RESPONSE - Insead

Recommendations Recommendations for management education
2. NGOs. There are also a few important take­aways from the work we have done for
the representatives of the wide variety of NGOs that interact with business
corporations in so many different ways, on so many different topics and with
sometimes divergent approaches to engagement (from the most confrontational to
entirely cooperative ones).
a. Understand the Business. The interviews conducted for this project reveal
that NGOs typically possess, compared to SRAs, an even more limited level
of understanding about what actually happens inside corporations. This is
problematic because the potential to influence corporate behaviour is clearly
dependent on the credibility as a valid counterpart in relevant initiatives
aimed at the joint impact on economic and social performance. If NGOs want
to have a chance to play a role in the change process that companies need
to go through to become a more responsible actor in society, they need to
substantially upgrade their understanding of corporate processes and their
skills in coordinating and cooperating on the internal change agenda. Unless
and until business corporations complete this internal change process, it is
hardly reasonable to expect that they will play their full role in tackling the
global issues.
b. Be Sceptical of “Engaging” Corporations. The fact that the degree of
development of stakeholder engagement practices in business corporations
does not necessarily lead to a better understanding of stakeholders’ interests
and mindsets, as one would expect, rings an alarm bell for NGOs who
receive offers to engage in stakeholder dialogues or other external initiatives.
There is nothing bad about engaging with corporations, of course, but NGOs
should learn to discriminate when these offers come with motivations tied to
boosting external reputations from the, much more rare but at the same time
appealing, case in which the genuine motivation is to enact profound internal
changes in the way the company operates.
3. “Inner Circle” Stakeholders. SRAs and NGOs (including consumer associations,
industry associations, and issue­specific pressure groups) can be considered
intermediaries or mediators of the interests of “inner circle” stakeholders: customers,
suppliers/partners, shareholders, employees and communities (including local and
national government authorities) (Freeman, 1984; Preston, Post and Sachs, 2002).
The message offered to managers about the refocusing of their attention and
resources from the external engagement activities to internal change processes is of
particular relevance for the “inner circle” stakeholders. The implication is, in fact, that
they become (or return to be) the central focus of both the attention and the rhetoric
of the corporations they are dealing with. In turn, this means an increasing
responsibility to help those corporations enact the internal changes necessary to fully
integrate the social impact of their decisions and activities in their operating and
strategic processes. Given the magnitude of the internal change challenge, and
given the peripheral position of the “CSR experts” in most business corporations, it
seems an obvious conclusion that the key to the puzzle really lies in the hands of the
“inner stakeholders”: the shift towards a truly responsible enterprise can only happen
if customers, suppliers/partners, employees, shareholders and communities move
beyond signaling and towards active collaboration in driving the internal change
agenda.
11.3 Recommendations for management education
The experimental part of RESPONSE was designed specifically to assess the relative effectiveness of
the current approaches to executive education on Corporate Social Responsibility. In particular, the
experiments focused on the challenge of helping managers and corporate leaders develop the
psychological attributes and personal values that can support the integration of principles of social
responsibility in the day­to­day operations of business corporations.
The results summarised above point to the need to rethink the approach to CSR education in several
different ways:
RESPONSE: understanding and responding to societal demands on corporate responsibility
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