Filed under: CSR, Clients In The News, Education, Events, Technology | Tags: AB+2, Activboard, Activclassroom, Assessment and Learning, ICT Jim Knight, promethean board, Promethean Summit
The interviews with speakers and audience highlight some of the important messages that people took away.
- The excitement and opportunity for change that now exist
- The critical importance of professional development when deploying technology
- The need to actively engage students in their learning
- The need to balance technology with other tools and ideas
Worth a watch… Click the picture below or follow this link
Filed under: CSR, Community Empowerment, Environment, Events, General Media | Tags: Ben & Jerry's, CSR, Jerry Greenfield
Jesse Fox captured some good thinking from Jerry Greenfield on good business at Maala’s 2008 CSR Conference in Tel Aviv…
After your speech, the CEO of one of the big cellular companies gave a presentation about the charity work that his company does, including donating to kids who are fighting cancer. He neglected to mention that his company’s cell phones and antennas are seen by many in Israel as a major cause of cancer! What will convince corporate managers to start moving the core of their business activity toward sustainability and social responsibility, instead of continuing along more or less the same path while covering it up with donations and greenwash?
JG: It’s really an interesting question – the core of your business versus these things on the side. I don’t quite know where to start. What we essentially figured out was that normally in business you think about cost, quality, time of delivery, things like that. We added another factor – responsibility for social and environmental impacts – as another fundamental thing, alongside price and quality.
Managers are trained to think in terms of these things, and when you add another factor, it adds another layer of complexity, which managers don’t like. Plus they may not even believe in these environmental and socially responsible things in the first place! So you may be asking people to do things they don’t believe in, and which they think just makes their job harder. Unless you have people in the company who believe in these things, its’ going to seem like a burden.
So I think it needs to come from the top. As important as it is to have these ideas bubbling up from [workers and consumers], the person at the top has to make the decisions. That person is looking at the welfare of the company, hopefully not just in the short term, but in the long term as well.
You know, when Ben and I started doing this like 20 years ago, these ideas were considered very fringe. Nowadays they are quite mainstream. That’s the way it happens. The companies that start things like this are the smaller, innovative, entrepreneurial companies. The big conglomerates are not leaders on this; they come on board after it’s been shown to work. That’s the nature of their role. They are behemoths who are good at making something bigger once it has already developed.
Sometimes people say to me, what do think about businesses who are doing good things, but only because they think it’s good for business. I say whatever makes businesses be more positive is wonderful. If they are just going through the motions, and good things are coming out of it, that’s okay.
