Corporate Social Responsibility, Ten Years After

Ten years ago this month, in a review in the Washington Post of my just-published book, Beyond the Bottom Line: Putting Social Responsibility to Work for Your Business and the World (Simon & Schuster, 1994), staff writer Brett D. Fromson attacked the very notion that companies could be considering the interests of anyone beyond their shareholders.

“It may come as something of a shock to the hundreds of thousands of workers laid off in recent years to learn that we are living in the age of ‘caring capitalism,’” he began. “This odd notion is the theme of Joel Makower's rather fanciful look at Corporate America.”

It went downhill from there. And this wasn’t the only cynical reviewer I encountered at the time.

Perhaps it was the unabashedly enthusiastic tone of the book -- one of the first framing pieces about the then-emerging world of corporate social responsibility -- or perhaps it was a poorly constructed argument for why, as the book’s intro stated, that companies

function best when they merge their business interests with the interests of customers, employees, suppliers, neighbors, investors, and other groups affected, directly or indirectly, by these companies' operations.

No matter. The fact is, the notion that big business could possibly do the right thing was foreign then and, to a large extent, even today -- at least in the U.S.

I’m pleased to see that the tide is shifting. Marc Gunther’s new book, Faith and Fortune: The Quiet Revolution to Reform American Business, brings the argument up to date, accompanied by a far richer pool of company case studies than was available a decade ago.

Gunther, a senior writer at Fortune magazine, argues that “great companies serve their workers, customers, shareholders, and the common good.” He tells tales of firms as diverse as Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, and Staples: how faith -- whether in God or simply the goodness of people -- is becoming a tenet of big business, but how the “Sunday-Monday gap” leads many business executives to, often unwittingly, separate the principles of their faith from their leadership principles at work.

It’s a compelling book, and while many of the company stories have been well-told in other media, Gunther does a fine job of bringing them all together to make his case. (See more from Gunther in his recent op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle.)

In reviewing Gunther's book, I was inspired to revisit that 1994 Washington Post review of Beyond the Bottom Line, if only as a reminder of how far things seem to have come. In his critique, Fromson noted:

The naive political assumption underlying Makower's book is that business is a benevolent agent for social change and that corporations can safeguard the commonweal.

Capitalism is admittedly a wonderful engine for producing wealth and jobs, for expanding the economic pie, but let's not delude ourselves about capitalists' proper role in society and their real self-interests. Why not let capitalists be capitalists, and leave it to government, individuals, and community groups to solve our social and political problems?

It’s gratifying to see that such cynicism and ignorance, while still evident in the mainstream media, are waning. I highly recommend Gunther’s book and hope it is able to reinvigorate the conversation that my book tried, however feebly, to begin a decade ago.