I spent much of last week at the annual Business for Social Responsibility conference, which was in San Francisco this year. There were about 1400 people in attendance and in some ways it was like a reunion - running into all those people I met at last year's conference (or other conferences over the course of the year). I wasn't sure how the conference was going to go - the agenda did not seem particularly compelling at first glance. But, to my surprise and delight, I ended up deriving a lot of value from the conference itself, as well as several of the "extra-curricular" events I attended.
Motorola
I went to several dinners last week, each one sponsored by a different company and with a different agenda. One of the more interesting dinners I attended was one organized by the great CSR team at Motorola. Motorola pulled together a group of people - from other companies, from NGOs, from academia - to discuss the company's latest CSR efforts, including its 2006 CSR report. We got together for dinner at a nice San Francisco restaurant and had an engaging discussion. The folks at Motorola really take these conversations seriously - one of the participants also participated in the discussion about last year's report and he was blown away by the improvement. Motorola took the comments to heart and made significant shifts in how they report based on those comments. So I am really looking forward to next year's report to see what role our feedback ends up playing.
Conference Highlights and Observations
In addition to delicious and stimulating dinners, the daytime conference events also featured some highlights worth mentioning. And, as usual, I made some observations that I will share here. Among the highlights for me were running into old friends (and old bosses!), and making new connections in the CSR community - in a job that can sometimes make you feel like Sisyphus, you can never have too many people in your network to call on for help, support and plain old kvetching and kibbitzing.
There were also more cerebral highlights including:
**The incredibly compelling keynote speech from Gerd Leipold, the Executive Director of Greenpeace, who was forceful and forthright while also being generous and gracious. He shared with us the details of a Greenpeace campaign against Cargill and its practice of tearing down the Amazon rainforest to create land to grow soy (which, like corn, is in just about every processed food people eat, including the feed of the animals that end up as our main dishes). A representative from Cargill was present and during the Q&A he told the audience that Mr. Leipold invited him to offer a rebuttal and so he did (after which Mr. Leipold declined to comment, saying that Cargill deserved the opportunity to offer its point of view without further comment by him. Very cool.). What I liked about this speech (and what I would have liked more of at this conference) was that he awakened the activist within us. I think that most CSR people are activists at heart. We are working day in and day out to change the way corporations do business-as-usual - and we are doing it from the inside. And while we may seem pretty corporate to your average Greenpeace activist, in our roles and within our companies, we tend to be the ones stirring it up - protesting this or that, trying to get some policy or practice to chance, trying to set stretch goals - generally being a thorn in someone's side! Mr. Leipold's speech helped us feel like being an activist within your company is honorable, if not glamorous. Like all that time you spend banging your head against the wall is well worth it because we are all together in this quest for making the world a better place, the planet a sustainable home.
**The provocative breakout session about the need to push the financial community toward a more long-term view of corporate success. Most American companies seem driven by short-term thinking - the need to meet the quarterly numbers or else face the wrath of shareholders. But this kind of short-term thinking has led to some shady corporate activities (think Enron), and there is a movement afoot to bring long-term thinking to the marketplace. (As a sidenote, all this talk of long-termism led me to ask our investor relations team if Sun gives quarterly guidance. As of Q407 we do not. Nice.)
**The engaging and often hilarious/ridiculous workshop led by the Institute for the Future entitled, "Superheroes 2.0" in which we put to the test some of the skills that will be necessary for success as the nature of how we work and the technology we use evolves. By the end of the session, IFTF declared us a Superheroes Network and I had met some incredible people working on sustainability issues at companies like UPS, Deloitte, Smith Barney, and others.
So Much to Learn
One of the great but also kind of depressing things about going to the BSR conference is the realization that there is still so much to learn and that there are so many companies doing such amazing work to lead the way. Sometimes it feels like we'll never catch up! Don't get me wrong, there are a whole lot of things Sun does incredibly well in this space that others don't - embedding environmental values into our core products, our commitment to transparency, our flexible work programs. And yet there is still so much we can do as a company to bring social and environmental responsibility into our core strategy and business operations.
In many respects, these improvement opportunities are motivating; but sometimes they can be downright depressing. Because just when you feel like you've done something really great, something to move your company forward (like developing a human rights policy or inching closer to getting a socially responsible investment option into the company's 401(k) plan), you realize that these things are blips on the radar, drops in the bucket. And you can turn in any direction and see some other company doing more and doing it faster.
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