What is Corporate Responsibility?

We think it is all about managing risk and opportunity.

It's a given that companies must abide by laws and regulations. But how should it handle society's wider expectations? There may be a view on how a business should treat its customers or a sense of the business' obligations towards the environment.

They might include a dawning sense that businesses should be more diverse or outrage over poor supply chain practices. Social expectations may be buried deep, may conflict with each other and yet crystallise with bewildering speed around a single story. Nonetheless, a responsible business must consider them in its strategy, operations and reporting.

Get it right and the business has a head start on new trends, employees who are ambassadors and a bank of social goodwill. Get it wrong and you damage reputation and attract sanctions. As we said - opportunity and risk.

And what is Acona? We’re an employee-owned consultancy dedicated to providing advice on CR. Our team members come from diverse backgrounds but share four important characteristics:

We create long term relationships. We are proud to have worked with most of our clients for many years and clients can expect to build long-term personal relationships with a small number of Acona partners: we don’t keep changing the project team.

We are business people. We don’t come to CR with any particular agenda, and we try to be very practical in our approach: our expertise in business, strategy and marketing lets us place our advice into a strategic and commercial context.

We think honesty is the best policy. We do what's best for clients, treating each job as a first and avoiding the temptation to ‘up-sell’ even if our fees end up lower. This is a policy of enlightened self-interest: by declining some opportunities we find that we build clients' trust, leading to long term relationships and lower marketing costs.

We like evidence. The field of CR seems to have attracted more than its fair share of conventional wisdom, tribal beliefs and ingrained opinion. We don’t mind challenging these ideas, even if that’s uncomfortable and we have a strong preference for evidence, analysis and data. We aren’t afraid of detail.