CSR -;Davignon: time to change corporate thinking

Date: 28/03/02

By Peter Chapman

WHEN Belgian national airline Sabena went belly-up, hundreds of its staff demonstrated outside Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt's office asking for their jobs back.

It was a reasonable request: they had just been fired, many of them after 20 or more years of service.

The manner of their exit - a curt letter telling them not to bother turning up for work - did not exactly come out of the CSR manual.

In a small but ironic twist, Viscount Etienne Davignon, the man who rounded-up the cash for Sabena's successor SN Brussels Airlines, helped write it - the CSR manual that is.

Belgium's former commissioner and all-round Mr Fixit is chairman of CSR Europe, a group of 48 big companies - whose origins go back to the days of Jacques Delors - vying to enshrine socially responsible management thinking into the minds of bosses across the EU.

That's good news for SN Brussels' new employees - many of them former Sabena folk.

Speaking to European Voice, Davignon insisted that the European Commission will find no evidence of state aid.

But if it ever does, and SN Brussels is closed down, presumably the workers will be the first to know. And when they do get the chop, they will be retrained for new jobs at the company's expense. He also said that businesses across the Union are clamouring to get in on the CSR act.

But Davignon admits that, when it comes to CSR, all that glisters in glossy reports and leaflets put out by firms is not necessarily gold.

Ignorance is still a problem. That explains the efforts Davignon's team is making to spread best practice to the unconverted - many of them smaller firms without the time or inclination to divert resources to reinventing the wheel.

Business school deans are also being quietly encouraged to put CSR issues onto the core curricula for MBAs - not just as easy options that give would-be CEOs a break from the algebra.

But there is also a danger that freeriders could knowingly dupe investors and the public - undermining confidence in the whole exercise by claiming to be model companies. 'Gimmickry' is also a possibility, said Davignon. That's why, he insists, some ground-rules are vital.

'You need a methodology by which if you do put in your annual report references to triple bottom line [which measures social, economic and environmental impact] and so on, you know what the benchmarks or the milestones that you have to refer to are.'

That doesn't mean a slavish box-ticking exercise, or CSR police coming to check that you are behaving.

'Going to regulation will stifle initiative, will bureaucratise the whole process and you lose the dynamism of the whole affair. On the other hand, it is good to say what type of references are required and then let the people get involved in this.

'Organisations like ours try to establish some of the benchmarks that one can refer to,' he said. For the growing numbers of ethical funds, said Davignon, 'there will be ratings...and in that sense the market gives the answer.' These could be supplied by the likes of Moody's and Standard and Poor - or other agencies which 'could invent themselves'.

Of the green paper, he said he would be happy if it helped to change the thinking of corporate Europe so that CSR and sustainability questions become 'preoccupations in the daily life of companies' and become 'a natural part of their thinking not only in principles but in practical management'.

Etienne Davignon, a former European Commissioner, outlines his views on the European Commission's proposals on corporate social responsibility.

http://ec.europa.eu/comm/employment_social/soc-dial/csr/greenpaper.htm http://ec.europa.eu/comm/employment_social/soc-dial/csr/greenpaper.htm

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