All company bosses want a policy on corporate social responsibility. The positive effect is hard to quantify, but the negative consequences of a disaster are enormous.

Noreena Hertz

Categorized in : Negative Positive Want Responsibility

Transparency, accountability and sustainability have become the slogans of the market leaders. Companies carry out environmental and social audits to court the consumer, and even the bluest chips woo organisations such as Greenpeace and Amnesty.

become sustainability environmental

All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.

us information focus want

The problem lies with us: we've become addicted to experts. We've become addicted to their certainty, their assuredness, their definitiveness, and in the process, we have ceded our responsibility, substituting our intellect and our intelligence for their supposed words of wisdom.

us intelligence responsibility wisdom

Stress makes us prone to tunnel vision, less likely to take in the information we need. Anxiety makes us more risk-averse than we would be regularly and more deferential.

anxiety information vision stress

From solar to electric cars, from geothermal to reconfiguring the grid, the scale of investment needed in green technologies in order to meet whatever agreements on emissions reductions are finally agreed will be immense.

meet whatever will green

Managing dissent is about recognizing the value of disagreement, discord and difference.

value about difference disagreement

Get into the habit of imagining an alternate scenario. By posing such 'imagine if' questions... we can distance ourselves from the frames, cues, anchors and rhetoric that might be affecting us.

questions posing distance habit

Experience is not the poor relation of expertise. Valuable insights in business often come from the people on the ground.

experience poor business people

Back in the 1970s, Kodak tried to give $25m to a black civil rights organisation in Rochester, New York. The company's shareholders rose up in arms: making this politically charged offering wasn't the reason they had entrusted Kodak with their money. The donation was withdrawn.

donation black money rose

Forcing companies to recruit away from the golf course might lead to the appointment of more women from NGOs and academia and medicine, all of whom are likely to understand such concepts as stewardship and sustainability much better than men picked from the usual hunting grounds.

better understand women men

At the end of the day, philanthropy can only ever be an adjunct to what governments provide. And government coffers need to be replenished.

end-of-the-day end day government

We live increasingly in a world of haves and have-nots, of gated communities next to ghettos, of extreme poverty and unbelievable riches. Some enjoy rights that are completely denied to others. Relative inequalities are exploding, and the world's poorest, despite all the advances of globalisation, may even be getting poorer.

live poverty enjoy world

Governments have been ceding power to big multinational corporations in the market. We see the manifest in a variety of ways. Where governments are giving up power to big international institutions like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, which are disabling governments' ability to protect the rights of their own people.

organization power people world

As an economist specializing in the global economy, international trade and debt, I have spent most of my career helping others make big decisions - prime ministers, presidents and chief executives - and so I'm all too aware of the risks and dangers of poor choices in the public as well as the private sphere.

risks career poor choices

Surely in a world of email, video conferencing and virtual assistants, isn't being expected to show up at the office extremely anachronistic? Yet to date it seems that where one works does matter. That creativity and innovation do feed off physical interactions between people.

innovation creativity people world

When Apple introduced its game-changing iPhone in 2007, Nokia was caught sleeping on the job. Although it had actually developed an iPhone-style device - complete with a color touchscreen, maps, online shopping, the lot - some seven years earlier. Astonishingly, it never released the product.

never job shopping color

So key for making smart decisions is a mindset that actively monitors and is open to shifting tides and new information, one that is acutely aware that the interplay between our environment and its outcomes is ever in flux.

new environment smart information

In an age that is sometimes nowadays frightening or confusing, we feel reassured by the almost parental-like authority of experts who tell us so clearly what it is we can and cannot do.

feel tell age sometimes

What my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps; that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition; that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus.

own me perspective research

I'm really looking at questions of power, navigation, and spin. Then I am also looking for real-world stories that give me greater insight into smart and new ways of thinking.

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