EP talks to Alan Knight about his belief that CSR practitioners have lost sight of the pressing global problems that should dictate their agenda
Few individuals have had more experience of working as a corporate social responsibility practitioner than Alan Knight, head of social responsibility at the world’s third-largest home improvement group Kingfisher and before that environmental specialist for Kingfisher subsidiary B&Q over the past decade. His decision to leave Kingfisher to become head of corporate accountability at SABMiller, the world’s second-largest brewer, signals both that company’s determination to make progress on CSR and Knight’s desire for a fresh challenge in another industry.
He will take up his new position, based in the UK, on 1 December, relishing the prospect of ‘focusing on one product – beer – rather than the 40,000 that Kingfisher sold’‚ and has already begun working on his priorities at the $11.4billion (£6.37bn) turnover brewer, owner, among other brands, of Nastro Azzurro, Carling Black Label, Miller Lite and Pilsner Urquell.
Responsible drinking is probably the most obvious challenge facing the South Africa-based brewer. Knight describes it as ‘a growth issue in virtually every country in the world’ and claims to have been impressed with SABMiller’s initiatives in this area. With a manager already in place to deal with that issue, he says he will adopt the attitude that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.
But he will take a more proactive role in SABMiller’s environmental management, which he says ‘needs more consistency across the group’, and has clearly been brought in to get to grips with what he calls ‘old-fashioned issues such as pollution control and conservation’. His other priority will be to work on improving labour conditions at SABMiller’s suppliers of sugar, malt, barley and other ingredients – an area he believes the company ‘hasn’t really looked into yet’.
In the longer term, and in line with one of the reasons for his engagement in CSR, he wants to tackle wider questions, in particular the ‘African development agenda’ and sustainable consumption. SABMiller, which is listed in London and Johannesburg, dominates brewing in South Africa, with 98 per cent of the market, producing Castle Lager, Africa’s best-selling beer.
To address such topics is key to CSR coming of age, Knight believes – the fact that he also wears two official hats as chair of the UK government’s Advisory Committee on Consumer Products and the Environment, and as a Sustainable Development Commissioner, adding weight to his views. ‘I look forward to the day when the CSR world thinks more about sustainable development and consumption. At the moment, the agenda is still concerned with risk management – how we stop social and environmental issues disrupting our strategic business goals. That is absolutely fine, and was the strapline of what we were doing at B&Q, but now, in 2004, we need to think differently. We need to be looking more at corporate citizenship than risk management.’
Non-governmental organizations are right to question the effectiveness of CSR, he believes. ‘I think they have made a fair assessment there,’ Knight says, arguing that socially responsible business has become inward-looking and no longer focuses enough on pressing global problems. ‘The bean counters have taken over. Too much of the debate at the moment is about reporting, performance indicators, management systems and verification. At the end of the day, CSR isn’t about any of that. There are more conferences on those things than on how to resolve problems such as child labour. We’ve drifted from issues to process, and by doing so we are starving the debate of oxygen.’
Knight says no one is especially to blame for this – NGOs have been equally guilty of focusing on reporting – but that all parties need to recognize why action is now needed.
‘We’ve allowed the reporting agenda to take over,’ he says. ‘Of course reporting has forced people to think about things, but what’s important is that we tackle the issues and do something to resolve them. The reason why I’m comfortable and proud of what has been done at B&Q and Kingfisher is that we drilled down and tried to solve environmental and social problems we were either causing or involved in.
‘At Kingfisher we left reporting, performance indicators and third-party verification to the end, once we felt we had begun to tackle things properly. Too many organizations are starting by thinking what they have to say to the world, as opposed to what they need to do.’ At SABMiller, Knight hopes action will speak louder than words, and that he will be able to shape a programme to spread this approach across the business.
‘The other big debate we should be having is on the role of the CSR profession. We should begin to focus less on how much we physically do as practitioners and more on how we mainstream things in the business.
‘We have to be more of a radar for the business, understanding what the upcoming issues will be and then translating them into action plans.’