Broken Promises: BP’s slide backwards into Promotional CSR

By Wayne Visser

Part 4 of 13 in Wayne Visser's Age of Responsibility Blog Series for 3BL Media.

By 2000, John Browne, then-CEO of BP, felt the company had earned enough sustainability kudos to risk a major rebranding. The company reportedly spent $7 million in researching the new ‘Beyond Petroleum’ Helios brand and $25 million on a campaign to support the brand change. When Browne justified the exercise by saying ‘it’s all about increasing sales, increasing margins and reducing costs at the retail sites’, perhaps more people should have tempered their expectations. Certainly Greenpeace wasn’t duped, concluding at the time that ‘this is a triumph of style over substance. BP spent more on their logo this year than they did on renewable energy last year’.

Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil (2008), was similarly sceptical, claiming that at its peak, BP was spending 4% of its total capital and exploratory budget on renewable energy and that this has since declined, despite Browne’s announcement in 2005 of BP’s plans to double its investment in alternative and renewable energies ‘to create a new low-carbon power business with the growth potential to deliver revenues of around $6 billion a year within the next decade.’

Sceptics notwithstanding, Browne had earned his new title as the ‘Sun King’ and his reputation was not only being earned with green stripes. BP was also one of the first companies to declare their support for the Publish-What-You-Pay campaign. But success or failure is all about timing. If Browne had been a politician and had retired in 2003 after two four-year terms of office, he may still have been covered in glory, with his Sun King crown firmly in place. After all, he had turned BP into an oil major – perhaps even a competitor for Exxon Mobil – by creating a lean, mean, green machine. Instead, he hung onto power long enough to face the consequences of his own legacy of cost-cutting and rhetoric. As a result, between 2004 and 2007, the proverbial chickens came home to roost. Browne was left tarred and feathered.

On 23 March 2005, when an explosion and fire at BP’s Texas City refinery killed 15 workers and injured more than 170 others. An investigation into the accident by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) ultimately found over 300 safety violations and fined BP $21 million – the largest fine in OSHA history at the time. In 2007, in a separate settlement related to the explosion, BP pleaded guilty to a violation of the federal Clean Air Act and agreed to pay a $50 million fine and to make safety upgrades to the plant. Two years later, in 2009, OSHA imposed an additional $87 million in fines, claiming that the company had not completed all the safety upgrades required under the agreement and alleging 439 new ‘wilful’ safety violations.

In March 2006, BP was found to be criminally liable for a corroded pipe on Alaska’s North Slope that leaked 200,000 gallons of oil. In August of the same year, another leak appeared and the entire Prudhoe Bay operation had to be shut down. During the investigation, a federal grand jury subpoenaed records from a Seattle engineering firm that had been hired by Alaska to evaluate BP's pipeline-maintenance record and uncovered a draft report that was highly critical of BP, but somehow turned into a final report that was largely complimentary. Member of Congress, Rep. Jay Inslee, concluded that BP had made a ‘wilful, conscious decision’ to ‘quash that information from the public’.

By the time of Browne’s undignified exit into the wings of BP history in 2007, he was widely criticised for the dual crimes of greenwashing and instilling a cost-cutting culture that was the root cause of BP’s spate of safety and environmental incidents. Even the new CEO, Tony Hayward, a year before taking over, admitted that BP had ‘a management style that has made a virtue of doing more for less.’

After taking over, Hayward quickly showed that he was not one for green rhetoric. Less than six months into the job, he announced BP’s plans to invest nearly £1.5bn ($2.3) to extract oil from the Canadian wilderness – the so-called Alberta tar sands – an action which earned it a Guardian newspaper headline as ‘the biggest environmental crime in history’. Greenpeace claims that it takes about 29kg of CO2 to produce a barrel of oil conventionally, but as much as 125kg for tar sands oil. It also believes the production threatens a vast forest wilderness, greater than the size of England and Wales, which forms part of one of the world’s biggest carbon sinks.

Two years later, Hayward’s apparent ‘back to the petroleum’ strategy gained momentum when BP announced that it had shut down its alternative energy headquarters in London, accepted the resignation of its clean energy boss and imposed cuts in the alternative energy budget - from $1.4bn (£850m) in 2008 to between $500m and $1bn in 2009. Bizarrely, Hayward used this occasion to stress that BP remained as committed as ever to exploring new energy sources. No wonder Grist journalist Joseph Romm responded with an incredulous rant: ‘Seriously, they gut the program and claim it is "reinforcement" of their commitment. Perhaps BP stands for "Beyond Prevarication" or "Beyond Pinocchio”.’

All of this history – the story of Browne, of Hayward and of BP – was like a dress rehearsal for the main event. I am referring of course to the catastrophic 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. That is covered in more detail in my book, The Age of Responsibility. For now, many questions remain unanswered: Will BP’s reputation recover? Will this prove to be the worst environmental disaster in history? Will we look back on the Macondo blowout as the inadvertent tipping point that ushers in a new low-carbon future? Students, professors and CSR wonks will study this case for years to come. But for the purposes of this blog, it is simply the latest drama in the BP saga – the story of a corporate leader in Strategic CSR, which managed to dethrone itself become a poster-company for Promotional CSR in an Age of Marketing.

About the author

Dr Wayne Visser is Founder and Director of the think-tank CSR International and consultancy Kaleidoscope Futures Ltd. He is the author of thirteen books, including The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business (2011), The World Guide to CSR (2010) and The A to Z of Corporate Social Responsibility (2010). He is the author of over 180 publications (chapters, articles, etc.) and has delivered more than 170 professional speeches on in over 50 countries in the last 20 years. In addition, Wayne is Senior Associate at the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, Visiting Professor of Sustainability at Magna Carta College, Oxford, and Adjunct Professor of CSR at Warwick Business School, UK.

Tracing Corporate Social Investment (CSI) Milestones in South Africa

By Greer Blizzard

2012 marks the eighteenth year of democracy for the ‘new’ South Africa – a country still navigating its way through the unique political, economic and social turmoil of its birth, while accepting the shortcomings inherent in its colonial and apartheid past.

Corporate Social Investment (CSI), a far more widely used and accepted term in the South African context, has been around for many years. As a broad concept it was introduced in 1972, when Meyer Feldberg called on local business leaders to support the communities that surrounded their operations and from where they drew the majority of their workforce.

Since then, this dynamic landscape has seen many challenges, yet continues to grow as cooperation between government, NGOs, the private-sector and individuals moves from confrontation to collaboration and responsibility – albeit a slow and far from perfect process.

In 1992, in an effort to support corporate South Africa, the Institute of Directors approached Professor Mervyn E. King to create a corporate governance solution for business. This resulted in the establishment of the King Committee on Corporate Governance, which in 1994 launched the first King Report that marked the institutionalisation of corporate governance in South Africa.

In 2002 the King II Report was published, which included a far-reaching section on integrated sustainability reporting, setting out specific reporting, accounting and auditing guidelines for non-financial matters. Although voluntary at the time, the Johannesburg Securities Exchange requested that listed companies comply with the King II Report recommendations, or explain their level of non-compliance. This subtle pressure was seen as a turning point in the formal life of CSI.

These shifts in the corporate world paralleled changes in the newly elected democratic government, with the intention of bridging the traditional economic gap between black and white South Africans. The first move saw the launch of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in 1994, followed by many transformations in an evolving effort to create a supportive, stable and economically profitable environment.

In 1996 the RDP was replaced with the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) macro-economic policy and further in 2000 by the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) commission, chaired by former politician and new leading black businessman Cyril Ramaphosa, which released a report highlighting the need to establish guidelines to ensure greater black participation in the economic future of the country.

This in turn led to a revised Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) Strategy, a precursor to the B-BBEE Act 53 of 2003. The period November 2005 to February 2007, saw three sets of B-BBEE Codes of Good Practice published, each setting various frameworks for the practical implementation of the B-BBEE Act, including a score-card system which supports the implementation of the following seven pillars:

1. Equity Ownership
2. Management
3. Employment Equity
4. Skills Development
5. Preferential Procurement
6. Enterprise Development
7. Residual Element/Corporate Social Investment

As a result of these two key legislative frameworks, the concept and application of Corporate Social Investment in South Africa, has become very closely aligned to the advancement of ‘black’ (African, Coloured and Indian) people and their more formal participation in the economy.

In 2014 when South Africa celebrates its 20th year of democracy, it will undoubtedly acknowledge the huge undertakings achieved and will most certainly highlight the steps going forward, as many more (listed) companies engage with Corporate Social Investment - not just as a ‘marketing add-on’, but as a fully integrated business strategy, giving it respected time on Board agendas.

Give a Man the Means to Fish

From Paternalistic Charity to Venture Philanthropy

Part 3 of 13 in Wayne Visser's Age of Responsibility Blog Series for 3BL Media.

By Dr Wayne Visser

Give a man a fish and he will eat today. Teach a man to fish and he will eat tomorrow – or until his nets break. Invest in a man’s fishing business and he will feed himself and others for a long time to come. This is what it means to shift from paternalistic charity to venture philanthropy. It is an evolution that is important to root in a long and varied cultural tradition of philanthropy.

Confucius (551-479 BC) said: ‘When wealth is centralized, the people are dispersed. When wealth is distributed, the people are brought together.’ Hence, ‘a man of humanity is one who, in seeking to establish himself, finds a foothold for others and who, desiring attainment for himself, helps others to attain.’ When asked, ‘Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life?’ he replied, ‘Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others’.

This so-called Golden Rule, which we find in all the world’s major religions, has come to represent the very essence of charity. In fact, the word charity derives from Latin caritas, which meant preciousness, dearness, or high price. However, in Christian theology, caritas became the standard Latin translation for the Greek word agapē, meaning an unlimited loving-kindness to all others. Hence, in St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, we read, in the King James Version of the Bible, of ‘faith, hope and charity’. Of course, it is not only giving that is important, but also the nature of giving. There is a Jewish proverb that says: What you give for the cause of charity in health is gold; what you give in sickness is silver; what you give after death is lead.

Islam also has a strong tradition of charity. Zakāt, or alms-giving for the purposes of alleviating poverty and helping those less fortunate, is one of the Five Pillars of Islam. The practice is generally in the form of an annual tithe or tax of 2.5% of an individual’s wealth, including money made through business, savings and income. The zakāt must also be above an agreed minimum (called nisab), which is said to be around $2,640 or the equivalent in any other currency. As important as the collection of zakāt in a community is its fair distribution among the needy. Another form of charitable action is sadaqah, which literally means ‘righteousness’ and refers to the voluntary giving of alms or charity. These ancient traditions are considered to be a personal responsibility for all Muslims, practiced out of love for humanity, to ease economic hardship for others and eliminate inequality.

There are numerous other religious and cultural variations on the theme. Philanthropy in Latin America typically revolves around asistencialismo, which is charitable giving for poverty alleviation. Out of dedication to their religion, education and culture, Bulgarian communities raised donations to build churches, schools and cultural centres called chitalishta. In India, Gandhi’s trusteeship concept was adapted and applied to welfare acts. In Mexico, the Raramori, who still live in the mountains of the state of Chihuahua, use the expression korima, which means ‘to share’ resources in times of stress. In Southern Africa, ubuntu is the practice of humanism based on the collectivist notion that ‘I am a person through other people’.

So much for the roots and cultural traditions of philanthropy. Upon these foundations, the great philanthropists, ancient and modern, built their charities – from Rockefeller and Carnegie to Gates and Turner. The more interesting question, I think, is whether there is anything new and transformative about charitable giving?

One concept that has generated a lot of excitement is ‘venture philanthropy’. Seemingly, it has origins in another HBR article, ‘Virtuous Capital: What Foundations Can Learn from Venture Capitalists’, by Christine W. Letts, William Ryan and Allen Grossman in 1997. Their basic message was that corporate foundations can be more effective if they ‘develop hands-on partnering skills’, for which venture capital firms offer a helpful benchmark: ‘In addition to putting up capital, they closely monitor the companies in which they have invested, provide management support, and stay involved long enough to see the company become strong.’

Since then, the debate has raged about what venture philanthropy is and whether it is plausible, ethical and desirable. After all, if the venture capitalists are treating their donations as an investment with expectations of a financial return, then is it philanthropy, or just business? And is it feasible to expect charities like community development organisations to generate a financial return in the first place? And what about the distinction between venture philanthropy and social enterprise, or social business?

So what do we know? There are basically three models of venture philanthropy. The first is traditional foundations practicing high-engagement grantmaking. The second is organisations which are funded by individuals, but all engagement is done by professional staff. Examples cited include the Robin Hood Foundation in New York City and Tipping Point Community in the San Francisco Bay Area. The third is the partnership model, in which partner investors both donate the financial capital and engage with the grantees. An example is the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund in San Jose, California.

Without getting heavily into the venture philanthropy debate, I do believe that – as with strategic philanthropy – it is symptomatic of the shift in our approach to tackling society’s most intractable problems. What we have seen is that traditional charity has been, for the most part, invaluable in bringing about alleviation of social and environmental distress, but rather ineffective in achieving resolution of the problems themselves. The need for pure philanthropy, irrespective of its strategic alignment to donors, will always be there. There will always be emergencies, crises and urgent problems that don’t link conveniently to business interests.

Venture philanthropy, on the other hand, recognises that we need ways to scale up solutions, and one way is to link business with a social cause, and provide the capital it needs to be effective. Hence, I regard venture philanthropy as one of the transition tools that we need as we move to the Age of Responsibility, not least because it brings creativity and scalability to the table. It is one of the critical enablers that is facilitating the social enterprise revolution, which is discussed in more detail in later chapters.

About the author

Dr Wayne Visser is Founder and Director of the think-tank CSR International and consultancy Kaleidoscope Futures Ltd. He is the author of thirteen books, including The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business (2011), The World Guide to CSR (2010) and The A to Z of Corporate Social Responsibility (2010). He is the author of over 180 publications (chapters, articles, etc.) and has delivered more than 170 professional speeches on in over 50 countries in the last 20 years. In addition, Wayne is Senior Associate at the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, Visiting Professor of Sustainability at Magna Carta College, Oxford, and Adjunct Professor of CSR at Warwick Business School, UK.

When passion takes over logic: Mugs vs. disposable cups

By Yelena Novikova

CSR and sustainability professionals are frequently prepared to go the extra mile when designing a solution. It is taken as a given that they have to, if the company aspires to be best in class. Yet, do we really have to? Or can the determination to be CSR-innovative make it easier to miss obvious, simple and more functional solutions?

These were the things I was thinking about sitting at a lecture hosted last June by the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). One highly respected CSR manager was talking about his experience of dealing with the issue of coffee cups when he worked in Italy. Seeing that employees drank impressive amounts of coffee (it being Italy after all!) and hence generated mountains of plastic-cup waste, he decided to do something about it.

The obvious solution was to have a policy that everyone must use a ceramic mug. However, the speaker’s research concluded that it took more energy to produce and continuously wash a ceramic mug than it did to produce a disposable paper-cup option that only requires one initial wash. However, Martin Hocking’s energy-based evaluation of reusable and disposable cups shows the reusable cup would use less energy than the plastic one after only 39 uses/washes with an efficient dishwasher [1].

I believe the company in question ended up using polystyrene foam cups, which was the logical - and yet not instantly obvious - solution. Here is some of the statistical evidence on the matter [1]:

• It takes 198 kj of energy to produce polystyrene foam disposable against 278 kj of primary energy required for single wash in a low energy efficiency countries; hence, there is no point at which a ceramic cup is preferable;
• Also, while ceramic mugs recover practically no energy during the recycling process, polystyrene foam and paper-cup alternatives recover 76 kj and 166 kj of energy per unit respectively.

The answer seems clear-cut. Nevertheless, digging a little deeper suggests a more ambiguous conclusion. For instance, since energy efficiency of dishwashers plays a pivotal role in Hocking’s calculations - and the Energy Label for electrical appliances has been available in Europe as early as 1995 [2] - perhaps it is more a case of choosing the right dishwasher than the right mug.

Furthermore, a recent study found that the average ceramic mug is used over 2,000 times [3]. That is four times the 500 uses that Hocking suggests as the threshold beyond which its high fabrication energy becomes unimportant [1]. We can conclude, therefore, that in a corporate environment, ceramic mugs may very well be an energy sustainable solution, not to mention all the aesthetic, cultural and recycling-related benefits it may also offer.

The point really is not to champion to cause of ceramic mugs, but to challenge the idea that CSR pioneers and innovators always have to dig deep. Sometimes the intuitively simplest answers are also the correct ones. And sometimes digging deeper just means finding the roots.

---

[1] Martin Hocking, “Reusable and Disposable Cups: An Energy-based Evaluation”, Environmental Management Vol. 18, No. 6, p. 894, 896, 899

[2] http://www.energy.eu/

[3] http://en.brinkwire.com/2082

Fat-Cats versus Alley-Cats: Why the Occupy Movement is Right

By Dr Wayne Visser

Part 2 of 13 in Wayne Visser's Age of Responsibility Blog Series for 3BL Media.

The most common explanation for the global financial crisis is to point a finger at the banks. And rightly so. But I believe we also need to shine a spotlight on the greed and irresponsibility of executives, fat-cats like Lehman Brothers’ former CEO Richard Fuld. These are the enriched 1% that suck the lifeblood out of the fleeced 99% and which the Occupy Movement is justifiably targeting. Naming and shaming is important, but we need to realise that this is a systemic cancer in our economic and financial system.

It is also not a new phenomenon, but worrying it is showing signs of getting worse, not better. In 2000, Enron was the 7th largest company in America, with revenues of $111 billion and over 20,000 staff. When the company collapsed in 2001, due to various fraudulent activities fuelled by a culture of greed, the average severance payment was $45,000, while executives received bonuses of $55 million in the company's last year. Employees lost $1.2 billion in pensions; retirees lost $2 billion, but executives cashed in $116 million in stocks.

At the end of 2007, just before the crisis went public, Lehmans’ CEO Fuld and president Joseph Gregory paid themselves stock bonuses of $35 million and $29 million respectively. At the time, Fuld lived in an enormous Greenwich mansion, over 9,000 square feet, valued at $10 million. He had four other homes and an art collection valued at $200 million. Hardly a picture of responsible restraint.

Taken on their own, these executive pay packages are outrageous enough. But the extent of creeping executive greed comes into even sharper focus when we look at trends in relative pay. In 1965, U.S. CEOs in major companies earned 24 times more than a typical worker, a ratio that grew to 35 in 1978 and to 71 in 1989. By 2000, it had hit 298, and despite falling to 143 in 2002 (after the post-Enron stock market slump), it bounced back again and has continued rising through the noughties (2000s).

The Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report reveals that the 2010 ratio between average worker and average CEO compensation leaped to 325-to-1, up from in 263-to-1 in 2009. Among the nation's top firms, the S&P 500, CEO pay last year averaged $10,762,304, up 27.8 percent over 2009. Average worker pay in 2010? That finished up at $33,121, up just 3.3 percent over the year before.

According to Fair Economy, the average U.S. worker's salary could pay for 10 months of health insurance, 5 months of college tuition, and buy 10 percent of an average home. On the other hand, the average Fortune 500 CEO's salary could pay for 300 years of health insurance, 200 years of college tuition and buy 34.5 new homes.

But at least these CEOs are contributing through taxes, right? Wrong. In fact, corporate tax dodging has gone so out of control that 25 major U.S. corporations last year paid their chief executives more than they paid the U.S. government in federal income taxes. Citizens for Tax Justice, as part of a study on tax avoidance among the Fortune 500, has identified 12 corporations that have paid an effective rate of negative 1.5 percent on $171 billion in profits.

It is easy to go cross-eyed or brain-fried when confronted by a barrage of numbers like that. And yet, there was one particular number that shocked me so much when I read it that it stuck in my mind. I believe I read it in Body Shop founder Anita Roddick’s wonderful and feisty book, Body and Soul. She claimed that it would take one Haitian worker producing Disney clothes and dolls 166 years to earn as much as Disney’s then president, Michael Eisner, earned in one day.

Reflecting on this, I wrote in my book Beyond Reasonable Greed: ‘rather than spreading around the wealth for the common good, it seems to us that Adam Smith’s invisible hand has a compulsive habit of feeding itself’. If decades of inaction by governments on executive pay is anything to go by, then we should not wait for our elected politicians to put restraints on the market’s invisible hands.

So that leaves us – civil society. And that is why I believe the Occupy Movement is a revolution whose time has come. But they need our support; they need our determination; they, even need our outrage. If they don’t get it, we will stand by shaking our self-righteous heads and watch as another generation of Wall Street fat-cats gets fatter at the expense of Main Street alley-cats – that’s us by the way: we, the middle class; we the people who create the real wealth of nations; we who need to say ‘enough is enough!’

About the author

Dr Wayne Visser is Founder and Director of the think-tank CSR International and consultancy Kaleidoscope Futures Ltd. He is the author of thirteen books, including The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business (2011), The World Guide to CSR (2010) and The A to Z of Corporate Social Responsibility (2010). He is the author of over 180 publications (chapters, articles, etc.) and has delivered more than 170 professional speeches on in over 50 countries in the last 20 years. In addition, Wayne is Senior Associate at the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, Visiting Professor of Sustainability at Magna Carta College, Oxford, and Adjunct Professor of CSR at Warwick Business School, UK.

Public Purpose & the Corporate Form: CICs vs BCorps

By Cyrus Bhedwar

Over the past decade, two legal innovations have emerged that attempt to integrate social and environmental purpose with the well-known profit-making prowess of the corporation. Can these alternative corporate forms successfully scale and attract the interests of business people and investors or will they remain footnotes in corporate registries?

The Community Interest Company (CIC) was created in 2006 in the United Kingdom. This alternative form of incorporation restores a broader sense of purpose to business enterprises. The CIC is an overlay on existing corporate forms, such as a private company limited by guarantee. What sets CICs apart from these conventional forms are two characteristics that ensure the primary beneficiary of the CIC remains the community it was established to serve.

An organization registering as a CIC must provide a community interest statement which serves as the mechanism against which the CIC’s stakeholders or the government regulator may judge its suitability. If either find that the organization is acting in conflict with its statement, remedial action may be taken.

Secondly, the asset lock is a requirement by which the resources associated with the CIC remain restricted to uses benefiting the community in perpetuity. Related to this limitation are restrictions on the percentage of profits that can be distributed to investors. CICs allow for modest returns, but they are not intended to generate significant wealth for their shareholders.

Rather than reintroducing broader purpose to conventional, profit-minded corporations, the CIC model is designed for the third sector; specifically for entrepreneurs who already have social purpose in mind but need additional opportunities to channel resources to those ends. While CICs address issues that limited social enterprises and they help to reintroduce the relationship between purpose and profit, their relatively strict limitations make it unlikely that they will attract sufficient interest to reorient the trend of profit-maximizing corporations.

The US version of an alternative corporate form is called the benefit or “B” corporation. While providing the legal protection to consider socially, environmentally and economically optimal solutions, it does not impose limits such as the asset lock or limits on the distribution of profits. Rather it emphasizes and protects broader purpose in organizations’ founding principles. It relies on instruments such as annual reporting and voluntary third-party evaluation to maintain the integrity of this brand.

Of these options, the B-corp seems to have greater appeal to conventionally minded business people; it has been adopted by once traditional corporations such as Patagonia. However without more stringent accountability mechanisms, will B-corporations reintroduce a broader sense of purpose to businesses in meaningful ways or will they simply be window-dressing?

Do either of these approaches make headway in the apparent loss of purpose in the business world? Can they influence the context in which businesses operate in ways that reduce the pressure and temptations to exploit opportunity rather than add value? Can additional innovation produce the right blend of profit and purpose to reduce the likelihood of corporate excess in the future?

The Meaning of Responsibility

By Wayne Visser

The Age of Responsibility blog series for TBLmedia - No. 1

Do you sigh when you hear the word responsibility? Perhaps responsibility is even a dirty word in your vocabulary. Perhaps you associate it with burdens and restrictions; the opposite of being carefree and without obligations. But responsibility doesn’t have to be a chore, or a cage. It all depends how you think about it.

Responsibility is literally what it says – our ability to respond. It is a choice we make – whether to be attentive to our children’s needs, whether to be mindful of the plight of those less fortunate, whether to be considerate of the impact we have on the earth and others. To be responsible is to be proactive in the world, to be sensitive to the interconnections, and to be willing to do something constructive, as a way of giving back.

Responsibility is the counterbalance to rights. If we enjoy the right to freedom, it is because we accept our responsibility not to harm or harass others. If we expect the right to fair treatment, we have a responsibility to respect the rule of law and honour the principle of reciprocity. If we believe in the right to have our basic needs met, we have the responsibility to respond when poverty denies those rights to others.

Taking responsibility, at home or in the workplace, is an expression of confidence in our own abilities, a chance to test our own limits, to challenge ourselves and to see how far we can go. Responsibility is the gateway to achievement. And achievement is the path to growth. Being responsible for something means that we are entrusted with realising its potential, turning its promise into reality. We are the magicians of manifestation, ready to prove to ourselves and to others what can happen when we put our minds to it, if we focus our energies and concentrate our efforts.

Being responsible for someone – another person – is an even greater privilege, for it means that we are embracing our role as caregivers, helping others to develop and flourish. This is an awesome responsibility, in the truest sense, one which should be embraced with gratitude, not reluctantly accepted with trepidation. Responsibility asks no more of us than that we try our best, that we act in the highest and truest way we know. Responsibility is not a guarantee of success, but a commitment to trying.

So why is responsibility seen by many as such an onerous burden? Responsibility becomes onerous when choice is removed from the equation, when we do not realise our freedom to act differently, when we forget that we are allowed to say no. Responsibility becomes pernicious when we take on too much, when we mistakenly think that more is always better, when we take on the guilt and expectations of others. Accepting too many responsibilities is, in fact, irresponsible – for it compromises our ability to respond. Do few things but do them well is the maxim of responsibility.

Being responsible also does not mean doing it all ourselves. Responsibility is a form of sharing, a way of recognising that we’re all in this together. Sole responsibility is an oxymoron.

Taking responsibility is a way of taking ownership in our lives, of acknowledging our own hand in the shaping of destiny. Responsibility is the antidote for victimhood.

When we walk with awareness, we realise the enmeshed nature of reality, we see the subtle strands that make up the web of life, we accept that everything is linked to everything else. Responsibility is being conscious of the oneness of existence.

Responsibility, if we manage it well, should never be like the curse of Sisyphus, eternally rolling a rock uphill, but rather a blessing gratefully received. For what can be more joyous than making a positive contribution in the world, or making a difference in someone else’s life?

Responsibility is the footprint we leave in the sand, the mark of our passage. What tracks will you leave? Where is the place where you can most freely and effectively respond? The choice, as always, is yours.

I wrote these opening words on responsibility in 2005, and I believe they are still as relevant today as they were back then. Responsibility is the choice we make to respond with care. My book – The Age of Responsibility – and this TBLmedia blog series, is a way of taking stock. What choices have we made – in the way we live our lives, in the way we do our work and in the way we run our businesses? How have we responded to the needs of our day – especially the social, environmental and ethical crises we face? And have our actions been taken with care – have we cared about our impacts on others?

There are even more troubling questions. For instance: Are companies more a part of the problem or the solution? Is the net impact of business positive or negative? There are other questions too; awkward questions that cut even closer to the bone. For better or for worse, I chose corporate sustainability and responsibility (CSR) as my way to make a positive difference in the world – the mark of my footprints in the sands of time. But given that CSR has increased dramatically over the same 50 years that many of our global problems have been getting worse, does that mean that CSR is ineffective?

It gets worse. Could the whole CSR bonanza be an unwitting accomplice to the spate of corporate crimes of recent decades? Am I quietly and unintentionally aiding and abetting our collective demise? After all, Enron was stuffed to the gills with CSR – from codes of conduct and ethics officers to corporate volunteering and community development programmes. I am sure all of these CSR programmes had their merits. And yet, if they did nothing to prevent these companies acting like pirates on the high seas of finance, what good are they?

If CSR cannot form the bedrock of ethical corporate behaviour, does it deserve to have ‘responsibility’ in its title? More worryingly still, if CSR is used to legitimise businesses or practices that are, at heart, irresponsible, surely CSR is partly to blame for the various corporate ‘sins’ that go undetected and unpunished? I am led to a very uncomfortable conclusion. At worst, CSR in its most primitive form may be a smokescreen covering up systemically irresponsible behaviour. At best, even the most evolved CSR practices might just be a band-aid applied to a gaping wound that is haemorrhaging the lifeblood of the economy, society and the planet.

So we need a new approach – a new CSR, which I call CSR 2.0. This blog series will explore why CSR 1.0 is broken, and how CSR 2.0 can breathe new life into the concept and practice of corporate sustainability and responsibility. I hope you will join me.

About the author

Dr Wayne Visser is Founder and Director of the think-tank CSR International and consultancy Kaleidoscope Futures Ltd. He is the author of thirteen books, including The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business (2011), The World Guide to CSR (2010) and The A to Z of Corporate Social Responsibility (2010). He is the author of over 180 publications (chapters, articles, etc.) and has delivered more than 170 professional speeches on in over 50 countries in the last 20 years. In addition, Wayne is Senior Associate at the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, Visiting Professor of Sustainability at Magna Carta College, Oxford, and Adjunct Professor of CSR at Warwick Business School, UK.