At the Entrepreneur Foundation's Corporate Citizenship conference, Mark Kramer gave the keynote address to room full of Entrepreneur Foundation affiliates and corporate philanthropy folks. I was fortunate to personally met and chat with Mark at the CEO breakfast put on by Bill Campbell of Intuit and Justin Kitch of Homestead.com/Intuit at the Synopsys headquarters.
As I mentioned before, this was a great event with tons of practical advise for folks working to integrate philanthropy into their company and corporate culture. In addition, the conference could not have started at a more strategic level with Mark's talk. Mark is a co-founder of FSG with Michale Porter. Their first paper from 12/06 in HBR on the link between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility sent me back in time to my MBA classes. It is strong paper for folks schooled in Porter competitive differentiation framework. His lecture leverage work from 2006 with his newest paper. "Changing the Game," can be found at Standford as part of their Social Innovation Review. This paper continues the discussion about the use of strategic Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to help companies differentiate. The discussion of offensive and defensive efforts was a great model for me. I am really interested in getting EFCO companies to take a offensive approach to CSR even when they are small. What is more interesting is the implications this approach has on integrating social responsibility into the business and on mental models of non-profits who work should work with these corporations. I was floored by the BP example in the paper.
I have recommend this paper to no less than 10 people, since I returned from the conference.