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Greece 2010 Notes

12 June 2010

This has been a crazy leg of the trip, but worthwhile. I delivered the keynote address at an inaugural conference on CSR 2.0, hosted by CEO & CSR Money Conference 2010 and sponsored by EuroCharity.

It was nice to be in Athens again. The first time I visited, in the late 1990s, I was in transit with 10 hours to spare, so I rushed around the city, visiting the Acropolis and other historic sites. It was hot, crowded and I wasn’t terribly impressed. One of my most vivid memories was of all the half-starving stray cats in the parks. Of course, I could hardly do the city or country any justice in 10 hours!

The second time I came to Greece, it was for a meeting of the ICCA (the organisation that sponsored The A to Z of CSR book). I was whisked out of Athens to some luxurious coastal part and remember having a bath in my hotel room with a view over the bay. Luxury indeed!

This time is different again, although no less luxurious – I stayed (if arriving at 2 am and checking out the same morning qualifies as ‘stays’) at the 5-star Olympic hotel, which overlooks the historic heart of the city, with views of the Acropolis as well. It is strange to think that Plato or Aristotle could have been in that very place thousands of years ago.

As my colleague, John Elkington, who shared the platform with me at the conference, said to our hosts: ‘Thanks for civilization!’ The conference was in one of the historical buildings right in the centre of Athens’ green lung. Apart from the wonderful cool marble floors and walls, the towering pillars and patterned ceilings were beautiful. Terrible acoustics for a talk (lots of echoes) but a welcome change from the usual plush hotel conference rooms.

Being in Athens again really made me thing about how things have changed in the past 10 years or so. When I came the first time, it was in the lead up to the 2004 Olympics and I remember a conversation with a taxi driver, who was optimistic about the future for Greece. Now, their economy is in tatters and their national pride is severely damaged. They have unwittingly become the ‘canary in the mine’, a warning for the rest of Europe and the world about the consequences of corruption and greed (or are they just a victim of shareholder-driven capitalism?).

How the world turns!

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China 2010 Notes

30 May 2010

Peking University campus – There is a large lake about 5 minutes walk away, where I plan to walk (or maybe even jog!) every day. There are also several sculptures that I am taking pictures of.

I once started a university course in Mandarin. I never got very far, but it is an indication of how long I have been fascinated with Chinese culture, and in love with its written language. To me, the script is like art. The closest thing to a religion that I align myself with these days is Taoism – the ancient Chinese philosophy of harmony and balance. The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu is poetry and wisdom combined.

I think the West is far too judgemental of China. No doubt, there are some policies that we would find difficult, but what I see is an emerging nation, full of dynamism and progress, including on many social, environmental and ethical issues. Just this morning, I read in the paper that new regulations make evidence obtained under duress inadmissible in court.

There’s a palpable sense here that the only way is up, that the future is all to play for and that a combination of vision, national pride and hard work make all dreams possible. It all seems rather familiar – the same sort of ideals that built the American Dream. The 21st century will be the century of the Chinese Dream.

 02 June 2010

One of the things I love about the Chinese is that they value the artistic side of life. And not just paintings and sculptures. They see art in nature. For example, in many temples and palaces, they will simply frame a slab of marble stone with a beautiful pattern, or erect an interesting stone formation as a sculpture, or even just create a window frame with a view onto a tree or garden.

06 June 2010

It is Sunday, my last ‘free’ day before my workshop tomorrow. Last night, it was good to get off the campus and into the city. The underground is excellent – very clear and simple, with constant updates. The trains have electronic maps of the tube lines, where a flashing red dot and a green arrow tell you exactly where you are and the direction you are travelling. And it is ‘cheap as chips’ – about 20p to travel anywhere in the city. Even the taxis are cheap – about £5 to go from the centre to the outskirts of the city (and Beijing is bigger than London).

After a British embassy event choral event, I went on with some friends to the ‘Stone Boat’ bar, a beautiful bar/restaurant in the middle of a park, overlooking a lake and literally on a stone boat. Stone boats are an ancient tradition of the emperors of China. After that, we went to a jazz club with live music, then I took a taxi back to the campus.

It is interesting to see how many Westerners are moving to China – many of them permanently. Clare is English and has been here about 7 years. In our group were also two Americans, one Canadian and a Pakistani. It is testimony, I think, to the fact that China is seen by many as ‘the brave new world’ – the superpower of the future.

I have been very content here in Beijing and I could easily spend a month here, just writing, walking around the lakes and parks and occasionally heading into the city for a change of scenery. There are some amazing buildings downtown, many of which were built in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. From what I can gather, the Olympics had a dramatic positive effect, not only in improving infrastructure and public transport, but also in reducing pollution and opening up to Western ideas.

Tomorrow night, I take the overnight train to Shanghai, sharing a compartment of four. I am looking forward to it. It brings back memories of the two day train my sister and I took a few times from Cape Town to Bulawayo. There is something wonderful about watching the world speeding by outside the window, having time to read, falling asleep to the clickety-clack gentle sway of the train.

10 June 2010

My time in Shanghai and China has been all too brief. There is so much to see and explore that I expect I will keep coming back for the rest of my life, especially given my interest and affinity for the culture.

Yesterday, I did a video interview with Jacylyn Shi, one of my hosts here. We found a quiet park near the venue for my talk to do it. Then it turned out that a man was doing Tai Chi in the background while I was filming – just wonderful! After the interview, we were walking through the park and we saw the Tai Chi man again. So Jacylyn asked him to teach me some Tai Chi moves. She took some photos of me looking very clumsy trying to copy him, but it was an unexpected and delightful experience.

Of course, Shanghai is not only ancient but rapidly turning into one of the most modern cities in the world. Some people say it lacks soul and that it is too commercial – all brands and no substance. But I like it – it’s vibrant and constantly changing.

The Expo was just a glimpse into what is possible in this city now. There were some fabulous buildings and exhibits, even though I only saw about a quarter of the Expo site. It is probably no coincidence that the quietest pavilions were the eco-design ones, while the oil and Cisco (technology) displays were among the most popular. Some, like the China and Saudi pavilions had 7 hour ques! I’m not sure any exhibit is worth such a long wait, but it just shows the excitement and thirst for new experiences among the Chinese. The Expo is getting 500,000 people a day!

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The Rise and Fall of CSR

The Rise and Fall of CSR:

Shapeshifting from CSR 1.0 to CSR 2.0

Paper by Wayne Visser

One of the proposed antidotes to the Age of Greed is corporate social responsibility (CSR), which has been debated and practiced in one form or another for more than 4,000 years. For example, the ancient Vedic and Sutra texts of Hinduism and the Jatakas of Buddhism include ethical admonitions on usury (the charging of excessive interest) and Islam has long advocated Zakat, or a wealth tax.

The modern concept of CSR can be more clearly traced to the mid-to-late 1800s, with industrialists like John H. Patterson of National Cash Register seeding the industrial welfare movement and philanthropists like John D. Rockerfeller setting a charitable precedent that we see echoed more than a hundred years later with the likes of Bill Gates.

Despite these early variations, CSR only entered the popular lexicon in the 1950s with R. Bowen’s landmark book, Social Responsibilities of the Businessman. The concept was challenged and strengthened in the 1960s with the birth of the environmental movement, following Rachel Carson’s critique of the chemicals industry in Silent Spring, and the consumer movement off the back of Ralph Nader’s social activism, most famously over General Motors’s safety record.

The 1970s saw the first widely accepted definition of CSR emerge – Archie Carroll’s 4-part concept of economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibilities, later depicted as a CSR pyramid – as well as the first CSR code, the Sullivan Principles. The 1980s brought the application of quality management to occupational health and safety and the introduction of CSR codes like Responsible Care.

In the 1990s, CSR was institutionalised with standards like ISO 14001 and SA 8000, guidelines like the Global Reporting Initiative and corporate governance codes like Cadbury and King. The 21st century has been mostly more of the same, spawning a plethora of CSR guidelines, codes and standards (there are more than 100 listed in The A to Z of Corporate Social Responsibility), with industry sector and climate change variations on the theme.

Why is all this potted history of CSR important in a discussion about the future? Well, first, we must realise that CSR is a dynamic movement that has been evolving over decades, if not centuries. Second, and perhaps more importantly, we must acknowledge that, despite this seemingly impressive steady march of progress, CSR has failed.

CSR has undoubtedly had many positive impacts, for communities and the environment. Yet, its success or failure should be judged in the context of the total impacts of business on society and the planet. Viewed this way, as the evidence already cited shows, on virtually every measure of social, ecological and ethical performance we have available, the negative impacts of business have been an unmitigated disaster, which CSR has completely failed to avert or even substantially moderate.

Why has CSR failed so spectacularly to address the very issues it claims to be most concerned about? In my view, this comes down to three factors …

Continue reading

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/paper_rise_fall_csr_-wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] The Rise and Fall of CSR (paper)

Related pages

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”info” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-age-of-responsibility”]Page[/button] The Age of Responsibility (book)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2010) The Rise and Fall of CSR: Shapeshifting from CSR 1.0 to CSR 2.0, CSR International Paper Series, No. 2.

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The Ages and Stages of CSR

The Ages and Stages of CSR:

From Defensive to Transformative Corporate Sustainability & Responsibility

Article by Wayne Visser

I have found it useful to view the evolution of business responsibility in terms of five overlapping economic periods:

  1. The Age of Greed;
  2. The Age of Philanthropy;
  3. The Age of Marketing;
  4. The Age of Management; and
  5. The Age of Responsibility

Each of which typically manifests a different stage of CSR, namely:

  1. Defensive CSR;
  2. Charitable CSR;
  3. Promotional CSR;
  4. Strategic CSR; and
  5. Transformative CSR.

My contention is that companies tend to move through these ages and stages (although they may have activities in several ages and stages at once), and that we should be encouraging business to make the transition to Transformative CSR in the dawning Age of Responsibility. If companies remain stuck in any of the first four stages, I don’t believe we will turn the tide on the environmental, social and ethical crises that we face. Simply put, CSR will continue to fail  …

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[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/inspiration_ages_stages_csr_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] The Ages & Stages of CSR (article)

Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”info” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-age-of-responsibility”]Page[/button] The Age of Responsibility (book)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2010) The Ages and Stages of CSR: From Defensive to Systemic Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility, CSR International Inspiration Series, No. 8.

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Ukraine 2010 Notes

27 April 2010

My visit to Kiev, Ukraine, to deliver a talk at the IV International CSR Conference was worthwhile, but far too fleeting. From the brief night-tour I had, I can see that it is a beautiful city, with lots of fascinating architecture and history. The Kiev equivalent of the Statue of Liberty, which stands 8 metres higher than it’s American counterpart, is a case in point.

While here, my favourite books of all time – Possession, Time Traveller’s Wife and Bridge Across Forever – have been wrested from top spot by the epic, gritty, poetic, Bombay-based biography that is Shantaram. It is at once compelling and disturbing, beautiful and ghastly, insightful and confusing. It blurs the lines between good and evil, between love and tragedy, between life and death.

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India 2010 Notes

17 April 2010

Now, after a few days back in Kuala Lumpur to pick up my India visa and an overnight stop in Singapore, I am on my way to India, a place I have dreamed of visiting for many years. Much like the Far East, so many of my philosophical and spiritual influences originate here that it feels like a soul homecoming of sorts (although culturally, these countries are very foreign and unfamiliar). It will essentially be a working trip, as my two weeks are packed with talks and workshops (in Mumbai, Raipur, Delhi, Chennai and Pune), but sometimes that is the most authentic way to get to know a country.

21 April 2010

My first few days in India have been all work and no play, but rewarding nevertheless. The evening that I arrived in Mumbai, I interviewed the founder and researcher at Karmayog, an organisation which runs an information and sharing portal for NGOs and citizens, including the ability to report corruption. It also runs a CSR Rating of the top 500 companies in India.

The following day, I travelled to Raipur to deliver a talk on the Future of CSR, hosted by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). The flight back to Mumbai was via Bhopal, which felt somehow significant, given my work and the number of times I have used the 1984 Bhopal disaster as a case in my talks and writing.

Yesterday, in Delhi, I did a workshop on CSR Around the World, hosted by the national power supplier (NTPC). Several power cuts during my stay at their guest house seemed ironic, but just highlights the scale of the challenges India faces. Today, I do a workshop on CSR, Marketing and PR, hosted by NASSCOM.

My impressions of India so far are still in flux. On the one hand, I didn’t get the ‘assault on my senses’ that I had expected, other than the heat – it has been 43 Celsius during the day and 30 at night, the highest April temperatures in 52 years. Poverty is everywhere in evidence, but is not as overwhelming or pervasive as I had expected. Perhaps I am just accustomed to slums and scenes of hand-to-mouth existence, having grown up in South Africa and travelled extensively in developing countries.

What is more notable is the traffic. Not only are the roads swarming with cows, bicycles, bull carts, rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, taxis, cars, buses and trucks, but there appear to be no rules of the road, other than ‘take the gap’. Traffic lanes, stop signs and traffic lights have no meaning. Hooting is constant. Many cars and trucks even have ‘Horn .. ok .. please’ painted on their bumpers, seemingly encouraging hooting in the interests of safety. Somehow, this lack of rules makes drivers more alert and aware, so in a chaotic way, it works.

Cutting through the dust and (in Delhi) the smog are iridescent colours – of the women’s saris, the brightly painted trucks and the temples, shrines, gods and goddesses. I find this fascinating, that the hottest, driest and often poorest places in the world are also the most colourful. Perhaps it is compensation for a harsh and bland environment, or perhaps it is simply the richness of indigenous cultures.

There is also a real sense of diversity and dynamism among the people here – constantly busy and bustling, wheeling and dealing, in animated discussion, struggling to make themselves seen and heard amidst the crowd, manoeuvring, manipulating, engaged in the cut and thrust of survival. What is also different is that people and animals mix and move freely together, on the streets and pavements, through waste dumps and in markets. It is a moving morass of life that is unmanageable and incredible.

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Cambodia 2010 Notes

17 April 2010

Last Saturday, I headed to Cambodia with my mom and dad. Siem Reap is a bustling town, totally geared for the tourist trade, but without having lost its agricultural and cultural roots. I felt very relaxed among the people, dusty roads, scooters and market stalls. Our visit to the various Angkor Wat temples was fascinating. They are just as one imagines jungle temple ruins should be.

We had a very informative guide, who was very patient with our endless picture taking and videoing. My favourites were the two temples that were returning to nature, with trees growing throughout the crumbling complexes and roots clinging to the remaining walls. We also had a hot hike through the jungle to an area where a rocky river bed had been carved.

The only pity, for both Thailand and Cambodia, was that we were too early for the rainy season. As a result, the temperatures were scorching (over 35 or 40 degrees most days and over 25 most nights), the landscape was not very green, the rice paddies were still dust bowls and the waterfalls were hardly more than trickles. Despite this, it was an incredible 2 weeks or so, with many amazing sights and rich experiences.

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Thailand 2010 Notes

05 April 2010

Arrived in Koi Samui, after a few days in Bangkok, spent with my parents. We took in the usual sights – a visit to the Grand Palace, a canal boat ride, a tour to the floating markets, a trip into the city to buy dad a new camcorder with digital hard drive and a ride on a tuk-tuk.

The most interesting part for me was that our hotel was right in the heart of the red-shirts protest zone. That made it a very noisy 36 hours, with constant sloganeering and speechifying over the load speakers set up about 250 metres from the hotel (including throughout the night). I didn’t really mind. The protests were all peaceful (at that stage) and it was interesting having such a close-up window on a rising social resistance movement.

My 3 hour speech on Friday – hosted at the Thailand Stock Exchange, with sponsorship and support from Thai Health Promotion Fund and NGO Business Partnership – seemed to go down well. Certainly, it was an honour to be the expert guest, with over 150 participants. I also took my parents to the Cabbages and Condoms restaurant, a social enterprise to promote awareness on safe sex and HIV/AIDS with décor made from condoms and pills.

17 April 2010

I haven’t written since arriving at Koh Samui. On the Tuesday before my sister’s wedding, both sets of families and friends had a day of adventures together, travelling by boat from Koh Samui to various islands for snorkelling, kayaking, and hiking to an enclosed lagoon (where they filmed The Beach, I think). The snorkelling along a small coral reef was amazing; definitely something I’d like to do more of, or even scuba diving. Mom, Dad and I also spent a day exploring some of the Buddhist and Hindu temples, including a giant gold statues of Buddha and a 12-armed goddess.

The bachelor party the night before the wedding was lots of fun. After dinner, we headed to the part of the island where all the night-life happens. The open-air, circular bars were quite an eye opener, with girls serving drinks, playing games (like Jenga) with customers and pole dancing (fully clothed), all while trying to entice clients into buying more than just a drink. Very bizarre.

The wedding itself in Koh Samui was really lovely – an idyllic setting, beautiful floral arrangements, thoughtful words of love in the ceremony and grand finale with an elephant ride for the bride and groom. The setting meant that everyone was fairly relaxed; I even wore my crocs! The size of the wedding also meant that it was quite intimate. My sister looked absolutely stunning and it all went off wonderfully.

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The Rise and Fall of CSR

The Rise and Fall of CSR:

Three Curses of CSR 1.0 and Five Principles of CSR 2.0

Article by Wayne Visser

Despite its seemingly impressive steady march of progress in the past decades, CSR has failed. Furthermore, we are witnessing the demise of CSR, which will continue until its natural death, unless it is reborn and rejuvenated.

CSR has undoubtedly had many positive impacts, for communities and the environment. Yet, its success or failure should be judged in the context of the total impacts of business on society and the planet. Viewed this way, on virtually every measure of social, ecological and ethical performance we have available, the negative impacts of business have been an unmitigated disaster, which CSR has completely failed to avert or even substantially moderate.

Why has CSR failed so spectacularly to address the very issues it claims to be most concerned about? This comes down to three factors – the Triple Curse of Modern CSR, if you like:

  1. Incremental CSR
  2. Peripheral CSR
  3. Uneconomic CSR

To get beyond these curses, we need a revolution that will, if successful, change the way we talk about and practice CSR and, ultimately, the way we do business. I call this new approach, CSR 2.0, where CSR stands for Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility. There are five principles that make up the DNA of CSR 2.0:

  1. Creativity
  2. Scalability
  3. Responsiveness
  4. Glocality
  5. Circularity

Making a positive contribution to society is the essence of CSR 2.0  …

Continue reading

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/inspiration_rise_fall_csr_wvisser.pdf”]Pdf[/button] The Rise and Fall of CSR (article)

Related websites

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”tick” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.csrinternational.org”]Link[/button] CSR International (website)

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”info” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-age-of-responsibility”]Page[/button] The Age of Responsibility (book)

Cite this article

Visser, W. (2010) The Rise and Fall of CSR: The Three Curses of CSR 1.0 and the Five Principles of CSR 2.0, CSR International Inspiration Series, No. 7.

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CSR 2.0: Beyond the Age of Greed

CSR 2.0:

Beyond the Age of Greed

Chapter by Wayne Visser

Extract from Reframing Corporate Social Responsibility

Quotes

The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. – Gordon Gekko, Wall Street (the movie)

Responsibility is literally what it says – our ability to respond. 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 footprints we leave in the sand, the mark of our passage. What tracks will you leave? -Wayne Visser, Business Frontiers (the book)

Abstract

The 1987 movie Wall Street and our recent global financial crisis (GFC), despite one being fictional and the other painfully real, tell a common story. Over the past few decades, we have been living through an Age of Greed, characterised by a colossal failure of corporate responsibility and corruption of individual morality. This Crisis of Responsibility has had catastrophic consequences for the global economy, bankrupting whole economies (like Iceland) and wreaking havoc with the lives of ordinary citizens around the world, many of whom are now without a job and without a roof over their heads.

In this chapter, I want to explore the ways in which the GFC represents a multi-level failure of responsibility – from the individual and corporate level to the finance sector and entire capitalist system. I will also examine the impact of the GFC on what is traditionally viewed as corporate social responsibility (CSR). To conclude, I will set out my conviction

that unless CSR itself is fundamentally transformed, into CSR 2.0, it will do nothing to prevent an equally (if not more) devastating Crisis of Responsibility from recurring in future.

The Age of Greed

Gordon Gekko’s words, although spoken by a fictitious character of Oliver Stone’s imagination, captures the spirit of a very real age: the Age of Greed. This was an age that, in my view, began when the first financial derivatives were traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1972 and ended (we hope) with Lehman’s collapse in 2008. It was a time when ‘greed is good’ and ‘bigger is better’ were the dual-mottos that seemed to underpin the American Dream. The invisible hand of the market went unquestioned. Incentives – like Wall Street profits and traders’ bonuses – were perverse, leading not only to unbelievable wealth in the hands of a few speculators, but ultimately to global financial catastrophe.

The story of Gordon Gekko (and his modern day real-life equivalents like Richard Fuld, the captain of the titanic Lehmans before it hit the iceberg) gets to the heart of the nature of greed …

Continue reading

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”download” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/chapter_wvisser_age_responsibility.pdf”]Pdf[/button] CSR 2.0: Beyond the Age of Greed (chapter)

Related pages

[button size=”small” color=”blue” style=”info” new_window=”false” link=”http://www.waynevisser.com/books/the-age-of-responsibility”]Page[/button] The Age of Responsibility (book)

Cite this chapter

Visser, W. (2010) CSR 2.0: From the Age of Greed to the Age of Responsibility, In W. Sun, et al. (eds.), Reframing Corporate Social Responsibility: Lessons from the Global Financial Crisis. Bingley: Emerald.

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