10th October 2009

Today we had our first class of CSR aka ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’, the teacher was taking our views on the subject and was trying to know what we think of it as a subject. There were some views which were so radical whereas others were just taking the path of the normal MBA jargon.
And there I was dreaming how it would be to talk about it with my company boss. Will it be the same or will it be different, how will he take it and other such questions were coming to my mind. And I kept on thinking that one hand we say that ‘the Business of Business is Business’ and on the other hand we talk about that ‘one who demands from the society must also give back to the society’. The two statements are contradicting to each other, the first on one hand talks about the business as merely a profitable thing whereas the second one talk about the moral responsibility, the responsibility of a person or an organization to return back to the society in any way he or it can. And I just kept on dreaming on this thing that is there any way that these two can be intermingled, can they be joined and made into one. And the answer I got was the view of my other professor ‘one of my favorite in the college’ that a Business should be run in a moral and ethical way and there is nothing left that should be done as CSR. But even then I wonder that will it be possible for the business to be commercially viable and make profit.
I haven’t have seen any company that works on these lines, so many companies call them moral and ethical, a number of them involves themselves in CSR activities like opening schools, providing basic amenities to poor and many other such things but what I feel as do other people around me that these are just the basic advertising and marketing stunts to built a brand image of the company and not to really benefit the society but on the other they are at least doing something for the society which should be encouraged more and more.
-By D