PRESS RELEASE

Launch of a business network on corporate citizenship strategy

Membership is open to companies willing to align corporate citizenship to business strategy and long-term value creation

A new international business network is being created to help companies to align corporate citizenship to core business strategy. Known as the Global Leadership Network (GLN), its objective is to improve the impact of corporate citizenship initiatives and demonstrate the important role the corporate sector can play in improving economic, social, and environmental conditions in the world.

The GLN is chaired by IBM and includes among its members British drinks giant Diageo, car manufacturer General Motors, General Electric, the food producer Cargill, the technology innovator 3M, the Japanese technology manufacturer Omron, the Mexican cement company Cemex, the human resources management company Manpower and the logistics company FedEx.

The GLN assess companies on how to develop corporate responsibility strategies that are appropriate and relevant to their business, rather than simply complying with external standards.

Over the last 2 years, the GLN companies – with research support from London-based think tank AccountAbility and the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College, USA – have explored what constitutes excellence in corporate citizenship.

‘We agreed that corporate citizenship can only deliver true value to a company and its stakeholders when it is considered part of core business, rather than treated as a bolt-on activity. Excellent companies should introduce social, economical and environmental impacts and opportunities in their strategy and process performance measures‘ said Simon Zadek. ‘Together we set out to establish practical ways to make this happen within world-leading businesses.’

Today the GLN launched the result of that research in the form of a first in class learning network and an online self-assessment and planning tool for corporate citizenship strategy. Today GLN also opened membership of the network to industry-leading companies worldwide in a move to share learning and best practices.

‘Corporate Citizenship is about doing profitable business in a way that solves society’s problems rather than creating them,’ said Simon Zadek, CEO. ‘This means developing a long-term corporate responsibility strategy that is in synch with your underlying business strategy. The GLN helps companies to minimize business risk and maximize opportunity in our changing world.’

The Global Leadership Network provides companieswith:

“The GLN allows IBM to do significantly better in the corporate citizenship area. It will allow us to use the kind of web-based analytics we use in other elements of our work and enable us to engage all the requisite players at IBM “ says Stanley S. Litow, Vice President of Corporate Community Relations at IBM.

The GLN Framework identifies four critical commitments a business must make if it is to achieve excellence in corporate responsibility:

“The GLN global network has been very valuable as we have reviewed our corporate citizenship strategy. In particular the framework has enabled us to benchmark our performance against world-class excellence particularly in the alignment with core business strategy and operations for the future.” Says Geoffrey Bush, Director of Corporate Citizenship at Diageo.

The GLN has been created to understand the trade-offs of business corporate strategy and social impacts and help them to reflect on how to develop the necessary competencies to manage corporate citizenship effectively. In words of Raul Franchi, Institutional Development Director at CEMEX “ There is no magic answer regarding the development of Corporate Citizenship in an organization but this benchmarking network and tool can help us to understand how to move forward in the development of our initiatives”

For more information about the GLN please visit our website: [1] www.globalleadershipnetwork.org
Or contact us:

Itziar Castello Molina
AccountAbility
Unit A, 137 Shepherdess Walk
London, N1 7RQ

Tel: +44 (0)20 7549 0400
Fax: +44 (0)20 72537440
[2] itziar@accountability.org.uk
[3] www.accountability.org.uk

Steven Rochlin
Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College
Wallace E. Carroll School of Management
55 Lee Road
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 3942
Tel: +1 617 552 4545
Fax: +1 617 552 8499
[4] rochlin@bc.edu
[5] www.bc.edu/corporatecitizenship