Welcome to CSR@Intel
posted by Dave Stangis on June 14, 2007
I’ve thought about a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) blog for a few years now. I still remember sitting in the launch meeting for the Global Reporting Initiative in 1997 in London….wondering if this CSR/Sustainability concept was just common sense or another passing business fad.
By 2000, under a formal Corporate Responsibility function at Intel, we shifted our actions and reporting to align closer to the ‘art’ that was still forming. Outward appearances were one thing, but what had begun to occur inside the company was completely another. Employees and key business units engaged in the internal debates and took part in the external dialogs. Early internal adopters included those organizations that had ‘skin in the game’ – Environment, Health and Safety, Human Resources and Public Affairs.
Stakeholder management was approached as a competitive advantage that could generate intellectual capital. Emerging issues monitoring vs. crisis management was embedded as a management system. Business practices and codes of conduct evolved amid ever increasing expectations.
Executives had always worked to “do what’s right,” but they came to realize the business value of trust and credibility in global markets with global stakeholders. To be honest, nothing in the evolution was, or is easy. It’s complex – different businesses and internal organizations are at different levels of maturity and need to be managed differently.
Today, we stand at yet another of what seems to have been hundreds of crossroads. We have regional teams focused on the CSR agenda. Our branding and marketing teams want to take advantage of the stored credibility we’ve built, but struggle with how to define the concept of CSR, let alone factor it into brand value. New business ventures have shifted their thinking from only providing ever-faster chips to designing technology solutions for unique society challenges. An Intel Community Solutions team actually works within the CSR function to find sustainable projects that are judged on values such as societal impact, innovation, scalability and revenue generation. Today, CSR touches everything - it is how leading companies do business.
This is where the CSR agenda has taken us….and I’m convinced we have just scratched the surface. We are launching the CSR@Intel Blog with a small group of content experts. We will cover a broad array of topics and share both our thoughts and what we are doing personally and as a global company.
I invite your scrutiny. I invite your engagement. And, I invite your input.
There is yet another fork in the CSR path. Let’s take it together.
Comments (3)
tagged: corporate social responsibility, CSR, EHS, global reporting initiative, GRI, Intel, social responsibility, SRI, stakeholder, Stangis, sustainability
Comments
Jun 19 | Erica Salas said:
Hi, I am from Intel Costa Rica and work as a student in Intel Involved Program. Since I arrive to Intel I heard about CSR and I thought it was a great way to do business and sell more. But as the time pass by I learned that CSR isn’t all about selling a brand or product, it’s about being and structuring a better and healthy social environment. I have a question : What is the best method to explain to other external people how to understand CSR? I have struggled a little bit trying to change people’s thoughts about CSR and explain that Intel really believes in CSR and that isn’t a strategy to sell a product or a brand, I learn all this because I am in Intel but what about the people that aren’t? Is that CSR not for all regions around the world?? GREAT BLOG! Thank you!
Jun 19 | Karla Blanco said:
Hi Erica! CSR it’s not for a specific region…it’s for the WORLD and it’s something from many many years a go in the human beings history… Doing the right things right has been as old as the humanity. Although the CSR concept it’s not that old …and sometimes difficult for people to understand it, you can share it with specific examples. All the community projects, ethics and in general how Intel does biz shows what CSR is.
Jul 14 | Jennie Morris said:
First, congratulations on making the effort to reach out, and thank you for giving us some insight into your organization. I’m an MBA candidate, working on a project to illuminate how the increase in sustainability reporting has affected corporate structures - and interested in how people are actually getting things done! You say CSR is “how leading companies do business” but it isn’t clear to me that that’s actually happening across all sectors, or that there’s any “best practices” one can point to as models.
So I’ll be happy to hear more (even “blog-a-ganda”). And if you’re willing to take my brief survey on the topic, I’ll happily send a zoomerang link! best wishes, JM