Successfully Engaging Europe's Smaller Businesses in Environmental and Social Issues

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...

Using a case study from the Nilgris Biosphere Reserve in India, the Green Indian States Trust created a challenging presentation which analyses the link between poverty and environmental degradation as well as offering ideas of how to break the cycle.

This presentation was given by Dr. Matthew Kiernan, Chief Executive, Innovest Strategic Value Advisor at the 2008 Tomorrow's Company Annual lecture. In it he powerfully brought together the arguments for the importance of recognising the link between the management of environmental, social and governance factors as an indicator of business performance, sustainable value creation and long-term investment returns. You can read Tony Manwaring's blog about the event here.

This piece documents a Management Today and Tomorrow's Copmany rountable discussion kindly hosted by Lovells. In it a number of leading business practicitioners and thinkers sat down to answer some of the key questions that came out of the Tomorrow's Owners - Stewardship of tomorrow's company report and it produced some rather interesting ideas for change. Here is a full list of the very high quality participants: Tim Wates, chairman, Wates Family Holdings; Will Hutton, executive vice chair, The Work Foundation; Adrian Beecroft, senior managing partner, Apax Partners; Sir John Egan, chairman, Severn Trent Water;  Colin Melvin, CEO, Hermes Equity Ownership Services; Mark Goyder, founder director, Tomorrow's Company; Rajesh Sennik, leader, private equity and corporate strategy, Accenture; Round Table chairman: Matthew Gwyther, editor, MT; Blake Lee, Harwood environmental consultant; Richard Ufland, corporate partner, Lovells;