The solution to Corporate Social Responsibility

Scenario

You are the CEO of Carpeteria, a successful carpet manufacturing company headquartered in Alabama. Carpeteria competes head-to-head with Interface, the Georgia carpet manufacturer that 5 years ago embraced corporate social responsibility and began a program to reduce the environmental impact of its business. Your customers have begun to tell you that they are concerned about CSR. They are asking your sales people problems about Carpeteriaâ??s environmental impact and about other CSR-related issues such as fair wages, community involvement and supply chain activities. As the CEO, you have decided that it is time for your company to begin the implementation of a full-blown CSR effort. Realizing that this will be a major culture change in your company, you determine that the first step is to sell the idea to your Board of Directors.

Your assignment for this final paper is to prepare a report to the Board of Directors that describes your CSR strategy, outlines why it is important to implement such a strategy, and tells how you are going to do it. Assume that your board is not familiar with CSR, so you must both describe what it is and describe the scope and complexity of the subject. Your report should answer, but not be limited to answering, the following problems:

* What does it mean to take a stakeholder perspective versus a stockholder perspective, and why is it important?

* How will this change impact the corporate culture, and how could the resulting culture evolve to become a competitive advantage?

* What changes are occurring in customer expectations and in the global marketplace that makes this change desirable?

* What internal organizational changes are necessary in order to successfully implement this cultural change?