RESPONSE - Insead

Recommendations Recommendations for policy and standards
seems to be that it produces the type of cognitive alignment among managers
and stakeholders that dialogue by itself fails to produce. In other words, the first
concrete thing that business corporations and their counterparts (SRAs, NGOs,
etc.) can do to have a positive impact on global problems is to collaborate to
help each other change themselves towards (a) integrating social responsibility
principles in their day to day work (business organisations) and (b) upgrade
their competencies to evaluate corporate behaviour and offer constructive
support in their internal change efforts (stakeholders, particularly the
intermediaries, such as NGOs and SRAs).
c. Then, partner for external change. Only once the collaboration for internal
change is at least launched and the first fruits are generated, can the “partners”
start investing in joint external change projects. At that point, the two partners
of the “alliance” will have established the credibility, the mutual respect and the
inter­organisational routines (Zollo et al. 2002) necessary to scale up the
perspective and ambitions of their collaboration. For example, addressing the
global issue of climate change should pass first through active business &
society collaboration in changing the ways in which corporations are organised
and work to produce their products and services to minimise the environmental
impact of processes and outputs. Only once that is, at least in good part,
accomplished, corporations and their “alliance partners” will have developed
the joint understanding (cognitive alignment), the external credibility, the
internal commitment and the collaborative routines that will allow them to tackle
the broader and more challenging issues of solving the global problems
beyond the boundaries of their extended enterprises.
RESPONSE: understanding and responding to societal demands on corporate responsibility
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