5

The Death of CSR

A year after the end of the worst global conflict in history, Fortune magazine polled business executives (who, in a manner so charmingly indicative of the times, were called businessmen) on their responsibilities beyond profit making. Other than the term businessmen, the question—and the answers—are surprisingly contemporary.

In a spirit of digitally enabled appropriation, I took just a teeny bit of millennial liberty with the wording—replacing “men” with “people”—so you could experience the date of its publication as a kind of punch line. Gender equality might still not reign in the boardroom, but the fact that “businessmen” is an utterly outdated term is evidence that things have progressed significantly on the social front since this survey.

What’s fascinating here is that in a business era even more overtly sexist than the butt-pinching business culture of Mad Men, that as cigarette smoke wafted through corner offices and gamine secretaries pecked away at typewriters, a humane and socially progressive sentiment was taking hold among the business majority. This notion of social stewardship accompanied a growing sense that corporations were very much public institutions, not unlike universities, or government itself. Even back in 1946, business was beginning to feel culturally sanctioned to take wider responsibility in society beyond generating profit.

Baked In

Fast-forward to the next millennium. It’s another sunbaked Friday in East L.A., and I’ve just walked into Intelligentsia Coffee, a classic example of a third space hangout in one of the more stylishly pseudo-scruffy parts of town. “Third space,” as you no doubt know, is a term for that unique category of place that’s neither home nor office—a place that has the comfort of the former with the social productivity and fast Wi-Fi of the latter. In typical third space style, the café is full of young, creative-looking tweeters with their iPads, carefully maintained beards, piercings, tattoos, and ironic tee shirts. The air is thick with the nutty-warm scent of coffee, brewed masterfully, of course, by skinny youths who, based on their caffeinated chatter, seem to have gotten dual master’s degrees in barista management and cognitive theory.

It’s all very poetic, and for someone of my generation, perhaps a bit “been-there-before”—but a closer look reveals some emergent trends in action. And before you argue that what I’m describing is merely the marginal and rarified environs of a major cultural capital, and not the province of the ordinary Jane and Joe, do remember where trends begin. After all, L.A. is the dream factory, and its workers, its creative class, are clustered around this very neighborhood, with its interesting bookshops, artisanally produced soaps scented with trail-foraged evergreen boughs, and vintage-decorated grunge bars. Unlike Vegas, what happens here doesn’t stay here. It migrates. To everywhere else.

So I have a look around. And right there, on a shelf next to the cash register, I see something so perfectly of the moment that I do a double take. In a new row evocative of a miniature Donald Judd sculpture, sit three tastefully designed boxes of energy bars, carefully and lovingly merchandised like design objects. On each bar, in big, bold, sans serif type: “THIS BAR SAVES LIVES.”

I always like branding that gets to the point. And indeed, this particular product falls into the category of buy-to-donate. For every bar you buy, the company’s nonprofit partner gives a donation. The product itself doesn’t save lives—the for-profit manufacturer of the product supports a nonprofit that has created another product that feeds malnourished children in Africa.

The intentions are great. And the business and the earnestness of its founders are emblematic of the moment. But can This Bar Saves Lives become a leading brand?

The buy-one-give-one model can be tough to support, as I learned from Duncan Goose, who started the brand One a decade ago in the United Kingdom. Buy something, support something. Duncan is a pioneer in conscientious brand building. After spending a few years in the international advertising industry in London, Duncan decided at the ripe old age of twenty-eight that he had learned all that business could teach him, and that it was time to get schooled by life itself in the wider world. He quit his plush job, sold everything he had, and embarked on a round-the-world motorcycle trip that in and of itself is worthy of a major motion picture.

It was an amazing and dangerous adventure. He almost lost his eyesight after hitting a deer in Alberta, Canada. He was shot at in Mexico. He narrowly avoided being kidnapped on the Afghan border. But the most extraordinary experience he described was being in Honduras and surviving the strongest hurricane to ever hit its shores.

The coast was literally decimated. The entire infrastructure disappeared in a matter of hours. While riding along what looked like a beach full of rubble, he came to realize it had been a village. “There was a single structure that looked like a bandstand, you know, all open to the air. A woman was sitting in it. I rode up to her. She told me this was her village, and this structure had been her home.” Duncan was astonished. But nothing prepared him for what happened next. She asked if he had a place to stay, and when he shook his head, she led him to a nearby refugee camp where he immediately became accepted into the community.

“People who have nothing will share with you what they have,” he recalls, and his eyes immediately fill with tears. “I had the means to purify water, but I was still given water by the chief of the community. I was feeling so…” he trails off, and he chokes up. His eyes are shining with tears. I’m silent. I can see that this particular experience was a life-changing one that still sustains him.

There was no access to electricity, no fresh water. Duncan experienced firsthand the preciousness of what, for most of us, in the U.K. and the U.S. at least, is a commodity so common that we have a porcelain fountain in the middle of our homes, replenished at the touch of a lever with gushing potable water. But instead of drinking this abundance, we—well, to put it bluntly—we pee and poop into it. The day is coming when this will seem as surreal and wasteful as throwing gold into a sacred lake.

Duncan stayed with the community for a while. He spent a day digging a house out of a mudslide. He joined forces with some tourists from Switzerland and Belgium and somehow managed to raise about $100,000 to help the community. Eventually he moved on to more adventures, and ultimately back to London, where the lesson stayed with him.

The bottled water category is highly competitive, but innovation in the water category, he explained to me, is “about as exciting as changing the cap.” So one night in a pub with friends, Duncan decided there was an opportunity to be creative at the intersection of the water sector and public health in countries where safe drinking water was scarce. The One Water brand was born, to an FMCG product company where a social sensibility is baked in to the very business model itself.

The drumbeat of “we executives/investors/managers/employees have a wider role to play in society” may feel fashionably of the moment in today’s more relaxed and open-collar boardrooms, but in fact, the debate about the role of business in society—and whether it should assume the obligation to give back to the community in which it operates—is well over a century old. Admittedly, the “C” in the term CSR came a while later. But social responsibility has been on the discussion agenda as long as the balance sheet has, as we are about to see.

Business and Society: The Dance Begins

Indeed, the history of what we now call CSR is the history of business itself, something we don’t obviously have time to cover in this chapter. Nevertheless, there is fascinating historical evidence that illustrates how the demands of business and the needs of society have been entangled in an elaborate and evolving pas de deux since the dawn of the corporation. Enlightened industrialists (like the Quaker-run enterprises in Victorian Great Britain) recognized from the get-go that they needed to provide support for the health and well-being of their workforce, whether directly through housing and other essential resources, or through philanthropic support of public institutions. Sometimes seen as separate forces, and other times viewed as integrated domains, the practices of business and the well-being of society have always been dependent upon one another, because healthy workers, thriving resources, and a stable customer base are the core components of business itself.

CSR as an exercise and a service manifests the most beautiful of human intentions—it’s been essential in the evolution of our civilization. As a discipline and a catalyst, I love it to death. But it’s served its purpose. It’s time to offer the function a graceful retirement, hand it a gold watch, and move on.

Oh no, I’m not talking about retiring the CSR team! On the contrary. These fervent and visionary people need to stick it out and step up, because they have far more important work to do. They need to get out of their specialized, professionalized department and make an even bigger difference in the enterprise and the world. They are, indeed, the next COOs, the next CMOs, and the next CEOs, the next congressional representatives, the new leaders. The CSR team are steeped in factual and anecdotal knowledge that’s needed for the Conscience Economy to take flight.

But before we take off for the future, let’s have a look at the runway. Because although massive change really does happen overnight, the run-up can take far longer. And in the case of the Conscience Economy, it’s been decades of trial and error, with a major disaster partway through, that’s led to this moment. For your delectation, as well as your use as a provocative topic of discussion during a lull at your next business dinner, I offer a brief history of how the advancement of CSR from a debate to a management function unfolded.

To whom is the corporation ultimately responsible? This, perhaps, is the central question. People’s essential humanity hasn’t grown, it’s not like we’ve evolved—but what’s happened is that we know more, we experience more.

The whole thing really kicked off during the Industrial Revolution, when industrialized manufacturing and distribution on a mass scale heretofore never seen, gave rise to a host of dilemmas, from the emergence of inhumane working conditions in factories and mines to intensified urban pollution as hordes of laborers moved from the countryside to dense conurbations of manufacturing. The “dark Satanic Mills” of William Blake’s nineteenth-century poem began spreading across the landscape, producing goods efficiently but belching smoke and soot into the air while in too many cases, harboring suffering workers within. Essayists and novelists, as writers do, critiqued the consequences of the explosive growth of the time. And occasionally, some semblance of legal policy contravened. Briefly, in the later 1800s, it was actually a requirement to provide evidence of social usefulness in order to receive a governmental charter of incorporation.

But by the end of the Civil War, with the U.S. desperate to kick-start the economy again, nearly any business was granted its incorporation documents. And within a few years, corporations had grown exponentially stronger and more powerful. An era of nearly unchecked corporate irresponsibility bellowed forth.

Collapse Causes Conscience

Thank goodness for the Great Depression. Without the cataclysmic and near-total collapse of the financial system, say business historians, the nascent dialogue about the public, social, and environmental role of business might have disappeared forever. The business ecosystem itself had to be rebuilt, and in that process, ideas about a broader role for business ethics and governance in the greater community reclaimed a place in the discourse.

As corporate structures and governance evolved, and as citizens’ and social awareness increased, the conversation shape-shifted. And although it has not been linear, looking back, it’s not hard to conclude that there were clear phases through which discussion and the culture have moved.

Particularly useful, I think, is the series of themed phases that were described by Patrick Murphy, writing in the University of Michigan Business Review in 1978. Although these “eras” don’t have absolute beginning and end dates (does any era?) they still, even today, elegantly express an evolving sensibility of business in relationship with society through the decades.

Murphy suggests that a more formalized reciprocity between business and society began in what he calls a philanthropic era. This rather long period of business history can be both defined (and limited) by the singularly predominant strategy of the business donating a portion of its proceeds to causes in the community. It seems that the impulse toward philanthropy was driven then, as it still is today, by a combination of personal commitment or experience and a wish to improve community relations.

For example, as early as 1875, the accounting books of New York City store R. H. Macy’s show that the company was contributing to an orphan asylum—an expression of Macy’s personal interest in nurturing a positive relationship with the urban community from which his customers and his employees came.

Robber barons like Vanderbilt and Carnegie, looking for a permanent legacy, endowed universities, art museums, and other institutions, establishing their names as heroic and aristocratic noblesse oblige enablers of social betterment. Given that those who had amassed sufficient wealth to build a world-class university had likely done it at the expense of those who were exploited by their near-limitless powers, the desire to recast their celebrity and rebrand the meaning of their own names makes perfect sense. It was as savvy as any other decision they made, and perhaps the benefits of their giving in the long term outweigh the means by which they became capable of doing it. A strange variant on the Robin Hood theme—steal from everyone, then give (some of it) back to everyone.

Recently, I was at the Frieze Art Fair, a contemporary art trade show that fairly crawls with high-net-worth individuals (I’m not one of them) ready to throw down six figures or more for a “picture.” I ended up chatting with a real estate financier from New York City who ranted passionately to me about how he resents “named giving.” For him, the truest motivation for donating to important causes should be the impact it makes, not celebrity or narcissistic self-glorification. His point of view is provocative. Does the motivation matter if the giving happens anyway? Is the “amass great wealth, then give some of it back” model really viable in the long term? One argument in favor of traditional philanthropy is that the “who gives more” status competition encourages generosity. On the other hand, the current system, both socially and economically, keeps many institutions and particularly charities locked in an ongoing dependence on donations, on aid, when perhaps positive impact and innovation to solve societal and environmental problems could instead be a more daily economic, personal, and business imperative and thus in the long term, more sustainable.

Another form of philanthropy is blurrier in terms of its deepest motivations. For example, records show that in this same so-called philanthropic era, during the late 1800s, National Cash Register initiated a number of what look like rather visionary employee welfare methods that wouldn’t seem out of place in the Googleplex. The company provided medical facilities, bathhouses, and lunchrooms for employees. This was seen at the time, as Google’s own employee benefits and environments are today, as a mix of humane empathy and sheer business savvy. Healthy, well-fed employees are also more productive employees.

Today, you can’t say YMCA to a certain generation without a slightly embarrassed recollection of the karaoke rendition of the Village People hit. Everyone loves the exuberance and spirit of the song, but the kitsch connotation doesn’t do the actual organization justice. The YMCA was one of the earliest pioneers of social responsibility, and one of the first to have a meaningful intersection with business.

Founded in the U.K. in 1844 and eventually spreading to the U.S., the YMCA was radical in its time, and in some ways its founding mission still feels contemporary today. Created to support the strengthening of mind, body, and spirit (hence the three-sided logo in the familiar logotype) the YMCA, and later the YWCA, provided a safe haven and accommodation for rural young men and women moving to the city. By World War I, businesses like railroad companies were supporting the organizations with funding. Again, the motivation was a mix of humanitarian and practical concerns—the YMCA provided safety and accommodation for their workers.

According to Murphy, the philanthropic era lasted well into the 1950s. And it should be noted that, although corporate philanthropy continues, and indeed most major charities couldn’t exist without it, it cannot be taken for granted. Donating a portion of operating costs or potential shareholder return to charities opens up governance challenges that have long been debated in the courts as well as the boardrooms. The central question—should businesses be giving shareholder dollars away?—is perhaps moot today because of the broad shift in our sensibilities, but it took nearly a century of practice before the dust settled on the argument.

Increasing Awareness

Philanthropy is a theme we will return to later, because it too is evolving. For now, on with our runway. Sometime in the 1950s, Murphy’s next era came into being. In the awareness era, the enterprise begins to acknowledge and identify areas where business needs to engage more fully. We see the genesis in the Fortune poll. It makes sense that, as the world began to rebuild after the mass destruction brought about by World War II, business would begin to see itself as more than a mere participant in civilization. Business could be the engine of growth, health, even justice—albeit still largely through philanthropic giving and employee welfare. But by the 1950s, academics and management experts were writing articles with CSR in their titles.

By the late 1960s, and current with the climax of the civil rights movement, the issues era arose. Businesses began believing that they could and should participate in tackling specific issues—for example, urban decay, pollution, and environmental and geopolitical dilemmas. However, throughout the sixties, it was still more talk than action—and executionally, business continued to focus on corporate philanthropy and, when essential, community relations, to assuage its sense that it had more to do than make money. The debate over the role of business in society still had no clear winner.

Despite this, in the late ’70s something different started to happen. The responsiveness era arose, from about 1978 onward. And this is the period when what is now officially called corporate social responsibility became a part of the strategic management of the business. Worker conditions were taken more seriously, and policies regarding diversity and ecology began to be addressed more directly. By the ’80s, there was a clearly identifiable—and impactful—shift from talk to action.

Although there had been a century of debate, experimentation, media, and academic theorizing, this is the period that most people will tell you saw the actual birth of CSR. The reason for this, I think, is because it’s when the intention became categorized, professionalized, and integrated into strategic management.

Professionalized Corporate Citizenship

At last, after more than a century of dialogue and good intention, the moment arrives when the CSR we know, love, or reject as lip service emerges into corporate life. I’m intrigued by this responsiveness era, one that practitioners describe with the kind of reverence that architects and Italophiles reserve for the Renaissance, and I decide I need to talk to some people who were there. I’m skeptical about the field and its future, and this is perhaps a provocative point of view given that CSR is so well-intentioned. I want to learn more about what it was like when it started from someone who will share an unvarnished and firsthand point of view. But where would I find such a person? It occurs to me that if I call one of the many consultancies that serve CSR departments, I’d get at best one-sided hopefulness, at worst beaten-down-but-still-faithful defensiveness.

I’d been working with a group of executive MBA students at the Cambridge Judge Business School, which positions itself as a premier institution preparing future business leaders for success in the Conscience Economy. In other words, the perfect environment for exploring not only the history of the field, but the dimensions of its current space as well as its future.

While working on the project, I learn that a member of the program’s administration, Jane, had worked for a pioneering organization called Business in the Community, one of the U.K.’s first organizations founded to bring business and communities together to solve challenging social and urban issues. I hear from my research team that Jane has a strong point of view on the topic.

I take the train from London to Cambridge. Jane is a fount of energy, the kind of person who seems to hover a few inches off the ground. We meet over lunch at a café just across from the Gothic spires of King’s College. The discussion takes off so quickly that we forget to order. (Later, I have a sandwich on the train back to London.)

There’s something intriguing about a person making the decision to work in a field that hasn’t fully formed yet. It strikes me as either bold or, given the context and meaning of social responsibility, perhaps motivated by something deeper. So, I dive right in and I ask her how she ended up involved in a field that hadn’t quite taken shape.

At first she’s reluctant to give the whole story. “It’s very personal,” she explains with classic British reserve. “I’m American,” I answer with a small grin. “We love oversharing.”

And that’s when Jane explains how at the dawn of the ’80s she had been working for one of the Big 5 consultancies (there were five back then). As Jane puts it, “Even they didn’t know what to do with me.” I can almost imagine why: this woman is anything but left-brained. While she was away on holiday, a sudden family tragedy occurred. Grief, and deep questions about the meaning of work and life, triggered her decision to abandon the corporate world and do some soul seeking. She traveled to the most alien and spiritually sustaining place she could imagine: the Himalayas.

As emotionally motivated pilgrimages often do, her journey stretched into weeks, and when she returned she decided she wanted more meaning in her work life, perhaps by working in development in emerging markets. Given her credentials, she found a position as a temp for the local director of Amnesty International. Before long she was recruited by an organization called Business in the Community, where she worked for seven years.

As she puts it, “It was serendipitous luck. I didn’t need to turn my back on my business experience. I didn’t need to work in developing markets. There were issues to be dealt with right here in my own country.”

The U.K. was ahead of the game, as it turns out. After a series of riots—in Liverpool and in Brixton—a group of concerned business leaders set up Business in the Community to directly address urban social challenges.

There was a mantra behind the organization: “healthy high streets need healthy back streets.” This is a very British expression—translated into American English, it might be “healthy business districts need healthy residential districts.” This sounds as eminently practical today as it was visionary then. And it’s the genesis of a principle that will come to govern the way we all make business decisions in the future.

When the social fabric of a community has broken down, particularly in economically deprived areas, someone needs to fix it. Not only for stability and safety, but for a sustainable community. And for business. Without healthy, happy residents, where’s the healthy, happy employee base? Where are the customers? Managers?

And so, at the very beginning, BITC took the lead in tackling very real, local, urban issues. It built links between businesses and communities, persuading companies to get involved—for example, in supporting small businesses, offering training programs for unemployed youth, and participating in literacy programs in schools. The organizations gave people and time as much as money and resources, and perhaps more significantly, the effort introduced a generation of business executives to the pressing social issues that were literally within a few streets of their shining headquarters.

Again, although the intentions were good, the reality was that companies saw this kind of social interaction as an extra rather than fundamental to their operations. But the potential for greater business and social reciprocity was now firmly on the radar. BITC built a conduit between enterprise and community organizations.

Despite the excellence of the work of BITC, and its impressive roster of charter members, the organization struggled to expand serious, committed community involvement beyond thirty or so path-finding companies. Many BITC members still viewed it as part of their charity mission, and at the time it was tough to get most companies to significantly increase their individual contributions. After years of building and nurturing collaborative relationships between businesses and community organizations, Jane ultimately found it frustrating that many companies were unwilling to get more deeply involved in what is still a compelling and urgent mission.

I ask Jane what she thinks of CSR now. “It’s become segmented and professionalized,” she answers with a wry smile, pointing out that it even has professional qualifications. “It’s a mature product. If it were a product line, this is what you’d expect it to be, thirty years on. You’d expect it to become more specialized.” But she worries that, although CSR is now more strategic and sophisticated, it has shifted from something people were personally and directly passionate about, to, as she puts it, “a check in the box.” I agree with her.

Milton Friedman may be rolling in his grave over the very notion of CSR as part and parcel of corporate structure and governance, but the professionalization of the discipline is not, in and of itself, a bad thing even for achieving the core business objectives he held sacred. It catalyzes repeatable practices. It puts good and meaningful topics on the agenda and invites accountability for achieving that agenda. It ensures a healthy pipeline of educated and ambitious talent. It creates opportunities for global acknowledgment, setting standards and raising the bar. The professionalization of CSR has done all this, and more.

Specialization, too, can be positive. It creates domains of expertise and promotes further research and understanding. It allows communities of shared interest to flourish and supports their further development. In the CSR space, specialization includes topics like sustainability, conflict zones, ethical sourcing, employee welfare, labor practices, health and safety, human rights, diversity, women’s issues, government relations, and more. These are all vital areas of knowledge and practice, and they will form the pillars of the Conscience Economy.

But I sense that Jane misses the old days, when the mission for doing good while doing well was driven solely by passion, not professional ambition to get to the top of the CSR field and be the keynote speaker at one of the many CSR conferences that proliferate. It’s tricky to critique something so well-intentioned. But I can’t help but wonder: has it become a box to be checked, or worse, a perceived cost center that frustrates shareholders?

The Case Against CSR

A few weeks before I met with Jane, I had stopped by the library of the Cambridge Judge Business School to ask one of the librarians for her suggestions on books about CSR. She said, “And how about the anti-CSR movement?” I stopped in my tracks. It just seemed so…specific. An anti-CSR movement? But indeed, there are many who believe that CSR is worse than a check in a box. Companies use it as “greenwashing” to make it look like they’re more ecologically balanced than they are. They use it as camouflage, or a cover-up, or for risk mitigation during tough crisis-management periods. I mention this to Jane. She’s familiar with the concerns, of course. But she remains ardently in the pro-CSR camp. Or at least she’s a fan of its highest intentions. “I’d just like to see it find its way into mainstream thinking.”

My train is leaving in thirty minutes, and Jane has a meeting to get to, so I’m down to my last question for her. “What would you pitch today if you were back in a position of looking for corporate investment for social good?” Jane is quiet for a moment.

“I suppose the big question is, do you appeal to their self-interest or to their goodwill?” she says. “Because goodwill ultimately is self-interest.” I smile. And then I sigh. So does Jane. Because she has landed on the gorgeous paradox that sits at the crux of the Conscience Economy. If only all business leaders saw it that way.

Fortunately, many leaders do, and this leads us to the next era, an era that came after Murphy’s article was published, so I’ve gone ahead and named it myself. I believe that right now we’re in the performance era, characterized by an ongoing quest to connect social impact with business performance. In the performance era, measurement is paramount. Proving that by making a positive impact companies also improve the bottom line is critical. The mantra of the performance era is “Do good in order to do well.”

Concerns for employee welfare, which we saw earlier, continue but in new forms: diversity initiatives, scholarships, flextime, all sorts of new and customizable benefits for employees. Former Safeway CEO Steve Burd recently announced a program that incentivizes employees to take better care of their health, stating that, “Making money and doing good are not mutually exclusive.”

In the performance era, a company’s conscientiousness finds its way directly into the core message. Doing good is not just an additional activity designed to compensate for the necessary evil that ensues in the daily operations of enterprise.

The growing sense now is that by engaging in socially and environmentally impactful ways—for example, by producing products sustainably, employing a diverse workforce, or avoiding doing business with corrupt governments and thus supporting geopolitical conflicts—companies can have a positive effect on the bottom line. Social good is good for performance. It mitigates future risk. It builds trust that fuels cross-selling and up-selling and brand margin. It stabilizes predictability and forecasting. It motivates employee engagement and productivity. And it can even (as in the case of car-sharing subscription services like Zipcar) drive innovation that leads not only to category disruption but even to triple-digit growth.

But things will not stop here. I’ve been peering into my virtual telescope, but to be truthful you don’t have to look very far to see evidence of the next business prerogative to come. I call this next one the initiative era, when business is functioning within the precepts and cultural values of the Conscience Economy itself. In this era, business innovation begins with a mission of social impact that’s as mission-critical to the enterprise as profit is today. And what was once called social responsibility or good corporate citizenship simply becomes good business.

It’s time for CSR to stop being a specialized function and for its best intentions to suffuse the daily operations of business. It’s time to embed CSR’s skills and expertise into every function it can impact. Some questions for businesses to consider:

• Is your actual business model—not just its loftiest aspirations—driven by an expressed humane motive beyond profit? Could it be?
• If so, does leadership talk about it and reinforce it, regularly and consistently?
• Is your organization well-known for making a positive impact on society and the environment?
• Is such positive impact considered core to your value proposition, part of your operational procedures, or a philanthropic sideline?
• Are your performance incentives aligned with conscientious outcomes?
• Is your company’s way of working making a quantifiably or qualitatively positive difference in the lives of people who don’t work for you? Could it?
• Are the products or services you sell directly or indirectly empowering people to positively impact their lives, communities, the environment, and the world around them? Could they?

The Conscience Economy will be built by organizations that put positive social and environmental impact at the heart of business value creation. But without a specialized department, who’s driving? Those tasked with leading the process should not only be its most vocal champions but those closest to your product, those closest to innovation and production, and those in closest relationship with your customers. That means the product and service innovators, designers, customer intimacy experts, creative storytellers, and communicators. And they will be led by a function that will resurrect and reinvigorate a function that is undergoing as creatively destructive a transformation as CSR: the marketing department.