Giving Compass' Take:

• Lata Reddy, President of the Prudential Foundation, discusses how companies need to put their corporate social responsibility efforts at the core of their business model or they won't continue to be successful. 

• Why is CSR becoming such as priority for businesses? How does a corporation transition from not having any programs in CSR to making it a focal point of their business model?

• Read about how to make everyone care about corporate social responsibility.

Lata N. Reddy is Senior Vice President of Diversity, Inclusion & Impact at Prudential Financial, and Chair and President of The Prudential Foundation. In this concise Shift Forum talk, Reddy outlines how a 140+ year old company has hewed to its original mission by incorporating “corporate social responsibility” directly into its business practices.

Lata Reddy: It’s great to be here. I’m going to talk about how it is that a legacy company makes the shift to this new vision of capitalism that we’ve been talking about. For us at Prudential, the new vision is really rooted in the past and in the belief that everybody should have the opportunity to be financially secure.

Our story began over 140 years ago when our founder John Dryden had a radical idea. He wanted to offer life insurance to working families.

That went against the common business wisdom at that time because the prevailing belief was that working families could not afford to pay premiums, and worse, couldn’t be trusted to pay premiums.

He created an insurance product that was affordable, specifically burial insurance, which he sold for as little as three cents a week. In that one act, he created an inclusive market that allowed working families to have the same opportunity to achieve financial security as everybody else.

This quote here…is something that our founder said soon after the company was founded. “The justification of the Company’s existence is the advancement of the efforts of its policyholders and their families for better economic and social condition.”

What that also means is that things like corporate social responsibility are no longer things that can be done off to the side. It can’t be about how we spend the money we make. Fundamentally, it has to be about how we make our money.

Read the full article about corporate social responsibility at NewCo Shift.