nutrition
Submitted by:
Susan Steinhagen
Nestle wishes women around the world a Happy Women’s Day
March 8, 2010
Creating value for society while creating value for shareholders is Nestlé’s approach to CSR. As women are a major workforce at Nestlé – in farms, factories and offices – Nestlé has implemented a worldwide initiative to accelerate gender balance. This initiative includes giving our leadership teams the necessary background and best practice guidance necessary to increase gender balance, Some reviewing human resources processes, and deploying locally adapted action plans in all markets.
Nestle Japan, for example has run gender balance awareness workshops with more than 250 participants, including its entire management team, while 3 task forces (one each for sales, factories, and women and leadership) have been set up.
Nestlé also has specific programmes targeted at women in the farming communities where the company sources its raw materials. The Village Women Dairy Development Programme in the Moga milk district of Punjab, India, focuses on advising female dairy workers on efficient water usage and other agricultural practices. Nestlé is also promoting cottage industries for women in South Africa and conducting nutrition education programmes for women in Nigeria.
We would like to thank you for your continued support as we celebrate Women’s day today!
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Submitted by:
Susan Steinhagen
Nestlé Chairman speaks on creating shared value
March 4, 2010
Follow Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Nestlé Chairman, speak live about Creating Shared Value as a new concept of corporate social responsibility at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington, USA.
The Policy Seminar proposes a new approach, which replaces the more traditional descriptions of corporate social responsibility with Creating Shared Value – a concept initially developed by Harvard’s Professor Michael Porter and championed by Nestlé. Using a range of examples from the Nestlé context, Mr Brabeck-Letmathe will also examine the links between the role of business in society and the broader issues surrounding food security.
Click here to listen to his speech.
You can view his presentation here.
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Submitted by:
Susan Steinhagen
Nestlé inaugurates USD 100 million milk processing facility in Indonesia
March 3, 2010
Nestlé today inaugurated the USD 100 million expansion of its milk processing facilities in Kejayan, Indonesia, which has now become one of Nestlé’s ten largest milk-processing plants worldwide.
In one of the company’s largest investments ever in the country, Nestlé is aiming to double the Kejayan plant’s capacity to produce high quality nutritious milk products to meet the demand of Indonesian consumers. This will significantly increase Nestlé fresh milk intake from local dairy farmers to more than one million litres per day in the next few years from its present intake of approximately 620,000 liters per day. The Kejayan plant has always stood as a symbol of Nestlé’s commitment to Indonesia, particularly to the 30,000 dairy farmers of East Java, Indonesia who have been collaborating with the company for over 30 years. The expansion is expected to have a significant impact on the economic development of the surrounding area. An excellent example of creating shared value – for society as well as shareholders.
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Submitted by:
Susan Steinhagen
Are Gen-Y grads heading toward CSR?
March 3, 2010
Sarah Barrell’s article in The Independent about a growing breed of MBA graduates who are looking to do well by doing good provoked me to write this post on the current crop of students that seem to be attracted to CSR.
An increasing number of students are showing interest and involvement in corporate social responsibility, not just in terms of additional academic credits but also in terms of active engagement in CSR/sustainability forums as well as in development projects. One such example is Universities Fighting World Hunger (UFWH), which represents a campus best practice in international programming and sustainable human development.
Having been a part of in the CSR/sustainability arena for the past 4 years within the United Nations, and now at Nestlé, it is very gratifying to see the rapid increase in the number of students focusing on CSR. But is this just a passing trend, or is CSR truly becoming a movement within Gen-Y? Your thoughts welcome!
For students out there who are considering CSR/sustainability as a career option, one great resource to be a part of is Net Impact, an international NGO that uses its 7000+ members consisting of students and professionals to create a more socially and environmentally sustainable world through businesses.
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Jo Hazelwood on March 7, 2010
I was at the IESE Doing Good Doing Well conference in Barcelona last week, and I'm convinced that the interest ...
Submitted by:
Susan Steinhagen
CSR, Smaller and Smarter
March 3, 2010
What is the current state of play of CSR in China? Has CSR come into its own in the country? Is it pervading only multi-national corporations or has it trickled down to SMEs as well? Wei Zheng, senior project manager as CSR Asia, writes an interesting article on the state of play of CSR in China.
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Submitted by:
Susan Steinhagen
Divining Destiny in the Tehuacán Valley
March 3, 2010
The Tehuacán Valley captures the tragedy and triumph of Mexico’s worst freshwater crisis in decades. Forces of man and nature have turned this valley’s freshwater supply, once renowned throughout Mexico, into an ancient memory. Industrial and agricultural pollution have rendered many waterways dangerous, and some deadly. Rainfall is scarce, leaving soils parched and aquifers dangerously empty.
As Tehuacán confronts its water crisis, a Mexico-based non-profit called Alternativas helps communities find solutions that combine modern technology with ancestral wisdom. It’s a new paradigm for water management that offers part of the solution for Mexico’s water future.
Andrew Maddocks of Circle of Blue interviews Raúl Hernández Garciadiego, Director General of the NGO Alternativas on how he and his team overcame this challenge.
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Submitted by:
Obi Tabansi Onyeaso
Peace in Our Time: Why the Shareowner versus Stake-tenant Conflict is Outdated
March 2, 2010
Normative extremism in the shareholder versus stakeholder debate may well be on its way out. If shareholder value was the pre-eminent metric of corporate entity success in the past two decades, in the new decade it will be far less so. The undisputed twenty-plus-year reign of financialization could be drawing to an overdue end. Similarly, the exclusive rights on do-gooder patents that activist groups, environmental campaigners, social crusaders and community advocates have hitherto laid claim to might be nearer its expiry date than its partisans realize. After waging an acrimonious war for so long, veterans on both sides have almost failed to notice how close they are to a final settlement. My prognosis is that the fanatical bipolarism of hardliners on either side of the debate will give way to one that vigorously searches for common ground.
Responding to questions in a 2006 interview, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the former Nestlé chief executive, urged companies to strike a balance between, ‘financial fundamentalists’, stubbornly wedded to the view that a public company’s main mission is to enhance shareholder value at all costs and oversee a steady rise in the stock price, on the one hand, and, on the other, ‘ethical stakeholders’ who are actively sympathetic to the position that the creation of a financial surplus is not the primary goal of companies, but rather the delivery of social benefits.
In reality, this either-or conception is an anachronism, at least, within many boardrooms. Most contemporary boards recognize the need to accommodate the interests of a broader set of interests in the formulation and execution of their business strategy. Saddled with multifarious pressures to implement proposals that benefit a basket of diverse constituencies, and not only shareholders, boards have grown quite adept at appraising their responsibilities and integrating its fulfillment in their corporate plans. While ‘ethical shareholders’, who, by the way, do not form a monolithic interest bloc, are content to make demands from vertical silos, boards which are charged with reviewing, analyzing, prioritizing and approving them, are obliged to progress much further to dealing with their implications on the business model, competitiveness, and profitability of the firm. Resolving these dilemmas require delicacy, tact and a firm grasp of the competing arguments.
The responses of boards to these demands, under the rubric generally referred to as corporate social responsibility (CSR), have undergone a significant evolution in recent years. From the philanthropy-dense activities of early years, today many companies have learned to distinguish between spontaneous charitable instincts and business-inspired programs. The January 2010 announcement that Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, would require its partners and senior executives to donate to charity falls in the former category. Noble as these gifts may be, their discretionary character and isolation from the investment bank’s value chain disqualifies them as CSR initiatives.
Professor Geoffrey Heal’s definition of CSR as ‘a program of actions taken to reduce externalized costs or to avoid distributional conflicts’ brings to the fore the fundamental nature of such activities. Heal’s definition presumes productive activities which generate these costs and a cumulative value chain whose end product ownership is disputed by each link on the assembly line with a legitimate claim on it.
In their path-breaking paper, ‘Strategy and Society: The Link between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility,’ published in the December 2006 edition of the Harvard Business Review, Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer argue that the time has come to stop treating ‘corporate success and social welfare as a zero-sum game.’ According to the researchers, ‘if corporations were to analyze their prospects for social responsibility using the same frameworks that guide their core business choices, they would discover that CSR can be much more than a cost, a constraint, or a charitable deed – it can be a source of opportunity, innovation and competitive advantage.’
Increasingly, many companies are bringing the same dispassionate criteria they use for business decision-making to their CSR agenda setting. In his speech, ‘A Conflict of Interests? Reconciling the Interests of Shareholders and Stakeholders,’ delivered at a 2008 RiskMetrics conference, Sir Stephen Green, chairman of HSBC Group, pointed out that sustainability is about ‘bringing relevant issues together into your own business model.’
CSR has outgrown its humanitarian-moralist origins to assume its proper stature as an integral part of value creation and assurance process at corporations. Undoubtedly, articulating the social contract that binds shareowners and staketenants has grown in importance.
In its 2007 Creating Shared Value Report, Nestlé explains that ‘to be successful in the long term it has to create value, not only for its shareholders but also for society . . . not as philanthropy or an add-on, but a fundamental part of our business strategy.’ For corporations whose survival skills are sharply honed, co-opting the new thinking is a clear-headed choice for Darwinian longevity. From building water processing plants in Nigeria to training women in sustainable farming in Pakistan to micro-finance loans for dairy farmers in South America, the company has dovetailed its CSR initiatives with its business goals. In fact, Nestlé has been so successful at establishing and communicating the synthesis of interests between its financial statements and CSR activities that it has won shareholder support for them.
This progress presents an historic opportunity for activists and campaigners who have long complained about the indifference and insincerity of companies to socially responsible practices. Will they take the companies up on their word or prefer to keep barking at an uprooted tree? The convergence of values must not go unnoticed. Companies, like individuals, are still far from the ideal in what they aspire to become within their communities. But strident criticism and persistent condemnation of former practices that companies have taken bold steps to correct is counter-productive and undermines the stated goals of these organizations. Around the world, companies are extending the hand of reconciliation. Would the other side accept it? The time to seize the day is now.
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Nwachukwu on March 2, 2010
Great article. You peel away the confusing layers and get to the issues at the heart of the matter. There ...
Submitted by:
Susan Steinhagen
Does CSR make good business sense?
February 24, 2010
Does mainstreaming CSR make good business sense? Do they actually positively impact a company’s bottom-line?
Craig Smith writes about why mainstreaming CSR still makes good business sense, even during an economic downturn when CSR is not high on the priority list of many companies.
Lisa Cohen, in a recent post on CSRWire also discusses whether socially responsible investment (SRI) strategies produce results.
Nestlé is one example a company doing well by doing good. Creating Shared Value, which is Nestlé approach towards CSR, is a fundamental part of Nestlé’s way of doing business, which focuses on specific areas of the Company’s core business activities where value can best be created both for society and shareholders. With an organic growth of 4.1% achieved in 2009, Nestlé has been able to grow substantially faster than the industry.
I would like to invite you to share examples of companies you think are doing good work in integrating CSR in their business operations.
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Susan Steinhagen on March 3, 2010
Dear Surinder,
Thank you for pointing out Mahindra & Mahindra's work. I invite you to share more details of their ...
Surinder Singh on February 27, 2010
Hi,
No doubt Nestlé is doing very well in CSR activities like nutrition , water, rural and others by Creating ...
Submitted by:
Susan Steinhagen
CSR in the United Arab Emirates
February 24, 2010
A recent national survey in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) indicates that although companies are showing high awareness of CSR, an inordinately low number of companies actually practice CSR. The study covering all 7 emirates was undertaken by the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and funded by The Emirates Foundation.
According to the study, while CSR has made its way into the lexicon of businesses, over 90% of the companies surveyed do not currently adopt CSR policies and practices. However, Dubai and Abu Dhabi appear to be the driving force behind CSR practices, which could hope to provide the momentum for implementation of CSR throughout the UAE.
Although the countries in the Gulf were only mildly affected by the economic crisis that ravaged many economies in the Western hemisphere, businesses in the UAE would be wise to learn from this experience and develop new strategies to better manage their portfolio.
The European Union is presently looking to strengthen bilateral business relations with the UAE at present. The Swedish Minister of Trade Dr. Ewa Helena Bjorling, while addressing a press conference at the Jeddah Economic Forum, urged the country to move away from protectionist tendencies and encouraged increasing transparency in businesses.
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Matt on March 2, 2010
I am really pleasedto see that you are putting so much of effort for encouraging the readers with valueable ...
Submitted by:
Susan Steinhagen
Addressing water shortages through CSR
February 24, 2010
Yanti Triwadiantini of the Jakarta Post, in a recent article, discusses why companies should focus on efficient water management in their business operations to not only protect the environment, but also support and improve local communities, making companies more environmentally sustainable as well as socially acceptable.
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