A Hospital without Patient Safety?

Corporate responsibility is to the management of a company what patient safety is to the administration of a hospital. If you are not doing it, what are you doing?

But as the concept of corporate responsibility has expanded beyond it initial construct of corporate social responsibility, so too the early focus on transparency, reporting, metrics and monitoring leaves much of this work outside the core business of business. Who would go into a hospital for surgery if we knew in advance that there were only, say, seven people working on patient safety while the rest worked on… what?

So for all the good that CR has done and is doing, in too many organizations the issues remain peripheral – small teams of dedicated people, sometimes with the ear of the CEO, pushing nudging the core business into incremental changes. Like tugboats working with a tanker, we often remain far from the engine room of power, profit, decision-making, and prestige.

Whether an executive, a stakeholder, a shareholder, or a CR professional we must confront the reality of popular fiction. Corporate structure is a figment of our legal and cultural imagination. Phenomenally effective at generating economic growth and the stuff that we all use and discard, and this engine has been one of prosperity for many millions of people, so too has this imaginative structure enshrined a set of incentives that all too often set people against one another. Short-term profit maximizing behavior clearly has denuded forests and stripped mountaintops bare. Long-term social development and cultural unity has often frayed as corporate institutions excel. Incumbents use market power to stifle innovation, even though they were yesterday’s innovators.

We know what CR looks like today, but tomorrow?

Are you Handling or Mishandling the Climate Challenge?

The issue of our time is framed for failure. Climate change is the norm and everyone experiences it daily; the weather changes. Climate stability, however, is the goal – for people, business, and global ecosystems. We need predictable climatic conditions to make good decisions – whether to make major capital investments or whether to carry an umbrella.

And the climate is not an environmental issue but rather the connective tissue that ties energy together with business, development and poverty with agriculture, and health with the environment. No mere question of semantics, the fundamental definition of the challenge has immense impact on how we work to develop solutions.

The challenge is not fundamentally science, finance, or even policy. Rather, we lack the thinking and the institutions capable of effectively responding to an issue that cuts across so many traditionally distinct areas of expertise – especially when compounded by issues of risk allocation and intergenerational financial equity.

Are you handling or mishandling the climate challenge?

Going on Three Decades

Difficult to manage, impossible to avoid, and the endless driver of opportunity, driving and managing changehas been at the core of my work going on three decades. Living and working in Moscow as the Berlin Wall collapsed, guiding senior Western business executive through the splintering of the Soviet Union, and mapping the massive social, political, and global economic changes brought forth by perestroika and glasnost I experienced the turmoil and opportunity of profound change.

The dynamic process through which organizations and individuals act and react has much in common with the interaction of organisms and the natural balance of our globally linked ecosystems. As evolution happens every moment, but cannot be seen except across millennia, the power of entrenched thinking, cultural norms, and infrastructure cannot be swept aside in a moment. Yet, disruptive change happens; incumbent players are toppled and a new order emerges.

As nature abhors a vacuum and water flows until stopped, so too information floods our world – much of it incomplete, inaccurate, or manipulated to suit the needs of one actor at the expense of another.

Whether through research and strategy development or the execution of communications programs, I honed a unique mix of skills enabling me to work effectively at the intersection points where organizations tend to stumble and where high level yet narrow expertise often proves an obstacle to original thinking and the capacity to see opportunities in challenge. Not easily pegged I work in the white space, across and between neatly delineated departments and functions on organizational charts.

Whether presenting at a trade conference, driving a strategic brainstorming session, creating new means of communications, or providing one-on-one counsel to nonprofit or business leaders, my work is firmly grounded in how things are today – and how they might be in a better world tomorrow.