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Clear and consistent reporting fosters transparency, both internally and externally. This promotes open communication among
stakeholders and builds trust.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
One compelling argument for ethical governance is that it promotes trust. Trust is the bedrock of any healthy relationship, including those between a company and its stakeholders.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Virtuous Boardroom: How Ethical Corporate Governance Can Cultivate Company Success)
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Identifying key stakeholders is crucial for any company because it allows them to understand who is impacted by their decisions and how.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
In an era where businesses operate under the watchful eye of a globally connected and informed public, the ethical imperative has transcended mere compliance and become a critical determinant of long-term success.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Virtuous Boardroom: How Ethical Corporate Governance Can Cultivate Company Success)
“
Consumers today are more discerning and value companies that operate ethically and responsibly.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
Profitable companies built in questionable ways and employing reckless means engage in corporate social responsibility, and some rich people make a splash by “giving back”—regardless of the fact that they may have caused serious societal problems as they built their fortunes.
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Anand Giridharadas (Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World)
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I believe that companies, as major employers, resource managers, technological innovators, and capital allocators, have a unique responsibility to operate with integrity, transparency, and accountability.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
As more companies comitt to Corporate Social Responsibility, the result is the emergence of a Permaculture Economy and a more prosperous world.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
A good company offers excellent products and services. A great company also offers excellent products and services but also strives to make the world a better place.
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Philip Kotler (Corporate Social Responsibility: Doing the Most Good for Your Company and Your Cause)
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Over the past 60 years, marketing has moved from being product-centric (Marketing 1.0) to being consumer-centric (Marketing 2.0). Today we see marketing as transforming once again in response to the new dynamics in the environment. We see companies expanding their focus from products to consumers to humankind issues. Marketing 3.0 is the stage when companies shift from consumer-centricity to human-centricity and where profitability is balanced with corporate responsibility.
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Philip Kotler
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A strong definition of business success often incorporates elements from several frameworks. A balanced approach might combine financial health with a commitment to innovation and social responsibility. This ensures the company remains profitable while considering its long-term impact and ethical obligations.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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A balanced approach is attractive to top talent and investors who increasingly seek out companies with a strong sense of purpose beyond just profit.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Focusing on innovation fosters a dynamic and exciting work environment, while social responsibility initiatives resonate with employees who want to contribute to a greater good.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Stakeholder trust is the bedrock upon which long-term value creation is built in the context of corporate social responsibility.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Virtuous Boardroom: How Ethical Corporate Governance Can Cultivate Company Success)
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To whom is an international corporation answerable? Often they do not employ workers. They outsource manufacturing to places far away. If wages rise in one place, they can, almost instantly, transfer production to somewhere else. If a tax regime in one country becomes burdensome, they can relocate to another. To whom, then, are they accountable? By whom are they controllable? For whom are they responsible? To which group of people other than shareholders do they owe loyalty? The extreme mobility, not only of capital but also of manufacturing and servicing, is in danger of creating institutions that have power without responsibility, as well as a social class, the global elite, that has no organic connection with any group except itself.
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Jonathan Sacks
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Businesses are uniquely capable of creating social value and solving social problems - they have this wonderful fuel called the profit motive.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
The shift towards Permaculture Economics represents a paradigm shift in how businesses operate. By recognizing their interconnectedness with the world around them, companies can unlock new opportunities for growth, resilience, and positive impact.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Profit enables businesses to innovate and develop sustainable solutions, such as environmentally friendly technologies, socially responsible products, and ethical supply chains.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Virtuous Boardroom: How Ethical Corporate Governance Can Cultivate Company Success)
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While Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and ESG frameworks have pushed companies to consider their broader impact, a new frontier is emerging: Permaculture Economics. This holistic approach transcends the traditional focus on mitigating negative impact and instead emphasizes actively creating a regenerative future.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Rather than simply doing no harm, companies should strive to leave the environment and communities in a better state than they found them.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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This book explains how it became fashionable to pathologize the behavior of millions of healthy male children. We have turned against boys and forgotten a simple truth: the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal males are responsible for much of what is right in the world. No one denies that boys’ aggressive tendencies must be mitigated and channeled toward constructive ends. Boys need (and crave) discipline, respect, and moral guidance. Boys need love and tolerant understanding. But being a boy is not a social disease.
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Christina Hoff Sommers (The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men)
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By understanding and embracing Permaculture Economics, boards can help their companies become positive change agents, driving innovation, and creating a more equitable and sustainable world.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
Corporate Social Responsibility is a company’s commitment to its stakeholders — to conduct business in an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable manner. At scale, and with mass buy-in, society at whole is the beneficiary of Multiplicative Value Effects.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
We have made money our god and called it the good life. We have trained our children to go for jobs hat bring the quickest corporate advancements at the highest financial levels. We have taught them careerism but not ministry and wonder why ministers are going out of fashion. We fear coddling the poor with food stamps while we call tax breaks for the rich business incentives. We make human community the responsibility of government institutions while homelessness, hunger, and drugs seep from the centers of our cities like poison from open sores for which we do not seek either the cause or the cure. We have created a bare and sterile world of strangers where exploitation is a necessary virtue. We have reduced life to the lowest of values so that the people who have much will not face the prospect of having less.
Underlying all of it, we have made women the litter bearers of a society where disadvantage clings to the bottom of the institutional ladder and men funnel to the top, where men are privileged and women are conscripted for the comfort of the human race. We define women as essential to the development of the home but unnecessary to the development of society. We make them poor and render them powerless and shuttle them from man to man. We sell their bodies and question the value of their souls. We call them unique and say they have special natures, which we then ignore in their specialness. We decide that what is true of men is true of women and then say that women are not as smart as men, as strong as men, or as capable as men. We render half the human race invisible and call it natural. We tolerate war and massacre, mayhem and holocaust to right the wrongs that men say need righting and then tell women to bear up and accept their fate in silence when the crime is against them.
What’s worse, we have applauded it all—the militarism, the profiteering, and the sexisms—in the name of patriotism, capitalism, and even religion. We consider it a social problem, not a spiritual one. We think it has something to do with modern society and fail to imagine that it may be something wrong with the modern soul. We treat it as a state of mind rather than a state of heart. Clearly, there is something we are failing to see.
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Joan D. Chittister (Heart of Flesh: Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men)
“
The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases. As long as prevailing social relations remain unquestioned, those who are concerned about what is happening are left with few visible avenues for environmental action other than purely personal commitments to recycling and green shopping, socially untenable choices between jobs and the environment, or broad appeals to corporations, political policy-makers, and the scientific establishment--the very interests most responsible for the current ecological mess.
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John Bellamy Foster (The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment (Cornerstone Books))
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The European Parliament responded by focusing on corporate governance. If corporations wanted to be legal citizens they could damned well shoulder the responsibilities of good citizenship as well as the benefits. Social as well as financial audits were the order of the day. Directives outlining standards for corporate citizenship were drafted and a lucrative niche for a new generation of management consultants emerged - those who could look at an organization and sound a warning if its structure rewarded pathological behaviour.
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Charles Stross (Rule 34 (Halting State, #2))
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Permaculture Economics emphasizes the elimination of waste by designing closed-loop systems where outputs become inputs for other processes.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Implementing Green Infrastructure on the company’s properties is one of the simplest ways to improve its ESG performance.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
The ability to make risk scenario simulations is a profoundly helpful way for company leadership to engage in risk management.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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Companies that proactively address social and environmental risks are better positioned to avoid costly controversies, regulatory fines, and reputational damage.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
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Corporate social responsibility is only a PR stunt. Business with warmth lasts forever in people’s heart.
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Abhijit Naskar (Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth)
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The Vedanta Cancer Hospital is part of Agarwal’s corporate social responsibility programme. There has been no work on the site for the past two years.
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Josy Joseph (A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India)
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In other words, while evidence of corporate social responsibility (scenario C) boosts sales a bit, it’s far more effective when the individual and the business share social responsibility and the individual determines the amount of money donated.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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Let’s be reminded that companies, and those of us who lead companies, don’t have to choose between Profit and Corporate Social Responsibility. In fact, if done right, the latter will enhance the former. Then the former will enhance the latter, and this should happen in endless cycles.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Companies should embrace sustainable business practices because it demonstrates corporate responsibility, reduces environmental impact, and appeals to socially conscious consumers. Sustainable practices not only contribute to a better planet but can also enhance brand image, customer loyalty, and long-term profitability.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
If you have influence on other people. Dont be influenced by their hate, money, jealousy, anger and popularity .
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D.J. Kyos
“
If a billionaire really starts doing actual humanitarian work in their fullest capacity, they would stop being billionaires.
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Abhijit Naskar (Ain't Enough to Look Human)
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Human evil is a collapse of the moral faculty, but not an operating pursuing of the wrong.
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Arvin Adriyan (Zarathushtra and Corporate Social Responsibility)
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Supporting women is not just good for women. It's good for everybody. When you look at the economy as a whole, the companies with the greatest number of women on their boards outperform the companies with the fewest. The number of women on a board correlates positively with social responsibility and reputation. The more women, the better the corporate governance.
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Kirsten Gillibrand (Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World)
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War -- is a last ditch moral nightmare. People begin worshiping a mysterious slouching beast, following after, bowing down, offering gifts, making much of zero; and worse. Love of death, idolatry, fear of life; that roughshod trek of war and warmakers throughout the world, hand in hand with death. Long live death!
They wouldn't worship it if they weren't in love. Or if they weren't in fear. The second being a state of devouring, at least, as the first. I think the clue is the second masquerading as the first -- just as the beast is the ape of god; to do some thing successfully, you have to, above all, hide what your up to. In this way fear can ape love. Death can demand a tribute owed to life, the ape can play God.
Such reflections are of course ill at ease by some: those to whom the state is a given, the church is a given, Western culture a given, war a given, consumerism a given, paying taxes a given. All the neat slots of existence into which one fits, birth to death and every point in between. Nothing to be created, no one to be responsible to, nothing to risk, no objections to lodge. Life is a mechanical horizontal sidewalk, of the kind you sometimes ride at airports between buildings. One is carried along, a zonked spectator...
Every nation-state tends towards the imperial -- that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police propaganda courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth.
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Daniel Berrigan
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The longer someone ignores an email before finally responding, the more relative social power that person has. Map these response times across an entire organization and you get a remarkably accurate chart of the actual social standing. The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes. There’s an algorithm for this, a data mining method called “automated social hierarchy detection,” developed at Columbia University.8 When applied to the archive of email traffic at Enron Corporation before it folded, the method correctly identified the roles of top-level managers and their subordinates just by how long it took them to answer a given person’s emails. Intelligence agencies have been applying the same metric to suspected terrorist gangs, piecing together the chain of influence to spot the central figures.
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Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
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Now we're in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodelled to be market friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to install democracies. First is was topple them, now it's install them. And the whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility--it's all part of a New Managed Democracy. In a sense, it's all part of the same machine.
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Arundhati Roy (Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations)
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A homeless guy lifts a bread out of hunger, it's called burglary, but a cool-looking guy rips off an entire population, while spreading disparities wider than ever, it's called entrepreneurship. What a world! What a pathetic world!
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Abhijit Naskar (High Voltage Habib: Gospel of Undoctrination)
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Studying the mining industry requires a healthy dose of skepticism and perhaps even a measure of cynicism, especially in relation to the promotion of the virtuous discourses of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. In contrast to the anthropological tradition of suspending one’s disbelief when conducting ethnographic research, I have declined to give the mining industry the benefit of the doubt: its track record demands a higher standard of proof.
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Stuart Kirsch (Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and Their Critics)
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On the back of the government scratching Wall Street’s back with its corrupt bailout, it was corporate America’s turn to return the favor. They did it by directly assuming the responsibilities of democratic government—especially the agendas of liberal politicians who might otherwise have harmfully regulated or penalized big business. Messy debates about racial inequality? Don’t worry: we’ve got it covered. New policies to fight climate change? We’ll take care of that too. Big business volunteered to take on the role of liberal government itself—crucially, on terms that were favorable to its own interests. That’s what woke capitalism is all about. It’s the hip new avatar of old-school crony capitalism.
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Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
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After the New Deal, economists began referring to America’s retirement-finance model as a “three-legged stool.” This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of those legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less. And since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions that are funded by employers and guarantee a monthly sum in perpetuity with 401(k) plans, which often rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices, 401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism. Translation: 401(k)s are vastly cheaper for companies than pension plans. “Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families,” Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker writes in his book The Great Risk Shift. The overarching message: “You are on your own.
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Jessica Bruder (Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century)
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Fascists notice empty gestures of corporate responsibility—the makeup brand posting about police violence, the investment bank sponsoring Pride Week—and use it to attack all work for social justice as cynical and self interested. This elevates a side effect of a cultural shift towards equality and presents it as the main goal, and that makes a win look like a loss. […] They say any attempt to do anything about racism only serves to make society less equal, not more. […] Modern internet fascists are consumed with hatred for liberal democracy.
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Elle Reeve (Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics)
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. . . it's still baffling as to why social media companies are able to shirk responsibility for the extreme harm perpetrated via their sites. Imagine if such harms were routinely inflicted on members of the public visiting other types of privately owned spaces - like shopping malls or amusement parks.
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Ginger Gorman (Troll Hunting: Inside the World of Online Hate and its Human Fallout)
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Such forms of what we might term 'carewashing' join a rich array of corporations trying to increase their legitimacy by presenting themselves as socially responsible 'citizens', while really contributing to inequality and ecological destruction. They go further by trying to capitalise on the very care crisis they have helped to create.
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The Care Collective (The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence)
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Global corporations have the human capital, the financial resources, the technology, the international footprint, the power of markets and the profit motivation to build a better world. NGOs will be essential partners...Governments will be essential partners...By engaging together through an iterative process, we will achieve "A Better World.
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Alice Korngold (A Better World, Inc.: How Companies Profit by Solving Global Problems…Where Governments Cannot)
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Sylvester says they sold their lefty student principles, if they ever had them, as soon as they left university and accepted an overpaid starter-salary in a morally objectionable corporate job offering lucrative career prospects and inflated annual bonuses which soon turned them into filthy-rich Tories with a hatred of the social welfare infrastructures they’re actively not contributing to through tax avoidance and evasion while hypocritically scorning the underclasses as the scourge of society who sponge off the state when they’re the ones who are the biggest scroungers on society with no sense of community responsibility other than a very self-aggrandizing, tax-deductible form of fashionable charity they like to call philanthropism!
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Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other)
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Democracy and decarbonization are often seen as enemies. Democratic processes are slow, and time is running out. But unless we are able to democratize our society, political and economic decision-making processes will continue to be dominated by those who have helped to cause climate breakdown up to now.
We cannot rely on the hope that the powerful will suddenly realize the need to tackle climate breakdown and take appropriate action. Even if they do realize in time, they will seek to protect their interests at the expense of the general interest. It is not hard to envisage a world in which wealthy nations respond to climate breakdown by building walls to keep at bay those displaced by rising temperatures.
Much like the separation between states and markets, the separation between man and nature is a liberal myth. Humanity is a part of nature. The fight against climate breakdown is not a fight to save "the planet"- the planet will continue to exist long after it is rendered uninhabitable for humans. The fight against climate breakdown is a fight to protect human life on earth. And that fight cannot be won by sacrificing millions of lives or the freedoms that make life worth living. But if we continue to allow the response to climate breakdown to be shaped solely by the powerful, this is the kind of "solution" we will get.
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Grace Blakeley (Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom)
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How are we going to bring about these transformations? Politics as usual—debate and argument, even voting—are no longer sufficient. Our system of representative democracy, created by a great revolution, must now itself become the target of revolutionary change. For too many years counting, vast numbers of people stopped going to the polls, either because they did not care what happened to the country or the world or because they did not believe that voting would make a difference on the profound and interconnected issues that really matter. Now, with a surge of new political interest having give rise to the Obama presidency, we need to inject new meaning into the concept of the “will of the people.” The will of too many Americans has been to pursue private happiness and take as little responsibility as possible for governing our country. As a result, we have left the job of governing to our elected representatives, even though we know that they serve corporate interests and therefore make decisions that threaten our biosphere and widen the gulf between the rich and poor both in our country and throughout the world. In other words, even though it is readily apparent that our lifestyle choices and the decisions of our representatives are increasing social injustice and endangering our planet, too many of us have wanted to continue going our merry and not-so-merry ways, periodically voting politicians in and out of office but leaving the responsibility for policy decisions to them. Our will has been to act like consumers, not like responsible citizens. Historians may one day look back at the 2000 election, marked by the Supreme Court’s decision to award the presidency to George W. Bush, as a decisive turning point in the death of representative democracy in the United States. National Public Radio analyst Daniel Schorr called it “a junta.” Jack Lessenberry, columnist for the MetroTimes in Detroit, called it “a right-wing judicial coup.” Although more restrained, the language of dissenting justices Breyer, Ginsberg, Souter, and Stevens was equally clear. They said that there was no legal or moral justification for deciding the presidency in this way.3 That’s why Al Gore didn’t speak for me in his concession speech. You don’t just “strongly disagree” with a right-wing coup or a junta. You expose it as illegal, immoral, and illegitimate, and you start building a movement to challenge and change the system that created it. The crisis brought on by the fraud of 2000 and aggravated by the Bush administration’s constant and callous disregard for the Constitution exposed so many defects that we now have an unprecedented opportunity not only to improve voting procedures but to turn U.S. democracy into “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” instead of government of, by, and for corporate power.
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Grace Lee Boggs (The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century)
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Folkloric dances in the metro, innumerable campaigns for security, the slogan “tomorrow I work” accompanied by a smile formerly reserved for leisure time, and the advertising sequence for the election to the Prud-hommes (an industrial tribunal): “I don’t let anyone choose for me”—an Ubuesque slogan, one that rang so spectacularly falsely, with a mocking liberty, that of proving the social while denying it. It is not by chance that advertising, after having, for a long time, carried an implicit ultimatum of an economic kind, fundamentally saying and repeating incessantly, “I buy, I consume, I take pleasure,” today repeats in other forms, “I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned”—mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification.
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Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation)
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In addition to social and ethical reforms, Christianity was responsible for important economic and technological innovations. The Catholic Church established medieval Europe’s most sophisticated administrative system, and
pioneered the use of archives, catalogues, timetables and other techniques of data processing. The Vatican was the closest thing twelfth-century Europe had to Silicon Valley. The Church established Europe’s first economic
corporations – the monasteries – which for 1,000 years spearheaded the European economy and introduced advanced agricultural and administrative methods. Monasteries were the first institutions to use clocks, and for
centuries they and the cathedral schools were the most important learning centres of Europe, helping to found many of Europe’s first universities, such as Bologna, Oxford and Salamanca.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
The critical infrastructure of Indigenous worlds is, fundamentally, about responsibility and being a good relative. But our responsibilities do not happen only in the realm of political transformation. Caretaking, which we address in the introduction and in Part III, is the basis, too, for vibrant economies that must work fluidly with political structures to reinforce the world we seek to build beyond capitalism. We must thus have faith in our own forms of Indigenous political economy, the critical infrastructures that Huson speaks of so eloquently. We must rigorously study, theorize, enact, and experiment with these forms. While it covers ambitious terrain, The Red Deal at its base provides a program for study, theorization, action, and experimentation. But we must do the work. And the cold, hard truth is that we must not only be willing to do the work on a small scale whenever it suits us—in our own lives, in our families, or even in The Red Nation.
We must be willing, as our fearless Wet’suwet’en relatives have done, to enforce these orders on a large scale. In conversation, our The Red Nation comrade Nick Estes stated, “I don’t want to just honor the treaties. I want to enforce them.” We can and should implement these programs in our own communities to alleviate suffering and protect what lands we are still able to caretake under colonial rule. To survive extinction, however, we must enforce Indigenous orders in and amongst those who have made it clear they will not stop their plunder until we are all dead. Settler and imperial nations, military superpowers, multinational corporations, and members of the ruling class are enemies of the Earth and the greatest danger to our future. How will we enforce Indigenous political, scientific, and economic orders to successfully prevent our mass ruin? This is the challenge we confront and pose in The Red Deal, and it is the challenge that all who take up The Red Deal must also confront.
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The Red Nation (The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth)
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Christianity and other traditional religions are still important players in the world. Yet their role is now largely reactive. In the past, they were a creative force. Christianity, for example, spread the hitherto heretical notion that all humans are equal before God, thereby changing human political structures, social hierarchies and even gender relations. In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus went further, insisting that the meek and oppressed are God’s favourite people, thus turning the pyramid of power on its head, and providing ammunition for generations of revolutionaries. In addition to social and ethical reforms, Christianity was responsible for important economic and technological innovations. The Catholic Church established medieval Europe’s most sophisticated administrative system, and pioneered the use of archives, catalogues, timetables and other techniques of data processing. The Vatican was the closest thing twelfth-century Europe had to Silicon Valley. The Church established Europe’s first economic corporations – the monasteries – which for 1,000 years spearheaded the European economy and introduced advanced agricultural and administrative methods.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
The government has a great need to restore its credibility, to make people forget its history and rewrite it. The intelligentsia have to a remarkable degree undertaken this task. It is also necessary to establish the "lessons" that have to be drawn from the war, to ensure that these are conceived on the narrowest grounds, in terms of such socially neutral categories as "stupidity" or "error" or "ignorance" or perhaps "cost."
Why? Because soon it will be necessary to justify other confrontations, perhaps other U.S. interventions in the world, other Vietnams.
But this time, these will have to be successful intervention, which don't slip out of control. Chile, for example. It is even possible for the press to criticize successful interventions - the Dominican Republic, Chile, etc. - as long as these criticisms don't exceed "civilized limits," that is to say, as long as they don't serve to arouse popular movements capable of hindering these enterprises, and are not accompanied by any rational analysis of the motives of U.S. imperialism, something which is complete anathema, intolerable to liberal ideology.
How is the liberal press proceeding with regard to Vietnam, that sector which supported the "doves"? By stressing the "stupidity" of the U.S. intervention; that's a politically neutral term. It would have been sufficient to find an "intelligent" policy. The war was thus a tragic error in which good intentions were transmuted into bad policies, because of a generation of incompetent and arrogant officials. The war's savagery is also denounced, but that too, is used as a neutral category...Presumably the goals were legitimate - it would have been all right to do the same thing, but more humanely...
The "responsible" doves were opposed to the war - on a pragmatic basis. Now it is necessary to reconstruct the system of beliefs according to which the United States is the benefactor of humanity, historically committed to freedom, self-determination, and human rights. With regard to this doctrine, the "responsible" doves share the same presuppositions as the hawks. They do not question the right of the United States to intervene in other countries. Their criticism is actually very convenient for the state, which is quite willing to be chided for its errors, as long as the fundamental right of forceful intervention is not brought into question.
...
The resources of imperialist ideology are quite vast. It tolerates - indeed, encourages - a variety of forms of opposition, such as those I have just illustrated. It is permissible to criticize the lapses of the intellectuals and of government advisers, and even to accuse them of an abstract desire for "domination," again a socially neutral category not linked in any way to concrete social and economic structures. But to relate that abstract "desire for domination" to the employment of force by the United States government in order to preserve a certain system of world order, specifically, to ensure that the countries of the world remain open insofar as possible to exploitation by U.S.-based corporations - that is extremely impolite, that is to argue in an unacceptable way.
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Noam Chomsky (The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature)
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The 12 Principles of Permaculture Investing are:
1. Accumulate & Compound Capital: Consistently save and invest to grow your capital base over time, leveraging the power of compound interest.
2. Utilize Capital: Actively deploy your capital into productive investments that generate returns, rather than letting it sit idle.
3. Retain Maximum & Gradiented Liquidity: Maintain a balance between liquid assets (easily accessible cash) and less liquid investments, ensuring you can meet immediate needs while still investing for the long term.
4. Actively Manage Passive: While focusing on passive income sources, actively monitor and adjust your investments to optimize returns and mitigate risks.
5. Prioritize Long-Term Growth: Focus on investments that offer potential for significant growth over the long term, even if they don't provide immediate high yields.
6. Prioritize Consistent Yields: Balance your portfolio with investments that provide reliable, consistent income to support your financial needs.
7. Add Net Value to all Stakeholders: Invest in ways that benefit not only yourself but also the broader community, environment, and all parties involved.
8. Provide Authentic Data: Be transparent and honest in your financial reporting, providing accurate information to all stakeholders.
9. Collect & Utilize Authentic Data: Base your investment decisions on reliable, verified data rather than speculation or rumors.
10. Diversify Holistically: Diversify your investments across different asset classes, industries, and geographical regions to reduce risk and maximize potential returns.
11. Harvest Yields Equitably: Distribute profits fairly among all stakeholders, ensuring everyone benefits from the investment's success.
12. Reinvest Yields in Most Profitable Assets: Continuously evaluate your portfolio and reinvest profits into the most promising opportunities to further compound your growth.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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The view has been gaining widespread acceptance that corporate officials and labor leaders have a “social responsibility” that goes beyond serving the interest of their stockholders or their members. This view shows a fundamental misconception of the character and nature of a free economy.
In such an economy, there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud….It is the responsibility of the rest of us to establish a framework of law such that an individual in pursuing his own interest is, to quote Adam Smith again, “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”
Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine. If businessmen do have a social responsibility other than making maximum profits for stockholders, how are they to know what it is? Can self-selected private individuals decide what the social interest is? Can they decide how great a burden they are justified in placing on themselves or their stockholders to serve that social interest? Is it tolerable that these public functions of taxation, expenditure, and control be exercised by the people who happen at the moment to be in charge of particular enterprises, chosen for those posts by strictly private groups? If businessmen are civil servants rather than the employees of their stockholders then in a democracy they will, sooner or later, be chosen by the public techniques of election and appointment.
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Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom)
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The AIDS obsession doubtless arises from the fact that the exceptional destiny of the sufferers gives them what others cruelly lack today: a strong, impregnable identity, a sacrificial identity -- the privilege of illness, around which, in other cultures, the entire group once gravitated, and which we have abolished almost everywhere today by the enterprise of therapeutic eradication of Evil [le Mal]. But in another way, the whole strategy of the prevention of illness merely shifts the problem [le mal] from the biological to the social body. All the anti-AIDS campaigns, playing on solidarity and fear -- `Your AIDS interests me' -- give rise to an emotional contagion as noxious as the biological. The promotional infectiousness of information is just as obscene and dangerous as that of the virus. If AIDS destroys biological immunities, then the collective theatricalization and brainwashing, the blackmailing into responsibility and mobilization, are playing their part in propagating the epidemic of information and, as a side-effect, in reinforcing the social body's immunodeficiency -- a process that is already far advanced -- and in promoting that other mental AIDS that is the Aids-athon, the Telethon and other assorted Thanatons -- expiation and atonement of the collective bad conscience, pornographic orchestration of national unity.
AIDS itself ends up looking like a side-effect of this demagogic virulence. `Tu me préserves actif, je te préservatif' ['You keep me active, I condom you']: this scabrous irony, heavy with blackmail, which is also that of Benetton, as it once was of the BNP, in fact conceals a technique of manipulation and dissolution of the social body by the stimulation of the vilest emotions: self-pity and self-disgust. Politicians and advertisers have understood that the key to democratic government -- perhaps even the essence of the political? -- is to take general stupidity for granted: `Your idiocy, your resentment, interest us!' Behind which lurks an even more suspect discourse: `Your rights, your destitution, your freedom, interest us!' Democratic souls have been trained to swallow all the horrors, scandals, bluff, brainwashing and misery, and to launder these themselves. Behind the condescending interest there always lurks the voracious countenance of the vampire.
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Jean Baudrillard (The Perfect Crime)
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The first thing to note about Korean industrial structure is the sheer concentration of Korean industry. Like other Asian economies, there are two levels of organization: individual firms and larger network organizations that unite disparate corporate entities. The Korean network organization is known as the chaebol, represented by the same two Chinese characters as the Japanese zaibatsu and patterned deliberately on the Japanese model. The size of individual Korean companies is not large by international standards. As of the mid-1980s, the Hyundai Motor Company, Korea’s largest automobile manufacturer, was only a thirtieth the size of General Motors, and the Samsung Electric Company was only a tenth the size of Japan’s Hitachi.1 However, these statistics understate their true economic clout because these businesses are linked to one another in very large network organizations. Virtually the whole of the large-business sector in Korea is part of a chaebol network: in 1988, forty-three chaebol (defined as conglomerates with assets in excess of 400 billion won, or US$500 million) brought together some 672 companies.2 If we measure industrial concentration by chaebol rather than individual firm, the figures are staggering: in 1984, the three largest chaebol alone (Samsung, Hyundai, and Lucky-Goldstar) produced 36 percent of Korea’s gross domestic product.3 Korean industry is more concentrated than that of Japan, particularly in the manufacturing sector; the three-firm concentration ratio for Korea in 1980 was 62.0 percent of all manufactured goods, compared to 56.3 percent for Japan.4 The degree of concentration of Korean industry grew throughout the postwar period, moreover, as the rate of chaebol growth substantially exceeded the rate of growth for the economy as a whole. For example, the twenty largest chaebol produced 21.8 percent of Korean gross domestic product in 1973, 28.9 percent in 1975, and 33.2 percent in 1978.5 The Japanese influence on Korean business organization has been enormous. Korea was an almost wholly agricultural society at the beginning of Japan’s colonial occupation in 1910, and the latter was responsible for creating much of the country’s early industrial infrastructure.6 Nearly 700,000 Japanese lived in Korea in 1940, and a similarly large number of Koreans lived in Japan as forced laborers. Some of the early Korean businesses got their start as colonial enterprises in the period of Japanese occupation.7 A good part of the two countries’ émigré populations were repatriated after the war, leading to a considerable exchange of knowledge and experience of business practices. The highly state-centered development strategies of President Park Chung Hee and others like him were formed as a result of his observation of Japanese industrial policy in Korea in the prewar period.
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Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
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Another dangerous neoliberal word circulating everywhere that is worth zooming in on is the word ‘resilience’. On the surface, I think many people won’t object to the idea that it is good and beneficial for us to be resilient to withstand the difficulties and challenges of life. As a person who lived through the atrocities of wars and sanctions in Iraq, I’ve learnt that life is not about being happy or sad, not about laughing or crying, leaving or staying. Life is about endurance. Since most feelings, moods, and states of being are fleeting, endurance, for me, is the common denominator that helps me go through the darkest and most beautiful moments of life knowing that they are fleeing. In that sense, I believe it is good for us to master the art of resilience and endurance. Yet, how should we think about the meaning of ‘resilience’ when used by ruling classes that push for wars and occupations, and that contribute to producing millions of deaths and refugees to profit from plundering the planet? What does it mean when these same warmongers fund humanitarian organizations asking them to go to war-torn countries to teach people the value of ‘resilience’? What happens to the meaning of ‘resilience’ when they create frighteningly precarious economic structures, uncertain employment, and lay off people without accountability? All this while also asking us to be ‘resilient’…
As such, we must not let the word ‘resilience’ circulate or get planted in the heads of our youth uncritically. Instead, we should raise questions about what it really means. Does it mean the same thing for a poor young man or woman from Ghana, Ecuador, Afghanistan vs a privileged member from the upper management of a U.S. corporation? Resilience towards what? What is the root of the challenges for which we are expected to be resilient? Does our resilience solve the cause or the root of the problem or does it maintain the status quo while we wait for the next disaster? Are individuals always to blame if their resilience doesn’t yield any results, or should we equally examine the social contract and the entire structure in which individuals live that might be designed in such a way that one’s resilience may not prevail no matter how much perseverance and sacrifice one demonstrates? There is no doubt that resilience, according to its neoliberal corporate meaning, is used in a way that places the sole responsibility of failure on the shoulders of individuals rather than equally holding accountable the structure in which these individuals exist, and the precarious circumstances that require work and commitment way beyond individual capabilities and resources. I find it more effective not to simply aspire to be resilient, but to distinguish between situations in which individual resilience can do, and those for which the depth, awareness, and work of an entire community or society is needed for any real and sustainable change to occur. But none of this can happen if we don’t first agree upon what each of us mean when we say ‘resilience,’ and if we have different definitions of what it means, then we should ask: how shall we merge and reconcile our definitions of the word so that we complement not undermine what we do individually and collectively as people. Resilience should not become a synonym for surrender. It is great to be resilient when facing a flood or an earthquake, but that is not the same when having to endure wars and economic crises caused by the ruling class and warmongers.
[From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]
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Louis Yako
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To a social worker working for other is not a job, it is a joy.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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With the first banks opened on Monday, the afternoon brought another request from Roosevelt. Stating that he needed the tax revenue, he asked Congress that beer with alcohol content of up to 3.2 percent be made legal; the Eighteenth Amendment did not specify the percentage that constituted an intoxicating beverage. Congress complied. The House passed the bill the very next day with a vote count of 316–97, pushing it to the Senate. Wednesday brought good cheer: The stock market opened for the first time in Roosevelt’s presidency. In a single-day record, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained over 15 percent—a gain in total market value of $3 billion. By Thursday, for increased fiscal prudence, the Senate had added an exemption for wine to go with beer, but negotiated the alcohol content down to 3.05 percent. Throughout the week, banks were receiving net deposits rather than facing panicked withdrawals. Over the following weeks, the administration developed a sweeping farm package designed to “increase purchasing power of our farmers” and “relieve the pressure of farm mortgages.” To guarantee the safety of bank deposits, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created. To regulate the entire American stock and bond markets, the Exchange Act of 1933 required companies to report their financial condition accurately to the buying public, establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission. Safety nets such as Social Security for retirement and home loan guarantees for individuals would be added to the government’s portfolio of responsibilities within a couple of years. It was the largest peacetime escalation of government in American history.
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Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
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social purpose of the corporation was to pursue profit. He argued that “the doctrine of ‘social responsibility’” in business, if “taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity.” He warned that its proponents were “preaching pure and unadulterated socialism,” and “undermining the basis of a free society.
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Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
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Common “imposter causes” include things like moon shots, a drive to “be the best,” or mistaking “growth” for purpose. It is also common to find organizations confusing their corporate social responsibility (CSR) program for a Just Cause.
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Simon Sinek (The Infinite Game)
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In the essay, Benda said that we must throw away “the regular clichés about liberation” from the traditional obligations of marriage and family. In the Christian model, marriage and family offers three gifts that are urgently needed for believers struggling within a totalitarian order. The first is the fruitful fellowship of love in which we are bound together with our neighbor without pardon by virtue simply of our closeness; not on the basis of merit, rights and entitlements, but by virtue of mutual need and its affectionate reciprocation—incidentally, although completely unmotivated by notions of equality and permanent conflict between the sexes.2 The second gift is freedom given to us so absolutely that even as finite and, in the course of the conditions of the world, seemingly rooted beings, we are able to make permanent, eternal decisions; every marriage promise that is kept, every fidelity in defiance of adversity, is a radical defiance of our finitude, something that elevates us—and with us all created corporeally—higher than the angels.3 The third gift is the dignity of the individual within family fellowship. In practically all other social roles we are replaceable and can be relieved of them, whether rightly or wrongly. However, such a cold calculation of justice does not reign between husband and wife, between children and parents, but rather the law of love. Even where love fails completely . . . and with all that accompanies that failure, the appeal of shared responsibility for mutual salvation remains, preventing us from giving up on unworthy sons, cheating wives, and doddering fathers.4
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Rod Dreher (Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents)
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A business that thinks beyond 'profit making' and 'profit maximization' by incorporating corporate ethics and contributes to the society at large, through its well defined corporate social responsibilty policy, is the one that will withstand the test of time and meet sustainable growth in the market. I believe its curve will never grow flat for a good number of years and may only meet merger or acquisitions but rarely a winding up.
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Henrietta Newton Martin
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People are significant resource of the world that deserve to live in a safe and healthy environment. Thereby corporates need to maneuver conservative and strategic sustainable development principles to meet the demands of business in the present without compromising the needs of future civilization.
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Henrietta Newton Martin
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Corporate Social Responsibility is the spine of a healthy corporate structure today.
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Henrietta Newton Martin
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Purpose and human connections constitute the very heart of business. And I believe they should be at the heart of the necessary and urgent refoundation of business now under way. Capitalism as we have known it for the past few decades is in crisis. More and more people hold the system responsible for social fractures and environmental degradation. Employees, customers, and even shareholders expect much more from corporations than a blind pursuit of profit. Disengagement at work is a global epidemic.
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Hubert Joly
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Which company is best for using construction Project work?
The Shree Siva Balaaji Steels project is a significant endeavor that encompasses the establishment and operation of a modern and advanced steel manufacturing facility. This project represents a fusion of innovation, cutting-edge technology, and industrial expertise, aimed at delivering high-quality steel products to meet the growing demands of various sectors.
Key Features:
State-of-the-Art Manufacturing Plant: The project involves the construction and operation of a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant equipped with the latest machinery, automation systems, and environmentally friendly processes. This allows for efficient production and reduced environmental impact.
Diverse Product Range: Shree Siva Balaaji Steels aims to offer a diverse range of steel products to cater to different industries such as construction, automotive, infrastructure, and manufacturing. This versatility enables the company to meet the varying needs of clients and partners.
Quality Assurance: A cornerstone of the project is its commitment to delivering high-quality steel products. The facility adheres to strict quality control measures and follows international standards to ensure that the end products are durable, reliable, and meet or exceed industry specifications.
Sustainability Focus: The project places a strong emphasis on sustainability and environmentally conscious practices. Energy-efficient processes, recycling initiatives, and waste reduction strategies are integrated into the manufacturing process to minimize the ecological footprint.
Employment Opportunities: Shree Siva Balaaji Steels contributes to local economies by creating employment opportunities across various skill levels, from skilled labor to technical experts. This helps stimulate economic growth in the region surrounding the manufacturing facility.
Collaboration and Partnerships: The project fosters collaborations with suppliers, distributors, and clients, establishing strong relationships within the steel industry. This network facilitates efficient supply chain management and enables the company to provide tailored solutions to its customers.
Innovation and Research: The project invests in research and development to constantly improve manufacturing processes, product quality, and the development of new steel products. This dedication to innovation positions the company at the forefront of the steel industry.
Community Engagement: Shree Siva Balaaji Steels is committed to engaging with local communities and implementing corporate social responsibility initiatives. These efforts include supporting education, healthcare, and other community-centric projects, fostering goodwill and positive impact.
Vision:
The Shree Siva Balaaji Steels project envisions becoming a leading name in the steel manufacturing sector, renowned for its exceptional quality, technological innovation, and sustainability practices. By adhering to its core values of integrity, excellence, and environmental responsibility, the project strives to contribute positively to the industry and the communities it operates within.
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shree sivabalaaji steels
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We are trapped inside the libertarian economic and personal theories Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand created in the 1950s. For corporations, Friedman decreed, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to increase its profits.” Rand told individuals that “achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life.
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Jonathan Taplin (Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy)
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Many leaders still regard the private sector with skepticism—an attitude inherited from the old “New Left.” They fear that they might lose focus or be co-opted if they partner with corporations. Some nonprofits play a corporate watchdog role and protest the excesses of capitalism and globalization—often for good reason. And a recent spate of corporate scandals hasn’t helped improve the image of business. “Among many nonprofits, there is a view that business is the enemy,” says Mike McCurry, who is on the board of Share Our Strength. On the other side of this debate, more pragmatic members of the social entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility movements have long touted the benefits of cross-sector partnerships and of harnessing market forces for social change. They argue that companies’ bottom lines can benefit from social responsibility, while nonprofits
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Leslie R. Crutchfield (Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits (Jossey-Bass Leadership Series Book 403))
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Also, an animal cannot fear death. Rats and marine snails are not abstractly aware of the prospect of a car accident, or a plane crash, or a terrorist attack, or nuclear annihilation—or of social rejection, or diminishment of status, or professional humiliation, or the inevitable loss of people we love, or the finitude of corporeal existence. This, along with our capacity to be consciously aware of the sensations of fear, and to cogitate about them, gives the human experience of anxiety an existential dimension that the “alarm response” of a marine snail utterly lacks. For Dr. W., this existential dimension is crucial.
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Scott Stossel (My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind)
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theory of shareholder primacy that is at the heart of so much finite-minded business practice today. “In a free-enterprise, private-property system,” he wrote, “a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.” Indeed, Friedman insisted that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business, to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.
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Simon Sinek (The Infinite Game)
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Waste levels Logistics: Schedule accuracy On time delivery percentage Average time to deliver Inventory accuracy Human resources: Employee turnover Average time to fill a position Cost per hire Employee satisfaction/engagement index Absenteeism Salary competitiveness factor Training return on investment Corporate social responsibility: Carbon and water footprints Energy consumption Product recycling rate Waste recycling rate
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Georgi Tsvetanov (Visual Finance: The One Page Visual Model to Understand Financial Statements and Make Better Business Decisions)
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But Anita Roddick had a different take on that. In 1976, before the words to say it had been found, she set out to create a business that was socially and environmentally regenerative by design. Opening The Body Shop in the British seaside town of Brighton, she sold natural plant-based cosmetics (never tested on animals) in refillable bottles and recycled boxes (why throw away when you can use again?) while paying a fair price to the communities worldwide that supplied cocoa butter, brazil nut oil and dried herbs. As production expanded, the business began to recycle its wastewater for using in its products and was an early investor in wind power. Meanwhile, company profits went to The Body Shop Foundation, which gave them to social and environmental causes. In all, a pretty generous enterprise. Roddick’s motivation? ‘I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community,’ she later explained. ‘If I can’t do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?’47 Such a values-driven mission is what the analyst Marjorie Kelly calls a company’s ‘living purpose’—turning on its head the neoliberal script that the business of business is simply business. Roddick proved that business can be far more than that, by embedding benevolent values and a regenerative intent at the company’s birth. ‘We dedicated the Articles of Association and Memoranda—which in England is the legal definition of the purpose of your company—to human rights advocacy and social and environmental change,’ she explained in 2005, ‘so everything the company did had that as its canopy.’48 Today’s most innovative enterprises are inspired by the same idea: that the business of business is to contribute to a thriving world. And the growing family of enterprise structures that are intentionally distributive by design—including cooperatives, not-for-profits, community interest companies, and benefit corporations—can be regenerative by design too.49 By explicitly making a regenerative commitment in their corporate by-laws and enshrining it in their governance, they can safeguard a ‘living purpose’ through times of leadership change and protect it from mission creep. Indeed the most profound act of corporate responsibility for any company today is to rewrite its corporate by-laws, or articles of association, in order to redefine itself with a living purpose, rooted in regenerative and distributive design, and then to live and work by it.
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Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
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But, with a few carefully chosen exceptions, the US wouldn't let them. If poor states had been allowed to industrialize, they would have been harder to exploit. As a result, when peripheral countries did try to industrialize in the mid-twentieth century, powerful states, corporations, and international institutions worked together to undermine these efforts. As home to the most powerful capitalists in the world, the responsibility for protecting the system fell primarily to the United States, which worked tirelessly over subsequent decades to maintain the hierarchy of global capitalism and its own position at the apex.
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Grace Blakeley (Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom)
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In less than 20 years, the ESG/DEI movement has grown from a corporate social responsibility initiative launched by the UN into a global phenomenon representing more than $30 trillion in assets under management. It basically hands over social and political responsibility to oligarchs, corporatists, and financial assets management firms like Ernst & Young and BlackRock, which invest in the future equality and sustainability goals of what they hope will become a global society, with homogenized virtues, ethics, goals, and initiatives.
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Jennifer Bilek (Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches from The 11th Hour)
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Impaakt India: Pioneering the Future of Sustainable Business Publishing
As businesses today increasingly balance profitability with purpose, Impaakt India stands out as a forward-thinking magazine publisher committed to reshaping how we view corporate responsibility. Unlike conventional business publications, Impaakt India dives deep into the positive and negative impacts that businesses have on the environment, society, and governance. Their platform serves as a comprehensive resource for readers who seek to understand a company’s ethical footprint as well as its financial one. As a magazine publisher dedicated to sustainability and social good, Impaakt India provides a fresh perspective on what makes a company successful, transcending typical measures like revenue or market share to include the full spectrum of a brand's impact.
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Impaakt india
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In Orissa, where it is mining bauxite, Vedanta is financing a university. In these creeping, innocuous ways mining corporations enter our imaginations: the Gentle Giants Who Really Care. It's called CSR, corporate social responsibility.
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Arundhati Roy
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It might come as a surprise, but the Bible also addresses the importance of corporate responsibility. The Old Testament “law of gleaning” speaks loud and clear about this. Leviticus 19: 9-10 (NIV) summarizes this important social justice law which is also restated in Deuteronomy 24: “‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the LORD your God.” This law from God Himself, commanded landowners, business owners in our language today, to leave some of their potential profits for immigrants and the poor.
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Robert Chao Romero (Jesus for Revolutionaries: An Introduction to Race, Social Justice, and Christianity)
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Our concern,” Jimmy wrote in the DU brochure, is with how our city has been disintegrating socially, economically, politically, morally and ethically. We are convinced that we cannot depend upon one industry or any large corporation to provide us with jobs. It is now up to us—the citizens of Detroit—to put our hearts, our imaginations, our minds, and our hands together to create a vision and project concrete programs for developing the kinds of local enterprises that will provide meaningful jobs and income for all citizens. To engage Detroiters in the creation of this vision, DU embarked on a campaign for open government in the city, issuing a series of leaflets calling on citizens to examine the whole chain of developer-driven megaprojects with which Young had tried and failed to revive the city (including Poletown and the People Mover) and to assume responsibility for envisioning and implementing alternative roads of development based on restoring neighborhoods and communities. During the debate over casino gambling Young had challenged his opponents to come up with an alternative, accusing us of being naysayers without any solutions of our own. Jimmy welcomed the challenge. There was nothing he liked better than using crisis and breakdown as an opportunity for renewal and transformation. His forte was devising solutions that were visionary and at the same time so down-to-earth that people could almost taste them. For more than fifteen years he had been writing and talking about the crisis developing in our cities and the need to redefine work, especially for the sake of our young people. In October 1986, at a meeting in Oakland, California, which the Bay Area NOAR sponsored to present “a vision of 21st century neighborhoods and communities,” Jimmy had declared that it was now “idealistic” to expect the government or corporations to do the work that is needed to keep up our communities and to provide for our elementary safety and security. Multinational corporations and rapid technological development have turned our cities into graveyards. “Efficiency in production,” he argued, “can no longer be our guiding principle because it comes at the price of eliminating human creativity and skills and making millions of people expendable.” He continued: “The residue of the last 100 years of rapid technological development is alienation, hopelessness, self-hate and hate for one another, and the violence which has created a reign of terror in our inner cities.
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Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
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I feel that the government should uphold the concept that it is there for us, “We the People.” That it does what we alone cannot do. By standing unified and proud, we have strength because of our numbers and the power to do what is right. That we always remain on the right side of history and care for and respect our less fortunate. Now, you may think that I’m just spouting out a lot of patriotic nonsense, which you are entitled to do, however I did serve my country actively in both the Navy and Army for a total of forty years, six months and seven days as a reservist and feel that I have an equal vested interest in these United States.
If we don’t like what is happening we have responsible ways and means to change things. We have Constitutional, “First Amendment Rights to Freedom of Speech.” There are many things I would like to see change and there are ways that we can do this. To start with we have to protect our First Amendment Rights and protect the media from government interference…. I also believe in protecting our individual freedom…. I believe in one person, one vote…. Corporations are not people, for one they have no human feelings…. That although our government may be misdirected it is not the enemy…. I want reasonable regulations to protect us from harm…. That we not privatize everything in sight such as prisons, schools, roads, social security, Medicare, libraries etc.….. Entitlements that have been earned should not be tampered with…. That college education should be free or at least reasonable…. That health care becomes free or very reasonable priced for all…. That lobbyist be limited in how they can manipulate our lawmakers…. That people, not corporations or political action committees (PAC’s), can only give limited amounts of money to candidates…. That our taxes be simplified, fair and on a graduated scale without loop holes….That government stays out of our personal lives, unless our actions affect others…. That our government stays out of women’s issues, other than to insure equal rights…. That the law (police) respects all people and treats them with the dignity they deserve…. That we no longer have a death penalty…. That our military observe the Geneva Conventions and never resort to any form of torture…. That the Police, FBI, CIA or other government entities be limited in their actions, and that they never bully or disrespect people that are in their charge or care…. That we never harbor prisoners overseas to avoid their protection by American law…. That everyone, without exception, is equal…. And, in a general way, that we constantly strive for a more perfect Union and consider ourselves members of a greater American family, or at the very least, as guests in our country.
As Americans we are better than what we have witnessed lately. The idea that we will go beyond our rights is insane and should be discouraged and outlawed. As a country let us look forward to a bright and productive future, and let us find common ground, pulling in the same direction. We all deserve to feel safe from persecution and/or our enemies. We should also be open minded enough to see what works in other countries. If we are going to “Make America Great Again” we should start by being more civil and kinder to each other. Now this is all just a thought, but it’s a start…. “We’re Still Here!
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Hank Bracker
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Merck • Corporate social responsibility • Unequivocal excellence in all aspects of the company • Science-based innovation • Honesty and integrity • Profit, but profit from work that benefits humanity Nordstrom
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Jim Collins (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy)
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We abstract injustice, allowing ourselves to believe we no longer have a direct hand in it. We make injustice impersonal; if everyone is responsible, then no one is responsible. But justice should not be abstracted to a corporate concept that justifies ongoing individual injustice. Justice is social and corporate, but it requires a personal face.
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Soong-Chan Rah (Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times)
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Impact” has a similar effect on the listener in that the word is ostensibly neutral but remarkably influential. Thanks to my firm’s extensive work ion corporate social responsibility, I found this one word – more than any other – caused listeners to assume that they will see and feel a measurable difference.
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Frank Luntz (Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear)
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There are only two distinctions between anybody in this room and an institutionalized schizophrenic: (1) whether you have a good reality strategy and you can make that distinction, and (2) whether the content of your hallucination is socially acceptable or not. Because you all hallucinate. You all hallucinate that somebody's in a good mood or a bad mood, for example. Sometimes it really is an accurate representation of what you are getting from the outside, but sometimes it's a response to your own internal state.
And if it's not there, sometimes you can induce it. "Is something wrong?" "What is bothering you?" "Now I don't want you to worry about anything that happened today while you were gone."
Drinking blood in this culture is not acceptable. I've lived in cultures where that's fine. The Masai, in Eastern Africa, sit around and drink cups of blood all the time. No problem. It would be weird in their culture for somebody to say "I can see that you are feeling very bad about what I just said." They would begin to wonder about you. But in this culture it's reversed.
When we trained residents in mental hospitals we used to go up early and spend time in the wards because the patients there had problems we never had the opportunity to encounter before. We would give them the task of determining for themselves which parts of their experience were validated by other people, and which were not. For instance, with the cup-of-blood guy, we immediately joined his reality. "Yeah, warm this one up for me, will you?" We joined his reality so much that he came to trust us. And then we gave him the task of discovering which parts of his reality other people in the ward could validate for him. We didn't say this was really here and that wasn't, but simply asked him to determine which parts of his reality other people could share. And then he learned - as most of us have as children - to talk about those parts of reality which are either socially acceptable hallucinations, or that other people are willing to see and hear and feel, too. That's all he needed to get out of the hospital. He's doing fine. He still drinks cups of blood, but he does it by himself. Most psychotics don't have a way of making distinctions between what's shared reality and what's not.
(...)
I've made a lot of jokes about the way humanistic psychologists treat each other when they get together. They have many social rituals that did not exist when i worked at an electronics corporation. The corporation people didn't come in the morning and hold each other's hands and look meaningfully into each other's eyes for five and a half minutes. Now, when somebody at the corporation sees somebody do that, they go "Urrrrhhh! Weird!" And the people in humanistic psychology circles think the corporation people are cold and insensitive and inhuman. To me, they are both psychotic realities, and I'm not sure which one is crazier. And if you think about shared realities, the corporation people are in the majority!
(...)
Therapists feel letters. I don't think that's any more peculiar than drinking cups of blood. Everywhere I go, people tell me they feel O and K. That's pretty weird. Or you ask people "how do you feel?" and they say "Not bad." Think about that for a moment. That's a very profound statement. "I feel not bad." That's not a feeling. Neither is "OK.
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Richard Bandler, John Grinder
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hanging the function’s value proposition entirely on its financial impacts risks exacerbating the myopic view of Procurement as a ‘cost savings’ function. We must think beyond the numbers – issues like supply risks, supply base alignment and corporate social responsibility (CSR) can rarely be adequately encapsulated by numbers alone. These are all issues in which Procurement has a lead responsibility.
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Sigi Osagie (Procurement Mojo: Strengthening the Function and Raising its Profile)
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CSR sustains that companies should see to their personnel healthcare.
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Bernardo Kliksberg (Ethics for CEOs - Why Corporate Social Responsibility is Good for Businesses and Countries)
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CSR should begin at home. In order that corporations may proclaim CSR, they should implement it on their own staff. Decent working conditions, coupled with fair compensations, career growth opportunities and training are all essential.
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Bernardo Kliksberg (Ethics for CEOs - Why Corporate Social Responsibility is Good for Businesses and Countries)
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CSR shall be unmistakably defined as a responsibility incumbent upon all management levels and it shall be subject to ongoing follow-up by top executives”.
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Bernardo Kliksberg (Ethics for CEOs - Why Corporate Social Responsibility is Good for Businesses and Countries)
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It is about time companies shifted from the simple strategies to earn a mere operation license towards earning a leadership license, that is, they should serve the needs of both their shareholders and stakeholders by making profits while also being a positive driver in society”.
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Bernardo Kliksberg (Ethics for CEOs - Why Corporate Social Responsibility is Good for Businesses and Countries)
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become engaged in a more comprehensive leadership style which may include experts, activists, employees and consumers”.
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Bernardo Kliksberg (Ethics for CEOs - Why Corporate Social Responsibility is Good for Businesses and Countries)
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creating “social value” is not merely an abstraction. Companies may create it by using their managerial imagination or by forging strategic alliances. It is just about setting out to it, integrating it into corporate priorities and policies and maintaining absolute consistency between words and actions.
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Bernardo Kliksberg (Ethics for CEOs - Why Corporate Social Responsibility is Good for Businesses and Countries)
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CSR begins “at home”. A paramount measure of an effectively responsible company lies in its human resources policies. When companies proclaim CSR outwardly but acts contrarily inwardly, there is no true CSR. Instead, it is an inconsistency that will burst out into pieces.
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Bernardo Kliksberg (Ethics for CEOs - Why Corporate Social Responsibility is Good for Businesses and Countries)
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According to the Institute for Policy Studies (Anderson, Collins, Klinger, Pizzigati, 2011) the ratio between a CEO and an average company salary stood at 42 to 1 back in 1980, while it climbed to 263 to 1 and to 325 to 1 in 2009 and 2010 respectively.
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Bernardo Kliksberg (Ethics for CEOs - Why Corporate Social Responsibility is Good for Businesses and Countries)
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According to related studies, “fear-based” staff management techniques engender a hostile atmosphere, which in turn arouses fierce competition and seriously impairs moral values.
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Bernardo Kliksberg (Ethics for CEOs - Why Corporate Social Responsibility is Good for Businesses and Countries)