I highly recommend the book The Responsibility Revolution written by Jeffrey Hollender, former CEO of Seventh Generation. This book is a great guide for anyone interested in the catch phrases: CSR, sustainability, corporate consciousness and sustainability.
One of the topics that struck me was the idea of starting a corporate strategy process by investigating the “global imperative” which is defined as:
Global imperative: What is it that the world needs the most that the company is best able to provide
Yes, companies are in business to make money for their stakeholders – that’s important. But what if we could extend company purpose to something like it’s global imperative? Would this allow us to develop meaningful purposes that employees, owners and customers could relate to? And then as they say – maybe even do well by doing good?
I’ve become rather intensely interested in these topics lately, mostly due to the fact that most of the companies I’ve worked with over the last several years have not had these issues on the agenda at all. When I ask my peers what they think I often hear different variations of the same answer. It goes something like this:
“When I was a teenager and college student I was super interested and even involved in social and environmental issues. Then I started to work, maybe had a family and daily life took over. I still think it’s very important but I recognize that I never managed to do anything about it.”
It often comes back to the same old topic: “I’m too busy.” But if we’re too busy to look our after ourselves (think big, not little) and our earth, who else will?
Referenced in this blog post:
Seventh Generation, Burlington, Vermont, USA