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"Making a True Difference" has been Tim Hortons' slogan animating its social responsibility and sustainability initiatives over the past few years. But since they were acquired late last year by Brazilian private equity outfit 3G Capital, the owners of the fast food chain Burger King, the true difference seems to be that sustainability is suddenly in rapid decline at the iconic Canadian coffee chain. The new owners, promising to cut costs and improve performance, have effectively closed down the company's sustainability department. The change has been pretty dramatic. Just last year, the then CEO of the company was saying that their "overall vision for sustainability is to be a leader in the North American quick service restaurant sector and across all sectors in Canada" . Already well-known for their community initiatives, the company  had upped its game over recent years in a number of key areas including sustainable sourcing, recycling, energy and water e...

The crash of the Germanwings flight earlier this week is still dominating much of the (Western) news media. It is not just the fact that it happened with a well known Airline with a good safety record (Germanwings is a part of Lufthansa) right in the middle of Europe – in fact one of us sat on a Lufthansa A320 just a day before the crash. But it is also the absence of any good explanation as to the cause of the crash. Now that story has evolved over the last hours. First, we learned from the voice recorder of the black box that the co-pilot was alone in the cockpit and did not open the door for the pilot to come back after his toilet break. It was interesting to see how Lufthansa, the prosecutors and most media then jumped to the conclusion that the co-pilot deliberately crashed the plane. While that is indeed one option , only few reports raised the question why the flight data recorder – the other black box – could not be found . Or why when it was found the hard disk with the data w...

The Apple Watch understandably took the limelight at Apple's big launch event today . But what is becoming increasingly clear is that to really understand the company we need to see it as so much more than simply a technology company. And we have to look beyond its products, however alluring they might be. Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of corporate responsibility. For much of the past few years, the corporate responsibility community has been focusing hard on Apple's product supply chain. And for good reason, with a spate of labour violations plaguing the company (most recently from the BBC in December last year ) despite some impressive commitments to responsible sourcing. But with the launch of the Apple Watch and its extended capabilities for health monitoring, research and diagnosis, along with the rapid growth of its Apple Pay system, it is the company's capabilities in data management and security that will likely define its reputation for corporate re...

Over the last week or so we have seen a vibrant debate unfolding after the announcement of Apple and Facebook’s latest benefit : Female employees can store and freeze their eggs on the company’s dime so that they can postpone pregnancy beyond the phase where they might want to just focus on their careers. I put the case up for debate in my undergraduate classes on business ethics this week. It was a fascinating experience. To start, we assessed the upshot. There is a surge of female professionals who attempt at pregnancy in their forties and thus a surge in in-vitro fertilization and a host of other avenues to late motherhood luckily provided by progress in obstetrics these days. But there is also a fair number of women who just have to suck it up that by the time they can put their head around having babies, that ship has sailed. Here, such an offer seems to be a big benefit. You can progress in an environment where your commitment to the job is 24/7 – like your male colleagues – and ...

This weekend offered an interesting opportunity to discuss, dissect and reflect on the state of the art of business ethics research and some of its future trajectories. At the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania a small group of business ethics scholars gathered from all around the globe to celebrate and honor the work of one of the faculty members, Professor Thomas Donaldson . Donaldson, a philosopher by training, can be considered one of the pioneers of the business ethics field and one of its most longstanding and certainly most influential voices over the last four decades. Some of the speeches at the event focused on appraising and celebrating Donaldson’s impressive body of work, including many humorous interjections on Donaldson as a person by some of his contemporaries such as  Norman Bowie , George Brenkert , Ed Freeman , or Pat Werhane . Most of the day though was dedicated to work by scholars who build on, extend, refine, and continue some of Donaldson’s wor...

Over the last days we have seen a captivating debate unfolding. Jill Lepore’s article in The New Yorker on the concept of ‘disruptive innovation’ has garnered quite some attention. Not at least from its progenitor, Lepore’s Harvard colleague Clayton Christenen , who appears to be anything but amused . Disruptive innovations - put simply - are new products or services that create new markets, while at the same time turning existing solutions to customer demands obsolete, and thus destroying existing markets and the companies that serve them. In his many books, Christensen initially developed the idea from a corporate context (such as his floppy disk, steel, or construction equipment examples) but it quickly branched out into other sectors. The article is a fascinating read not just because it takes on an idea largely uncontested in academia and beyond. Moreover, the concept of ‘disruptive innovation’ had quite a substantial impact on the real world. Lepore writes as a historian and d...

Today (Monday April 28, 2014)  Jeremy Oppenheim was in Toronto. Oppenheim is the director of the   Global Commission on the Economy and Climate (chaired by former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, co-chairs include Lord Nicholas Stern and the OECD Secretary-General). He was hosted by Corporate Knights ’ Toby Heaps for a 'high level' lunch which included some of the top brass of Toronto’s investment, real estate, insurance and academic communities. And civil society, of course, David Miller (ex-Major of Toronto and now Head of WWF Canada) was there, too. It was, first off, a real game changing experience to see a room of 30ish ‘climate activists’ in pinstripes (or female equivalent) convening over antipasto e bistecca to discuss the plight of the planet. Oppenheim's remarks were thought provoking as they reflected the current gist among those leaders that care  seriously about climate change. Oppenheim started by highlighting that the public debate has somewhat stalled...