I’m especially happy its happening virtually because my favorite CEO, Jeff Schwartz of Timberland, is giving the keynote. If you, like me are out of town, you do not to have to miss it.

It makes sense that a summit on new models of social responsibility should take place making use of a new model of communications. And the event is environmentally friendly as well. By utilizing web conferencing technology, the live summit’s carbon footprint is minimized (because large events can have significant environmental impacts).  According to the organizers:

This is a ground-breaking summit that is using the latest communications technology to reach everyone who can help add to the knowledge necessary to to make social responsibility the way all organizations conduct business.

The summit has all the makings of a must-attend event:

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Today’s business climate is more competitive than ever.  Several highly qualified MBA grads are vying for fewer and fewer corporate jobs.  According to a 2008-2009 survey by the MBA Career Services Council, business schools have experienced a drop in corporate recruiting of more than 10 percent affecting more than half of the 94 top-ranked business schools in the United States, Canada and Europe.  Scary, isn’t it…especially if you’re one of the many contemplating a return to graduate school.  So what would set you apart or give you the competitive edge to land that corporate gig?  Corporate Social Responsibility

The Aspen Institute just released the 2009-2010 edition of Beyond Grey Pinstripes, a biennial survey and alternative ranking of full-time MBA programs that integrate issues of social and environmental stewardship into curricula and research.  Did your school make the list?

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Owned by the Taylor family of St. Louis – which also owns and operates Enterprise Rent-A-Car - Enterprise Fleet Management offers businesses with medium-sized fleets services to efficiently manage their vehicle fleet.

The award comes as no real surprise for this blogger, as Enterprise Rent-A-Car has come to our attention on several occasions for their work expanding their low emissions rental fleet, providing van pool services throughout various cities across the U.S., funding alternative fuel research, and acting generally as a good corporate citizen.

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We recently applauded Apple for its new energy efficient 17″ MacBook, but news that the company wants to stifle shareholder requests to publish a Corporate Sustainability Report has overshadowed our praise.

The shareholder resolution was proposed by an environmental group called As You Sow, and asks for detailed information about toxins, recycling, greenhouse gases, and more. This past Wednesday, Apple’s board of directors asked shareholders to vote against the resolution.

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KPMG’s International Survey of Corporate Responsibility Reporting came out over a month ago, but at 118 pages, it has taken me a while to go through it. If you’d like to check it out, download the report from the KPMG site.

But if you’d like a quick summary, here are some highlights that stood out to me:

First, some good news: The report says, “Corporate responsibility reporting has gone mainstream - nearly 80 percent of the largest 250 companies worldwide… issued reports.” However, the continuation of that sentence says, “…and an additional four percent integrated corporate responsibility information into their annual reports.”

I’d love to hear from an annual report writer or investor relations executive, because four percent sounds very low. Maybe there is a good reason for a stand-alone report, but it seems to me that sustainability and social responsibility should be integral to corporate operations in the Twenty-first Century.

(I get ahead of myself. The punchline of the KPMG report is that companies are not integrating sustainability and social responsibility plans sufficiently. Many companies may report their plans, but very few declare their strategies and results.)

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Like corporate social responsibility (CSR), you find yourself semi-exhausted before the next sentence.

You sense inherent good in each of these phrases – sure – but just want them to make sense in a realer world.

And so to the VCS.

Voluntary carbon offsetting is big business. In 2006, there was a huge surge in this market resulting in a 200% growth.

Big brands were, and are, getting into carbon offsetting in a big way. Google, Nike, Coca Cola, Yahoo! – all are now part of this market.

I don’t think it at all beneficial at this stage to analyse their reasons for announcing green credentials. Whether it really is genuine CSR or in each case a PR exercise is redundant. Don’t muddy the waters. They’re doing it.

So, yes, multinationals are offsetting their carbon within the voluntary sector. Good.

But what’s drawing them to the market? Two reasons.

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This comes mere weeks after Gordon Brown, the UK’s new prime minister, gave his first speech on the environment. Whilst not being exactly radical, it did at least entertain some hope that we finally had a leader with green credentials.

Until London Heathrow that is.

Airport bosses must be dancing a jig at the moment because the government has decided to give the green light to a third runway. And yes, I use the word “green” witheringly.

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The slogan may sound like the kind of marketing ploy that’s in vogue these days, especially coming from a company that’s best known for making soda and potato chips. But Nooyi says that by emphasizing baked whole-grain snacks and vitamin-enhanced water, Pepsi can lead the industry’s push toward better nutrition. That, she argues, would benefit not just consumers, but investors, too.

While the charismatic Nooyi seems to have won the hearts and minds of BusinessWeek and the few people who have commented, I wonder if her well intentioned message will ever reach the global mass of consumers her “performance” requires. Steering a goliath of modernity into the 21st century is no easy task and simply providing a better portfolio and digging some wells in India is more of an expectation than a consumer strategy.

We are not advocating Nooyi set the consumer strategy – it’s hardly not the traditional role of a CEO. However, she needs to provide some point-of-view, some framework and some rallying cry to help bring such a global organization together. She needs to spell out how PepsiCo, beyond providing a functionally healthier portfolio, enrich the world.

Now many sustainability experts I speak with say this is a risky idea. It sets PepsiCo and Nooyi up for further criticism and distrust from consumers. Since sustainability is a learning process and programs are filled with risks and rewards equally, it’s better to hold back than make large public pronouncements.

But I am not suggesting unrolling a creative consumer strategy to the tune of fireworks and a marching band here. I am advocating PepsiCo step up to the plate and inspire a new world. I am advocating setting the tone and spirit for what PepsiCo aspires to be in a much more visceral way. I am advocating providing sites for real engagement and education. PepsiCo’s focus areas of obesity and water for example should be significantly more compelling than they are today. Decreasing obesity and improving water are noble goals but hardly a rallying cry for consumers. Who is pro-obesity, pro-water contamination and pro-drought?

Beyond survival, what is PepsiCo’s real agenda? What would a sustainable world with PepsiCo in it look like? Why should consumers believe PepsiCo, care or feel involved with any products within the portfolio?

These are tough questions admittedly, but PepsiCo has a far reaching global footprint and frankly sustainable behavior isn’t universal. What is culturally accepted in China will not necessarily be seen as “ethical” behavior in Germany. Dealing with these questions and providing a real point-of-view helps PepsiCo provides a central dialog within and outside of the organization for better integration. Contradictions can be discussed and addressed. Differences and similarities can be equally celebrated. Strategy can be richer and more dynamic.

Luckily for PepsiCo, Nooyi is already doing this from a personal perspective. She is proud of her cultural heritage and celebrates it. As much as she is comfortable both in a business suit and a sari, her childhood experiences genuinely drive her to change the world with more than profitability:

Although she describes her family as “very middle class,” they still had to rise every morning between three and five—the only hours that the valves to the municipal water supply were turned on—and fill every bucket in the house. Two buckets were set aside for cooking, and two each would go to Nooyi, her older sister, and her younger brother. “You had to think about whether to take a bath,” says Nooyi, matter-of-factly. “You learned to live your life off those two buckets.”

We only hope she takes the license to, over time, transform a culturally conservative and competitive organization like PepsiCo into a change agent in the new economy. We at The Eightfold are not taking her commitment to change the food industry lightly. As we watch what she does for her company and communities, it will be interesting to see how she uses these experiences to build awareness and create profound change amongst consumers at mass. That is the mark of a truly socially purposeful and progressive organization.

BusinessWeek

The UK-based organization provides support for travel management professionals and promotes best practices across the industry. The toolkit was announced at their 2007 conference entitled "Responsible Travel Management". The intent of the toolkit is to help create a framework for the travel management industry to help companies conduct business travel more responsibly and to better understand corporate social responsibility.

The toolkit includes corporate case studies highlighting successes in the use of video conferencing and ground transportation, a guide to RFP and travel policy environmental best practices, an FAQ document dispelling some emission reduction myths, and tools to calculate and analyze carbon footprints.

The toolkit is part of ITM's Project ICARUS, which was established last year to "promote carbon reduction in travel management programmes throughout the UK business travel industry." As part of ICARUS ITM is also working to implement a set of environmental accreditation standards and an awards process to give credibility and recognition to business travel suppliers who are working towards these goals.

ITM has been around since 1956 and has no doubt seen changes in their industry as transportation and technologies have evolved over time. ITM is demonstrating the need to help their members respond to new corporate needs with Project ICARUS and the toolkit, which will also make it easier for businesses to reach their CSR goals and emission reduction targets.

Via Institute of Travel Management; The Transnational; Environmental Leader

According to the report Growing Opportunity: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Insoluble Problems, a social entrepreneurs are:

…entrepreneurs whose new ventures (social enterprises) prioritize social returns on investment, i.e. improving quality of life for marginalized populations by addressing issues such as health, poverty, and education. One key reason why mainstream business needs to pay attention is that these people aim to achieve higher leverage than conventional philanthropy and NGOs, often aiming to transform the systems whose dysfunctions help create or aggravate major socioeconomic, environmental, and political problems.

SustainAbility surveyed 100 social entrepreneurs all over the world to gauge the different approaches to global health and environmental problems, and the challenges they face in their business ventures. Major challenges cited by respondents were access to capital, promotion and marketing of programs and services, and not enough opportunities to work with experts and other businesses.

Given these results, SustainAbility has made recommendations for governments and businesses to help in fostering the success of small entrepreneurs including pathways to funding and creating partnerships. They also map out different phases of funding, and the stages of evolution of an entrepreneur's business.

This report gives the global development community a better understanding of what problems social entreprenuers face. It also gives evidence to larger, established companies that corporate social responsibility continues to grow and provides new avenues of participation in this area.

SustainAbility

The Pennsylvania based confection maker has been working with organizations such as the World Cocoa Foundation and the International Cocoa Initiative to help ensure that cocoa farmers are treated fairly and that the crop is grown responsibly. They also signed the Harkin-Engel Protocol in 2001 that called for the end of child labor on cocoa farms by 2005.

Now shareholders are asking for more and the company is responding. Hershey's recently announced that they will evaluate their entire supply chain to make sure their other ingredients, such as sugar, dairy, nuts, and their product packaging are manufactured and produced responsibly.

Hershey's is also working with Verite, a non-profit human rights organization, and non-profit Business for Social Responsibility, to develop a supplier code. This code is like a social and environmental auditing process for their vendors, which will be transparent and available on the company's website.

Now, I'm not a Hershey's girl myself, but when a corporation like Hershey's (the largest manufacturer of chocolate and candy in the US with annual revenues of $5 billion) asks their suppliers to step up, the amount of positive change that will come out if it is huge.

And FYI - as of October of 2006, Hershey's owns the organic chocolate label Dagoba.

Via WBCSD; PR NewsWire; Hershey's