Notes from a Conference

April 2008

On April 6-8, 2008, roughly 500 people came together - corporate citizenship practitioners, experts, and thought leaders - at the Boston College Center's annual International Corporate Citizenship Conference.

A lot of information gets crammed into these three days, and we're providing many ways to learn from this event - from videos of our keynote presenters and powerpoint presentations from breakouts on our post-conference portal, to summary articles on our web site about our keynote presenters.

But this year we wanted to provide not only the Center's perspective on the event, but that of one of our participants as well. For this purpose we asked Melissa Tritter, a corporate social responsibility researcher, commentator and advocate who writes the blog capitalism4good, to share her thoughts about the conference. Tritter works with the Center and is a part-time consultant with Sustainable Business Strategies. She is also a research assistant at Harvard Business School and leads the Boston Professional Chapter of Net Impact.

Melissa Tritter's Observations:

My first stop is the publications table, as the Center's conference is always a great opportunity to stock up on hard copies of its latest research reports, case studies and other publications. Usually I keep a pretty light footprint when it comes to paper use, but I also like to get away from the computer for my reading every once in a while. So, with a few pangs of guilt, I grab one of everything. I’m especially looking forward to reading What do Surveys Say about Corporate Citizenship? as it can be so difficult to find quantitative data about how the field is progressing.

Next stop: registration. I remember last year’s impressive efforts to green the conference, and wasn’t surprised to see the recycled multi-use conference bags, or to hear that sponsor materials would be distributed via an online portal, but what really floored me was the Toyota-sponsored conference goodie: not a mug, not a T-shirt, but a tree! Each participant received a plastic tube containing a pine seedling, complete with a little bit of soil and some planting instructions.

Not everyone was ready to plant it – we’re a combination of urban dwellers, international visitors, and overly busy people. But no one wanted to waste it either. In the end those with big local yards took extra trees from those who had to pass through international customs, and some city-dwellers decided we could grow a sapling indoors for a few years. The Center also announced it was donating some of the trees to a local nonprofit that would happily accept them. What a great win for all of us!

So, conference bag in hand, I set out to connect with old and new colleagues. The conference is a rare opportunity to connect in person, and it seems like everyone is on the same mission of catching up with old friends. Corporate citizenship folks seem to be inveterate networkers, and my personal theory is that we simply don’t feel ashamed to network because it’s all for the greater good. Networking can often seem self-serving, but in a profession devoted to making the world a better place, we’re all just looking for others who share that mission. And when people bring their personal values to their work, I think it becomes much easier to connect with others and to form real friendships.

Center director Brad Googins interrupted the chatting crowd for only a few minutes to introduce his new book, Beyond Good Company: Next Generation Corporate Citizenship, and to explain the conference theme: Real + Relevant + Responsive.

To be honest, this tagline had seemed overly vague when I first heard it, but my doubts disappeared as Brad put context around each term, giving more nuanced meanings. In a nutshell:

• Corporate citizenship is Real because we’re past the point of arguing that it should exist; former skeptics are agreeing that it has become a major force, and it has become part of the mainstream consciousness.
  
• At the same time, these ideas are Relevant both to each attendee’s organization and also to society; they are important, they matter, and they can make things better.
  
• Finally, we must be Responsive to dire needs in a changing world, and we must take the window of opportunity we now have and use it to embed corporate citizenship deeply – rather than squandering the spotlight we now enjoy.

So corporate citizenship is happening (real), it matters (relevant), and we must act quickly (responsive). Great theme.

Dinner was held at Artists for Humanity, whose primary purpose is to help underserved youth create viable careers in the arts. As an additional source of funding, the organization hosts corporate events and other large receptions in its new building – which is among the top LEED-certified buildings in the country, and is decorated with youth art. During dinner, three teenage artists finished up their commissioned paintings for the Center, with each tied to one of the three theme elements of the conference. In terms of aligning values between venue and event, it doesn’t get any better than this.

Inspiring Keynotes

As usual, the Center brought together inspiring keynotes who brought their unique perspectives to the topic of corporate citizenship.

For the opening session, Toyota chose an interesting approach: three different speakers presenting together. The most striking aspect of their talk, in my mind, was that it did not focus on the Prius – an engineering and marketing success that many in the sustainability world consider Toyota’s crowning glory. Instead, the speakers talked in depth about the company’s long-term support for family literacy, about the energy efficiency and waste management programs in manufacturing facilities and offices, and emphasized the goal of making cars that consumers want. (Read more about the Toyota keynote.)

The afternoon keynote was Charles Fombrun of the Reputation Institute, who came prepared to both enlighten and entertain, starting with a hilarious YouTube video. In this advertising spoof, investors declare in self-empowering voices that they will put themselves at the center of everything, profit from the misery of others, and so on. Then a buttoned-down executive from the fictitious firm of “Wormwood Bayne” explains that his organization invests in companies that ignore social and environmental issues in favor of short-term profit, because “in the long run we’re all dead.” It’s probably the best pitch for SRI that I’ve seen yet. (Read more about Fombrun's keynote.)

Monday night's after-dinner speaker Earl Martin Phalen addressed minority issues directly by describing the organization he founded and currently leads: BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life). Earl and his law-school friends had been mentoring inner-city youth and encouraging them to go to college, but realized that most didn’t have the reading skills to make that a real possibility. Today, BELL is a multimillion-dollar program that provides both mentoring and literacy skills in urban minority communities. An amazing number of participating youth – 100 percent of the first cohort – have gone on to college. It was an inspiring note to end the day.

Tuesday morning's keynote was an eye-opener too, as charismatic author Chip Heath presented ideas from his book Made to Stick. The point was that we in the corporate citizenship world have lots of good ideas – for our organizations and for their impact on the world – but we could do a much better job of getting those ideas to be memorable and contagious. Urban legends circulate for long periods of time without the benefit of either advertising budgets or credibility. So, how do we get the good ideas to become the sticky ones? Chip emphasized a checklist of key attributes: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion and stories. He showed that saying too much is like saying nothing at all, whereas one concrete example can be much more powerful – something the film industry calls a “high concept pitch” and uses to create a unifying vision for a large crew with a complex project. For other great examples, I’d highly recommend reading his book. (Read more about Heath's keynote.)

The closing keynote was Iqbal Quadir, an extraordinary social entrepreneur, founder of Grameenphone, philanthropist, and founder and executive director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT. His passion is finding new ways to create economic opportunities for poor people, and he firmly believes in a bottom-up approach to enterprise as a way to bring social, political and economic change for the better, as opposed to the top-down development that has typically been pursued in poor countries. His advice: don’t try to make money from the poor, make money with the poor. (Read more about Quadir's keynote.)

So Many Breakouts, So Little Time

Starting with the first breakout session, a common problem emerged – each of us can only be in one place at one time, and there are too many interesting panels. Suffice to say that all the sessions I attended were chock full of great information, and I took home lots to think about.

In the end, as usual, the Center's conference reminded me of drinking from a fire hose: so much great content crammed into so little time. Fortunately, there's always next year.

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