Obama calls on business to press ‘reset’ button on CSR

Barack Obama has challenged US companies to ‘transform’ their corporate responsibility programmes to make them more effective and wide-ranging.

The American president has delivered the message through his social representative for global partnerships, Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, who told the annual Business for Social Responsibility conference in San Francisco: ‘Even the most responsible businesses must go further by extending CSR to be truly transformational.’

Frawley Bagley, who told delegates she was speaking on behalf of Obama and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, said such changes ‘should impact every aspect of your supply chain, every professional development programme you create, every decision you make in the boardroom, every employee in your operation and every stakeholder’.

The message is Obama’s first significant communication on CSR since he took office at the beginning of 2009 and his most explicit challenge for US businesses to become more ambitious in practising CSR.

Frawley Bagley said the financial crisis had emphasized the need for companies to reassess their CSR aims. ‘The challenge from the Obama administration is this: hit reset in the way you see your own practices,’ she said. ‘We can no longer afford to take incremental approaches that do not mobilize business drivers to solve the world’s problems.’

She emphasized that the government was willing to work with businesses to seek more effective ways of tackling social and environmental issues. ‘We must increase the scale of our collaborations to meet the scale of the problems that the world is facing,’ she said.
 
Frawley Bagley, a former US ambassador to Portugal, is a senior official at the global partnership office in the secretary of state’s office. She is an attorney by training, was senior adviser to secretary of state Madeleine Albright from 1997 to 2001, and was appointed to her present post in June.