Not merely the words and the idea but the infrastructure: CSR departments, CSR reports, CSR conferences and CSR executives.

And, as long as we're at it, let's think about ditching the triple bottom line, the pursuit of shared value, corporate citizenship and especially, yuk, the idea that stakeholders deserve a say in how to run a business.

All of these are, at best, distractions and, at worst, ways of thinking about business that create a separation between a company's core business and its impact on the world. Both ought to be life-enhancing. No more and no less.

 

It's not the first time we've heard these concerns, but it's a timely and welcome reflection, especially as more and more people are talking about "embedding" CSR and sustainability into their business. (The words are often used interchangeably, but that's a topic for another time.)

 

The intention is good, but the process is often too mechanistic. Gunther quotes Carol Sanford, author of the excellent new book, The Responsible Corporation, who says "The biggest challenge for a company that aspires to be a responsibility business is to stop working on parts and start recognizing and working on whole systems."

 

The Purpose of Business

 

 

But it goes deeper than that: to strategic sustainability roadmaps that provide a comprehensive view of how sustainability touches every part of the enterprise; to shared frameworks that activate dozens - or thousands - of eyes and ears in discovery and innovation toward a common purpose; to feedback systems that give every employee a clear line of sight that connects their decisions and actions, and the impact of those actions, on the goals, impacts and value of the company.

 

That's something much more than CSR, more than the metaphor of "embedding CSR into your DNA," though that's important too. I think cybernetician, poet and my mentor Stafford Beer came closer when he wrote about The Heart of Enterprise. The heart, to the ancients, was the repository of courage. And courage is what's needed to re-design business, to re-invent the global economy, to build new worlds.

The International Society for Sustainability Professionals (ISSP) has announced a slight change of plan. Instead of selecting a single Pinnacle Award winner from their five nominees -- Ray Anderson, Gil Friend, Amory Lovins, Karl-Henrik Robert and Bob Willard -- for "significant contributions to the field of sustainability and to the professionals that serve it," they've decided to honor all five of us as the inaugural members of the ISSP Sustainability Hall of Fame.

Originally designed to honor a single individual each year, the ISSP Board of Directors soon discovered the difficulty in singling out just one of the stellar nominees under consideration for the new award. Because of that conundrum and because it seemed more fitting to honor contributions rather than create a competition, the ISSP board has chosen instead to create the ISSP Sustainability Hall of Fame and honor all five of the nominees as the inaugural members of this distinctive group of professional fellows.

 

It's an incredible honor to be in the company of these pioneers, and I'll have more to say about each of them -- and my view of their contributions -- in future issues.

I'm grateful to the ISSP for their vision, and look forward to seeing all of you at the awards ceremony at the ISSP conference in Portland this fall. (See sidebar.)