After the successful 2011 launch of its worldwide, company-wide health and well-being initiative in September, Novartis is working to expand Be Healthy Celebration Week in 2012 to involve more than 95 percent of all Novartis affiliates’ associates at more than 150 locations.

Novartis provides health care solutions that address the evolving needs of patients and societies around the world. The inaugural Be Healthy Celebration Week, which occurred September 19-23, demonstrated Novartis’ belief that good health care starts with its own employees. Be Healthy helps Novartis associates take an active role in managing their own health and is a natural extension of the company purpose to “care and cure.” Read the rest of this entry »

The 2012 International Corporate Citizenship Conference March 25-27 in Phoenix will provide more than 500 practitioners a variety of perspectives on managing the many environments of corporate citizenship. One of those perspectives will come from keynote speaker James E. Nevels, chairman of The Hershey Company Board of Directors. Read the rest of this entry »

Novo Nordisk, a world leader in diabetes care, is growing its efforts to make a difference for children with type 1 diabetes in the neediest parts of the world. The company’s Changing Diabetes in Children program, launched in 2009, recently expanded to India where there are more than 50 million people living with diabetes and little detailed information about the children afflicted with this disease. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time for the Oscars, Emmys and Grammys to take a back seat. Voting is under way in Boston College’s fourth annual Corporate Citizenship Film Festival!

A record 68 entries were submitted for our 2012 Film Festival, which provides companies with an opportunity to demonstrate how they have utilized video as a communication tool to spread word of their good work.

Entries in this year’s festival cover a wide range of corporate citizenship issues as companies tell the stories of how they are having a positive impact in communities around the corner and around the world. Health and wellness, education, economic development and protection of the environment are just some of the topics.

Public voting is open on the Center website from February 14 through March 3 to select 10 finalists. Last year more than 25,000 employees, partners and members of the public viewed the videos and voted for their favorite.

The 10 finalists will be reviewed by a panel of judges to choose the winning video. We will present the Film Festival trophy to the winner at the 2012 International Corporate Citizenship Conference, March 25-27, in Phoenix. During the conference, the 10 finalist videos will be available for viewing by the more than 600 conference attendees.

Voting in the Film Festival is open to anyone interested in weighing in on the video messages of corporate citizenship’s brightest stars. While there is no other requirement to participate, we do make one strong recommendation: Grab a big bowl of popcorn before you sit down to enjoy the shows and cast your vote.

Last April, Medtronic hosted a plenary session at Boston College’s 2011 International Corporate Citizenship Conference, sharing information on how we are putting shared value into practice through our Global NCD Initiative. (See related article in the recently released fall issue of The Corporate Citizen.)

The initiative is our response to the rapid rise of chronic, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) worldwide and the very real challenge they present to global health and economic development, as underscored by the September 2011 United Nations High-Level Meeting on the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases. Read the rest of this entry »

If you had visited one of Microsoft’s locations in the United States during October you might have found an employee’s office filled with pink flamingos. For a small sum donated to a nonprofit of their choice — and matched by Microsoft — an employee can have their co-worker’s office “flocked” with plastic pink flamingos. It’s one of hundreds of creative fundraising activities that make up our employee giving campaign at Microsoft. The 2011 campaign was our largest year of employee giving since the program began in 1983, with $100.5 million donated and matched for community organizations and nonprofits. Read the rest of this entry »

News headlines across the world remain focused on record joblessness and struggling economies. A deeper story, however, lies in the scarcity of talent facing corporate America. Today’s workers simply don’t have the skills employers need.

PwC’s recently released 2012 Global CEO Survey found that almost 60 percent of U.S. CEOs planning to hire this year believe it won’t be easy to find the right people. (And this despite a jobless rate that’s hovered in the 9 percent range for months in the U.S.)

Almost a quarter of the U.S. CEOs confirm they were unable to pursue a market opportunity and another fifth were unable to innovate effectively because of talent constraints. Eighty-four percent of these CEOs are making direct investments in workforce development, but these measures alone aren’t enough. Most people consider hiring and retaining the right people a human resources issue, but I and others in the corporate responsibility (CR) community consider recruitment and retention inextricably linked to our field.

Read the rest of this entry »

I grew up near Amish country in Northeastern Ohio, where you are as likely to get stuck behind a buggy or tractor on the road as you are a school bus.  In my childhood we visited and bought from these farms and learned from our neighbors about the necessity of seed crops – the best part of the harvest that is put aside for future plantings. To ensure future yields, our neighbors deferred some of what they could have taken for profit in any given year and devoted effort and resources to future productivity.  They rotated crop fields, and sometimes devoted entire growing seasons to planting soil-enhancing cover crops.

Amish country is a long way from Davos, but it seems like the World Economic Forum discussions focused on sustainable economies might benefit from an infusion of farm wisdom.  For those who missed it, the theme Read the rest of this entry »