EP talks
to Simon Zadek about his plans for international growth as the new head
of the Institute of Social and Ethical Accountability
When
environmental responsibility became a prominent corporate issue in the
late Eighties, one individual – John Elkington – came to prominence for
his ability to unpick the issue and think through the ramifications for
companies.
A similar process has happened in the corporate
social responsibility field. Simon Zadek has emerged as a leading
thinker in its development both through his writing – he has just
published The civil corporation,
his sixth book, frequent conference appearances and his consultancy
work for clients including Novo and the Body Shop.
Zadek
has brought some order to the complex issues underlying the term
‘corporate social responsibility’ by, in his words, finding the pieces
that make up the CSR jigsaw and then seeing how they fit together.
All of which makes it surprising that a man best known for his ideas
has just become chief executive of the Institute for Social and Ethical
Accountability, a UK-based membership organization which eight months
ago had a core staff of only three. Isea (also known as AccountAbility)
has been in the doldrums since its previous chief executive Kay Sexton
left last year on health grounds.
But Zadek has plans for
the institute, an organization he helped to found. He wants to increase
its international membership and to build on its AA1000 standard on
stakeholder engagement, which he launched as Isea chair in 1999.
The staff complement now stands at ten and is expected to rise to
between 15 and 20 by the end of 2002. ‘We have 300 members from about
20 different countries but the bulk of them, about 50 per cent, are
UK-based,’ he says. ‘That partly reflects the strength of CSR in the
UK, but it is something we want to change. We want to become more
international.’ Isea will invest heavily in international events over
the next 12 months and Zadek will spend much of his time building
alliances with CSR organizations outside the UK.
One key
alliance is likely to be with the Global Reporting Initiative, the body
that produces the GRI guidelines on sustainability reporting. Zadek
describes closer links between the GRI and AA1000 as ‘a marriage made
in heaven’.
The GRI, which has just set up a permanent
secretariat, seems the body most likely to harmonize the way businesses
report their impact on society and the environment.
Meanwhile, AA1000 is being revised and will include a quality assurance
framework ‘specifically to complement reporting standards like the
GRI’. The framework, to be launched on 12 June, will help assure
stakeholders that a company’s CSR reports and management systems are
reliable. Zadek does not think the two standards will merge, but
clearly sees them working together.
Before this can happen, however, AA1000 needs to be more accessible. One FTSE 100 firm told EP
it had to ‘translate AA1000 into English’ before working through its
recommendations. Zadek says the revisions reflect this, and a pro bono
deal with Edelman Communications should improve Isea’s presentational
skills.
At some point, Zadek believes, there will be a
‘gap in the market’ for a global ‘institute of CSR’ that will draw
together the strands of corporate social responsibility. Some observers
believe Isea, with a membership comprising companies, non-governmental
organizations and academics, may decide to fill that gap.
But not yet. It is too early, Zadek argues, because the CSR field is
still consolidating, making it impossible to build a firm foundation
for such a body at the present time.
The jury is still out
on whether Zadek is the best choice to head Isea. A man of ideas may
not be the best person to expand and run an organization – but Zadek
counters that he is both a thinker and a doer. ‘In the last couple of
years what people have seen of me has largely been what I have
written,’ he says.
Yet between 1992 and 1998 he was
development director at the New Economics Foundation, overseeing its
expansion into a leading think tank, and he helped set up the Ethical
Trading Initiative. ‘It is enormously satisfying to create institutions
that are effective change-makers in society. Whether I’m good at it is
for others to judge, but my spell at AccountAbility will be the
ultimate test of that.’
