A regular blog about (un) sustainable business. A focus on practical stuff, not blue sky pretentious waffle. Around 6000 regular readers, surprisingly.
Here’s a presentation I gave tonight to my postgraduate students at Birkbeck, University of London. It’s on NGO campaigns, collaboration and partnerships. The links provide some context. I hope it’s useful for some readers. I use it for a 30-45 minute presentation on how the corporate / NGO relationship is evolving from tactical to strategic….
As some blog readers will know, I have blogged on Asia Pulp & Paper for a number of years. As a pro-business sustainability / responsible capitalism advocate, I’ve felt for a long time that the campaign against APP by NGOs, journalists, activists and other citizens, has been about more than the company itself. APP’s refusal…
I can’t tell you the number of completely one-sided proposals for ‘collaboration’ I’ve seen over the years. As a Brit, and therefore a self appointed (and no doubt occasionally pompous) guardian of the term irony, I don’t throw the word around lightly. But it is somewhat ironic that folks who purport to work in the…
Here are some thoughts campaigners might want to consider when engaging big companies. I wrote these for a recent presentation and hope they might be useful to some readers. Campaigners, when engaging companies, ruminate on this: Your idea about how you notify companies is very different from theirs. Speaking to a mid-level supply chain manager…
Here’s my forthcoming column for Ethical Corporation’s September edition. Ambitious heads of corporate responsibility will help create the cooperation deals of the future, suggests Toby Webb Sustainable bedfellows? Here’s a prediction for you. Sustainable business strategy will one day soon incorporate brand to brand partnerships that incorporate the needs of society with social and environmental…
It seems a bit odd to be suggesting that transparency can be a bad thing. Just to be totally clear, I’m not. But business transparency alone, without institutional reform, could end up doing more harm than good. Let me explain what I mean. Let’s say you are fictional oil company PBChevEX. Let’s say you are…
This is a question I’ve been asked quite a few times by companies to whom no-one pays much attention to on CSR issues. I suggest to them in training sessions and workshops that they seek out local NGOs when choosing factories, plantations, local/national companies or even areas to source from. The idea behind it is…
It shows how little the media cares for the environment that even a newspaper such as the Guardian rarely puts green stories on the cover/homepage. Today all UK media is obsessed with the News International story, Ad Nauseam, as usual. Yes, it is/was a big story, but all the lessons have been learned now. We…
I had many emails after this previous post, snappily titled: “Six NGO types relevant for corporate responsibility“. So I thought I’d flesh it out a little with my thinking behind the initial comments. I’d add a caveat here that this is a work in progress, not definitive guidance. That applies to any other post on…
As part of a lecture I gave last night on business and NGO engagement/campaigning, I wanted to try and define a few NGO types to help the students navigate this often confusing area. Here’s what I came up with: 1) Campaigners, such as Greenpeace, Global Witness, Clean Clothes Campaign. 2) Partnership NGOs, such as The…
As I mentioned in a previous post, 2012 may be a year when campaigning NGOs refocus, catch up with Greenpeace, and begin more targeted campaigns against big business. The example of ForestEthics and Chiquita provides a compelling warning of this. According to the FT: “Chiquita Brands, the fruit producer, has become the latest company to…
US environmental NGOs, along with other, more globally minded ‘green’ and conservation-minded NGOs, have been poorly led in recent years. They’ve blown a series of chances to help businesses change using a nuanced approach. Their approach been too cut and dried, too ‘with you not against you’ in ideology. It was never as simple as…
Here’s a guest post from Brendan May. It’s an article published last year in Ethical Corporation. I was re-reading it for a presentation I am working on for some training next week, and it struck me that blog readers might find it amusing/interesting. Here’s where you can find it online. The original text is below….
I said a while ago that I’d do a couple of things after recent posts critical of WWF. 1) Commission an independent journalist to look into the story 2) Not see that story before it was published, so as not to bias it with my views. 3) If I was wrong, to apologise. So the…
As some readers will be aware, I have somewhat casually criticised WWF recently on this blog. I’ve had an anonymous post in the comment field on this post, and a few emails from WWF folks accusing me of scoring an own goal with my “campaign”. I would hardly call it that myself. And the way…
I'm Toby Webb, founder of Innovation Forum, a sustainability focused research, publishing and events business. I'm also a lecturer on Corporate Responsibility at Kings College London and at Birkbeck, University of London. Tobias DOT Webb AT innovation-forum.co.uk
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