Integrating strategies for corporate responsibility and evaluating their impact, both sociallyand environmentally, is becoming increasingly critical to business. Companies are seekingways to successfully put their strategies on sustainability into practice - strengthening theconnection between corporate responsibility and global competitiveness. This paper summarises the key discussion points from a high level roundtable discussionorganised by CIMA and Tomorrow’s Company, where senior business decision makers met with experts in sustainability. Anant Nadkarni, Vice President, Group Corporate Sustainability, Tata Council for Community Initiatives (TCCI) presented the Tata Index to the group.  This has been captured on video and can be found here.

   “A lack of long-term stewardship by company heads and shareholders is at the heart of the current financial crisis, an influential think-tank says in a report published on Wednesday. Tomorrow’s Company, whose previous research has helped shape UK company law, urges the government to understand better the effects of the growing “casino economy”, where activities such as derivatives trading are often far removed from the real economy activity to which they theoretically relate. The report warns against the search for scapegoats for the current crisis and says that it is wrong to attack private equity, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds for irresponsibility, noting that different shareholders perform different functions. However, it condemns the practice of borrowing shares for voting purposes and asks if investors need to toughen up their engagement to change company behaviour or divest holdings in companies with particular shortcomings. Mark Goyder, Tomorrow’s Company...

This diagram was developed by Corporate Culture to explain how CR evolves within a business. Disparate – disparate stage a business is conducting a random mix of activities with no clear strategy or link to the business Silos – this is the phase of CR where the business is working in silos, for example the HR team may be looking at the diversity of the business, someone in facilities management maybe looking at recycling for the building, there may be someone with overall responsibility for CR activities (possible at Board level) but there is no overriding strategy Cross-cutting – this is the phase where the business starts to join up activities and cross cut their CR activity into an overriding strategy which different parts of the business talking to each other. There may be a CR steering Group, CR strategy and will probably be a person or team co-ordinating activities Fully-integrated – this is the phase where the CR activity is fully integrated into the business and decisions...

Mark Goyder discusses how changing trends in shareholder ownership will affect the decisions of executives and what this could mean for sustainable policies.  This article was published by Ethical Corporation in July. Mark Goyder is founder director of Tomorrow’s Company.  Mark holds a number of other positions, including British Airways Corporate Responsibility Board; BT Leadership Advisory Panel; Camelot Advisory Panel for Social Responsibility and Judge for Unipart group Mark in action awards. He was named Director of the month, June 2004, by Director Magazine and won the IMS Millenium award for best speaker.

Apart from money, what is it that motivates people at work? There is plenty of rhetoric about ethics and social responsibility, but does it really make a difference to people's performance at work, or their their loyalty? In 2001 the Ci Group (www.careerinnovation.com) conducted a large-scale global survey to answer these questions. This previously unpublished research illustrates the business benefits from being a force for good company, including: Motivational benefits of employee volunteering; Statistical evidence that ‘Ethical Reputation’ is a top driver of staff retention; The ethical motivation profile of industry sectors;  Links between career discussions and retention.