Managing All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 3

Embracing Corporate Social Responsibility

In This Chapter

Creating a CSR strategy

Assessing your political environment

Behaving ethically

Corporate social responsibility — CSR, for short — is a way of doing business that's rapidly gaining popularity in the United States and around the world. Corporate social responsibility means conducting your business in a way that has a positive impact on the communities you serve. As you discover in this chapter, CSR affects many different aspects of operating a business — from recycling, to ethics, to environmental laws, and much more.

Ethics and office politics are powerful forces in any organization. Ethics is the framework of values that employees use to guide their behavior. You've seen the devastation that poor ethical standards can lead to — witness the string of business failures attributed to less than sterling ethics in more than a few large, seemingly upstanding businesses. Today more than ever, managers are expected to model ethical behavior, to ensure that their employees follow in their footsteps, and to purge the organization of employees who refuse to align their own standards with the standards of their employer. ...