Stakeholder Relations

By Michael Dupee, Vice President of CSR, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters

In his much-lauded book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” Stephen Covey famously encouraged us to “begin with the end in mind.”  In business, many of us try to take that encouragement to heart, engaging in visioning exercises, brainstorming adventures, long-range planning sessions, and other lesser forms of torture to help us identify the outcomes we want to see in the world as a result of our sustainability initiatives.

External Forces Drove CSR 1.0. CSR 2.0 Is Being Driven By Business Value.

While investors exert a large amount of pressure on the quarterly earnings results of a company, they neither weigh in on nor act as barriers to the company's long-term social efforts. This is a key conclusion from Monday's Board of Boards CEO Conference, hosted by the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy in New York City.

This is going to be a difficult year on a number of fronts for the corporate social responsibility field. The presidential election campaign season will undoubtedly have various squalls and arguments that will have some kind of CSR dimension. The Eurocrisis could have a number of ripple effects. The doldrums of the economy will continue to dampen spirits.  Pollsters say that the American people feel “stuck,” “frustrated,” and “pessimistic.”

Let’s do a quick word association with CSR.  What comes immediately to mind?  Philanthropy, volunteerism, accountability, reporting, sustainability, and maybe the triple bottom line--these are the usual suspects. Shared value?  The term is new but in practice it is a repackaging of “win-win” business models.  So, if you’re looking for something new, search the term “social innovation.”  You’ll find over 430 million hits (that’s one-third more than for CSR!). 

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” so said Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s then Chief of Staff, at the height of the financial crisis in November 2008. 

This was when workers in Chicago occupied their factory that had been shut down on three days’ notice, when stockholders picketed on Wall Street, when taxpayers protested over the bloated bonuses of bailed-out CEOs, and when the public and news media woke up to the fact that something had gone terribly wrong.