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Upon landing in Toronto Saturday I could already see it: The G20 heads of states are in town and their modest means of transportation were neatly parked at Pearson International Airport: Obama's Air Force One, Two Jumbojets each for the Chinese, Japanese and Saudi-Arabian Heads of state, Merkel's and Sarkozy's relatively modest Airbuses, and – how cute – the Virgin Atlantic A340 which must have shipped the new British PM Cameron to TO. Telling array of status symbols... I t looked somewhat different in downtown Toronto. The entire centre, where the convention place for the G20 is located, was fenced off with a 3m high wall – reminding me of my childhood playing next to the Berlin Wall. There was a sizable number of protesters out there – but many thousands more of police. The city was a fortress. The G20 is another 'tool' of global governance, similar to the Global Compact. But while the Compact receives only scant attention from the public, the G20 is a major even...

For the past two and half days I've felt a strange tension in this conference. It is about the thorny question of whether ethics pays. The business case for CSR. The harmony between economic, social and ecological sustainability. Most of the time panellists and speakers were hammering it home that joining the UN Global Compact and implementing the principles just makes good business sense. I had a very lively conversation with Peter Solmssen, Executive VP of Siemens about this, who joined the company recently as part of the revamp of the board in the aftermath of the corruption scandals. He was fairly bullish that fighting corruption makes good business sense, 'we are more profitable now' he argued. He argued that in most countries big conglomerates like Siemens or General Electric are doing business with public purchasers who at the top level are not interested in corruption, and that companies who are known for not engaging in it, in fact have a competitive advantage. Hi...

One of the benefits of going to big global conferences is that you meet old colleagues and friends. So I was very pleased to bump into Peter Lacy (now Managing Director Accenture, Sustainability Services, Europe, Africa and Latin America). I enjoyed working with Peter while he was Exec. Director at EABIS (an association of businesses and academic institutions to boost CSR in Europe) and built up the organization in the early/mid 2000s. Peter was here, among other things, to present a Survey on CEO perceptions of the Sustainability topic which I mentioned earlier in another post. I won't bore you with some of the bickering raised here (too small sam ple of 'converted' companies, CEO rhetoric is no data etc.) since it does not jeopardize the main message of the research: that sustainability is now clearly on the strategic agenda of many major companies and in fact 93% of surveyed CEOs globally see this as a key imperative. No more just an 'issue', a blip on the scr...

This morning the Summit opened. It was a well organized and well choreographed session. Our ten year old is a well behaved boy indeed (sorry for masculin-izing the UNGC, I just go by the blue colour of the UN...). Ban-Ki Moon opened, followed by a number of panellists and it were the usual, well meaning speeches by many leaders in business, and civil society. Moon announced the goal of raising the membership from currently 8,000 to 20,000 by 2020. Bloomberg ventured to step out of his role as Mayor and into that of a concerned citizen by pointing to two of the major challenges for future sustainability: 1bn deaths due to tobacco consumption over the next decade, and a similar level of road fatalities, given the current trends in automotive growth. These were quite daunting, but nevertheless refreshing new angles on the issues. Maybe i am hanging out too much on conferences that my ears are by now a bit teflonized for much of the sustainability rhetoric. But reflecting back on this ope...

See it here: http://www.un.org/webcast/globalcompact/leaderssummit2010/

Those of you who have followed this blog and our work over the last years will know that we have taken a special interest in the political role of private corporations. So what are the vibes here at the UN Global Compact Summit? Well, the general gist seems to be that most of whom are quite happy to pass on more responsibility for the environment, human rights etc. (i.e. the ten principles) to the private sector. The most poignant role in this probably put forward by the UK's new Minister for International Development, Alan Duncan. I liked him when I lived in the UK, but was a bit underwhelmed by what he said. Basically he is a pink Thatcherite, talking about shareholder value and how companies can combine this with development. He ducked questions on BP and whether there is a role for governments in preventing these disasters, which was a bit weak, I found. A refreshing accent was set by Mike Bloomberg and what the City of New York is doing. He was kind of cool, I found, saying th...

Ten year olds are in a funny age. Not quite children anymore, they are not grown ups either. They have learned the basics, reading and writing and calculus - but there is still a lot ahead of them. I like the metaphor for the UN Global Compact ten year anniversary Summit. In the opening ceremony it became quite clear that indeed much has been achieved. To talk about business responsiblities is now widely legitmate and the guest list shows, that many companies have grown with it. This is also visible in who - next to Ban-Ki Moon (UN Secretary General) - was invited to give the major talk in this afternoon's opening ceremony: Wang Zhongyu, President, China Enterprise Confederation - China of all countries. Its nice that ten year olds still don't care too much about what the world around them thinks. And in fact one has to give Chinese businesses in the UNGC a lot of credit, certainly for their commitment and also for successes. CSR is a world full of ambiguities, but today China...

So here we are. As hot as the weather is in New York, as hotly contested is the role which business education has played recently in making for more responsible companies. At the PRME 'side event' of the UNGC Summit some rather soulsearching questions were raised. Rakesh Kurana from Harvard made it quite clear that one of the dilemmas of b-schools in fact is that they have come to see their students rather as ‘customers’ then people who need education and at times been served a diet that needs some acquired taste. Just to blame the business world for lack of demand for issues of CSR and ethics is not enough in a world where the public increasingly worries about the status of wider societal impacts of business. While the Accenture Study (in cooperation with the UNGC) of the opinion of more than 800 CEOs suggest a slightly different picture, it leaves us with one general problem: Since business education, certainly at postgraduate/MBA level is in fact privatised and ‘purchased’ b...

What do you bring to the birthday party of a ten year old? Especially if it has pretty posh parents and throws the party nowhere less than at Times Square in New York? Crane and Matten have been invited to be the official Summit Bloggers for the 10 year anniversary Conference of the United Nations Global Compact this week Thursday and Friday in New York City. Over the next three days Dirk will keep you posted with news and updates on what is going on here. I have never done such a thing, so expect a colourful medley of comments, life blogs from the sessions or just thoughts. Let me know what you think, too, so that we can learn as we go. I have no real idea where this will be going. In the spirit of the party, I am not in the mood of only talking about how naughty the boy has been over the last 10 years. This job is done by others already in the bloggosphere . And besides, its not how I feel about the compact. In a world with serious governance deficits on the global level I think w...

Argentina, according to activists such as Naomi Klein and others, can be seen as a textbook case for what often is vilified to as ‘neo-liberalism’. In Argentina, this alludes mostly to the presidency of Carlos Menem and its aftermath, which ended 2001 in the bankruptcy of the Argentinean state. It was a period of rampant privatization, radical free market policies, most notoriously boosted by the conditions which the IMF and the Word Bank dictated to the country for its loans. Unforgotten are the decrees allowing every citizen to withdraw from their bank not more than $250 per week. Many lost their pensions and savings and the devaluation of the currency has led to an economic downturn from which the country is only slowly and partly recovering. Looking at Argentina now (Dirk has just spent 6 weeks there) provides a rather fascinating picture. Yes, it cannot be overlooked that the country shows signs of deterioration: In Buenos Aires, the stunning architecture, the layout of the wide s...

The fast food chain McDonald's has recently released an interesting TV ad in France featuring a young gay character talking with his father. It's notable not just because it features a gay character in a big multinational company's commercial, but also because the character is actually hiding his sexuality.  You can see the spot with English subtitles here : The ad has gained a lot of online attention. The spot itself has been seen by nearly 2m people on YouTube and there are countless sites (including repostings on YouTube) where commentators have made their views known about the ad. These views range from a positive appreciation of McDonald's for acknowledging the gay community to some pretty nasty homophobic vitriol. Somewhere in between there are those who are asking why a fast food company should even be mentioning someone's sexuality, and those that are questioning whether McDonald's is trying to reach out to a new, and potentially prosperous targt market...