adapt as a race.
16. That culture counts, more than anything, yet we hugely under-rate it.
17. That yes, we do live in a volatile world, but we should have some perspective: Recall the events of WWII or even the 1970's.  
18. That technology spreads faster than we can ever predict. Not that it will 'save' us, but it will help more than we currently give it credit for.
19. That we've only just started innovating on sustainability & business. So much more is to come.
20. That we may well be able to change consumer behaviour for the better once we actually put some serious resources behind it rather than messing around with label ideas and get stuck into incentives and story-telling.

 I think I'll stop there. 20 is a long list, even for me.

May 8th and 9th Conference on Competition, Collaboration and Culture Change

As some of you know we're holding our 11th annual Responsible Business Summit in London on May 8th and 9th. All blog readers are very welcome to join us.

Amongst the speakers will be:

John Brock, CEO, Coca-Cola Enterprises   
Paul Walsh, CEO, Diageo   
Ian Cheshire, CEO, Kingfisher   
Peter Rothwell, CEO, Kuoni Travel   
Stef Kranendijk, CEO, Desso

Plus lots of others. Our three themes in 2012 are Competition, Collaboration and Culture Change.

More on it all here. It's mostly going to be moderated discussion, with minimal powerpoint. Hope you can come along.

Anyone for a sustainability thriller?

Novels incorporating sustainability ought to be a rich vein of literature.

We've had "Solar" from Ian Mcewan, lots of Carl Hiaasen novels and a fair few others.

Even though the broadness of the subject ought to lend itself to novel writing, in practice a few of genre I have read haven't been particularly strong.

Hiaasen's books are funny, but often set in Florida and tend to be similar to each other.

This new book "Vapor Trails", at least from the Amazon reviews and sample, looks work investing £6 / $10 in.

Here's a bit of the blurb about it:

"Mason Burnside was the number two man at Splendid Oil, a company with a budget larger than most countries. His top spot came from years of leaving a path of personal and ecological destruction in his wake while fighting to meet market demand. Long time rival, CEO Jack Masterson, finds a way to topple Burnside as his signature project in Ecuador turns into an environmental disaster. Now Burnside is demoted and head of the company's token and toothless sustainability department...". (More here)

Some beach reading this summer perhaps. I've just bought the Kindle edition and will report back.

22 key sustainability challenges for Unilever

I''ve just come back from a conference on Unilever's Sustainable Living Plan progress on year on.

I did warn readers that this week is "Unilever week".

No other large company would get this many tweets or blog posts about it written by me.

But Unilever is the exception. No other company of its size has equivalent sustainability ambition. Unilever deserves our serious attention and congratulations.

Here's a podcast interview, no log-in needed, that I taped with the CEO Paul Polman last week.

Here are the 22 challenges that I heard discussed, many by senior company executives this morning.

I also know they are already working on many of these. But there's of course a long long way to go.

So here goes, in no particular order:

        External:

1. Palm Oil: Unilever may well need to move beyond the RSPO and GreenPalm certificates (like carbon offsets). This is because it may become obvious that not enough forest will be left by 2020 to make the current approach and "no deforestation" targets credible a few years down the line from today.
   
2. Consumer behaviour change / Engaging citizens in altering habits. We have to tell ourselves that it can be done. Evidence to date shows business has not yet been smart enough to get this right. There are a million miles to go here. But what an opportunity.
   
3. B2B Sustainability collaboration: Getting retailers and logistics companies / traders on board. How far can/should Unilever push them to raise their game (GreenPalm certificate take up by other large companies being a good example of this) Here's a good example of what the company is already doing.
4. Persuading Governments to think long term, or even beyond the next election cycle. Paul Polman co-chaired the World Economic Forum this year: Can he push WEF to push Governments harder? (I asked him about that in this podcast last week)
5. Lobbying Governments in the short term: How far can Unilever push Mexico's Government on land titles for women famers in Southern Mexico, for example? (Female farmers improve yields, cut impacts)
6. Encouraging NGOs to collborate and focus. Yes this will be like herding cats, but serious efforts must be made. Liberia has 400 NGOs, including a landmine NGO in a country with no landmines. Big players will have to help with better co-ordination, tough job though it will be.
7. Working out how to help smallholder farmers run better businesses in a sustainable way.
8. Making boundary decisions: Should an FMCG company run an agricultural bank? If yes, where does that end in terms of operational spread? Should it?
9. Talking about the water impacts of increased handwashing due to Lifebuoy campaigns.
10. Turning shower timers into a commercial business
11. Investing in emerging economies and helping them move up the value chain (Using the latest £100m Indonesian processing plant investment news as the platform for further profitable investments)
12. Funding serious research and start ups who can show us where the business models of the future will come from outside of Unilever's direct work
    
    Internal:
13. Bringing marketers and brand managers on board: Moving from 'consumers' to 'users' as a paradigm.
    
14. Maintaining standards as the company grows (China for example).
15. Adjusting buying and procurement practices across the board further to support sustainability goals.
16. Allowing more constructively challenging stakeholder voices to be seen/heard internally.
    
17. Making difficult decisions about whether or not to sell unsustainable/unhealthy products in the face of internal opposition.
18. Using the right language: Not talking about RSPO / GreenPalm as 'sustainable' but 'more sustainable'. Not describing recycled plastic as 'biomass' when it is waste.
19. Shifting towards integrated reporting and making the communications of both areas unified and 'sticky'.
20. Setting criteria for losing ('unrecruiting' as Paul Polman puts it) employees when their values do not match those of the plan.
21. Getting the new Chief Sustainability Officer up to speed and accepted.
22. Taking sustainability in Research and Development to the next level: Disclosing progress and IP on closed loop thinking for new and existing products.

I'm sure I've missed a few. I'm equally sure readers of this blog may have a few thoughts to add in the comments section.

Interesting announcements from Unilever tomorrow

If you are looking for soundbites, stats and real corporate progress this week on sustainability, you'll get it in spades tomorrow and the next day from Unilever.

Remember this is the company with the most ambitious business plan in the world on sustainability.

I met the CEO Paul Polman last week and he said, "it's not a plan, it's a business strategy". Nice.

More on that in the forthcoming May edition of Ethical Corporation magazine, which will be a doozy.

Double the business and halve the impact is one headline. There are plenty of others.

I've seen the results, a year into their ten year journey, and I have to say they are pretty good.

I imagine the updates will be posted on this page, perhaps by the time you read this tomorrow.

Having said that, I expected them to be. Year one is not the tough year. Years three, four, five and six on the other hand, will be a lot tougher.

The consumer conundrum will take years to tackle, if it can be done at all. On other areas, progress is fairly impressive.

For the detail on what's going well, and what's going not so well, you'll have to wait until tomorrow.

There's a marathon online conference to join too, that will be worth a look.

I can tell you this is a good week for sustainable business and corporate responsibility.

There's enough in Unilever's results so far to cheer you up, and god knows we all need that sometimes in this field.

I'm pretty confident there will be enough positive and solid discussion that the online debate / discussion will be worth joining.

In the past Unilever's stakeholder voices have all been a bit too friendly, in my view.

Let's see what happens this time around. We all need more help than we might think we do.

There are some tough questions thrown up by the results for all of us to discuss in detail where the company is struggling: And most importantly, what some of the solutions might be.

They need your help to tackle some of this too.

Here's where to go to get involved

Corporate responsibility trends and leadership in 2012

Following on from my last post on random global trends that matter for sustainable business, here are some corporate responsibility-specific ones:

CR trends in 2012:

Integrated reporting: Combining financial and non-financial/sustainability information: Will it take hold and make a difference? Not clear as yet. Some leading companies ARE pushing CR data via the CFO to drive integration.

John Ruggie's work: Ruggie's Framework for Business and Human Rights now provides a genuinely workable framework for companies, governments and others on human rights as a management discipline

New standards and more in-depth Guidelines are being developed and used by companies: ISO 26,000, IFC Performance Standards, OECD Guidelines, Global Reporting Initiative etc

Investor coalitions are increasingly demanding data on water alongside carbon. (CDP / CERES)

In 2011 the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development released biz standards to measure, report & manage carbon emissions in supply chains and throughout product life cycles through Greenhouse Gas Protocol

Ethical Corporation research shows large companies pushing transparency and data requirements into Tier One suppliers: Energy, Carbon, Water top areas of interest, alongside supply chain audit fraud and resilience.

Ethical Corporation Research shows progressive companies are prioritising the following areas:

- Energy and resource efficiency
- Supply chain resilience
- Data gathering and collation in the business and down the supply chain
- Re-assuring and enthusing employees and customers
- Being more and more transparent with investors, stakeholders and governments.
- Constantly re-iterating the business case and selling internally
- Natural capital, biodiversity, habitat offsetting, even species trading, are all coming up the agenda slowly, but will accelerate as knowledge grows…Look at how work on climate change accelerated…

The leading companies are making a serious contribution to areas of public debate: Climate change, animal welfare, water use, supply chain standards etc etc, in a few different ways:

1) Engaging sustainability experts on key areas of debate to learn and share (PepsiCo Roundtables)

2) Engaging young people / the next and new generations on sustainability (Unilever and One Young World)

3) Working with media and membership organisations to promote innovative ideas (Accenture, Ethical Corporation)

4) Supporting progressive plans and ideas from Government and contributing to them (Davos)

5) Working on public campaigns to drive behaviour change and encourage consumer efficiency (M&S, Unilever, Anglian Water)

The leading companies in a recent experts survey were:

Unilever
Interface
GE
Patagonia
Walmart
Marks & Spencer
Natura
Nike
Novo Nordisk
Siemens
Toyota
IBM
Nestlé

What have they all got in common?

Buy in, a plan, and resources. That obviously matters. Many other factors are in play, but those three matter most.

Ten global trends and issues relevant for sustainable business

Having spent an hour with Unilever's CEO Paul Polman yesterday, (what a terrible name dropper I am, but it was fascinating) tonight I'm going to talk to 30 or so executives from a major UK retailer about sustainability trends and what they could mean for them.

I've got a number of presentations on trends around the world, and what rising issues mean for business strategy and operations.

So for tonight's talk I boiled them down to ten below that might be helpful, if perhaps a little obvious and a bit random.

Anyway, here they are, for what they are worth, which may not be much:

1) Governments are increasingly unable to tackle problems which are often clearly beyond their control. (energy, food) They are looking to business to be more solution than problem, and quickly.

2) UK Government is clearly in confusion about green incentives: FiTs, green tariffs, green deal, the CRC, Renewable Heat Incentive, have all faltered. Chinese, US and French Governments are somewhat paralyzed by election fever / regime change.

3) Business is increasingly expected to step in and make a serious consistent contribution to solving social and environmental issues.

4) Rio Earth Summit 2012 is unlikely to see major Govt action, but may be significant for business announcements and partnership commitments.

5) China’s latest Five Year Plan: Shift towards resource efficiency will be a game changer.

6) China’s middle class: Important to remember in China it is People vs. Govt more than People vs. Business. The dynamics are often very different indeed.

7) What can 400mn Chinese ‘soccer mom’ types mean for sustainability and consumer engagement? Rising wealth in Brazil, India and the CIVETS is also very significant opportunity for brands to engage on sustainability.

8) Fukushima and the recent UK debacle over investment criteria could be a major nail in the coffin of nuclear as a transition technology. Given the German ‘political’ decision it’s a distinct possibility.

9) Trust in institutions is wavering: Media for example. Big brands have an opportunity to win trust as a result.

10) Emerging market governments are becoming much more confident and a LOT more demanding on business: Reputation really matters as the landscape can change very quickly.

I've got quite lot more than this in various presentations, updated quarterly. Happy to come and discuss these with company teams and departments.

When it comes to alternative capitalism, is scale the un-asked question?

In preparation for starting to read Tim Jackson's book Prosperity without Growth, I've been watching his TED talk from a couple of years ago.

What worries me about this talk, given more people watch talks like this than read books like his, is the paucity of practical solutions within them.

Jackson talks of creating "an economics fit for purpose". This is about "a more meaningful and less materialistic society". Fine, I get that. On board. No problem.

He also talks of the need to create "community spaces to learn and collaborate".

Definitely agree. One of the reasons I created a media and events business and a stakeholder research/engagement company I suppose.

And living though the development of certain parts of London in recent years we can see that trend taking hold. It's great to see and experience. (Despite the slightly sterile design of modern community spaces in the city)

But his talk linked above, as with so many, seems to present the alternative choices without discussing how they reach scale to the point where they make a substantive difference.

I will gladly offer a mea culpa if I am wrong, but the Amazon reviews of the book appear to reflect this.

Search for "scaling social enterprises" on Google, and the top fifteen or so links don't show many solutions. That's a worry.

The options for more sustainable change seem to be, according to many who talk about reforming capitalism between:

Corporations
Governments
Community Interest Companies
B Corporations (More on these, here)
Social Entrepreneurs
NGOs
Public institutions

All discussed, of course, with longer term investment cycles and new technology investment and roll-out thrown in.

What no-one I have seen, has so far addressed, leaving aside finance and technology for a moment, is how and whether social entrepreneurs, B Corporations and Community Interest Companies can reach scale. This video tries, but doesn't address historic challenges of scale.

Currently Patagonia, a small but very sustainably-minded outdoor clothing firm, is the largest B Corporation out there.

Does this matter, when so much of GDP and jobs in most countries comes from small business?

I think it might: Given how powerful large companies are and their commensurate ability to raise cash and roll out products and services at scale.

The key question to address is whether social entrepreneurs, B Corporations and Community Interest Companies can be managed to scale. Are they to be replicated in two dozen cities / communities and beyond, or should they simply grow larger?

As someone who teaches on a Corporate Governance MSc, I've seen the historic literature that suggests that stakeholder-managed businesses struggle hugely with scale, lacking as they do the advantages of command and control capitalism.

Even European and Asian corporate governance models utilise those advantages of more simple decision making and ability to raise capital.

It's not unique to Anglo-Saxon companies or markets.

So if our future does depend on the nascent forms of new companies, from social entrepreneurs, B Corporations and Community Interest Companies, is scale a challenge we need to talk about?

And what do we mean by scale: Growth in organisational size or the ability to be replicated quickly? I'd suggest the latter is more likely.

Perhaps this question is something we ought to address urgently, alongside our constant conversations around technology, it's roll-out and subsidies, and our long overdue hand wringing over short term financial markets. (who are often driven by the pension funds some of us depend on)

All this is not to say that newer forms of more sustainable capitalist models mentioned above cannot overcome the challenges that stakeholder managed companies such as the Body Shop or GM's Saturn brand faced.

But we need to be talking about scale, both as a challenge and opportunity, rather than simply getting excited about new models.

How do we take these organisations from 5 to 50 to 500 people to 5000 or 50,000 people? Or do we create 50 companies of 500 people instead, all doing similar work, just in different places?

Surely questions worth asking, that need discussion and research.

Of course, I am now open to the criticism I levied at others at the top of the post: More challenges than solutions. So here's a few solutions:

1) Let's map which academics have tracked which differing models of success have worked, and highlight their work so it is not lost in unread, unreadable papers (Any of us could do this) Here's perhaps one example.

2) Let's put smart young researchers on breaking down the challenges of scale and working out what the solutions are. These can be qualitatively researched AND crowdsourced (A job for SRI firms, academics and media outlets, surely?) We need a lot more detail than this, for example.

3) Let's set some targets and reward alternative models that have demonstrated solutions to scale issues from within. (Create a foundation-funded or corporate-funded prize perhaps?)

4) Let's start holding public events and getting these key messages around beating the challenge of scale to business people, entrepreneurs, students, investors, governments and anyone else who will listen.

I'm happy to support any efforts however I can, through dissemination in Ethical Corporation, my newer business and my work at Birkbeck at the School of Management.

I may be able to have students look at this problem as research projects in 2012/13.

What will you do?

And now, once I have finished the latest Jo Nesbo novel, I shall get on with reading Tim Jackson's book, and in a week or so, report back on any further insight, or how I should have held my tongue...

Are more and more CR and sustainability folks moving East?

Is it me, or are more and more of your professional contacts taking jobs in Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, Bangkok and the like?

Between a friend and I we recently worked out that we knew more than a dozen CSR and sustainability professionals who have taken jobs in the cities above.

Of course, the whole "the West is on the slide, East is the future" argument is playing a role here.

One mid-level manager told me he just couldn't see enough opportunities to make it worth staying in Europe compared with opportunities out there.

We're seeing the rising wealth, plus concerns about supply chain resilience and market access, driving these changes. Also, the big consultancies are hiring, presumably in advance of, or perhaps because of, demand. That's definitely playing a role.

Also, I may be wrong, but from what I hear, the money being offered here and in Europe, given costs, is not particularly impressive:

80K for a senior CSR manager in a pharma company. 100K plus bonus/benefits for a Government and Stakeholder relations job in a mining firm. (Needing 15 years+ experience, that's not very good money)

In many ways this shift to the East is a good thing. I've always looked upon the whole 'rebalancing' debate in a positive way.

It's about time, globally speaking, more wealth was shared out.

Of course that has serious ramifications for the environment as we know.

That's the problem.

It's also a good thing because for far too long Asia has lagged the West in perceptions of who leads on corporate sustainability. Just look at the same old names that came up again in a recent survey.

It would be nice to think this new wave of managers and heads of CR can deliver some leadership from Asian-based companies.

Of course, it's much more complicated than that as we all know. Culture, media, NGOs and civil society demands matter as much as wealth for companies to move forward on sustainability.

But it's clearly a good sign for the 'movement' / profession / general progress, that we are seeing this shift.

From the 6000 or so of you that regularly read this blog, I'd like to know if US-based readers have noticed any similar such trends. I'd expect it to be less, but then I could well be wrong about that.

Three lessons to start the week from Peter Drucker

According to the entrepreneur and thinker Bob Buford, Peter Drucker told him three important things in the area of philanthropy:

1) Build on health and success.

2) Work only with receptive people. (Enthuse optimists rather than convert cynics)

3) Go big or go home.

Seems to me those lessons apply beyond philanthropy.

Food for thought as I type this post twenty minutes from a new Monday.

Why R&D and design are now firmly a responsible business issue

Sandblasting of clothes, particularly denim, and the effects on human health was one of the campaigns last year to affect big brand retailers.

This was alongside Greenpeace's largely successful Detox efforts.

But if the Clean Clothes Campaign's latest document on the issue of sandblasting is right then the problem has not yet gone away.

Research and development practices and particularly design considerations ought be be firmly on the consumer brand agenda as a responsibility issue now.

Here's why:

Fibre2Fashion reports the CCC as discovering that:

"One factory owner stated that it was impossible to produce some of the designs requested without the use of sandblasting. Indeed workers told researchers that they are told to switch to using sandblasting, even if a buyer has said it is not be used, if they are too close to production deadlines. Others stated that production was often carried out at night to avoid detection by inspectors and auditors."

Let's agree to leave aside the limits of audits versus helping factories run better businesses aside for a moment.

This sandblasting issue is a classic case of where we now see social and environmental issues colliding to help drive sustainable thinking much further back up the corporate value chains.

That's a good thing without doubt.

Companies seeking to be pro-active in managing these risks could do a lot worse than look to the work done over many years by Nike on this issue.

Others I know about include Interface, Desso, Patagonia, P&G, Unilever, Natura, M&S, Seventh Generation, Ecover and Timberland.

Meanwhile the Sustainability Consortium may be set to play a key role here. Their challenge, as with all such groups, is not to become mired in what I call "lowest common denominator syndrome". To think about that another way: an army marches at the pace of it's slowest soldier.

For anyone interested in meeting experts and discussing these issues, Ethical Corporation is hosting a session on exactly this topic on May 8th in London. See more about it here. Companies involved include Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson, Interface and Deckers Outdoor.

And on May 24/25 in Brussels, I'll be leading some discussions with a variety of retailers on how we build support in businesses to tackle these issues. More on that is here.

CEOs, corporate responsibility and the three C's of sustainability

If you had to boil down the modern sustainability agenda into three words, what could they be?

For the leading companies, but also firms starting the journey, I think you could do worse than consider three simple ways to frame an approach:

1) Competition
2) Collaboration
3) Cultural Change

Competition is about the business case. Saving money through efficiency, making returns by isolating new opportunities, building trust from stakeholders and customers. It's not simply about beating your rival: That matter less in sustainability than beating your own targets and bettering your own performance.

There are lots of examples of this. Here's some research that shows it works.

And here's an interview with the Desso CEO who has done some very interesting work transforming a business around sustainability.

Collaboration is all about working with suppliers, communities, competitors, industry groups, governments, NGOs and inter-governmental organisations to manage risk and look for new areas for the competition category. Here's a good example of this in the postal sector, and in an airport operator. (Disclosure, Heathrow is a customer of both Ethical Corporation and my other business, Stakeholder Intelligence). There are many others, including this one from Coca-Cola Enterprises.

Cultural change covers both internal and external engagement. Clearly one of the top three issues for any business is how to get the buy in, mentally and physically, of employees. That matters hugely, and has to come before in-depth consumer comunications.

But cultural change, or a variant, is going to become the new, more meaty way to talk about communication. Telling customers what you do is stage one, but persauding them to buy better products or act differently is where you start to become strategic. That's cultural change. Here's an example. And here's another one. And one more here, from Unilever.

There's a lot more to be said about all of this, but this is a blog, so I must keep posts fairly short.

You can meet the leading players mentioned above, and many others, at our big annual conference in a few weeks time in London. More info on that is here.

And you can read about all this, as it happens, in this magazine. And I hope, sometimes on this blog.

Jeffrey Sachs sums up some modern challenges...

If you can't view the video below, click here.

Sachs makes two points:

1) Power and wealth means people are more likely to cheat to hold onto it or grow it. He cites a study, amongst others, that demonstrates this tendency.

2) Wall Street titans still don't really understand what they did wrong.

Technology and accountability driven by transparency may help with the first issue.

On the second, only showing these kinds of people the real life consequences of their actions will make a difference, given regulation won't do it.

A role for someone such as Bill Clinton etc.

Here's the three minute video:

Five things about lists of five things

1) Five is the new ten.

2) All bloggers are obliged by blogging law to produce short lists of blatant truisms on a regular basis or face fines.

3) Readers are complicit: numerical lists get lots of reads, often more than other posts.

4) You must get to a clear number. Anywhere between three and twelve is the general rule. Five is by far the favourite. Who could concentrate further?

5) Social media means the pressure is on to write less and less: the ultimate destination may be "one thing about one thing".

So perhaps twitter one liners are the future. Let us hope not. What would Samuel Pepys say?

Is there a role for text surveys in stakeholder engagement?

Not many people enjoy telephone surveys, particularly those with numeric answers.

I gave up taking part in them some years ago after requests grew to several a week and I found the donations to charity offered declining and sometimes not even made.

The biggest challenge was the time they took. You knew when the interviewer, who usually knows little about the subject, says 15-20 minutes it's often more like 35.

So are there quicker and easier and cheaper ways to get feedback beyond measuring the often thoughtless and wild comments bandied about in social media?

Are there ways to make stakeholders think about the answer a little harder than they would when tweeting or commenting on a Facebook page?

Very possibly.

Doing so is simply about using technology in a smart way.

Despite the myriad problems that exist with quantitative research methodologies generally (here's a good book on some qual/quan methods that can work) numbers, where we can use them to provide some guidance, do matter, even in the field of corporate sustainability.

I heard recently from someone with an ecology Phd that carbon emissions, along with many other pollutants, cannot actually be properly measured, in that there is a +20% / -20% margin of error. I'm looking into that further.

Despite science not sometimes being exact, data hits home, and so we are all under pressure to produce it, even on very subjective matters like how we feel about a company or organisation.

The mobile firm 02, owned by Telefonica, recently sent me a very simple customer survey which I could respond to, in seconds, via free text message.

It's not perfect by any means (how does one pick 2 out of 5 rather than 3 when responding?).

But it gave me pause for thought: Could this technology be utilised for a little more than basic customer satisfaction surveys? How about a targeted survey to a set stakeholder group, with a donation confirmation to follow?

I don't know of any company doing this with sustainability/reputation/trust research in mind, beyond the simple examples below, but it strikes me it's certainly worth thinking about.

For business, is it worth going to Rio+20?

It's easy to be cynical about international sustainability meetings.

Lots of talk, lots of commitments, but generally little follow through.

Who remembers today Rio 1992's 'Agenda 21', which looks just as relevant today - and just as unimplemented.

On this basis, the signs don't look that great for Rio +20.

A lot of business people I know are not going as they feel it's just not worth the time and effort.

There'll be little or no access to the main government discussion forum, (reportedly) tens of thousands of participants, and a jamboree of events spread all over the host city (which is engaging in a bit of price-gouging, to make sure someone benefits...).

Overall there seems a lot less impetus behind it than in 2002 and 1992.

I'm hearing this from several well placed sources.

It's clear to everyone that from a political leadership point of view, not a lot will happen.

The Obama administration has apparently described it as "aspirational". Although that quote is from Fox news so bear that in mind.

Put this down to governmental preoccupation with financial crises or unwillingness to tell the voters that the 20th Century business model is nearing its end and resolve to pioneer a new 'green industry' one, as companies like Unilever are doing.

So a replay of the Durban climate meeting last year looks pretty likely.

On the business side it does of course represent a considerable opportunity to showcase solutions, progressive thinking and the potential of collaboration to drive sustainable change.

Since Johannesburg a leadership group of companies has emerged and are taking on the challenges outlined in Agenda 21.

More's the pity that governments and industry associations aren't supporting these moves more strongly.

For example the Business Action for Sustainable Development (Who? I hear you ask) website's main homepage article on it dates from January. Not a great sign.

A key question is what will the WBCSD do at Rio+20 in June?

The new boss, Peter Bakker, is a former TNT CEO and an impressive figure.

Mandatory reporting? No

On the reporting and transparency side of things, there is a small body of NGOs (Green Economy Coalition), business (Aviva) and standards developers (GRI, IIRC) and others pushing for recognition of the need for more and better sustainability reporting, with some calling for a 'report or explain' position for bigger companies.

Cold water is diplomatically being poured on this from on high by many larger developing countries and some OECD ones (US, Canada, Australia), this is notwithstanding that most of their bigger companies already do some form of sustainability reporting, and that the 2002 Johannesburg Summit specifically encouraged more non-financial reporting.

One more example of governments going into short-term thinking, and long term denial, mode.

The UN

From the UN side, I hear that when it comes to business partnerships and collaborations, there's lots of recognition of the problems, but capacity/ability for the follow through is not where it could be.

Inter-agency co-ordination is improving but remains a key challenge, as does mobilizing governmental funding.

According to one source I spoke to at the UN in February, lots of bilateral partnerships are set to be announced, with a 'target' of 1000 already set.

The vibrant Brazilian NGO scene is set to be very active. Although how relevant any of that will be for outside of Brazil is not clear to me yet.

I do know that quite a few senior heads of CR / SD are going from the really big companies. I suppose they feel they have to, and no doubt some will make announcements at the summit, which will help generate some headlines and build recognition for hard won leadership and progress.

That’s all fine. But it’s not making me allocate £3K+ from any of the budgets I work with to going along to hear about them, not to mention the time needed to go.

For heads of sustainability in big corporates, it may well be worth going along though. If your firm operates in South America, it may be useful for networking.

Even if not, and your firm is really multi-national, it may be worth it for the connections. It is a risk though.

This is perhaps despite the not-very-inspiring agenda of the struggling UN Global Compact conference taking place on June 15-18 in Rio. That's not making me jump on a plane.

Here's a further link so you can take a look and make up your own mind.

Communications training workshops: Brussels, 24-25 May

For any readers interested in meeting up for training, discussion, scenario planning and crisis / dilemma solving workshops around sustainability, this link might be of interest.

Through our new company, Stakeholder Intelligence, we've been working with the Business Social Compliance Initiative, to deliver training and discussion sessions for retail companies.

The next set of training workshops are on May 24 and 25 in Brussels. Blog readers are welcome to join us.

The other attendees are generally large and medium sized European retailers.

We spend day one discussing internal communications on CSR/sustainability.

This includes best practice in two way employee communications, engaging middle and line/unit managers and senior executives / the board.

The structure is based around best practice presentations and then small group work to solve problems and create action plans and to do lists to take back to the office.

Day two is similar, but with a focus on engaging suppliers, NGOs, and the media.

If you'd like to join us, it's only 400 Euros for two days. Now there's a bargain.

The slides I use represent quite a lot of condensed information on best practice, and the dilemmas we work through are real-life problems that companies face every day.

Here's the link for more information on how to sign up. Hope to see you there.

The vendor/client relationship in real world situations

This video is a couple of years old, but somehow, may still seem quite relevant to many of you out there.

If you've ever been involved in business negotiations, it will definitely make you smile. What more can you ask for on a monday?

Embedded below. The link is here.