In this episode of What That Means, Camille chats with Suzanne Fallender, Director of Corporate Responsibility at Intel, about what corporate responsibility really is. Is it doing the right thing? Is it not doing the wrong thing? And is there really a business benefit?

The conversation covers:

• What corporate responsibility is (in 3 mins or less, of course)

• ESG, sustainability & social responsibility

• Transparency & truth

• Integrated reporting

• Inclusion & diversity

• Corporate responsibility goal setting

• What happens when you don’t meet your corporate responsibility goals

...and more. Don’t miss it!

Here are some key take-aways:

• Corporate responsibility is about more than just ‘doing the right thing.’ It’s a management approach that looks at and proactively manages things like diversity, inclusion, supply chain responsibility, environmental compliance, and more.

• There’s a societal value and a business value to corporate responsibility. Proactively managing these factors ultimately reduces risk and is ‘good’ for business.

• When setting corporate responsibility goals, it’s good to set goals that are ambitious. Even if you don’t meet them all, you’ll likely make significant steps towards meeting them. It’ll give your team something to strive for.

• Transparency isn’t necessarily a proxy for truth.

• In order to incorporate corporate responsibility info into your processes, you need reliable, accurate data and third-party assurance over your corporate responsibility reports.

• There’s a shift, an evolution in the corporate responsibility space. Companies are realizing that many of these things do impact the bottom line. They impact how customers feel about the company and how employees feel about working for the company.

• Global companies, in particular, have shifted their thinking. Many are introducing voluntary initiatives in an attempt to get out ahead of requirements that impact business.

• 10 years ago, leadership in corporate responsibility was about ‘doing less bad’ and individual corporate accountability. 10 years from now, it will be more about ‘doing more good’ collaboratively and leveraging each company’s unique skills for the greater good.

• Cyber security will play a role in many solutions to global challenges — like electrifying the grid, digital access, and autonomous driving — as well as in things like governance and risk management.

Some interesting quotes from today’s episode:

“One of the key things in corporate responsibility — and it's been developing for a number of decades now — is about transparency in reporting on your performance, but also about setting ambitious goals and then being able to report on those goals.”

“When we set the 2020 goals that we've included in our most recent corporate responsibility report that's on our website, the thinking behind setting these goals is, you're setting goals that are ambitious. And I actually tell people internally, it’s actually, I think, more credible if you don't hit a couple of your goals, because it meant that you didn't just set out goals that you knew that you could meet.”

“The financial reporting standards and audit standards have evolved over decades. I think we have seen a similar conversation evolving on the ESG topics and the corporate responsibility reporting.”

"Now really it's all the leading financial services firms that have policies on ESG and are looking at this data. And for them to be able to incorporate this information into their investment processes, they need reliable, accurate data. So there is much more of a robust discussion happening about how do you standardize this data more? How do you make sure there's that third-party assurance over the data points?”

“I think that there are a lot of these ‘non-financial’ factors that do impact performance and financial performance. It may be hard to measure and quantify exactly how those are impacting, or it could be a time horizon question. They may not show up really in the short-term, but they can really have significant hidden costs in the long-term.”

“We've seen this shift in terms of who do employees want to work for and how does this connect with employee engagement and kind of pride and engagement with who you're working for.”

“10 years from now…leadership will be about convening people together to drive forward on these issues, and really leveraging the skills and the expertise of different businesses in the right way.”

“I think if everyone just keeps doing things on their own, we're not gonna make as much progress as if we have that kind of industry collaboration or kind of that broader kind of innovation focus, especially around the role that technology can play.”

“For Intel, yes, we make chips. But our purpose is to create world-changing technology that enriches the lives of every person on earth. Really aspirational, really kind of hard to measure sometimes from a really data-centric and engineering company. But that purpose is really, I think, what guides these new global challenges that we set out.”