7gen Bloc

Just before lunch I participated on a panel, "From Global Growth Company to Corporate Citizen."

The session description noted, "As the global agenda is increasingly shaped outside the traditional framework of nation states, corporations have licence not only to operate in the global system, but also a civic duty to contribute to its sustainable health."

The panel was filled with heavy hitters, but most of them whiffed.

Huang Tianwen, the president of China's Sinosteel Corporation, discussed hiring local employees at his South African mine, and improving school attendance among the local children.

Nobuyoshi John Ehara, a partner in Japan's Unison Capital, discussed how corporate responsibility increases the brand value of his investments. "This can be done very quickly, in a few years, by consistently doing lots of small things."

Khalid Abdulla-Janahi, the chairman of Ithmaar Bank in Bahrain, discussed corporate governance and education using an incremental approach. "The CEO must define how this adds to the bottom line," he opined.

From Lenovo chairman Yang Yuanging's perspective, a Chinese company can't play a role on the global stage without building a reputation for corporate responsibility. In his view, much of CR is all about corporate governance and philanthropy.

Samuel A. DiPiazza Jr, chief of PricewaterhouseCoopers International, focused on the notion that corporate responsibility is a magnet for attracting young, high-end talent. People in their 20s and 30s want to work for companies that want to make a difference in the world. I couldn't agree more, but I was disappointed that DiPiazza and the others didn't dig deeper.

The panel's elementary insights reflected poorly on both the Forum's organizers and on the panelists' companies. Too bad the audience, which numbered in the hundreds, got little more than platitudes and statements of the obvious.

Fortunately, things turned a lot more interesting after I left the meeting to get an update, from Simon Zadek, on what it's going to take for business to really make a big, positive impact on the world. Simon is the author of one of the first and best books on corporate responsibility, The Civil Corporation: The New Economy of Corporate Citizenship. He's also the founder of AccountAbility, the UK-based nonprofit that works with business and government to spark creative solutions to vexing world problems.

In Simon's view, corporate responsibility will never move fast enough or go far enough to truly affect the world's biggest challenges. He argued that the pressure on public companies to generate short-term profits squeezes much of the oxygen out of efforts to deliver long-term results. I optimistically countered that business is making great progress, but Simon wasn't swayed. He challenged me to demonstrate how such progress was slowing global warming, and I must admit that I wasn't able to do so.

The next morning, on the bus to the Beijing airport, we passed thousands upon thousands of newly planted trees. All of that green gave me hope. I thought about a question that Simon had posed: "What if China outlawed inefficient cars, forced all new construction to be carbon neutral, banned toxic chemicals, and forbid the sale of cigarettes?" Do all of that, and China would vault from an environmental nightmare to a living vision of a viable green future.

It's not politically correct to even ask the question, but here goes: Could a state-run country like China, with all of its centralized controls, move quickly enough and effectively enough to help avert the worst consequences of global warming? Certainly, you could argue that China, if it summoned the spirit and will, just might move faster than a democracy.

photo: World Economic Forum (click for more pictures of the event)