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Business leaders are among the most powerful people on the planet. At the helm of huge corporations, with billions of dollars of assets to leverage, their decisions have a profound influence on all of us. At the same time, however, those very same business leaders only very rarely seem to speak out on many of the public issues that actually affect us. Consider when the former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was engulfed in a crack-smoking scandal that put the city in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. The response from the city's business elite was a deafening silence . Nonetheless, the scandal must have prompted considerable anxiety among business leaders about its effect on the business and investment climate of Canada's largest city. Are CEOs right to hold back in such instances or should we expect them to take a more prominent position in public debates? There are no black and white answers to this; it largely depends on context. So here are four things to consider when decidi...

Today we have a guest post from Hans Rawhouser and Michael Cummings, both from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Hans and Michael have been working with Andrew on research about benefit corporation legislation in the US, and their paper has just been published in a special issue of the California Management Review about hybrid organizations. The short video above is from the special issue editors at CMR and provides a good introduction to some of the main issues and debates around hybrid organizations. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Social hybrid organizations mix characteristics of non-profit and for-profit organizations, and are receiving increased attention from management scholars and practitioners. A hybrid organization can be identified informally, based on an assessment of the organization’s practices, or it can be recognized more formally such as through third-party certification (...

Today we feature a guest post from our colleague over in the law school, Aaron A. Dhir, who is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Aaron's book on boardroom diversity is out next month and it is causing quite a stir. So we asked him to tell us a little about the issue of diversity quotas on boards and why, despite the controversy, his research suggests that it might be a good idea.  The lack of diversity in the governance of business corporations is quickly becoming one of the most discussed topics in corporate governance.   It has ignited a heated global debate, leading policymakers to wrestle with difficult questions that lie at the intersection of market activity and social identity politics. My new book, Challenging Boardroom Homogeneity , will be published next month by Cambridge University Press.   In it, I draw on semi-structured interviews with corporate board directors in Norway and documentary cont...

"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...