SALİM KADIBEŞEGİL

The First Sustainability Business Card

I got the first business card that read “Sustainability Director” from one of my peers who worked in a global company while we were having a coffee break at an international congress in San Francisco in 2001. I was, of course, puzzled by it.

I said “Do you say sustainability instead of social responsibility?”

He said articulately “If a company does not have a sustainability strategy, its corporate social responsibility practices will be nothing more than charity.” Then, he added “Charity is a nice thing, of course. However, our children will find themselves in a world where it is too late even for charity unless we leave them a habitable world.”

In other words, the “pollute-first-clean-up-later” approach might take us anywhere other than corporate social responsibility.

In fact, we generally consider corporate social responsibility as producing, distributing and selling something and spending some of our profit on the things we think our society needs.

Are fairness and righteousness when producing, distributing and selling things, transparency, accountability, preservation of natural resources, human rights, consumer rights, and primary responsibility for everything that we share this planet with such as women, children, animals and people with disabilities included in this approach?

The answer is “no” because they are subjects to be considered after making money!

This is where we disagree!

Look at this photo and following video carefully. This is a photo of the CEOs of the world’s biggest cigarette producers who swore that “smoking was not bad for health” in the Capitol in 1994. All of these companies have different social responsibility projects that have been going on for decades. If you count them as responsibilities, of course!

Life has been based on “money” since the Industrial Revolution. Unfortunately, money has turned into value. Therefore, the planet’s wound that we are trying to dress with the concepts of corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship or sustainability is actually a case of metastasis.

Orhan Ay

Here is a picture that Orhan Ay drew when he was just a fifth grader at a primary school in Samsun. This picture, which won the top prize in the competition organised by Arcelik in 2009, shows the kind of world that a child at that age received from his elders. The mind of an eleven-year-old can picture the background of making money first and attending to lofty matters later like this. However, experienced and knowledgeable managers who studied at the world’s best universities, who employ tens of thousands of people, who are among the key players of the global markets and who have annual incomes ending with at least six zeroes cannot see themselves in this picture!

Money turned into Value

The beginning of the last century saw a brainwave which would make the system work perfectly. On the basis of that brainwave;

• The development levels of countries were based on USD income per capita. Therefore, the growth of companies was shaped in line with that.
• The value of shares, which used to have no value, became the benchmark for size. Enron, which was worth USD 35 billion, turned into an 80-cent company in one night.
• New stock exchanges were built instead of swings or slides so that shadow companies could laugh all the way to the bank.

In other words, money turned into value! The approach of making money first and attending to other matters later was accepted as a life design.

When “meeting needs” was replaced with “marketing desires“, “brands”, which formed the basis for a tendency towards consumer society through advertising and public relations, were added to the system. As a result of that, the consumption economy turned us into a consumer society.

Our Planet is coming to an End

8200 litres of water are used to produce a handbag in our world where 1.5 billion people cannot access potable water.

Half a litre of plastic bottled water costs our economy 5.5 litres of water in reality. 5 litres of this amount is used to produce a plastic bottle. Not to mention the fact that used plastic bottles are not biodegradable!

Our planet is coming to an end. Issues concerning all humans such as global warming and climate change are threatening the future of life on Earth. The mass migration and immigration problems of millions of people who were displaced due to epidemics, famine, droughts and hot wars are right in front of our eyes. Agricultural land is getting smaller and losing its quality. The water problem is jeopardising the future of every one of us and our children.

We all want to do something. However, we don’t know what to do and how to do it. Our hearts hurt so badly. We want to be a part of the solution or at least to contribute to it.

I would like to give two examples which will remind us that social responsibility is a personal matter rather than a corporate matter.

The First Examples of Personal Responsibility

There were more than 2500 foundations only in Istanbul in 1500s. Foundations, the equivalent of personal responsibility, made investments that still exist to meet society’s needs. They worked on education, culture, healthcare, infrastructure (water, transportation, lighting, caravansaries) and other basic needs. They can be defined as an institutionalised model of personal responsibility.

Leylek Vakfi (Stork Foundation)

Leylek Vakfi was a foundation established in İzmir in those years in order to feed the storks around Izmir Yeni Cami. Its aim was to save an annual allowance of 100 kurus for feeding storks.

Management philosophers Peter Drucker and Howard Bohen were the first people to warn us that industry was outrageously consuming natural resources and that we were unconsciously becoming a consumer society in 1950s. Drucker underlined that responsibility towards their society was more important than making money in the business world, and he emphasised that society could progress with the leaders who did the right things not with the leaders who did things right. Nobody liked that idea, of course.

We were “guests” in this world. However, nobody cared about giving back what they got from nature to produce things or wanted to face the fact that they had limited sources.

They only let us play monopoly. They introduced us to the worthless banknotes distributed by the virtual central banks on a monopoly board. They wanted us to play a game of happiness with them. We bought houses, cars and hotels with those worthless banknotes thinking that they belonged to us. We owned water, electricity and railway companies. We realised that they did not belong to us once during the 2001 recession in Turkey and for a second time during the 2008 global recession.

Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote the recipe that the business world was looking for and defined social responsibility as making profit for companies in 1970s. Thus, ethical and moral responsibilities, transparency, accountability and responsibility, which existed after a fashion until that day, were discarded. The time spent since then revealed that companies could not have corporate social responsibility in an environment where the level of success was measured by “money” and the like.

Today, companies and their managers are rewarded and appreciated due to their money-based success. Responsibility is related to whether you make the targeted money in a business environment where money is the top priority. It is not related to your contributions to social life or to the planet that we live on.

For instance, VW, which created the most comprehensive corporate social responsibility projects and reports, was producing vehicles with the highest carbon emission level when advertising the most eco-friendly automobile. It decreased 7 billion people’s quality of life a bit more due to the environmental pollution it caused whilst disgracefully deceiving the public in order to make the targeted money.

The owners of Fukushima nuclear plant, TEPCO, have papered over the radiation leakage in the plant for weeks since they were worried that their shares would decrease in the stock market!

We all see what is happening in FIFA, a feudal system.

Are There No Good Examples?

In the meantime, some good examples made us gather around the concept of social responsibility. The ever-increasing tendency of consumer preferences, which is the main indicator of economy, might have caused that.

• Ben & Jerry’s prepared the first social responsibility report in 1989 although nobody asked for it.
• Mars quickly recalled all its products in 50 countries because of a consumer complaint although it cost a lot and nobody made an official request for it.
• Patagonia has defined today’s sustainability approach as their business model since 1980s.

The Patagonia example should be considered as an indicator of the approach which says “Take responsibility first and you will make money later as a result of this!” as opposed to the approach which says “Make money first”. This company, which introduced the world to organic cotton in the early 1990s, is full of responsibility stories.

What Can We Do?

 I can share a few topics. 

• We can make it obligatory for companies to have NGOs that will be the voice of stakeholders in their boards of directors.
• We can turn the development index into a happiness index.
• We can make sure that B Corps, social companies trying to be the voice of this planet, become widespread.
• We can ensure that ethical and fair trade certification is obligatory for public tenders.
• We can broadcast the daily global carbon emission levels and polluted water sources during weather forecasts on TV and on the radio.
• We can include “conscience” in the codes of artificial intelligence which is the last link of the technological revolution.

Responsibility is not Corporate but Personal!

We see that the possibility of companies’ being responsible is an illusion unless individuals are responsible. Therefore, we should start with ourselves. We should not be a part of overconsumption. We should be accountable to ourselves not to others. We should create responsibility area models. We should include them in the responsibilities in our business lives and share them with the people around us. We should leave a habitable planet and quality of life to our children by being aware that every step we take is a step of responsibility.

The most effective corporate social responsibility is to integrate ethics, fairness, transparency, accountability and personal responsibilities in every area into our business and our decisions.

In short, we can define corporate social responsibility as an approach which says “consume and manage responsibly” instead of an approach which says “pollute first clean up later” before we leave this conference hall.

Let me finish my talk with a quote from the ex-president of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, whose life philosophy has been a beacon for many people.

Jose Mujica Cordano (Pepe), the ex-president of Uruguay, simply summarised the humans’ dilemma during his visit to Turkey:

“The consumption society captures us as a cobweb. We think that happiness is buying things with a never-ending desire. When you buy something, you don’t buy it with money. You actually buy it with your time. I mean you spend some time of your life to earn that money. Then, you buy whatever you want with that time. What happens then? Let’s say you buy a car or furniture, but you cannot buy time! You cannot go in a supermarket and say “Can you please give me 500 years?” I’ve found out that I have to have time to be free.”