Quotes about Corporate social responsibility

Business social responsibility should not be coerced; it is a voluntary decision that the entrepreneurial leadership of every company must make on its own.

I think that today, more so than ever, corporate responsibility is the best strategic as well as financial path that most businesses can follow. For most businesses there are both compelling reasons to be responsible and compelling statistics that validate that responsible businesses do better according to traditional financial metrics. Of course, how you define "responsible" is somewhat of a conundrum.

Basically, our goal is to make sure that when it comes to water and energy, we replenish the environment and leave it in a net zero state. So across the world we have unleashed the power of our people to come up with ideas to reduce, recycle replenish the environment and we are making great progress by reducing how much water we use in our manufacture and the carbon footprint that we put on the environment. As a consequence, what we are seeing is an incredible investment in all these environment initiatives. But is otherwise really in two ways, one is tangible financial investment, second is a huge return on investment and because new employees are usually idealistic young people who just graduated from college. They want to come to a company to work for a purpose, that is wise about the next generation.

...it's always been difficult for us to lead an examined life as a corporation. I've always felt like a company has the responsibility to not wait for the government to tell it what to do, or to wait for the consumer to tell it what to do, but as soon as it finds out it’s doing something wrong, stop doing it.

The status quo is a very powerful opiate and when you have a system that seems to be working and producing profits by the conventional way of accounting for profits. It’s very hard to make yourself change. But we all know that change is an inevitable part of business. Once you have ridden a wave just so far, you have to get another wave. We all know that. For us, becoming restorative has been that new wave and we have been riding it for 13 years now. It’s been incredibly good for business.

For nearly 11 years, now, we have been on this mission; we call it, “climbing Mt. Sustainability”, a mountain higher than Everest, to meet at that point at the top that symbolizes zero footprint—zero environmental impact. Sustainable: taking nothing, doing no harm.

My vision for saving the planet holds that you not only need to work with communities and governments but also the forces … that are driven largely by business. We will fail if we don’t change the behavior of business and how it touches the places we care about.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, the supply chain will include products from all around the world. Whether we’re talking about fabric made in China, soybeans grown in the Amazon, palm oil harvested in Indonesia, biofuels created in Africa—companies will have to know how their products and the raw materials they use in their operations are affecting places, people, biodiversity, and the environment.

Companies still thinking about the environment as a social responsibility rather than a business imperative are living in the dark ages.

If a few of us can prove that it makes good business sense not just to be socially responsible but to make a serious social mission intrinsic to one's business, then this is going to be written about, studied, and publicized. Because nothing is transferred faster than a success story in business. So I am very optimistic that if a few businesses can set an example here, we can make a tipping point out of it.