Paula Luff is founder and CEO of Viso Strategies Corporation, a sustainability advisory firm based in New York. From 2007 through 2015, Luff was Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility for Hess Corporation, where she established and led the global Social Responsibility and Philanthropy functions for the company. Prior to joining Hess, she was senior director of Global Philanthropy for Pfizer Inc. where she set strategy and led the teams that developed flagship programs in global health for the company and its foundation. She also represented Pfizer on philanthropy and global health issues with the media, public officials, bilateral and multilateral organizations and other external stakeholders.
Christopher P. Skroupa: From your perspective, what is corporate social responsibility (CSR), who is impacted by CSR? What ecosystem is created by this interaction?
Paula Luff: If you ask 50 people, “What is corporate social responsibility?” you’ll probably get 75 different answers. For me, corporate responsibility is how companies operate. It’s about how they identify and manage their social and environmental risks and footprint. Defined this way, quite a few people are impacted by CSR. The breadth of stakeholders is vast—it includes the company’s shareholders, employees, customers and business partners. They will all be affected by corporate social responsibility defined as operational excellence. There is great opportunity here—when done well, corporate social responsibility can create significant value for the enterprise and for society. Corporate social responsibility can drive innovation and create shared value. The ecosystem is a new approach to collaboration, and to stakeholder engagement, to leverage the potential of core business functions effectivity for both business and social good.
Skroupa: How has corporate engagement developed into what it is today? What incited this need for action?
Luff: Early references to CSR appear in the literature in the mid-1950s. Initially, the notion of corporate social responsibility stemmed from the C-suite and eventually marketing departments, as an opportunity to be a charitable community partner and burnish corporate reputation. In the 1970s and 1980s a number of consumer-facing companies partnered with nonprofit organizations in the cause marketing space—brands benefited from the halo effect of aligning with a reputable nonprofit, and nonprofits derived some revenue from the arrangement. Overtime, stakeholder expectations of the role of the private sector have shifted and the evolution of CSR has mirrored that. Forty years ago, the business of business was business, that is necessary but no longer sufficient. While it is table stakes for companies to deliver shareholder value, they operate in a digital world where stakeholders have tremendous power to create and erode enterprise value. Increasingly, stakeholders expect the private sector to be at the table, contributing resources and thought leadership to solving the world’s greatest challenges from climate change to income inequality. No single sector has the resources to go at it alone. We are not going to make a dent in any of these issues unless we figure out new ways of working together to advance the cause.
