Responsible Business Guide: A Toolkit for Winning Companies

RBG
Responsible Business Guide: A Toolkit for Winning Companies
relevance and impact of the company’s behavior, feeding it all the way up through the
same process of engagement, to be checked against the core values.
As a result, the company is keyed in to its impact in the eyes of key stakeholders, and if it
remains responsive, it can continue fine-tuning its business behavior to gain an ideal “tradeoff”
between its business values and stakeholder expectations. In quest of this state of
optimal balance, the company generates responsible profits without adversely impacting
its environment and keeps stakeholders satisfied, pushing up growth as a spiral of virtue.
The six pillars of the RBF are the areas of focus in this model. Each must be addressed
separately, yet simultaneously. This journey has four practical milestones in each pillar –
Perception, Preparation, Practice, and Performance.
Responsibility Level I: Perception
The road to responsible business starts from Perception, where a company reflects on its
own values and understands how these values relate to its business goals. All businesses
exist to make a profit. It is a company’s values that determine the ethical point of reference
for business decisions that affect the creation and delivery of particular products or services
to customers, including determining what is a fair profit. A number of values derived from
culture and tradition are subjective. However, commonly held human values such as
honesty, integrity, and dependability equally pervade the realm of business transactions.
Altruism is another value, which though not integral to such transactions is often linked
to business behavior.
Responsibility Performance Level II: Preparation
With this relationship clear, the next step involves Preparation for action that demonstrates
a company’s responsible behavior to others. This typically involves documenting values
in the shape of policies and operation-level mechanisms, developing awareness and
implementation capacity among company personnel, and installing appropriate reporting
communication systems for stakeholders. Evidence shows this to be perhaps the most
difficult step for informally organized businesses, such as family-run enterprises, and may
require outside support. However, once written down, company values, policies, and
procedures are easier to integrate into day-to-day management.
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