CSR360

Posted: Tuesday 21 February 12, 10.17am GMT

The Doughty Centre team are currently researching the spectrum of ways in which employees help promote responsible, sustainable business behaviour in the context of their “day jobs”. CR/sustainability specialists do not work alone; they need to collaborate with fellow employees to achieve sustainability goals.

Some of these colleagues act as champions of sustainability, working with CR/sustainability teams to raise awareness of issues and actions their colleagues can take. Others may act as godparents – perhaps giving permission for sustainability projects, supporting new ideas, making introductions, freeing up resources.

If you think you have a great story to tell about how you and/or colleagues in your organisation are promoting sustainability in these (or other) ways, please get in touch with the Doughty Centre team to arrange an interview. Email Nadine Exter (nadine.exter@cranfield.ac.uk) or Melody McLaren (m.mclaren@cranfield.ac.uk) with your contact details and describe briefly how you and others are promoting sustainability in your “day job”.

Pears Business Schools Partnership lecture: It’s good for business for business to be good
Delivering the second annual Pears Business Schools Partnership lecture at Cranfield School of Management in January, Sir Andrew Witty, Chief Executive Officer at GlaxoSmithKline made a powerful case for businesses to connect more strongly with society and its values and reap the business benefits of doing so.

Speaking before an audience of over three hundred business leaders, academics and students at Cranfield School of Management, Sir Andrew noted that over the past twenty years, trust in the private sector has eroded and corporations have become more de-humanised. Businesses need to put the individual at the heart of everything they do – from their staff to customers, suppliers and shareholders – and senior business leaders need to take responsibility for setting the tone and leading by example.

By acting on their values, businesses have a stronger licence to operate, a more authoritative voice on key issues and promote a longevity that a narrow focus on quarterly earnings cannot achieve.

The speech was broadcast live to business schools in Denmark, Spain, Belgium, Brazil and France, and followed up with an extensive Q&A session. A full transcript will be made available on the Doughty Centre website (www.doughtycentre.info). For more details of the event, see the Cranfield School of Management website.

The Pears Business Schools Partnership was established in 2009 between Cranfield School of Management, London Business School, Said Business School and the Pears Foundation to help business students develop an understanding of, and commitment to, the public good and philanthropy.

Collaborative research with Business in the Community:
How Boards organise governance of corporate responsibility
Professors David Grayson and Andrew Kakabadse are leading a collaborative research project on corporate governance with Business in the Community. With 66% of FTSE-100 companies in BITC membership and approximately 150 companies providing corporate governance data via BITC’s annual Corporate Responsibility Index, the research team are working to distil key trends and publish provisional findings for consultation ahead of producing a final report in late 2012.

Social intrapreneurs and employee engagement with sustainability
The Doughty Centre team have been studying a form of innovation with an unusual twist – ‘social intrapreneurism’, the creation of products, services and processes that generate commercial value for companies and social and environmental value for the wider community. The team’s initial findings – based on interview research with 25 social intrapreneurs around the world who pioneered social and commercial innovations in their companies – were published in a January 2011. Doughty Centre Occasional Paper .

The team – which includes Prof. Heiko Spitzeck (Fundação Dom Cabral, Brazil) and doctoral student Elisa Alt (Universidad de Sevilla, Spain) as well as Doughty Centre Director Prof. David Grayson and Associate Melody McLaren – are now researching the features of the “enabling environment” that support social intrapreneurism in companies. The research is part of a wider Centre research agenda investigating the different types of employees and their engagement with sustainability issues. More information on this research is available on the Doughty Centre website.).pdf