CR or CSR?

Corporate Responsibility or Corporate Social Responsibility?

I touched on this briefly in my introduction post and wish to explain my thoughts behind this right now. Looking at the triple bottom line (economic, social, environmental impacts) no business can survive without being sustainable across all 3 fronts, however since we are people and no business can survive without people to buy from, sell to, or to employ; personally my take is that the social aspect is the most crucial and the most important.

The Economic impact is important because it provides income to people, who can continue to work for the business, or impact on other stakeholders who are also people. The environmental impact is important because without it, many of the inputs required for business (water, electricity, air) would not be there, and people would not be able to survive. Its all about people.

Thus I prefer to keep the term CSR, to make sure that every business is specifically focused on the people around them. I also want to mention the term social entrepreneur: the idea of creating a business that explicitly has social and financial benefits. This business aims to solve a social issue, but without needing to be a charity, and as it makes money, it can scale-up its business much easier than a charity.

I am aware of the controversial nature of this CSR stand-point, since the trend seems to be towards Corporate Responsibility, Corporate Citizenship, Business Responsibility and so forth. In many cases the term is not important, it's what you actually do as part of this work that is important, however in other cases the term is important since it defines what is done. Personally I don't believe many businesses do accurately explain what they mean by CC or CR or CSR -I think its important, since it means stakeholders have a better understanding of the motivation behind the work, the intended consequences and so forth. In a World where trust is so lacking and transparency and dialogue so crucial to success, explaining crucial differences in terminology (maybe crucial is too harsh a word, but in come circumstances it can be a crucial difference) can make a difference to how successful the business's CSR, and indeed the entire busienss is.

Thus my standpoint is for responsible leaders to recognise the impact of decisions they make on definitions early on; justify those decisions and thus not be surprised by the impacts. If a company think CSR is philanthropy its because there is a mis-understanding of what CSR is, that's because no-one ever explained what it actually is to the company. I don't believe there is a universal definition of CSR. Every business must interpret it in its own way -but not enough businesses are going through this important process of interpretation.