CSR and responsible business

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Great article on WorldChanging by Joel Makower, entitled Milton Friedman and the Social Responsibility of Business which repeats Friedman’s view that the sole purpose of business is to generate profit for shareholders…and that responsible business is therefore uncompetitive, costly and a distraction from their core obligation.

As Makower points out, we now know this to be nonsense: that ignoring environmental and social issues can be bad for business, and that this trend is only increasing. Want to recruit new graduates? Want to not poison/pollute your customers? Want to have raw materials to use in ten years time? Want to retain employees? And so on. If a company isn’t thinking in these kind of ways in this day and age, it will soon be left behind….better to be ahead of the curve than trying to claw your way up it over the next decade.

And that goes for big and small business: I enjoyed judging the CAF CCI awards recently, an enjoyment tempered only by how few SMEs enter the awards, a topic we discussed afterwards. So much discussion of CSR revolves (understandably) around the big boys that there is probably need for a corrective of some sort. I was interested to run across Small Business Journey the other day, which is an interesting way for “small businesses to realise more value by behaving responsibly”. Value of all types…

A few more corporate social responsibility pieces to end with:

– a corporate social responsibilty course in Barcelona (download the modules online) [via Audeamus]

– Fast Company have dished out their 2007 Social Capitalist Awards to, slightly bizarrely, 43 organisations (why 43? a secret homage to 43 Things and 43 Folders?)….mainly US-focused as ever, but worth reading some of their gumph as well, including their take on why this is all important: “A More Powerful Path“

– A post linking to some debates about Product Red (iPod, AmEx etc. raising money for HIV); interestingly, there was someone on the radio this morning discussing how we should be giving African countries an army rather than aid…will try and find the link….. 

Video posting: the Camel

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Have a replicas relojes china few bits of video I want to post up occasionally, so thought I would give this a test run (using VideoEgg.com). Here is a video of our local pub (the Camel) detailing its history during the war as an early social enterprise!

Third Sector media darlings

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As I waited for my meeting with Matthew Thomson, formerly of SSE and now Chief Executive of the London Community Recycling Network, I opened up Third Sector magazine and was delighted to find:

– on the front page, SSE Fellow Dave Pitchford is kicking up a storm with his web-based organisation Intelligent Giving and their take on Children in Need (Four Things Wrong with Pudsey)

– then on the first inside page, above the article about the new Social Enterprise Action Plan (see previous post ), there is a photo of Ed Miliband, SSE Chief Exec Alastair Wilson and two of our current students, Darren and Tania….who won £1000 for their project at a Dragon’s Den event on Social Enterprise Day

– then (!), on the letters page, they printed my response to Nick Cater which I blogged about here (where you can also read the letter) almost in full and only with one mistake (the School for Social Enterprise rather than Entrepreneurs)…and it won letter of the week, no less, so I get to dispense £25 to a charity of my choice….an SSE student or Fellow, methinks

All good – next week, on I’m a Social Entrepreneur, Get Me In There……

MySociety or WhySociety?

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Great coverage of the E-Democracy 06 conference by David Wilcox over on his Designing for Civil Society blog. Of most interest to me was the following “Not just e-democracy, new democracy says MySociety founder” post. This includes:

“Once you have managed to achieve the funding for tools, fix the bugs,
get people interested it’s time, says Tom [Steinberg, founder of MySociety], to reflect on what changes
we might want to see in the system, as well as in policies. What should
we be pushing for, and what are the dangers in doing that? After the
rush to practical solutions, it’s time for some theory.

Put around the other way “what could be the wrong philosophy of
representative democracy that would lead to us all building and
spending time on tools that were actually unhelpful”.

Tom wants people who are building sites in the e-democracy field
to start talking about what sort of democracy they are building those
tools for.”

Interesting this, and it obviously follows on from something that Matthew Taylor said earlier in the conference, namely:

“The Internet, said Matthew, had helped people to mobilise. It offers
new methods of search and exposure. But does it yet really help people
engage with dilemmas and challenges, and work their way through to
conclusions? He presented that challenge to developers and advocates of
e-democracy tools.”

It is very similar to what I said to Francis Irving (one of the MySociety crowd, who did PublicWhip.org.uk and then has had significant involvement in their other projects) when we were speaking together at an event in Wales. I basically said that the use of technology had to be driven by social need, that it was a ‘failure’ if it was driven by the desires/interests of the designers, rather than the needs of the users, that the use of new tech must be grounded in the organisation’s values, and that people shouldn’t overestimate (or underestimate) what technology can achieve.

Nothing very groundbreaking or controversial there….though I did then go on to say that I felt the challenge was not developing new tools but translating internet activity to real-world action; I then added that it was perhaps instructive to note that one of the primary successes of Pledgebank was the establishment of a digital rights organisation….so was that really reaching new people, extending democracy etc, or are these sites mostly being used by internet-savvy, Guardian-reading middle-class types? [NB – I should say that I would put myself squarely in that bracket, and think all of the sites are exceptionally well-built and useful….for me].

Now this may be unfair, and I have been a champion of all their sites in the past (particularly via the Global Ideas Bank and Blog + our Social Innovation Awards) and recommend and use them regularly, but certainly what Tom and Matthew say above would tend to support that view: they are great tools, but are they really changing anything? To our students at the replicas bolsas, they are just another useful resource to take advantage of, but it is their action, commitment and focus to change things in the real world that will make a long-lasting difference.

Now I don’t think Tom has ever overclaimed what these sites they can do, but their “sexiness” to the media and to the political establishment (which is Tom’s background as a policy wonk) has perhaps led to this situation. There seems to be a stepping back in that statement above (i.e. we don’t need more tools without really thinking about whether they are needed, and what changes they will make; and what, ultimately, this is all aiming towards). Indeed, surely the subtext of what Tom says above is that they rushed to develop stuff without thinking about why they were doing it. Even the most action-prone social entrepreneurs usually know their objectives and goals before they rush headlong into delivery….

These are amazing and incredibly useful tools for information, for campaigning, for communication, for accountability and so on. But it’s important we have them in context, which is why the statements above are welcome.

 

 

 

 

Happy Social Enterprise Day: Social Enterprise Action Plan

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So, drum roll, here’s the Social Enterprise Action Plan (pdf), and the Office of the Third Sector’s accompanying press release. And what does it say? Well, it’s in four areas which are:

1) Fostering a culture of social enterprise
2) Ensuring right information/advice are available
3) Enabling access to appropriate finance
4) Enabling social enterprises to work with government

Headlines within those include:

  • Promote social enterprise within schools, providing
    curriculum materials and ensuring it is studied in GCSE and A level
    business studies courses;
  • Appoint up to 20 social enterprise ambassadors to be role models for new entrepreneurs across the UK
  • Make over £18m available over the coming years to help knock down barriers to growth and enable social enterprises to thrive
  • Support the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship in promoting social enterprise as a career to young people
  • Research
    new ways to provide social enterprise learning at tertiary level and
    review whether existing professional training provisions meet the
    specific needs of social enterprises;
  • Support a marketing
    campaign to promote social enterprise to young people aged 14–30
    (Enterprise Insight’s Make Your Mark: Change Lives).

Which is all good, worthwhile stuff. Other points of interest include increased funding to the RDAs for social enterprise support, £10m directly for social enterprises (though how is to be decided), and involvement for social enterprises in the Olympics. At the launch of the plan this morning, both Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband name-checked the SSE and our work, which is good to hear. Later on today, our Chief Exec Alastair Wilson will also be appearing on a Dragon’s Den-type panel with Tim Smit, Cliff Prior (new CEO of UnLtd) and Ed Miliband as part of today’s activities; who will be the Simon Cowell?

It is perhaps interesting to compare the main themes with those that Alun Michael announced in the Spring:

  • confirming the value and credibility of social enterprise through new research into the impact of social enterprise;
  • embedding social enterprise as a recognised business model by
    ensuring that the publicly funded business support provided by RDAs is
    readily available and applicable to social enterprise;
  • helping to open markets to social enterprise by working with other
    government departments and local authority purchasers to remove
    barriers within the procurement process for third sector organisations;
    and
  • encouraging new entrants to social enterprise by raising awareness
    of social enterprise among new entrepreneurs, working with Enterprise
    Insight, National Council of Graduate Entrepreneurship and the Social
    Enterprise Coalition.

Quite similar, although "encouraging new entrants" has become the wider "fostering a culture of….", but it’s all there otherwise, in a coherent and comprehensive way. It will be interesting to track the regular progress reports on the Cabinet Office website…

Lest we get too Anglo-centric though,  it’s worth noting that the Scottish Social Enterprise Coalition have also launched their manifesto (Bigger Better Bolder) today. See here for more (and to download), but the key points are:

  • Delivering 10% of public spending through social enterprise by 2012
  • Using community benefit clauses in all public procurement contracts
  • Making it easier to communities to own assets and develop enterprises
  • Developing a joined-up national program for supported employment
  • Creating new investment models for businesses making social or environmental benefits

Also today is Make Your Mark with a Tenner wherein 10,000 young people are being given £10 and challenged as follows: "Each student is ‘loaned’ £10 and given 1 month to make an impact. Participants
must work to the best of their abilities to ensure that within one
month they are able to repay their initial £10 and demonstrate how they
made their mark and what profit they made." The 50 who make the biggest profit and the 50 who make the biggest social impact will be highlighted….