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Harvard Business Review on Corporate Responsibility (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series)

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Traditional corporate executives may shudder when they hear the term "corporate responsibility". In their view, the corporation's responsibility is to maximize shareholder value within the bounds of the law. That's a tall order as it is, so resistance to the thought of additional sources of responsibility and additional relevant "stakeholders" isn't surprising. The writers gathered in this collection of papers from HBR see corporate responsibility less as a burden and more as an opportunity. The opportunity lies in creating new markets, resolving age-old business problems, improving public perception, strengthening brands, and melding the best ideas for governments and nonprofit institutions for doing well while doing good.

This collection of eight essays provides a firm foundation in both critical and creative thinking on issues of corporate responsibility and active philanthropy. If the terrain is unfamiliar, the collection's fifth essay - "The Path of Kyosei should be a comfortable entry point. Canon's honorary chairman, Ryuzaburo Kaku, sets out five steps along a path toward a "spirit of cooperation". Practical but still intellectually not so challenging is Rosabeth Moss Kanter's "From Spare Change to Real Change: The Social Sector as Beta Site for Business Innovation". Craig Smith in "The New Corporate Philanthropy" sees philanthropic strategies as giving a competitive edge. A similar perspective, worked out in some detail, comes from Michael Porter and Mark Kramer in their contribution, "The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy".

Charles Handy takes his turn at defining the extent of corporate responsibility in "What's A Business For?". A more impressive piece with far more potential payback for the executive reader comes from C.K. Prahalad and Allen Hammond in their recent essay, "Serving the World's Poor, Profitably". Also of high quality is Roger Martin's "The Virtue Matrix: Calculating the Return on Corporate Responsibility". For the more philosophical, a challenging and well-presented argument for strong corporate responsibility appears in "Can a Corporation Have a Conscience?" by the fittingly-named Kenneth Goodpaster and John Matthews. With a couple of weaker spots, this collection succeeds in bringing together some of the best recent thinking on the issue in recent years. To fill in the gaps, be sure to look at the best pieces from other publications.

As an educational leadership professor, I am interested in learning about corporations and how they impact educational settings. This text was one of the most comprehensive collections of essays to offer a wide range of perspectives on the issues of corporate social responsibility. With its researchers and the commentary, this text provides a novice, like myself, with the background, application and insight as to how the business world perceives CSR within its own environment. For those of you who are new to this field, this is a must read.

Dr. Joan Jackson, Asst. Prof. Ed. Leadership, ODU

This collection of papers from well-known and respected authors such as Prahalad, Porter, and Kramer is a very good starting point for everyone who wants to get into the topic of corporate responsibility. In a very academic way these authors describe the concept, scope, and possibilities of corporate responsibility. With their years of experience in their fields they are able to outline examples of how this concept should work, but especially how it really works in practice.

As with most Harvard Business Press paper collections you will get excellent theory on the topic mixed with brilliant insights and prescient views. The expertise of the authors allows them to provide the reader with a great overview on the interaction between the different factors that play a role in corporate responsibility.

- Frank Roettgers, author of Going Green Together - How to Align Employees with Green Strategies

This collection of article opens interesting lines of reasoning and might just get fresh ideas in front of decision makers who can use business as a tool for good on the global scale. The eight articles cover a broad range of topics and vary in tone from sweeping philosophical musings to rigorous academic pieces. The first article is a very strong lead-off, I will try to summarize this piece in hopes of giving you a flavor for the whole collection:

* Serving the world's poor, profitably - C.K. Prahalad & Allen Hammond
How can companies profitably serve a market where consumers live on $2000 or less per year? On the other hand, how can companies afford to ignore a market of 4 billion potential customers? This article explores reasons why companies have in the past shied away from trying to serve the "bottom of the pyramid" (BOP) markets, why major growth opportunities exist in this niche, and how typical strategies need to be adapted into new thinking that will benefit the world's poorest communities and those who compete for their business. There is a distasteful element to imagining multinational corporations, the most powerful institutions of our time, engaging and profiting from the most economically powerless. The authors make the case that the poor suffer more from being ignored by the global marketplace of the multinationals than by engagement with it. They illustrate how prices charged by the informal economy that serves poor communities are typically much higher for the same goods than prices in more affluent communities served by efficient distribution. When BOP strategies are done correctly, corporations also benefit in more ways than simply generating additional sales: BOP markets can serve as incubators for new products, ideas and approaches that can revitalize productivity and leadership in the developed (and saturated) markets as well. An innovative approach for reaching poorer customers is to de-aggregate ownership from use by exploring "pay per use" models. Another strategy, that runs counter to mainstream thinking, is to deploy some of the most cutting edge wireless technologies in the least developed markets to overcome the isolation of poor rural areas.

The book was in great shape and transaction went very well. The book came a little late but within the time frame as specified. Otherwise great transaction!

A collection of articles gathers the latest thinking on the strategic significance of corporate social responsibility: a very interesting book!

As a self described old had on corporate responsibility, sustainability, and green leadership, I paged through this quickly, took interest in a few articles, and ultimately didn't get a lot out of it. If you have substantial experience in the field and have read other books and literature, I'd recommend you skip this brief compendium of the top Harvard Business Review articles.

On the positive side, the essays are all quite well written, researched, and vetted, though some are a bit dated now. Most of these form the backbones of some very serious strategy arguments in the business world, and considerable amounts of research have sprung from these quick leaders. If you're looking to get a broad overview quickly, read this, then go find books and articles that cite these articles to get a much more in-depth view of the philosophies.

This book is excellent for the researcher who has been trying to find some older works on CSR, which originally appeared in the Harvard Business Review.
There are some "classic" articles in this book, however I would not full-heartedly recommend this collection to the general public:

As one would expect by a Harvard Business Review collection anyway, the topic CSR is not dealt with in a consistent manner, the publication rather adds a number of distinguished articles one after the other.