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CSR and Social Business: Clinton to Gordon Brown

posted on Saturday, May 31, 2008 08:36 AM

Or how yesterday's activism is today's CSR and tomorrow's foreign policy.

Clinton was on-side from the beginning. In 1996 he was up for re-election and one of the honorary researchers on the committee took this as an opportunity to pitch a paper about a new way of doing business. Business he said, was about people in the end and in an increasing polarised world between poverty and wealth we needed a new way to address the problem, something to replace the conventional nonprofit approach, a new and inclusive way of doing business. The paper predicted that poverty arising from being left out the information age would succeed that resulting from having been excluded in the industrial age and that people excluded to the point of being disposable could only result in disaster. The social capitalism based model proposed was described as People-Centered Economic Development. It was published open source, with the intention of spreading the message far and wide as quickly as possible.

5 years later, on 9/11 two aircraft hit the World Trade Centre to illustrate the point which others then began to grasp, that enlightened self-interest was the way forward

12 years later, at the beginning of this month, in his Business Call to Action, Gordon Brown essentially read back the script of that paper on social capitalism.

This was not the only advocacy for the new CSR movement. Economist Jed Emerson had described the Triple Bottom Line approach, John Mackey of Wholefoods Inc named his as Conscious Capitalism and Daniel Fleischer delivered a paper on Profit with a Conscience.

Prior to 2000, Bill Gates firmly believed that the social responsibility of business was to make a profit. His conversion aligning his and the fortunes of Warren Buffet changed all that and at Davos this year, created his own brand of social or creative capitalism.

In 2005, Nobel Economics Prize winner Muhammad Yunus began describing the concept of a Social business Enterprise on the Grameen bank website as a precursor to his latest book, Creating a World Without Poverty.
ciding with Russia's economic downturn of the 90s.

Now P-CED begins to have influence on CSR in Ukraine. Following a strategy paper, delivered in October 2006, describing radical reforms needed to address widespread social problems, USAID funded the East Europe Foundation to fund sustainable local business and business foundations such as Krona have been launched to address issues in childcare which the strategy paper highlighted.

Interesting too is the effect on foreign relations. With a radical proposal to leverage business in the islamic community of repatriated Tatars of Crimea, P-CED made the case for ec...ategic thinkers in the development of smart power strategies.

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