Are companies realizing their corporate social responsibilities?

Filed in archive Business on October 14, 2007

Today I will not talk about any application development or any other aspect of technology but social responsibilities of corporate. Somebody had said to me 'my friend if you have to run a business you can never run it ethically' but I have an opposite belief. I am aware of the fact that most of the companies do not run on ethics but we have been witnessing a subtle change of late. Companies have started to open up off late and demonstrating the ability of transparency and following the philosophy of Innovate, Act, Share, Sun has unveiled its second annual Corporate Social Responsibility report which highlights the progress of the company and its policy of transparency and achieving success through innovation.




Here are some of the major points of Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2007 of Sun:

• Sun's eco responsible servers, storage and software use less energy while providing the same (or better) performance as standard datacenter offerings.
• The company received a 10 out of 10 rating by Governance METRICS International (GMI) which scores for board accountability, financial disclosure and internal controls; shareholder rights; executive remuneration; takeover defenses and ownership base; and corporate behavior.
• Committed to openness and transparency, Sun sponsors more than 3,000 blogs by employees, including CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz and General Counsel Mike Dillon.
•As part of Sun's transparency, the company publishes monthly energy use and related CO2 emissions for its major U.S. facilities.
• Sun's Open Work program helped reduce the company's need for office space by more than 15 percent or 2.6 million square feet in FY07.
• Sun is the largest single contributor to open source communities, and has donated up to five times as much code as its competitors.

It's nice to see companies giving preference to their social responsibilities but companies coming under this bracket are quite small. I probably feel that the time has come when we all need to think beyond profits!!! Business can be run on ethics, right?