Chema Alonso
Chief Data Officer, Telefonica.
There has been much debate about the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility. I don’t want to open this perennial debate on measuring CSRhere, but I will share my own view with a simple idea:
CSR is not about how much money the company gives to charity or to social programs; CSR is about how you get your income and how much value you generate to your stakeholders with your own business (social programs included).
Let’s see what this means in practice.
First; when I talk about how the company gets its revenues, I want to call the attention to the degree of integrity, respect for its stakeholders, transparency and ethical behavior that should guide the way in which any company should operate. Former IBM CEO, Louis V. Gerstner, said some time ago that “corporate culture is what people do when nobody is looking”. How we behave; how we make decisions; how we apply our Ethic Code… All this is a source of value and must be looked after.
For example in Telefónica, we rely on our ethical code or Business Principles. Thanks to them, we develop internal policies and internal procedures, to embed ethical behavior within the day to day management. We are trying to work transversally and to involve as many corporate areas and Operating Businesses as we can. As evidence of the progress made, OECD, UN and World Bank consider our Business Principles Office (the internal organ that runs the Ethic Code) a best practice internationally.
– You can read the full article in Markets for Good blog.
