Giving Compass' Take:

• Shannon Schuyler discusses why corporate social responsibility needs to be integral to business strategy and how companies can achieve that integration. 

• How can companies find the most impactful strategy? 

• Learn how Audible successfully conducts CSR.

Staying relevant in a crowded marketplace requires that businesses embrace change. It doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up or if your company has been around for more than 100 years. To stay relevant, you need to adapt to changing business models, demographics, and technologies.

The same goes for corporate social responsibility (CSR). For CSR to be relevant and have an impact, it needs to be an essential part of an overall business strategy, and often innovative, unexpected, and disruptive. In some cases, businesses embed societal issues in their strategy from inception—such as with the buy one-give one model popularized by Toms Shoes—but in most cases, they need to create, pivot, or fully redesign societal investments to be integral.

Research shows that diverse teams generate more revenue than their industry peers, and companies with at least one woman on their board yield higher net income. A diverse leadership also leads to higher levels of innovation.

Strategy is about meeting business objectives. If you can’t do that, you won’t survive. Responsible business leadership—which is how I would define the initiatives I’ve described here—should be about innovation, designing solutions, and inventing the means and methods to drive real change, as well as questioning how you can enact your purpose more powerfully. And while actions often speak louder than words, we also need to be talking about some of the biggest social issues of our time. Issues like #MeToo, immigration, and gun control have become an important part of the business conversation. We must keep pace with changing business models, challenge conventional thinking, invite unexpected collaborations, and stay relevant by never standing still.

Read the full article about CSR by Shannon Schuyler at Stanford Social Innovation Review.