Coherency Management

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. The Limitations of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): A Philosophy at Odds with Its Surroundings

Abstract

Despite its growth in popularity in the past twenty years, CSR has serious limitations, which profoundly affect its ability to reduce the negative social, environmental, and economic impacts that companies generate as they pursue the financial bottom line. Emerging as a response to changing expectations of how organizations should behave in a complex and increasingly globalized world, its incoherency makes it inadequate to deal with the serious problems faced by humanity in the twenty-first century. This chapter summarizes the origins of CSR, as well as its limitations and fundamental underlying contradictions. It then explains why CSR needs to adopt a more coherent approach and outlines what that approach should look like.

Ivan Hilliard

Chapter 2. Coherent Organizational Responsibility

Abstract

To behave in a coherently responsible manner requires fulfilling a series of conditions, which are drawn from a branch of philosophy dealing with the justification of belief. This chapter deals with applying those conditions to any firm serious about managing its myriad responsibilities. It starts by analyzing the fundamental properties of any organization—one being a group of people with a purpose, which in the context of responsible organizational behavior, are stakeholders who provide inputs, and the other being value creation. It then explains in detail what the coherency conditions are, and how they should be applied to these fundamental properties. It finishes by outlining the advantages of such an approach compared to current CSR thinking and practice.

Ivan Hilliard

Chapter 3. The Interdependent Business: Understanding Value Creation

Abstract

This chapter starts by analyzing what value is and how it is created. It then looks at the arguments behind shareholder supremacy and residual claims, and the risks supported by different stakeholder groups such as employees and suppliers in their relations with any firm. It goes on to explain why current management thinking on these topics is incoherent for any organization that claims to take seriously its social and environmental responsibilities and outlines what coherent value creation looks like, and how it should be distributed across the stakeholder spectrum.

Ivan Hilliard

Chapter 4. Organizational Autocracy: How the Democratic Wave Passed Over the Organization

Abstract

This chapter deals with the autocratic nature of most firm’s decision-making processes. It highlights the advantages of a more participative decision-making process for any organization that wishes to behave in a more responsible manner, as well as the risks of continuing a top-down imposition of something that cannot genuinely be forced on people. At the same time, it outlines the parameters of this democratizing process and explains why it needs to be limited. It finishes by explaining why such an approach meets the coherency conditions introducing in Chapter 2.

Ivan Hilliard

Chapter 5. Stakeholder Politics: Why Knowing More Can Also Mean Doing Less

Abstract

This chapter starts by analyzing the pros and cons of a stakeholder approach. It looks at different communication tools, principally non-financial reporting, used to manage the dialogue companies maintain with different stakeholder groups. It explains the limits of this type of tool and why they fail to improve overall responsible behavior. It then identifies why any organization serious about their approach to social responsibility must change current stakeholder dialogue practices and outlines how they can do so in a more coherent way.

Ivan Hilliard

Chapter 6. Organizational Squares: How Straight Lines Limit Vision

Abstract

This chapter looks at the theme of organizational design, and in particular, three of its principal features—organizational structure, organizational culture, and corporate governance. It analyzes them separately, identifying weaknesses in the thinking and application of each, and explains why such weaknesses prevent a more coherent approach to responsible management. It then outlines a more organic approach to organizational design, using the coherency conditions laid down earlier, and emphasizes the underlying importance of organizational culture and the supporting role of structure and governance.

Ivan Hilliard

Chapter 7. Employee Worth: Why Every Hour Worked Doesn’t Add Value (but Counts)

Abstract

This chapter begins by assessing the problems of improving employee engagement and commitment in the modern business environment. It also looks at how these are affected by concepts of organizational justice and social identity theory, and the importance of aligning organizational and individual values. It continues by outlining the positive effects on employees of responsible business practices in relation to these issues. It finishes by explaining how coherency management, when applied to the company-employee relationship, can improve overall productivity and commitment to more responsible organizational behavior.

Ivan Hilliard

Chapter 8. The Tipping Points of Organizations: Why They Are Not Fed Correctly

Abstract

This chapter looks at the way that knowledge is created, managed, and transferred, and its importance for generating responsible behavior. It looks at different types of learning and explains why some of them support a coherent approach and others don’t. It outlines the characteristics of learning organizations and highlights the limitations of current attitudes that block learning including short-term thinking, heuristic response processes, and cultural resistance to criticism. It finishes by considering complexity levels in the management of broad and diverse responsibilities, and the need for a more coherent approach to learning to manage such complexity.

Ivan Hilliard

Chapter 9. The Pillars of Coherency

Abstract

Based on Building upon the arguments in previous chapters, this chapter outlines the five pillars required for any responsibly-minded organization. These pillars are participation, interaction, design, learning, and vision, and each one is described in detail. An analysis is provided of two types of responsible organizations where these pillars are present—one that has Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) but continues to create economic value for a minority of shareholders; and another that applies the coherency conditions to ensure that the pillars support coherent value creation, distributed fairly based on stakeholder inputs.

Ivan Hilliard

Chapter 10. Getting to CORE

Abstract

Getting to coherent organizational responsibility (CORE) is a journey, which requires reengineering both organizational purpose and operational practice. This chapter outlines the principal ideas in the field of reengineering and uses them to outline the coherency journey. It looks at both the CSR organization and the coherently responsible organization at two different levels—abstract and system, showing what the five coherency pillars presented in Chapter 9 look like in each case. It explains how to begin the transformation from one to the other and outlines the different types of cognitive bias that prevent many firms from doing so.

Ivan Hilliard

Chapter 11. Systems Thinking for Coherency

Abstract

This chapter begins by explaining why management of social responsibility requires a systematic approach to understand complexity and provide organizational-wide solutions. It then analyzes why such an approach is useful and necessary, but not sufficient unless it is accompanied by a genuine implementation of the coherency conditions. It then assesses the role of systems thinking in driving change in complex adaptive systems, overcoming resistance, and dealing with different types of cognitive bias.

Ivan Hilliard

Chapter 12. Coherent CSR

Abstract

This final chapter begins by assessing the growth of CSR in the past twenty years and trying to understand why it has been so ineffective in terms of the objectives it set itself. One of the arguments presented is the need (currently lacking) for the field of CSR to acknowledge its limited strategic impact to date. A second argument presented deals with organizational bias, whereby decision-making becomes locked-into certain parameters and results are valued above processes. It finishes by outlining a series of pitfalls to avoid for any organization serious about adapting a coherent approach to social responsibility.

Ivan Hilliard

Backmatter