Matthew's RSA blog

In good company

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a company in possession of a decent turnover must be in need of a corporate responsibility programme. It’s certainly trendy – think Google’s “do no evil” tag. The RSA is very trendy too, and we’re currently looking at how an RSA Network could support SMEs in fulfilling all their social responsibilities (including turning a profit).

The argument about sustainable business development hasn’t been won yet. A recent Economist carried one of the best idiot’s guides yet to the potential pitfalls of the fashion for CSR. Is fixing the world what business is for? On a pragmatic level, does it mean having to actively build social responsibility into every part of your business or will the oddn philanthropic donation do?

Consider the CSR question in the context of the UK’s small to medium enterprises (SMEs). The majority of us working in the private sector are employed not by big corporations but enterprises of fewer than 100 employees; their social and environmental footprint is huge. But when upwards of 30% of small businesses go bust after the first year, turning a profit first and foremost is a matter of survival.

Having to respect other bottom lines (environmental, social, progressive working practices) is an unrealistic burden, some say. We want home-grown entrepreneurship, local businesses and economic diversity, so how exacting can we be of SMEs?

The RSA Network’s challenge is to reconcile SMEs’ bottom lines with their impact on the world around them. The aim is to rethink CSR not as a big business luxury, with a small number of high profile wins, but as a huge number of small gestures.

Anyone with practical insights into how we might make that happen should keep an eye on the Networks platform for details of how to get involved. To be continued…

The debate goes on

I found the responses to the last post really interesting. Peter’s argument as I understand it is that the real gap is not between the state and private sector but between parents who provide the right background for their children and those who don’t. I agree with this but it underlines why I worry.

My personal view is that the state-private divide doesn’t just separate children; it can also mean that some schools take for granted the engagement of parents (after all they haven’t paid all that money only to be passive consumers), while for others it is hard to get any more than a tiny minority of parents involved.

Caring, involved parents aren’t just an asset for their children; they are more likely to be part of the broader life of the school. So here again private schools have an embarrassment of riches while state schools in poor areas have unviable parent schools associations and unfilled parent governor vacancies.

Beth’s question about how to scale up local initiative and commitment is a huge one. Time and again promising local projects fail to replicate when they are scaled up because they lack the commitment and vision of those who began the initiative or because public funding comes with the wrong strings attached. In the end this is one of the strongest arguments for decentralisation.

I am interested in seeing if the RSA can do anything around strengthening relationships between parents and between parents and schools. Maybe we can learn something from Book Start Plus.

Suzanne, I agree that getting the very best teachers to go into and stay in the state sector is really important and I think Teach First is great.

There are loads of issues I wish I had time to write about.

For example, is it true - as a company advisor told me the other day - that large retail companies now face a squeeze between customers demanding ever greater levels of corporate responsibility and aggressive but largely anonymous investors and corporate raiders seeking to take advantage of any company that deviates from an exclusive focus on the bottom line (one of the issues we want to look at in a planned project called Tomorrow’s Investor)?

But I should really focus on the big change programme in the RSA. We heard yesterday that we had got some really helpful funding from NESTA to enable us as we seek to turn the RSA Fellowship into a network for civic innovation.

The funding means we can put a team in place to work on the substance, the people and the offline and online support for an early set of RSA Fellows networks.

The hard work starts here but as I go round the Fellowship – the weekend before last I was in Scotland - I am still getting really positive feedback about the idea of putting the Fellows and their commitment to change at the heart of the RSA.

So a bitty blog I’m afraid. This will only go to confirm the prejudices of Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur – How today’s internet is killing our culture. He is speaking here tonight in the first of our impressive autumn series of lectures. It promises to be a lively debate (check out his spat with Emily Bell from the Guardian). If you want me to ask any questions on your behalf please send them in.