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November 2006
In January 2007, The Center will begin offering a new Certificate in Corporate Citizenship. And, effective September 2007, The Center will significantly change the Certificate in Corporate Community Involvement, introducing more robust course options and more rigorous requirements.
What prompted these changes, and why now? We spoke with Chris Pinney, The Center's Director of Executive Education, to learn more.
Q: The Center's executive education program has been around for more than 20 years. Why is it changing now?
PINNEY: Twenty years ago when The Center began, corporate social responsibility typically meant “pay your taxes, obey the laws, and do something to help the communities you do business in.” It was a fairly straightforward equation for businesses to manage.
But today corporate social responsibility means something very different.
We now live in a global economy where the power and influence of business has grown dramatically. Fifty-one of the top 100 economies in the world are businesses.
With this power have come new expectations from society.
Today society is looking to business to help address major social challenges, from AIDS to education. It also expects business to take more responsibility for its conduct, from governance, to environmental, health and safety practices, to fair labor practices, to ensuring a socially responsible supply chain.
Companies today must learn new skills and competencies if they are to effectively meet these challenges. They need to learn how to use corporate citizenship as a strategy driver for their core business, and ensure their staff has the training to manage this strategy.
Q: How is The Center responding to these changes?
PINNEY: The Center is the only certified trainer in North America in corporate citizenship. We've had a longer and deeper journey with companies as they’ve dealt with the issue of corporate community involvement than any other institution out there.
But we know that our existing curriculum and approach must be radically upgraded if we are to help our customers address these new challenges. We need to help companies manage their total impact on society, to take an integrated and outcome-oriented perspective.
Take philanthropy. While philanthropy will continue to be a very important part of businesses’ contribution to community-building, if it’s just about money, we will not find the kind of solutions that we need for today’s society. The real challenge is to use that philanthropy as a powerful lever to engage other resources in the company, to work in an integrated fashion with employees to address community challenges that are aligned with the core competency of the business.
Companies now need to develop integrated, value-added strategies that are aligned with the core of their business, that help create new value for both the company and the community.
To help them meet this challenge, The Center for Corporate Citizenship is building a more robust set of corporate citizenship management training programs. We are reinforcing our existing programs on building effective community involvement programs, and creating new ones that help companies understand and manage the changes that are impacting business and society.
But this is not just about changes to our content.
It is equally about the way we teach and learn. The old "expert" model of executive education is no longer valid in today’s environment. This field is changing so quickly that in many ways the real experts are the practitioners themselves. Our challenge is to create high quality leaning environments where we are all learning together, where we can pull on the knowledge and experience of our participants, and provide frameworks and tools to help understand how to use this knowledge in moving forward.
Q: You talk about creating new programs to help companies understand the larger issues of business in society, but many of our courses currently focus on community involvement. Will we still provide training in this area?
PINNEY: Of course. When we started out more than 20 years ago as The Center for Corporate Community Relations, our audience was traditionally the person responsible for the company's community involvement activities. We will continue to provide training in community involvement, but today's practitioners are being pushed to expand their focus. Their companies want them to be more strategic, more focused on outcomes and impacts as opposed to inputs. Some are being asked to take on greater responsibilities. They’re being asked to produce the company's social impact or sustainability report, to address how what they do is providing value for the business.
There’s both a huge challenge and a huge opportunity for the community involvement field right now. These professionals are positioned to become significant leaders by helping their companies grasp and respond to these larger challenges. This is an opportunity for them to increase their influence and position within the company.
Our goal is to help them on their journey from understanding corporate community relations as a separate function inside the company, to becoming a key player and driver and who can help the company understand and manage corporate citizenship. Some will become the new managers of corporate citizenship, while others will be a catalyst to help the company recognize the need to better manage the risks and opportunities associated with this new operating environment.
Q: So The Center is prepared to work with both groups?
PINNEY: Definitely, yes. For those looking to build their company's comprehensive corporate citizenship strategy, we are introducing a new Certificate in Corporate Citizenship Management awarded by the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. The courses and products for this Certificate are designed to help senior managers, wherever they are inside the company, understand these new challenges and develop an integrated, strategic framework for managing them.
The new Certificate will build from a competency model that details the knowledge and skill sets required to effectively manage corporate citizenship. It will be comprised of courses that cover vision and strategy development, execution and performance management, stakeholder engagement, social reporting, and leadership and change management.
Three of the Certificate requirements will be available beginning in January 2007, including a new Institute – The Institute on Corporate Citizenship – which will be the linchpin of both the Certificate in Corporate Community Involvement and the Certificate in Corporate Citizenship; the other programs will be added to the curriculum beginning in fall 2007. (See New Courses to Debut in 2007 for more information.)
These courses will help participants develop competencies they will be well-placed to execute in their companies. The courses are appropriate for senior executives across a wide spectrum of functional areas – human resources, public affairs, environmental, health and safety (EHS), governance, sustainability, marketing, investor relations – anyone who's affected by the broader issue of the changing rules of business in society and its implications for business. In fact, our expectation is that companies will send teams of people to these courses to help them develop an integrated corporate citizenship strategy across the company.
Q: What about the Certificate in Corporate Community Involvement? Will that continue?
PINNEY: The Center and Boston College will continue to offer a Certificate in Corporate Community Involvement. We've spent the last year working to make the program more robust, renovating our existing curriculum to help companies implement more strategic, higher-value community involvement programs.
For example, two of the courses added this year go beyond tools and how-to's to provide participants with opportunities to discuss, in a real-time practical way, emerging issues in either philanthropy or volunteer management. These courses – Enhancing and Improving Your Strategic Philanthropy Program and Enhancing and Improving Your Employee Volunteer Program – will address tactical issues, but will also allow participants to delve into specific issue areas such education, inner-city poverty, and the environment. Ann Pomykal, one of our senior faculty members who has extensive corporate experience with Texas Instruments, will be teaching both courses.
The updated curriculum will be accompanied by new, more intensive requirements for earning a Certificate in Corporate Community Involvement. (Anyone who is within three credits of their Basic or Advanced Certificate in Corporate Community Involvement on September 1, 2007 will be permitted to complete their Certificate by taking one more course of their choosing.)
We know these are all big changes. But we’re at one of those junctures in history where massive systemic change is taking place. Business – in fact, all big institutions – are looking at their roles as part of a larger system and trying to understanding the impact of that system on the surrounding environment. So for companies to be successful, they have to understand and manage the bigger systemic drivers that are shaping the corporate citizenship challenge. And we are absolutely committed to providing today's community involvement and corporate citizenship practitioners with the knowledge and skill sets they need to help their companies with these challenges.
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