A Hospital without Patient Safety?

Corporate responsibility is to the management of a company what patient safety is to the administration of a hospital. If you are not doing it, what are you doing?

But as the concept of corporate responsibility has expanded beyond it initial construct of corporate social responsibility, so too the early focus on transparency, reporting, metrics and monitoring leaves much of this work outside the core business of business. Who would go into a hospital for surgery if we knew in advance that there were only, say, seven people working on patient safety while the rest worked on… what?

So for all the good that CR has done and is doing, in too many organizations the issues remain peripheral – small teams of dedicated people, sometimes with the ear of the CEO, pushing nudging the core business into incremental changes. Like tugboats working with a tanker, we often remain far from the engine room of power, profit, decision-making, and prestige.

Whether an executive, a stakeholder, a shareholder, or a CR professional we must confront the reality of popular fiction. Corporate structure is a figment of our legal and cultural imagination. Phenomenally effective at generating economic growth and the stuff that we all use and discard, and this engine has been one of prosperity for many millions of people, so too has this imaginative structure enshrined a set of incentives that all too often set people against one another. Short-term profit maximizing behavior clearly has denuded forests and stripped mountaintops bare. Long-term social development and cultural unity has often frayed as corporate institutions excel. Incumbents use market power to stifle innovation, even though they were yesterday’s innovators.

We know what CR looks like today, but tomorrow?