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Drawing the Lines
By Woody Huizenga | September 23, 2008
There is nothing difficult about the concept of corporate social responsibility. It’s simply a matter of doing business in a way that respects the environment in which we live and the community in which we work.
It gets tough when we try to flesh out those easily described principles in a way that we can measure—in a way that allows us to see and say with clarity whether a particular act or policy conforms to the principles of CSR.
For example, The Conference Publishers (like many firms) chooses not to do business with the tobacco industry. That’s simple and straightforward enough, right?
But there’s nothing simple or straightforward about the structure of the world economy. Ownership of tobacco companies is intertwined with ownership of consumer goods companies, and the only way to be absolutely certain you’re doing business with a vendor with no association with big tobacco is to buy your eggs from the farmer up the road and buy the wool to make your clothes from the owner of the sheep.
However, that’s not a serious option for most of us.
And the issues are also rarely black and white. It’s easy for us to say we won’t work at a conference designed to promote new and even more insidious ways to hook young people on cigarettes. I can’t imagine us ever working at such an event.
It’s also easy to say we won’t report a conference sponsored by the tobacco industry. That we won’t take their blood-stained money.
But what if that money were put to some incredibly worthwhile purpose? What if a world-changing meeting like the Landmine Treaty Conference—one of the proudest moments in the history of our firm—had been bankrolled with tobacco money? What are the ethics around using profits earned from the taking of lives to save or improve lives?
Mitchell and I have grappled with issues like this for a little while now. And we’re far from finished.
If we’ve come to understand anything about corporate social responsibility, it’s that if the answers seem simple and clear and obvious, we probably haven’t asked enough questions.
Topics: Corporate Social Responsibility, The Conference Publishers |
Comments Feed
September 23rd, 2008 at 8:25 pm
The other point, of course, is that there are sometimes ways to help an awful industry turn itself into something better.
Years ago, we glimpsed an opportunity to work on an economic conversion strategy to help tobacco growers shift to crops that would not, when used as directed, kill a large proportion of their customers. The project was never funded, but any eventual strategy would almost certainly have meant putting money directly into growers’ hands. In the short term, an effort to erode the tobacco industry’s sources of supply would have involved…increased funding for a part of the tobacco industry, albeit with some appropriate strings attached.
So, yes, a higher purpose can sometimes lead to some surprising practices. The problem is that that’s a *very* slippery slope…which is why, as Woody says, very little of this is as simple or straightforward as it might seem.