Avoiding the heat and working on CSR @ Intel

We recently brought our internal network of “CSR Champions” from all around the world into Santa Clara, CA (our corporate headquarters) for a “summit” covering a number of topics related to CSR. Any meeting that gets me out of Phoenix in the middle of summer is a welcome trip so I was excited to attend for several reasons. It’s always refreshing and enlightening to hear the perspectives of people working on the ground in places like India, Russia, Turkey, China and Costa Rica. We often find that CSR means different things in different parts of the world; however, at this meeting it seemed that we are all getting a little closer to a consensus of what CSR is or isn’t for Intel around the globe. We are not sure why this is – it could be the world is getting more aligned or we are getting more mature in our thinking. What ever the reason, we thought this was a positive development.

We did some visioning exercises and we worked on what we think CSR should look like at Intel in 2013; and we had a group work on answering two more timely and tactical questions: (1) What can we do as an organization [at Intel] to dramatically increase employee engagement and commitment around CSR? (2) What can we do to successfully integrate CSR into all aspects of Intel’s business and operations? Loads of good information derived from the summit; but now we need to prioritize it and put this into our business plans.