Corporate Social Responsibility

In a world recognized Global Executive MBA program, questions like the following have been asked:

What is CSR?
How is the government going to drive CSR?

While I am not the perfect example of social and environmental responsibility, I can’t help but worry about the future. As future leaders and decision makers of society, if we aren’t aware of our impacts on the environment (in more then just the economical sense) that our decisions create, then how are things going to change?

Corporate social responsibility has many names and many definitions but the overall principal is to stop hurting people and the environment (Whether this be through pollution, unsafe products, unsafe working conditions or through exploitive low wages).

How will the government drive this? They don’t, the people do. We have the fundamental ability to consume or not consume. Most places in the world have the option to take public transportation instead of driving in order to reduce gas consumption. Similarly the choice of products with more or less packaging or products without hazardous chemicals. A simple economic principle that supply equals demand demonstrates that if less people want non-sustainable products then less of these products will be made in the future. Even more dramatically, democratic countries are voted in by the people. That means us! We get to choose what the government issues are and we get to choose who is going to resolve those issues.

Next time you see the foaming in the water, garbage overflowing out of trash bins or industrial smoke stacks exhausting hazardous chemicals; ask yourself what are you doing to change this.