Leo Martin: Lessons from eight years of GoodCorporation

Date: 28 Feb 2009
Author: Mallen Baker

Leo Martin gives some plain speaking on a range of issues relating to responsible business, with some lessons that are both insightful and provocative.

1. Mind the gap: CSR as compliance, or communications?

Video: Leo discusses the distinction between compliance CSR and communication-led CSR

Leo Martin is one of the founders of GoodCorporation, which arose from a group of like–minded people at KPMG some years ago. Having been asked by clients whether KPMG couldn't just audit them to show their social responsibility to a sceptical outside public, they had realised that they couldn't. But that was a need that somebody should meet.

So in 2000, GoodCorporation was launched, and developed the GoodCorporation standard, which sets out 62 management practices that firms are assessed against, and which forms the core of the organisation's work today. It has carried out audits in 40 countries.

As you might expect, Leo's experience over such a wide field means he has strong views on a number of areas of what responsible business practice means. He starts by criticising what he describes as 'reporting–led' CSR (corporate social responsibility'.

There is, he says, "an enormous gap between CSR led by reporting and communications people, versus corporate responsibility led by people who are responsible for either business principles, codes of conduct, compliance, people that are actually inward–facing and looking at how does the organisation employ people, how does it sell, how does it operate?"

The communications people start with the premise of 'needing to tell a good story' and to put on the best face. Nothing wrong with that per se if that's there job, but someone needs to be looking at CSR in terms of internal processes that need to be changed and improved.

There are some companies, he agrees, that do both reasonably well. "Where companies have been forced into looking at behaviour and culture, and it's usually because they've had a scandal when something has gone wrong, they then tend to generate activities to check up on behaviour or to encourage the right culture in the organisation."

It comes down, Leo says, to ownership and structure within the organisation. With the right governance at the top, CSR challenges can be seen in terms of change management. Without that, it can be very difficult.

"Where we've made our sales to CSR people we've had quite an uncomfortable time because we've tended to be critical, hopefully always in a positive way, about the organisation's business practices. These poor CSR folks tend to find this very difficult to handle."

The contrasts the Anglo Saxon model with the French approach. "We're now working for companies in France and they all have an ethics committee that reports straight in to the chief executive, that owns the company's code of conduct and doesn't give a stuff about reporting, actually. They're interested in protecting the chief executive and making sure that things don't go wrong".

He hopes that the shock of the credit crunch will lead to more change here. "Somebody over the top of the organisation who's more powerful than the sales people, more powerful than the marketers, having a strong say over the culture of the organisation."

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Further reading

GoodCorporation website

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