This Is About Philosophy and Culture

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a simple and contagious idea, but its operation is extremely complex. It involves both technical factors relevant to your business operation and human factors of your stakeholders. It is one thing to improve your technical process efficiency, but it is entirely another to encourage your people to make the right decisions and be empowered to fully incorporate sustainability into their routines.

You can probably hire process improvement consultants to help you find more efficient equipment and protocols, but how do you inject the right kind of company culture and philosophy to prevent the kind of greenwashing that will end up costing you in the long run?

I will venture to bet that any consultant will not know your organizational core better than you do, better than your stakeholders do. Then why would you hire someone else to come in and help you “brand” and market that brand? That’s nonsense.

What you need is someone to come in and help you map your existing ecosystem of stakeholders and better define their core value to discover your existing brand. You need a restatement of your company philosophy and you need to empower your constituents to actively change your corporate culture to become more sustainable. Your consultants should provide you with sustainability index and guidelines to rail that process to success. If you come across a consultant that offers to design a sustainability program for your company, our advice is RUN!

You want your consultant to tell you that they know how to educate and empower your human factor and coincide that with a technical process improvement to be more sustainable. At the same time, we remind you that this is easily done via social media technology and you can easily capture some marketing opportunities if you allow the organic process of empowering your stakeholders.

Of course we run into naysayers who will allege these lofty thoughts are too high-level and not practical. what would you have us do? continue without a set of good sustainable principles? Keep going without a culture that matters and a philosophy that makes sense? 

Use your available resources to make a sustainable transition. This is about innovation from the depth of your own corporate philosophy. Anything else is simply uncivilized.

Remember: “ask, think, create, and do.”