Know Your Audience – Or They Will Fight Back

There is a business motto saying ‘the customer is always right.’ That is of course unless they are left.
Whole Foods founder John Mackey recently published his personal  recommendation for health care reform in the Wall Street Journal – bad timing in a hot debate and bad economy. Not every Whole Foods consumer sides with Mackey’s [...]

“CSR Doesn’t Pay?” You’re asking the wrong question.

A few days ago, Haas professor David Vogel posted an article titled “CSR Doesn’t Pay” on Forbes.com. The main jist of the article is that corporate social responsibility practices aren’t being rewarded in higher economic profits. This was the thesis of research released by a couple of Harvard Business School profs earlier this year as [...]

Question of the week: is donating 1% of pre-tax revenue an appropriate baseline determinant of whether a company is socially responsible?

An article in BusinessWeek online this week posits that, despite PR to the contrary, corporate philanthropy is down from 25% ago, with companies donating just 0.7% of their pre-tax revenue to charitable organizations.
They suggest that:
Badly needed is a meaningful voluntary commitment by the business community to “ante up” a minimum budget for corporate philanthropy. A [...]