Top Three Corporate Social Responsiblity (CSR) Principles to Live By

CSR is both cool and vexing in that it has emerged organically, representing ideas formed jointly by corporations and NGOs. It's a difficult topic because of the absence of unified leadership; no single thought leader, academic work, law or other authoritative sources of definition tell us what CSR is. This article volunteers three CSR principles that should underpin all CSR policy.

1. CSR: Do No Harm

Borrowing from the medical profession, "Do No Harm" applies to business in that CSR's most basic form means that companies should not knowingly inflict harm to create profits. This fits traditional business theory; businesses are supposed to create value. Causing harm undercuts and may overwhelm the utility of any value a business creates.

Biofuels are a prime example of this harm-cancels-value idea. Initially, biofuels were touted as a silver bullet substitute for oil, prized for their potential to slow or reverse climate change. Yet profit-oriented biofuel crop cultivation motivated destructive agricultural policies and deforestation. The harm to the climate caused by the deforestation cancelled out whatever positive climate effect biofuels might have replacing oil.

A similar requirement for net positive value extends to corporations. Do corporations contribute more benefits than costs to society? Are corporations doing as much as they can to minimize harm and maximize value? CSR is the movement to enable corporations to answer "yes" to both questions.

2. CSR: What Corporations Should Do

The second CSR element focuses on what a company "Should do". CSR advocates ask corporations to take responsibility for past transgressions, remedy past harms and halt practices that incur new harm. This prong is analogous to a balance sheet where societal harm is bad debt. To "break even", or get to zero net harm, companies must not only remedy past wrongs but stop doing the things that put them in "societal debt" in the first place. Companies "do no harm" when their business practices do not inherently, directly harm people. Obviously, there are a range of ways to define harming people/ society that won't be defined in this blog post [but maybe later ones].

3. CSR: What Corporations Could Do

The final element of the basic CSR triad is asking what companies "Could do". This prong aks that corporations to reduce the indirect harm they cause that they are capable of affecting. The "Could do" element asks corporations to fundamentally change their business to maximize community benefit of their organization while minimizing costs to society. In this way, CSR asks corporations to do what they can with their market power to change the world for the better.

Recap

The three CSR principles to live by are (in order of importance):

• encourage business models that do not incur harm to society in the first place;


• encourage corporations to rectify past harm and stop present harm (Should do); and


• encourage corporations to use their market power to solve the social issues that they can (Could do).