Brad Googins and Phil Mirvis, who teamed up with Steve Rochlin on the 2007 book Beyond Good Company: Next Generation Corporate Citizenship, have a new report out that looks at what lies ahead. Published by the Center for Corporate Citizenship Germany, “Moving to Next Generation Corporate Citizenship” examines how companies are progressing along the developmental stages of corporate citizenship, both from the outside in and the inside out. Read the rest of this entry »

Collaboration across sectors is at the core of the Boston College Center’s new initiative to help business more effectively contribute to solving the problems of education in the United States. But bridging the usual competitive divide between companies will be just as critical to successfully delivering value to an enterprise more important than any single company. Read the rest of this entry »

As the operating environment for business continues to change, more is expected of companies, even when fewer resources are available.  As a result the bar for community involvement managers continues to rise. Read the rest of this entry »

Corporate citizenship practitioners often ask me - sometimes with an expression of wide-eyed panic - “how do I start to measure my corporate citizenship program?”

The prospect of measuring to what degree product is “responsibly” produced or “ethically” traded, for example, can throw many into despair.

There is no need to suffer over the impossibility of measuring corporate citizenship. Sure, ethics and responsibility cannot be measured with a physical gadget the way temperature can with a thermometer. But this does not mean lofty abstract goals cannot be measured. They can. Read the rest of this entry »

Young writers are often advised to “write what you know.” An imagined perspective can never match real-life point of view when trying to tell an authentic story on any subject.

So if you want to know what the story is with the mystery of successful business investment in education, IBM’s Stan Litow is your man. As a product of the New York City public schools, an education activist, a former deputy chancellor of New York’s school system and IBM’s vice president for corporate citizenship and corporate affairs and president of the IBM International Foundation - the point man in its efforts to improve education - Litow has lived this saga on both sides. Read the rest of this entry »

Americans revel in the accomplishments of U.S. athletes in international competitions like the Olympics. But a survey finds the American consumer is no Michael Phelps when the worldwide measure of success has a green rather than gold tint. Read the rest of this entry »

Corporation 20/20’s second annual conference on the future of the corporation took place in Boston last week. Chaired by Allen White, founder of the Global Reporting Initiative and head of Corporation 20/20, the conference brought together a small and eclectic group of experts, pundits and business leaders, both domestic and international, to address the challenge of how to restore sanity to our economic system and create the foundation for a sustainable economy. The conference covered a breathtaking range of subjects, from the chartering of companies and regulation, to whether companies can have a “soul,” to the limits of modern portfolio theory. Read the rest of this entry »

These are challenging times and corporations are struggling to find creative ways to manage their commitments to their shareholders, employees and the community. When it comes to corporate philanthropy or corporate social responsibility, can a CEO communicate a change in strategy or decrease in financial commitment without undermining the corporation’s reputation? Read the rest of this entry »