Harvard Business Review on Corporate Responsibility (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series),   ISBN:9781591392743

Customer Rating: 

A collection of articles gathers the latest thinking on the strategic significance of corporate social responsibility: a very interesting book!

Customer Rating: 

As a self described old had on corporate responsibility, sustainability, and green leadership, I paged through this quickly, took interest in a few articles, and ultimately didn't get a lot out of it. If you have substantial experience in the field and have read other books and literature, I'd recommend you skip this brief compendium of the top Harvard Business Review articles.

On the positive side, the essays are all quite well written, researched, and vetted, though some are a bit dated now. Most of these form the backbones of some very serious strategy arguments in the business world, and considerable amounts of research have sprung from these quick leaders. If you're looking to get a broad overview quickly, read this, then go find books and articles that cite these articles to get a much more in-depth view of the philosophies.

Customer Rating: 

This book is excellent for the researcher who has been trying to find some older works on CSR, which originally appeared in the Harvard Business Review.
There are some "classic" articles in this book, however I would not full-heartedly recommend this collection to the general public:

As one would expect by a Harvard Business Review collection anyway, the topic CSR is not dealt with in a consistent manner, the publication rather adds a number of distinguished articles one after the other.

Customer Rating: 

As an educational leadership professor, I am interested in learning about corporations and how they impact educational settings. This text was one of the most comprehensive collections of essays to offer a wide range of perspectives on the issues of corporate social responsibility. With its researchers and the commentary, this text provides a novice, like myself, with the background, application and insight as to how the business world perceives CSR within its own environment. For those of you who are new to this field, this is a must read.

Dr. Joan Jackson, Asst. Prof. Ed. Leadership, ODU

Customer Rating: 

This collection of article opens interesting lines of reasoning and might just get fresh ideas in front of decision makers who can use business as a tool for good on the global scale. The eight articles cover a broad range of topics and vary in tone from sweeping philosophical musings to rigorous academic pieces. The first article is a very strong lead-off, I will try to summarize this piece in hopes of giving you a flavor for the whole collection:

* Serving the world's poor, profitably - C.K. Prahalad & Allen Hammond
How can companies profitably serve a market where consumers live on $2000 or less per year? On the other hand, how can companies afford to ignore a market of 4 billion potential customers? This article explores reasons why companies have in the past shied away from trying to serve the "bottom of the pyramid" (BOP) markets, why major growth opportunities exist in this niche, and how typical strategies need to be adapted into new thinking that will benefit the world's poorest communities and those who compete for their business. There is a distasteful element to imagining multinational corporations, the most powerful institutions of our time, engaging and profiting from the most economically powerless. The authors make the case that the poor suffer more from being ignored by the global marketplace of the multinationals than by engagement with it. They illustrate how prices charged by the informal economy that serves poor communities are typically much higher for the same goods than prices in more affluent communities served by efficient distribution. When BOP strategies are done correctly, corporations also benefit in more ways than simply generating additional sales: BOP markets can serve as incubators for new products, ideas and approaches that can revitalize productivity and leadership in the developed (and saturated) markets as well. An innovative approach for reaching poorer customers is to de-aggregate ownership from use by exploring "pay per use" models. Another strategy, that runs counter to mainstream thinking, is to deploy some of the most cutting edge wireless technologies in the least developed markets to overcome the isolation of poor rural areas.