Starting a Business All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition
by Eric Tyson, Bob Nelson, The Experts at Dummies
Chapter 3
Embracing Corporate Social Responsibility
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding corporate social responsibility
Creating a CSR strategy
Behaving ethically
Corporate social responsibility — CSR for short — is a way of doing business that’s rapidly gaining in popularity both in the United States and around the world. Corporate social responsibility is conducting your business in a way that has a positive impact on the communities you serve. 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, business owners are expected to model ethical behavior, to ensure that their employees follow in their footsteps, and to purge employees who refuse to align their own standards with the business owners’ standards.
This chapter looks at adopting a corporate ...