Date: 2025-06-17 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00026303
CAW MATERIAL
2024 WEBINAR ON CSR
A discussion about Corporate Social Responsibility
But where is the tangible value in CSR?
2024 WEBINAR ON CSR
A discussion about Corporate Social Responsibility
But where is the tangible value in CSR?
Open PDF: CAW-Webinar-1-30-24-CSR-Corporate-Social-Responsibility.pdf
and
Open copy PDF: https://cawnetworkusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Corporate-Social-Respsonsiblity-CSR-CAW-Webinar-1-30-24.pdf
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I did not see the 'in-person' presentation. I wish I had because I have had some familiarity with CSR since it first emerged several decades ago!
For me, the slideset is a bit like a trip down memory lane. Each of the 'slides' brings back memories about the use of the subject matter and raises questions all over again about why most of these ideas ... many of them very good ideas ... have not been very effective.
I am happy to see accountants ... those with good professional accounting training talking about management issues beyond simply compliance with professional accounting standards and government prescribed regulations. Accountancy, in my view, is a powerful management tool that has much more to offer than that! And accountants talking about CSR is a good step in the right direction.
The slideset is interesting.
My initial understanding, without the benefit of the live verbal presentation, is that CSR is 'all over the place!' To be honest, I am not impressed with the learning objectives set out on page 2 which really do not conform very closely with the management and accounting reforms that I feel are needed.
'The Effectiveness of Top-Down versus Bottom-Up' os a good question. I wish I knew the poll question answer!. My own experience is that it makes sense for some things like strategic goals to be Top-Down, but most implementaion behavior to be driven bottom up. It is not so much a 'combination' but 'both' with quite different roles for top down and bottom up.
Slide 7 gets my attention ... but not for any good reasons. Rather it reflects my long time interest in management and economic performance together with a long time concern that most management practices are not well suited to managing the business practices that are most needed ... and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) take poor corporate performance goals and expand them via a UN platform into something that is much broader.
I used a management framework that combined a money dimension and a social dimension in a lot of my consulting work around the world addressing exonomic development and humanitarian assistance in the 1980s and 1990s.The evolved into DBSDA ... DataBase System for Development Analysis ... which ran on a PC using FoxPro. Unfortunately Microsoft acquired FoxPro and almost immediately discontinued the product in favor of their own very much inferior product!
I was in the room when a lot of the discussion about SDGs was going on around the UN in New York was going on. This was around 2014. But I had also been in the room when the Millennial Development Goals (MDGs) were being developed 15 years before. It was pretty clear to anyone serious about management, progress and performance that the weak outcomes from the MDGs would not be mitiagated but more likely aggravated by the migration from MDGs to SDGs.
It is perhaps worth noting that there are 17 SDGs. Fifteen years before the MDGs had just 8 goals. Early in my own management career I had been advised that management effectivness was inversely proportional to the number of goals being addressed ... not a case of the more the better, but exactly the opposite. That is the main reason I have chosen just three dimesnsion for the TVM progress and performance management framework.
On slide 11 CSR is described in 4 dimensions ... specifically (1) Environment; (2) Workplace; (3) Community; and (4) Philathropic
I don't find this particularly valuable in making CSR a useful component in a complete management system
My own thinking about 'environment' has changed a lot during my adult lifetime, and especially during the last 20 years. But I still remember 1953 when I was just 13 years old and the UK was blanketted in what was referred to as a 'Killer-SMOG' ... a toxic mix of particulates from burning coal and old style atmospheric fog. In just a few weeks the UK government of the day passed legislation requiring ALL home heating in the country to burn only 'smokeless' coal. This was a draconian measure ... but it was needed and it worked. Over time, both the UK and Europe has done a lot to clean up their atmosphere ... something that cannot be said for most of the rest of the world, including the USA.
I am glad to see 'workplace culture' as a heading, but have a very different view of the role of people in the corporate setting and what is expected from 'people' in the corporate setting than seems to be described here.
In my own corporate career I did a lot to help employees become more productive and the company to become more profitable. In several cases I had to face a moral dilamma. What is the correct decision when company survival means firing employees who are doing everything right, but top management got it wrong!
I am not sure about what role 'community' has in 'Corporate' anything ... including CSR. When I was doing consulting work independent of corporate employment for organizations like the World Bank, the UN and some corporates, it became clear that a lot of decisions were made by the powerful to suit themselves ... end of story. As a practical matter, very few 'communities' are better opff today (in 2024) than they were 40 years ago in 1984! The owner class has done quite well ... in fact better than at any time in all of history ... but everyone else not so good.
Ouch! ... I have a lot of difficulty putting 'corporate' and 'philantropy' in the same sentence. While $17,77 billion sounds like a lot, it really is chump change! When I Googled the value of the NYSE, I got this respons:
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is a stock exchange with an equity market capitalization of over 25 trillion U.S. dollars as of December 2023.... and that is not chump change!
The discussion about Pros-and-Cons of Social Responsibility should be important ... but I am not sure how much it conforms with my own priorities. I have followed Warren Buffett since he started in the early days of his involvement with Berkshire Hathaway, and don't think he has done much that relates closely with CSR as described in this CAW presentation.
The bit about How Sustainability Efforts Fall Apart is solid and based on an article from the Narvard Business Review. It has 8 elements merged into 4 which is a poor idea since the 8 elements are better discussed separately. The 8 are: (1) Structure: (2) Governance; (3) Culture: (4) Leadership: (5)Processes: (6) Metrics: (7) Methods : (8) Skills.
To add somewhat to the confusion an example of a spider graph uses a different 8 elements with rather little overlap.
There is a bit of a plug for internal audit to provide validation for CSR. My impression is that CSR 'came and went' about 3 decades ago and to the extent that it is still 'a thing' has been higjacked to enable more efficient 'green washing!'
And then there is a return to SDGs ... one of my favorite 'Betes Noires' ... linking the 17 SDGs with 17 COSO Principles and the Framework for Internal Control
Finally the issue of redistribution of wealth is brought up. There is reference to a book by Gordon Tullock 'The Economics and Politics of Wealth Redistribtion.' which is a big subject in itself!
I did not see the January presenmtation and very much wish I did not miss it. I am a bit surprised there does not seem to have been much of any reference to the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) of People, Planet and Profit that emerged in the 1990s thanks to John Elkington nor the more recent emergence of ESG (Environment, Society and Governance) that the management flavor 'du jour!'
But I think the biggest issue I have with all of this is that the huge strength of core accountancy is ignored. My own strategy for better progress and performance of society, of environenmtal impact and of economic elements is to start with financial accountancy and expand its reach in a coherent comprehensive manner into all areas of everything ... essentially using the double entry framing everywhere and being clear about the good and the bad, the assets and the liability, the states and the flows!
People who have known me for a long time will have heard that my first impression of double entry accounting was that it was structured exactly the same as the engineering thermodynamics that I had previously studied as an engineering student!
Peter Burgess