Over at The McKinsey Quarterly, Eighty-four percent of the executives polled agreed that their companies should pursue not only shareholder value but also broader contributions to the public good; most said their companies could handle sociopolitical issues more successfully, as well.

I haven’t chugged the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Kool-Aid as much as some of my colleagues, but it doesn’t take a Harvard MBA to see that the principles of doing well by doing right can be applied strategically rather than merely as a tactical response to activists or isolated market pressures.

But how to go about it? McKinsey resarchers offer some helpful guidance:

To improve, a company should identify emerging trends and develop coherent organization-wide responses—an approach that requires it to integrate social issues into all dimensions of the business, not just the making of strategy.

If companies don’t adopt that approach they run the risk of misalignment—a CEO saying one thing, the rest of the company failing to translate those good intentions into practical action. A company whose external-communications strategy emphasizes the search for more environmentally friendly products and processes, for example, will stumble if it simultaneously fights limits on carbon dioxide emissions.

More McKinsey data on how executives think about social issues can be found here.

Share This