Abstract
Getting to coherent organizational responsibility (CORE) is a journey, which requires reengineering both organizational purpose and operational practice. This chapter outlines the principal ideas in the field of reengineering and uses them to outline the coherency journey. It looks at both the CSR organization and the coherently responsible organization at two different levels—abstract and system, showing what the five coherency pillars presented in Chapter 9 look like in each case. It explains how to begin the transformation from one to the other and outlines the different types of cognitive bias that prevent many firms from doing so.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, these properties are interdependent outside the scope of their association with the responsible organization, made up as they are of people in different organizations (be they suppliers, financiers, clients, competitors, etc.) and the natural world.
- 2.
Technically, it is reengineering rather than reserve engineering that will be looked at, as the latter is only a part of the former. For whatever reason, the term reverse engineering has caught the public eye in recent decades and is widely understood, while the rather more important term reengineering seems to be stuck in a technical rut of some sort, when it comes to popular awareness.
- 3.
Samuelson and Scotchmer’s reference to traditional and modern products also reflects an aspect of coherent responsibility—how business has traditionally been done until now, and a destructive limited-value creating manner, and the radically different approach that is needed for the future.
- 4.
The word system here refers to the operative elements of any organization. It should not be confused with the ideas of systems thinking in the following chapter, which refers to a holistic way of viewing the world.
- 5.
This is described as traceability by Ruiz et al. (2012).
- 6.
To mention just one example, many of the world’s largest companies, particularly in the most carbon-intensive sectors, have increased their emissions of harmful greenhouse gases in recent years, instead of lowering them (Moorhead and Nixon 2016). At the same time, these organizations dedicate substantial resources to promoting their CSR credentials.
- 7.
While every company has financial benchmarks (e.g., the internal rate of return on investment the weighted average cost of capital), that can effectively determine the outcome of many decisions, how many give the same importance to ethical or environmental considerations?
- 8.
In 2018, the Fortune Global 500 companies spent a combined $20 billion on their CSR activities (Meier and Cassar 2018). It would be fair to say that only a small percentage of this was spent on stakeholder dialogue. In 2015, the same companies spent $148 billion just on digital advertising (Translate Media 2016) and over $500 billion on advertising in total (IHS Market 2016).
- 9.
More and more organizations take into account social and environmental performance when selecting suppliers. However, it is unusual to see a person’s ethical perspective or willingness to be a whistleblower mentioned as requirements of an employment position.
- 10.
Even this quite often depends on the level of awareness by customers or the general public, the location where the negative impacts are generated, and the legal restrictions or controls.
- 11.
Coca Cola themselves state that 900 tons of plastic find their way into the world’s oceans every hour, with 70% of that sinking to the seafloor. Last year, the company sold 2.5 billion euros worth of drinks just in Spain and Portugal, which suggests a huge level of responsibility for some of that plastic. Their response has been a program called Mares Circulares (Circular Seas) to finance some limited beach cleaning, promote awareness of recycling and work with fishing organizations to encourage them to bring back to port the plastics they bring up in their nets. This last initiative hopes to recover 6 tons of plastic over the course of six months. Overall, the program aims to recover the same amount of plastics that the company used to bottle its products. There is no information about what these quantities are, nor any suggestion of fully phasing out the use of plastics or even non-PET plastic in the first place (Coca Cola, n.d.).
- 12.
82% of the wealth created in 2017 went to the richest one percent of the global population (Oxfam International, n.d.).
- 13.
For example, to continue making decisions, but to incorporate more thinking on possible negative impacts in decision-making processes.
- 14.
While the answer may appear obvious—money, it is somewhat more complex.
- 15.
Even Patagonia, the renowned outdoor clothing and equipment specialist, renowned for its responsibility to society and the environment, had until recently the following mission statement: Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. Is this to suggest that harm is okay, in cases where the firm deems it ‘necessary’?
- 16.
Two years into the agreement, researchers analyzing the impact of the accord found that of more than 3000 inspections, only eight factories have rectified problems enough to pass a final inspection (Ruben 2017).
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References for Case Study
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Hilliard, I. (2019). Getting to CORE. In: Coherency Management. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13523-2_10
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