General Conclusion

General conclusion > Conclusion > The future of CSR

• So we’ve been talking about CSR and the trick was in the beginning it was hype, it was new and hence it was a term that was taken on its own.
• Like we need to have a CSR strategy and we need to have a CSR manager.
• So my main criticism today is: the world necessitates people to think about what they really do from Monday to Friday and to attach CSR to their core business.
• That is the only way where CSR can really exist and continue to develop and not stay a small management gadget apart from a real strategic development.
• Thus, both employees and managers are aware though maybe to varying degrees of their responsibilities But considering our current economic circumstances and the dynamic structures in our ecosystem, CSR also needs to evolve into social acceptability.
• These considerations need to factor in direct stakeholders but also anticipate changes – like migration flows, resource extinction and, aging populations- that many societies are set to undergo.
• Again, to answer this question, we need to clarify what CSR means.
• More and more companies are adopting a different approach to CSR, designed to change the very way they do business.
• I say, “CSR is dead, long live CSR”. In the complex world ahead of us, we are likely to find diverging expectations from different part of the society. Some of them will struggle to protect the”status quo” and their style of living.
• Others will recognize the need for change to accommodate new interests from emerging economies.
• The billions of people who aspire to access basic needs, like food, health care, education, or getting out of poverty, have different priorities.
• So we confront the vital need for compromise as a way to find acceptable solutions and as a key driver of success.
• In particular, we need to build more bridges between private companies and the public sector, so we can develop joint, collective actions to support a sustainable world.
• Strong skepticism likely will continue about the ability of the private sector and its management to develop, implement, and act in accordance with strong, self-imposed values and codes.
• The Peter’s book is articulated some, most, a lot of concerns I have raised in my book on: “CSR, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly” I think the issue is is again for me it’s not a question of the beginning or the end or the death of CSR. I think it’s really to look at how CSR should be governed; how could we make CSR a much more progressive or perhaps even radical approach.
• So the real issue is to introduce some kind of a decision making process into a corporation which goes beyond the interest of the firm and starts looking at interests of people who are perhaps marginalized both by the firm and the state – who is very much nowadays in the sides of the corporations.
• I still maintain hope! I hope that one day, there will be no more need for the CSR concept, because all its elements will be naturally embedded in organizations.
• I think we totally need to rethink our economic model or our business models.
• As illustrated on on this diagram we need to move from the traditional business model to a new way of what I would call the sustainable economy.
• The first changing dimension is that we need to move from linear thinking to circular thinking.
• These are the traditional industrial productivity gains and we need to move to different types of gains which are more linked to people and to efficient managing of resources.
• The fourth switch is from a world of business which is very segmented, very bilateral where I see my company in relationship with its immediate stakeholders upstream, its suppliers and downstream its customers.
• We need to move from this segmented approach to a more collaborative and systemic and holistic approach where we look at the globality of things.
• We also need to move from short-term transactional thinking.
• We need to move to a more long-term relation based development of business.
• We also need to take into consideration what used to be called externalities.
• We need to move to a model where companies will increasingly incorporate those supposedly external factors into the thinking of designing their new business model or designing innovative business solutions.
• The last point, is that traditional economy is putting companies and offices and manufacturing sites on a map with basically no direct connection between the economic activity and the territory which means that you can very easily demobilize or delocalize the activity.
• The new way is that the activities of the companies are so directly related to the local people, to the local partners, to the local resources that they are really anchored into the ecosystem and cannot be delocalized.
• So this is how I would describe the major shift that we need to do from the traditional business model to another sustainable economy model.