Week 8 - CSR

 Cancel culture is rampant, but is that really why corporations are engaging in more socially "woke" practices? 

That's definitely what I thought before we studied this week.  I didn't realize that companies - like Hasbro or Adidas - have been working on improving their processes and human outreach for decades, not just the last few years where angry voices have called out gender or diversity issues regardless of the cost to the company to fix those things that they demand be "fixed." My husband thought it, too.

I remember watching The Lorax with my kids a few years ago.  We watched it maybe 50 times; Dany Divito, Zach Efron and Betty White with catchy music: we were addicted. There was something that didn't sit well with their portrayal of "The Onceler" though.  Especially in the song "How Bad Can I Be?"


I'm essentially a Capitalist, so I didn't appreciate them painting all businessmen as inherently BAD. But on the 50th viewing or so, I realized that the real problem with the Onceler was not that he went into business, it's that he never considered harvesting just part of the Truffula trees or planting some as he took them down. He was so inventive in a hundred other ways: why didn't he just look forward to his future and invest in - oh! there it is: sustainability. I remembered this lesson early in the week and it was very helpful as I read about Toms and other companies, seeing which were actually helping, only pretending to help, or actually hurting. 

Corporate Social Responsibility  isn't only about PR or answering their bad actions, it can also be about innovation with an eye to the future of the company and the world. 

So I'll say that I now believe CSR has become more popular for all these reasons. Companies are being created and run by people who are coming up in their education with greater social awareness and therefore committed to CSR and innovative enough to integrate it into their business plan. 

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