TheLaughingDog's Blog
Article in the Irish Times about the Danish island of Samsø which is billing itself as the 100% Renewable Energy Island: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0425/1224295410384.html
Samsø’s own website, Danish Energy Academy: http://www.energiakademiet.dk/default_uk.asp
I know I harp on about happiness quite a lot but this is the final post that I’ll specifically mention it in. On April 7th of this year I married my beautiful finacee, overlooking the sea in Kerry with our daughter beside us on a warm sunny day. It just doesn’t get better than that.
I didn’t think about a bike or an iPod gadget for a week afterwards. That’s happy. If we were all that happy, all of the time, then there’d surely be anarchy. Or society would find a way to appreciate the new found satisfaction and use it wisely.
Who’s going to effectively measure this? The company themselves? Used (abused) correctly CSR’s can be a source of genuine competitive advantage for a company or it can be another tool to be managed by a company so that they can hide a multitude of sins to people in the developed world. How much credence or attention is given to the validity of a company’s reported CSR’s for it’s operations in the developing world by governments in the developing world?
Who is going to police the validity of a company’s CSR’s? NGOs? There appears to be a multitude of organisations vying for the position of top dog for the policing of CSR’s. What does this mean? Could it be that there is a lucrative market for consulting in the field of compliance? Companies cannot conduct business without some form of accreditation these days and for many customers it is a requirement that their supplier be accreditied to a particular standard. As such the need for a company to achieve and subsequently maintain a particular certification is of paramount importance to their survival. Without a question of doubt this does lead to some sustained improvement in a company’s operation or behaviour. However accreditation & compliance to standards is also another item to be managed by companies. Invariably there is a rush of activity leading up to an audit in order to put on a good show for the auditor and once certification or recertification has been achieved, it’s mostly forgotten about until the next audit. I have witnessed and been party to such activity in the past which makes me very sceptical about CSR’s as they currently stand in large multinational companies.
SME businesses tend to be a different case as they are typically owner led and therefore the management of an SME is closer to the community and may also have quite strong views about certain issues which will be reflected in the company’s operations.
In relation to large multinational’s some sort of rigourous program with genuinely punitive consequences for failure to comply with CSR’s should be introduced. The Sarbanes–Oxley Act is one such example. Introduced to prevent companies folding in the manner that Enron and several others did, it genuinely made board of directors, CEOs, CFOs etc. sit up and notice. I never experienced anything as thorough as a Sarbanes-Oxley audit.
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