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Governments, activists, and the media have become adept at
holding companies to account for the social consequences of
their actions. In response, corporate social responsibility has
emerged as an inescapable priority for business leaders in every
country.
Frequently, though, CSR efforts are counterproductive, for two
reasons. First, they pit business against society, when in
reality the two are interdependent. Second, they pressure
companies to think of corporate social responsibility in generic
ways instead of in the way most appropriate to their individual
strategies.
The fact is, the prevailing approaches to CSR are so
disconnected from strategy as to obscure many great
opportunities for companies to benefit society. What a terrible
waste. If corporations were to analyze their opportunities for
social responsibility using the same frameworks that guide their
core business choices, they would discover, as Whole Foods
Market, Toyota, and Volvo have done, that CSR can be much more
than a cost, a constraint, or a charitable deed—it can be a
potent source of innovation and competitive advantage.
In this article, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer propose a
fundamentally new way to look at the relationship between
business and society that does not treat corporate growth and
social welfare as a zero-sum game. They introduce a framework
that individual companies can use to identify the social
consequences of their actions; to discover opportunities to
benefit society and themselves by strengthening the competitive
context in which they operate; to determine which CSR
initiatives they should address; and to find the most effective
ways of doing so. Perceiving social responsibility as an
opportunity rather than as damage control or a PR campaign
requires dramatically different thinking—a mind-set, the authors
warn, that will become increasingly important to competitive
success.
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