8 posts tagged “social responsibility”

[Cross-posted from Lucire] By Lucire’s editor-at-large and Planet Green host Summer Rayne Oakes, Style, Naturally is an eco-conscious guide to fashion and beauty, with responsible brands and tips for living sustainably. It’s the most comprehensive and accessible book on the topic—we had a sneak preview a few months ago. Out now; for more information, surf to Summer Rayne’s site at www.summerrayneoakes.com. Retail in the US is US$24·95—you can buy now via Amazon.com for a lower price of $18·96.

You know the smartest A-list actress in Hollywood wouldn’t endorse something like this if it weren’t credible.

For a moment I thought this was a real billboard saying someone was missing (see the bad typography), since it was the only one I saw. Turns out now it’s for a TV show.

   OK, this was clever (and we do have a lot of clever ads) and I am very glad TVNZ is at least promoting one of its own shows strongly—but is it also irresponsible? By the way, I do not recall what the show is named.

[Cross-posted] In January 2006, I predicted petrol would hit NZ$2 per litre but attributed it more to the Labour Government’s mishandling of New Zealand currency rather than oil prices. Now that the price has come to pass—consider that when I made it, $1·40 per litre was unheard of—I am surprised that no one in the mainstream media or even politics has brought up the parallels with the 1970s and New Zealand’s solution to the fuel crises.
   It seems a very obvious thing to bring up, so I have to question what people are afraid of.
   Responding to the volatility of international fuel prices, the Muldoon administration of 1975–84 embarked on energy projects in an effort to make New Zealand less vulunerable. The various Synfuel projects and energy exploration resulted in an era where New Zealanders drove around in natural gas vehicles, and we even produced our own petrol after converting it from gas.
   By the late 1970s, the New Zealand Government was subsidizing gas conversions and certainly by the early 1980s, many (most?) petrol stations offered compressed natural gas or liquefied petroleum gas alongside petrol and diesel. It was just considered normal.
   New Zealand was saving its foreign exchange and people were driving environmentally friendly cars.
   In 1984, the right-wing policies of the Labour Government saw most state assets relating to the venture sold off to corporations and Muldoon’s venture was passed off as a folly by the new administration, the technocrats of the Business Roundtable and, shockingly, by the National Party itself as it changed leaders.
   Even a bid to market LPG as an environmentally friendly fuel in the 1990s could not save it as the National Government taxed it tremendously—something that was clearly not done in the national interest.
   The winners of the destruction of this energy venture were the corporations, predominantly foreign-owned, buying in to outmoded, socially irresponsible technocratic thinking that has brought a widening rich–poor gap.
   That gap can only increase today with the cost of petrol, now refined offshore and imported by those same corporations, spiralling out of control.
   There’s not a peep from National, now in opposition, to say that it had been right in the 1970s as the only party prepared to shield a little country, so easily swayed by global economic forces, from oil company greed.
   The only logical and cynical conclusion is that National are as big a sell-out of New Zealanders as Labour and Roger Douglas were in the 1980s. And that they are suckers for monetarist theory, all the time closing their minds to the mere possibility that Muldoon—whose policies were adored by successful national leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, who did all right with them—might have been right.
   It’s election year—and National’s John Key is silent. Again.
   There’s a lot Sir Robert Muldoon got wrong but on the alternative-energy policies, I can’t find too much fault.
   First, New Zealand is a little country that is too drastically affected by global economics. Even Malaysia in 1997 could not protect itself properly against them. Hence, the technocratic, monetarist movement cannot be left unguarded.
   Secondly, energy prices are unstable and New Zealanders need to be protected against them.
   Thirdly, environmental policies demand that we look at alternative fuels.
   Fourthly, this is something that needs a governmental push to ensure alternatives are available nationwide, or at least somehow create incentives for the infrastructure.
   Faced with these basic facts, the development of our own energy sources for the long term seemed to be the only way forward.
   Sure it was cumbersome and expensive to develop, and there were missteps along the way, but where would we be today? Certainly not paying $2 a litre.
   Little did Sir Robert foresee that it would be so gleefully dismantled by his successors—with the same arguments of efficiency so cleverly used by the technocrats of the Slater Walker era in the United Kingdom.
   In spite of all the English expats here, we bought the arguments hook, line and sinker.
   One would have hoped that today, we would remain shielded from these energy crises offshore, with our fleet of natural gas-powered cars. That we would be leading the world in showing how alternative fuels worked, and foreign countries would be coming to us to license our technology.
   We gave up that lead, that advantage, in 1996 to follow the American example of gas guzzlers and SUVs.
   The General Election is mere months away, this is the hottest issue on the book, and no one dares bring up Muldoon. It’s because no one dares offend a few rich bastards making money off working New Zealanders by bringing up a leader who dared stand up to foreign corporate interests.

What do you tell a Lucire team member who claims to be addicted to chocolate? You tell her that almost all the chocolate sold in New Zealand has some slave labour component to it and let her conscience stop her from consuming, otherwise she effectively supports slavery. Amazing what you learn when you are on the Brands with a Conscience 2008 committee.

I was honoured to be interviewed by Uduak Oduok, lawyer, fashion model and journalist, for Ladybrille. Lucire readers may remember Uduak as the writer of a piece in an earlier issue on a fashion show in Nigeria, and I was honoured to be her subject this time.
   Years ago, I was inspired by Simon Anholt’s Brand New Justice, a book that emphasized that brands, not monetary hand-outs, help poorer nations out of their predicaments and allow them to raise their incomes. Simon’s viewpoints have held firm and many from his research found their way into the Medinge Group’s first co-authored book, Beyond Branding.
   By this time, I was heavily in to branding and CSR, and I attempted to set up a forum that would connect first-world advisers with entrepreneurs in less wealthy nations. Sadly, we never got proper first-world support—not enough people willing to give their time—and I admit it was one of the things we didn’t look after properly while we had some difficult staffers at Lucire creating internal problems.
   It was very much the third world’s loss as we had a few entrepreneurs sign up. But I have always taken the opportunities to extend some of those early-2000s ideas and appearing on the Ladybrille blog–zine was an ideal way to help specifically African businesspeople involved in this rather crazy fashion world. I hope I have contributed to helping them with my interview answers.
   Most importantly, the Ladybrille site attempts to do what I could not do with my forum: provide intelligence for entrepreneurs so they can raise their businesses and communities toward greater incomes, addressing this planet’s rich–poor gap. It is a noble goal that Uduak has set herself—and she has the courage and passion to succeed.
   The interview was done piecemeal since I could not spare a solid time period to answer Uduak’s questions, so please excuse any changes in expression or style. The URL is ladybrille.blogspot.com/2007/09/lucire-magazines-jack-yan-offers-tips.html.

Anita Roddick was an inspirational lady. Here are some quotations from her last interview in The Daily Telegraph.

On the US wealth divide
It’s a society that is absolutely separate, it’s a gated community living next door to a society that is impoverished, a gated community living next to ghetto—you see that all the time and it will happen here—the two poles of our society.
   Everything is here for the wealthy. You can hide your money away in tax havens, you can find ways of making more money.

The global credit crunch in the US
It's like that fresh flesh: I want it now, you know I can’t work for it, I can’t be an apprentice, I can’t look up to it. And people are living longer. The elderly don’t want kids in their home. Everybody’s staying at home and there’s not a work ethic that I’m seeing. There’s got to be more creative ways of finding jobs and getting skilled or finding jobs that are worthwhile and you don't have to be skilled for.

B-school
This notion that to be in business you've got to go to a business school: it’s crap. Because business schools only shape you to be a very efficient person working in a very traditional system—but the most exciting things are what’s being done untraditionally.

L’Oréal and the Body Shop
I’m thrilled with it, absolutely bloody thrilled with it. I think they’re going to do amazing things. I think they’ll be able to—with the research companies that they’ve bought—not the product companies—of completely eliminating animal testing in the future. It will not be part of the industry. Because they're doing cell culture testing—they’re making their own cells and their own skin. Every ingredient, every food product will be tested.
   For me it’s been a wonderful gift because a company that is a strong understanding brand bought it. The alternative was that a group of financiers would come in and asset strip it—they wouldn't give a toss for anything.

Outsourcing
We’re not a manufacturing country anymore. But I think you get people to understand the story behind what they buy—to make that one jump and say what's the real cost of something, if everybody got another 25pc for the garment they made then you wouldn’t get this big social dilemma.
   I remember going to a sweatshop area in Nicaragua, and it was quite a modern factory but there was no place to eat or have half an hour off. And the women were walking some 3 miles to work every day. And I walked back with them, and they were living in cardboard huts. One woman said to me, whatever you do tell them all that we want to do is move from slavery to poverty. They were forced to take contraceptive pills, they were thrown out if they had a grey hair and this is nothing compared to what goes on in Bangladesh.

The futility of “marketing”
We never had a marketing department for 20 odd years. Every year we were getting awards for our marketing, and we didn’t know what it was. The minute we brought in marketing as a traditional thinking—cover your trucks with messages, environment human rights etc, went out the door.
   We had an enormous amount of humour. I remember on Mother’s Day we had a message saying ‘God couldn't be everywhere so he created mothers’. We were doing really quirky things that got people engaged.

   There’s more on Dame Anita Roddick, DBE today in Lucire, along with a related op-ed from yours truly about her leadership.

I don’t know if my YouTube embedding worked at my main blog (I can’t remember how to do it), and it’s probably easier to share this video on Vox. It features Lucire’s US editor Summer Rayne Oakes modelling and discussing corporate social responsibility. (Originally on Summer Rayne’s official blog.)