CSR strategy

Corporate social responsibility can drive profits — but doing so requires challenging widespread myths about the CSR field and bringing a fresh approach to a primary question: What does it mean to be socially responsible in business?

These are the most common CSR-related "pain points" that surface with clients:

• CSR is not linked to company strategy
• The company lacks alignment on CSR goals and objectives
• CSR myths prevail in the culture
• Social responsibility is viewed as lone "department"
• CSR is seen as burdensome vs. a driver of value

Our approach

The old view of corporate responsibility overemphasizes so-called good and bad companies. We believe that's going at it wrong.

At its core, corporate responsibility is simply about taking responsibility. It is a matter of owning up to a company's past, present, and even future behavior. It means being strategically responsive to the conditions that affect a business — such as the toll that operating takes on the world, global climate change, the emerging trends in the marketplace, and unmet needs of stakeholders — rather than ignoring them.

Christine Arena, one of the leading experts in the CSR field and author of the recent book, The High Purpose Company, is our partner in helping our clients achieve CSR success.

Our expertise and tools help clients to:

• Assess CSR strategy for success and effectiveness
• Measure collaborative capability within the organization
• Build collaboration skills — defined as a key component to achieving CSR success

Our innovative work is focused on moving clients beyond the CSR status quo in order to:

• Focus the company's CSR efforts on building value, not promoting values
• Leverage the company's core strengths in order to meet an unmet need
• Start small and go deep, rather than trying to take on everything at once
• Integrate CSR throughout the organization by building mutual understanding and shared agreement (There is a fundamental connection between collaboration, innovation and corporate responsibility effectiveness. Without collaboration, CSR cannot thrive.)

Learn more about our other areas of expertise:

Leadership development
Change management
HR transformation
Team building
Coaching