Corporate Eye

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Chris Milton

Chris Milton

Three tips to develop CSR Redwood

Once in a while you come across a company name which is just sooooo apposite for their business you find it hard to believe some kind of legal name change hasn’t been involved.

The best example of this I’ve ever come across dates back to my early childhood and travelling into Oxford on the Park & Ride.  As the double decker rattled its way along the Abingdon Road we passed by a funeral directors, called Reeves and Pain.  I kid you not, and so far as I know the company is still going to this day.

You may have already come across an interesting little video from The Big Think project entitled “Companies Can’t Be Parasites Anymore”; it was released last month but I’ve only just watched it.

The video is of a brief interview with Stephen Miles, VC of Heidrick and Struggles, one of the oldest executive consulting firms in the US.  A video with that title from a company called “Struggles” .. I’m sorry, it somehow seems apposite once again.

All that aside though, the video is well worth watching.  It’s only three minutes long and in a quiet yet forceful way Stephen Miles outlines exactly the changes needed in corporate culture post-financial crisis. [Read more…] about Three tips to develop CSR Redwood

LSE & 3i : Precision and Content Combined | FTSE 100 Website Reviews

My eldest son, having reached the dizzying age of 11, really kinda worries me.  He doesn’t want to be top of his class and, I have a sneaking suspicion, he deliberately sabotages various tests to ensure he’s not.

Why? Because he’s afraid of being labelled as a nerd.  It’s OK to be in the top class you understand, and he gets rather upset if there’s any suspicion that he’s not.  But not top of that class; that just makes you a social pariah.

Eh. We’ve all been there in our school and professional days I guess, hiding our true thoughts under the bushel for popularity reasons, pretending we’re not quite the person we really are.

Me? I have no such issues anymore and I’m happy to admit to getting rather nerd-ish about companies, their websites and their Sustainability Reports.  Perhaps it will catch on? Who knows…

This is why two websites have caught my eye within the financial sector of the FTSE 100.  Not because they’re outstanding in any way, but because each has its own little nuances which makes it an intriguing site to have a look at.

See. I told you I was a nerd didn’t I?!

[Read more…] about LSE & 3i : Precision and Content Combined | FTSE 100 Website Reviews

Is China the future of CSR? | CSR Around The World

One of the acronyms which has gained common currency over the past few years is BRIC : meaning Brazil, Russia, India and China.  But have you ever wondered who coined the acronym in the first place?

Step forward Jim O’Neill, Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, who invented the term some nine years ago when trying to predict what the world would look like in 2050.

With China now the second largest economy in the world, Brazil and Russia in the top ten and India knocking on the door at 11, his prediction that they would dominate the traditional G7 by 2050 seems to be coming true faster than he imagined.

This is why, writing in Project Syndicate, he has revised the original prediction and now believes that by 2020 the BRIC countries’ economies will outweigh the US with up to two thirds of that block coming from China.

Aside from the simple financial influence this will have upon markets and commodities, what will it mean for the way business is done and, in particular, the currently growing CSR movement?

To try and get to the bottom of this I asked Richard Brubaker, Founder and Managing Director, Collective Responsibility and Adjunct Professor of Responsible Leadership, China Europe International Business School, about his experiences of CSR in China.

[Read more…] about Is China the future of CSR? | CSR Around The World

Truffling out a Diamond in Better Cotton

Like a diamond in the rough, you only come across those most precious of websites through digging around and having an open mind.

Actually I’ve always preferred the image of a pig digging around for truffles, but a) pigs don’t have a particularly good press, despite being a highly intelligent and social creatures; and b) truffles have nowhere near the kudos diamonds have. Ah, such is the way public perceptions drive our lives!

However, if you want a diamond (or truffle) of a sustainability website, you should have a look at the website for The Better Cotton Initiative (BCI).

It doesn’t matter that this is an NGO’s website rather than a commercial organisation’s.  How it has its information organised and presented is what matters, and BCI excels at this.

For starters, the homepage is wonderfully straightforward.

“The Better Cotton Initiative exists to make global cotton production better for the people who produce it, better for the environment it grows in and better for the sector’s future”.

These are the only words on the homepage, and I doubt any proponent of sustainability could put it any more succinctly. [Read more…] about Truffling out a Diamond in Better Cotton

Barclays and Standard Chartered – Two Sides Of One Coin | FTSE 100 Website Reviews

It’s always interesting to compare two leading companies in a sector and see how they approach their sustainability websites. 

There is a “standard” website design which has pretty well been settled on these days (3 columns, head and footer, menu system etc) but the question always remains how to use this to the best advantage.

Barclays and Standard Chartered are two of the best performing banks in the UK, yet their approaches to how to design a sustainability website are radically different.  You end up wishing they could have got together and produced one super-duper website, but that’s what competition and market segmentation is all about: being different to your rivals in certain, key areas. [Read more…] about Barclays and Standard Chartered – Two Sides Of One Coin | FTSE 100 Website Reviews