Corporate Citizenship

As if Apple weren’t in enough trouble with a number of worker suicides on its hands in its Chinese supplier factory Foxconn… Shanghai papers this morning report concerns from female customers in its flagship store who are attracting leery stares from men at the bottom of its transparent spiral stairs, looking up their skirts. We’re [...]

Monsoon season in Mumbai, wellies or plastic shoes the order of the day. Staying in the ITC Maratha Hotel where bedside reading is, I kid you not, their Sustainability Report 2009!  At 100 pages it’s a hefty read, GR3 compliant, with claims to be ‘the only company in the world to have become carbon positive, [...]

I visited a Beijing suburban market last weekend and came across an organic dairy enterprise called Green Yard that made this claim: ‘we have a wide playground for cows, with mild music that increases their feeling of happiness, and thus enhances the freshness and good taste of the milk.’  
One year on from its milk contamination [...]

 In the city that never sleeps, I’m here to talk sustainability and citizenship to a group of senior Chinese managers.  There’s appetite for the subject, but apathy too. With a business growing at 40% + p.a, it’s hard to convince them that anything other than business as usual is the way forward.  But they also [...]

Who’d have thought it? Mao memorabilia is nothing new in China. His face adorns lighters, t-shirts and alarm clocks…but always in revolutionary red (as he would have wanted it). But now Mao can be found in mini statuette form, in a pretty shade of pink. What would he think?  From red revolutionary to pink trinket.  [...]

This time, it’s about consumers, ‘co-creation’ and ‘crowd-sourcing’… A clever marketing strategy/wheeze through which brands keep their consumers emotionally attached (and financially committed) by inviting them to ‘co-create’ new ideas for products and services.. Can’t fault the basic logic of this approach..an enthusiastic pipeline of free ideas that could potentially generate new markets and make [...]

Last month the CEO of ASDA spoke of the dawning of a new shopping experience. ‘There will be no ‘behind the scenes’ he said.  Carrot cams and cow-cams will reveal all about the way in which our food is produced and we will have the power to decide if we buy (or not) according to [...]

I went to an event the other evening, entitled ‘Many Heavens, One Earth: Faiths, the Environment, and Copenhagen’.  Oops. In light of various pronouncements in the past 24 hours that ‘the Deal is dead, long live the Deal’.. perhaps putting Copenhagen in the same sentence as ‘faith’ and ‘environment’ might have been a tad optimistic! 
Nonetheless, [...]

The debate has raged over whether ‘ethical spend’ is taking a hit now that we’re in a recession.  For every statistic that suggests it will (or is), another can be found to suggest the opposite is the case.  Witness headlines in both the Guardian and The Times in the same week last month:  From the [...]

I was struck by a comment in the editorial in today’s FT about the resignation of the government’s chief drug advisor Professor Nutt. At the heart of the row, the question of government moving from reliance on ‘evidence-based policy’ to one that seeks to do the opposite: find the right evidence it needs to justify [...]