IA5

My favorite guest speaker over the year was Dr. Macagno, who gave us great insight to corporate social responsibility. Before this lesson, I had no idea what CSR was, till after when I learned that this is one of the more important sides to a business. Having a great public image is a key to having a successful business.

A focus point in Dr. Macagno's lesson was on ethical rights. In the textbook, a section that helped expand on some of these areas was in dealing with customers. There are four customer rights that were indicated by President John Franklin Kennedy. 1. the right to safe products, 2. the right to be informed about a product, 3. the right to chose what to buy, and 4. the right to be heard.

In recent news as I talked about in my last post, Facebook is under extreme heat for selling their member's data to companies without the member's consent. This is a huge legal and ethical issue from Facebook as to what lead Mark Zuckerberg to want to do this? He was not using the ethical reasoning to not sell the information but focused on making more money.

In the article, "The Truth About CSR," authors V. Kasturi Rangan, Lisa Chase, and Sohel Karim discuss the lack of involvement directly with companies CEO's and rather with internal managers. They discuss the three "theaters" in which they use to turn companies on a effective CSR strategy for their specific company. Theater one is focusing on philanthropy, theater two is improving operational effectiveness, and theater three is transforming the business model. Although following CSR strategy is sometimes harder than cutting corners, it is beneficial to make sure that your company runs as safely as possible, while still being effective.