The Glocal Citizen

Countries, governments, companies, societies… they are all made up of people.  

Since we, people, are not mindless animals struggling in evolution according to the law of the survival of the fittest, but rational self-determining beings with an ethical conscience that holds us responsible for our own actions, we are compelled to make sure that everybody has the same chance to live with dignity and to give a hand promptly to those that fall behind. That is what makes us humans.

The corporation was given the same legal status as a natural person in the 19th century. Since then, corporate “persons” have followed the law of survival of the fittest in the jungle of free markets, letting the real people making the real decisions hide behind “limited liability” and the excuse that profits are the raison d’être of the corporation and the only way they can be of any value to society.

Corporate Social Responsibility for me is an effort to give the corporate person the ethical conscience that it has lacked, to give the corporate person the same responsibility that we all have as human individuals of giving everybody the same chance to live with dignity and give a hand promptly to those that fall behind. CSR tries to make the corporate person more human.

How is this being done?

- Broadening the corporation’s bottom-line to include the impact it has on other stakeholders beyond their clients.

- Developing measurable values of the extra-market impact of the corporation’s decisions and strategies.

- Finding new business models and structures that allow the compatibility of profit with social action.

- Demonstrating that every investment that the corporation makes in a socially responsible fashion will bring extraordinary long-term returns.

The same way a man has to be “first a man and then a saint”, the corporation has to be first profitable and then socially responsible. Without air and a healthy life, a person dies; without profit and a healthy balance sheet, a corporation dies.

It is stupid to criticize corporations because they care about profits. That’s what they do and that’s how they give value to society. But they have to realize that there is not only profit.

Daniel Lubetzky, founder of PeaceWorks, said in a conference at the IE Social Responsibility Forum, that the best way to achieve a social objective is to make business out of it, because the profit-oriented approach of business organizations makes them far more efficient than fundraising-oriented NGO’s. His own business, PeaceWorks pursues both peace and profit being quite successful in achieving both.

Another idea that I have been thinking about is the understanding of the risk and unfairness of submitting vital services like healthcare to the laws of supply and demand, because it sets a price on people’s possibilities of living a dignifying life or a life at all.

There has to be an equilibrium price for healthcare because there is a cost and there is a need of providers to be profitable to be able to provide… but at the same time it is unfair that a person can’t have access to healthcare because he or she can’t pay the price. Since governments sometimes don’t have the capacity to provide free or accessible healthcare to everybody, and non-profit organizations are not efficient enough, corporations must understand their responsibility to take direct action on these matters.

From now on, wherever I go, either if it’s consulting, telecom, media, or starting a new venture, I will always include a socially responsible point of view to my business decisions.

I think that’s all it takes. Incorporating social responsibility to everyday decisions, assuming personal responsibility of corporate actions, having always a long-term vision of the social impact, is a far better solution than big social projects with loads of marketing that consume time and money unnecessarily and have short-term effects that fade away.

Social responsibility for me is not a career path. Social responsibility is a change of attitude in our business roles, wherever they are performed.

**UPDATE (18/Dec/2008): My good friend Tobias Schirmer has published on his blog, an article about CSR that we wrote (together with Philipp Pausder and Blagoja Hamamdziev) for brandeins magazine. **