Social Responsibility

For a while now, I have been thinking of posting some of my Toastmasters speeches online. Here goes unedited version of my 7th speech - research your topic.


Last week, my friend Vikram, while approaching a stationary shop, saw a old lady come out of the shop and drop a 5-hundred rupee note in front of him. She kept walking down the street. Vikram looked around: there was no else there and the lady was now far away from him. No one but Virkam saw her drop the hundered rupee note. So what did Vikram do? Did he return the money to the lady who dropped it, even though she was far away at this point and might’ve taken some effort to catch up with? Did he take the note and run in the shop and quickly spend it?
Did he have any responsibility to return that money? Do we have any responsibility towards another person? Well, the bigger question is: can we survive living our lives in an insular disconnected manner?

We owe our existence, and our values to the society which rears us, we owe some responsibility towards its upliftment. All of us privileged persons, who were lucky to be born in a family that could afford to pay for our education, our clothes and all our frivolous desires. – do bear a responsibility towards our not so fortunate brothers and sisters. It is very encouraging to know that many of us here, like AR, AM, and some others in our office are involved in such an initiative, an NGO called Jagaran that financially supports underprivileged but motivated students.

About one month ago, some of us went to visit a few of our beneficiaries to verify how they were doing academically. We visited one a boy named Imran. We came to know from our local NGO contact that initially the NGO used to sponsor Imran's books as well as his private tuition fees. After a few months, Imran had turned down the aid for tuition fees while continuing to receive books for his studies. When we asked him about it, he replied, with a charming smile, that he finds it immoral to ask for tuition aid when he can very well manage on his own! The facts support his quiet confidence. He has never stood 2nd in his school and was a consistent top performer even in std 11. Here was a person who lived his life out of just one dank room, where his parents, his sister and he vies for each inch of space, who cannot even afford to replace his worn out shirt, yet he dared to refuse aid for something that he could well do without. We had set out in the journey that day to give something to others but this soft spoken, charming, bespectacled boy of 15 gave us so much.
Such is the nature of social work – you get more than you give.

Now the people are what make an organization. So if we, as human beings share a social responsibility towards the society at large, what about corporations?

Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR is concerned with treating the stakeholders of the firm
ethically or in a socially responsible manner. Many people criticize companies which undertake CSR programs because they feel that the companies are trying to distract the public from their unethical practices

Milton Friedman, a Nobel winning economist said, and I quote, "There is one and only one social responsibility of business -- to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits."He goes on to say, "so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud." (I'm sure you can think of a few companies that forgot that last part.)
Let's look at some of the side effects of single-minded pursuit of profit
“There were thousands of bodies. There were bodies everywhere. And people were dying all round.” These were the words of one of the victims of Bhopal gas tragedy. On early morning of 3rd Dec’1984, 40 tons of poisonous methyl isocyanate gas was released from pesticide plant of Union Carbide Corporation in Bhopal. Severe cost cutting measures resulting in improper security facilities were to blame for this disaster. The disaster left 15,000 dead, 5.5 lakhs ill, with a polluted environment that is yet to recover. An average monetary rehabilitation of … Rs 200 per year was awarded to each person. Rs 200(!!) for the victims of such a disaster!
We have all heard about the Enron scandal. At the beginning of 2001, the Enron Corporation, the world's dominant energy trader, appeared unstoppable. However, after a series of revelations involving fraudulent accounting procedures perpetrated throughout the 1990s, it stood at the verge of undergoing the largest bankruptcy in history by mid-November 2001. As the scandal was revealed, Enron shares dropped from over $90 to just pennies.
To draw a contrast with the above examples, let’s see a few examples of socially responsible behaviour by corporations.
Let’s take PwC: it has a well developed CSR program worldwide.
Various offices of PwC engage in activities like volunteering in the community (eg. parties for marginalized children), monitory donations by individuals and the firm to supported organizations, free professional Services such as Audit, Tax Advice, etc to community or not-for-profit organizations and so on.

Closer home, the Infosys Foundation has taken a lot of initiatives. While I was in Pune, I was part of one such initiative: we used to go teach slum kids in a place called Khadki. As most of the kids were Marathi, I had to teach them Marathi while I couldn’t even say “Hello” in that language! Well what happened was I knew Hindi and since the alphabets of Marathi are same as that of Hindi, I somehow managed it. Nonetheless it was great fun.

The ITC e-chaupal initiative also deserves mention. The e-Choupal places computers with Internet access in rural farming villages; the e-Choupals serve as both a social gathering place for exchange of such information as market prices of the crops and also help the farmers to locate potential buyers. This system is also a highly profitable e-commerce platform for the company.

The social responsibility of businesses may always be a sticky point to argue about, but plain old responsibility shouldn't be hard to strive for. Sir Winston Churchill used to say, “The price of greatness is responsibility”. It stands to reason that companies with great management teams that focus on profiting from excellence and innovation, and not "profit at all costs," are the ones that will produce sustainable profit growth.

So, today we have examined various instances of both responsible and irresponsible behaviour by individuals and corporations. Personally, I believe in what Samuel DiPiazza, our Global CEO, says, “Our obligation as business leaders and as individuals is to leave the world better than we found it”. So the choice is ours: whether we choose to focus our attention on our own lives or we look slightly above and beyond our quotidian tasks and try to make a difference in the lives of others as well. And to come back to my friend Vikram, he did take that extra step. He did run after the lady and return the money to her. He was socially responsible. Just as you and I are. And we all can, as Michael Jackson sang,
Heal the world
Make it a better place
For you and for me and the entire human race