This article is part of the Building a Sustainable Business series about starting and running a sustainable business. Read all the articles here.
Are you a socially responsible individual? If so, here is a list of things you probably shouldn’t do: blast your neighbors with poisonous fumes; dump toxic waste on their yards; sell them products that will kill them.
I think I’m a socially responsible person and I set my company up to match my moral code. Bellwether Materials does no harm to people, animals, or the environment. We believe in total corporate social responsibility.
Now here’s a funny thing—even though our product is so obviously green and our practices are so responsible, officially, we cannot be considered a socially responsible corporation without third party certification. I discovered that there are thousands of organizations out there who want to charge us $20,000 (initial fee to be followed by annual dues to keep the certification) just to certify that wool is green and that we don’t pollute. Where did all these organizations come from? How are they qualified to certify other people’s companies and products? For a start-up, that’s a lot of money to prove the obvious. It feels a bit like the certificates issued by the Wizard of Oz.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is now a booming business. In addition to the certifying groups there are consultancies to advise companies on how to be socially responsible. I didn’t realize that being socially responsible was so difficult that armies of people and who knows how much money is required to figure this out—and then print out the certificate. A quick and easy way to figure out how to be socially responsible is to Google the Ten Commandments. They pretty much cover the waterfront.
Then I realized I was looking at CSR from the wrong direction. The big money is not in penalizing small business like mine, but in cloaking big business in respectability. If your product destroys the earth and kills people, throw fairy dust in people’s eyes to redirect their attention. So what if the company destroys the environment and depletes a finite resource, look over here – see? We’re planting trees and saving baby birds.
Corporations, of all sizes, are considered individuals under law. All the people who work in major corporations are probably decent citizens who take care of their families and do their best to be good neighbors. But once they go to work, in the clear light of day, the individual that they constitute, the corporation, can kill, maim, and pollute with impunity. If they tried that at home, they’d be arrested.
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Some corporations can’t be socially responsible because the product they produce is harmful, like tobacco or fizzy drinks full of chemicals that can dissolve rats. Others, like petro-chemical companies go further and destroy the earth while manufacturing harmful products. It is these organizations who have embraced CSR to present a respectable front to the general public.
The consultancies that serve these major corporations have probably come up with a CSR balance sheet: $3M to the opera balances out one oil spill; sponsoring a green conference balances out disregard for OSHA rules for workers; educating African children balances out refusal to clean up the environmental mess left behind when governments kick them out.
Images of baby animals being tenderly handled by (presumed) oil staff gives people a sense that buying their gas helps the environment. While not scientific, I asked everyone I ran into for several months what they thought of the CSR ads on TV. Most said that while they were aware that the company damaged the earth, they were also trying to be good citizens.
If I pointed out that for each million spent on CSR projects, the corporation was saving much more in narcotizing the public so they wouldn’t protest their activities, I was accused of being way too cynical.
CSR programs apparently do work. They alleviate guilt in the consumers of the products produced by large companies who manufacture and sell things that are not good for people, animals, or the environment. This allows them to buy, guilt-free, that SUV or a six-pack of Mountain Dew.
I’m thinking about this. If I, as a corporation, lie, cheat and kill, it’s okay. If I, as an individual, do the same, I would go to jail. Usually, the bad guys sneak around at night in the dark. But these large companies do their dastardly deeds in full view, during the day. The obvious next thought is what do I want to get away with that I can only do within the structure of a C Corp? I haven’t thought of anything yet, but I’m working on it.
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Priscilla Burgess is CEO, Co-founder, and Co-inventor of Bellwether Materials, an award-winning, triple-bottom line company that manufactures deep green building insulation made from an agricultural by-product. Before founding Bellwether Materials, she ran her own management consulting business. She has traveled all over the world, asking questions about how people work and from that, has developed several models and many opinions about the best way to grow a flourishing business.
This article is part of the Building a Sustainable Business series about starting and running a sustainable business. Read all articles here.
image: US Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region via Flickr cc