Best TED Talks on CSR
TED Talks are a great platform for inspirational and innovative leaders to share their expertise and to motivate viewers to think differently. At The Works, we believe there is always new insight to learn and new strategies to explore, particularly in the pursuit of making the world a more sustainable place. In the words of The Great Wes, “In this field, there’s always a better solution than what’s currently available.” It turns out the TED community shares in that opinion: corporate social responsibility is one of the organization’s most highly explored subjects.
We’ve been sorting through countless talks with diverse perspectives on business, investment and how it can impact development and social change, and here is our list of the top four TED talks on the importance and benefits of corporate social responsibility.
Audrey Choi: Why we need to prioritize investing for social change
When it comes to investing in social change, consumers are more likely to act with their Starbucks orders than with their finances, says Audrey Choi, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley’s Institute for Sustainable Investing. This means that consumers are more willing to spend their money on (and time thinking about) fair-trade coffee beans, and less on investing in sustainable practices for their business.
Choi notes how contrast to popular belief, businesses actually do better when they prioritize sustainability and invest in social development. Choi backs up her claim by sharing some insightful examples of companies that have boosted their operating performance and share price by adopting a sustainability-driven agenda.
Michael Porter: Why business can be good at solving social problems
Our list of CSR TED Talks would not be complete without Michael Porter, a man dubbed by Fortune Magazine as “the most famous and influential business professor who has ever lived.” Porter is a celebrated Professor at The Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at the Harvard Business School, and founder of FSG-Social Impact Advisors, a leading non-profit strategy firm specializing in creating social value for corporations, foundations, and NGOs.
In this Talk, Porter challenges the conventional notion of the limited role that businesses can take in addressing social issues. He begins by highlighting issues that (especially in our digital age) we have become very much aware of, such as climate change, access to water and food insecurity. He notes that despite this awareness, these issues have made little progress because of the lack of willingness to invest in them by businesses that can afford to do so. Porter proposes that rather than creating a new NGO for every new social need, the current system of tackling issues should instead shift to let big business take the lead.
Michael Porter thinks deeply about the intersection between society and corporate interests. He gave this talk at TEDGlobal in 2013.
Harish Manwani: Profit’s not always the point
In this TED Talk, Unilever’s Chief Operating Officer Harish Manwani shares his insight on the strategy that Unilever, a company whose role in responsibility is well known, uses to increase profitability as well as positive social impact.
Manwani offers information about Unilever’s approach to sustainability and explains why more companies should also embrace this new business model – one that prioritizes responsibility as a key factor in their growth plan. He adds that when adopting this model, companies must ask, “How do make sure that we have a great business, but we also have a great environment around us?”
Manwani explains that companies cannot afford to be just “innocent bystanders” in what’s happening in our current societies. They have to take on the role of “helping the communities that actually sustain them” if they want to succeed in the long term. That vision can be boiled down into simple actions, he says. In Unilever’s case, a woman working in India as a small distributor started to change social order in her village when she became part of the company’s project ‘Shakti’, a program teaching women about business and how to spread the message of nutrition and hygiene. This one woman proves that even small actions can make a big difference, but when you multiply that by 60,000 small distributors in country, the change can be exponential.
Steve Howard: Let’s go all in for sustainability
Sustainability should go beyond public initiatives and donation; it should be something that companies actively implement in-house as well. This is because as Steve Howard puts it: “Sustainability has gone from a nice-to-do to a must-do.” In this TED Talk on “selling sustainability,” Howard discusses the importance of adopting sustainability practices both internally and externally, and shares convincing data of why that is more necessary than ever in our current political and environmental climate.
As the chief sustainability officer at IKEA, he has helped the furniture giant choose to invest in solar panels and wind turbines for their stores to generate 100% renewable energy for the entire company, replace all older model light bulbs with energy-saving LED ones from their shelves, and completely switch to recycled cotton – all without changing the price or quality of their products. Howard notes that these changes did not happen overnight. It took time and creativity before choosing sustainability did not mean sacrificing quality or accessibility, but it was a challenge that more companies must strive for in order make changes on serious issues, and to make sustainability “a reality for many people – not a luxury for the few.”
