Purpose Inspired: by Wayne Visser

Part 1 on how greed has become institutionalised in business, the economy and society - including in the form of Defensive CSR. In the podcast, Prof. Dr Wayne Visser reads Chapter 2 from his book, The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. Part 1 of the podcast is broken into the following sections: - Case: Larry McDonald and Lehman Brothers

Part 3 on how and why corporate sustainability and responsibility (CSR) has failed and how it is evolving. In the podcast, Prof. Dr Wayne Visser reads Chapter 1 from his book, The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. Part 3 of the podcast is broken into the following sections: - Our global dishonesty - Awkward questions - The ages and stages of CSR

Part 2 on how and why corporate sustainability and responsibility (CSR) has failed and how it is evolving. In the podcast, Prof. Dr Wayne Visser reads Chapter 1 from his book, The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. Part 2 is broken into the following sections: - Our global footprint - Our global weather - Our global village

Part 1 on how and why corporate sustainability and responsibility (CSR) has failed and how it is evolving. In the podcast, Prof. Dr Wayne Visser reads Chapter 1 from his book, The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business. Part 1 is broken into the following sections: - The meaning of responsibility - The failure of CSR

We live in an unfathomable universe. All around us are mysteries that we cannot pretend to understand. Life is a tangle of complexities, the synergies of which we can only feebly guess at. To survive this uncertainty, to prevent us from going insane with confusion, we automatically try to simplify “life, the universe and everything”. One way is through adopting beliefs – patterns of thought that t...

History shows us that science is always incomplete and very seldom synonymous with wisdom. Some say that science is always playing catch-up with our spiritual understanding. Yet, it is forever pregnant with new discoveries, insights and theories, each with the potential to completely transform our picture of the world we thought we knew and understood. Seen in this context, modern brain-mind resea...

What are the positive signs - the stories of hope? Well, I draw my hope from the testimony of four people. They are Edgar Mitchell, James Lovelock, Victor Frankl and George Washington Carver. But what about each of us in our own daily lives. Are we listening? I believe that, for Creation to be healed, each of us needs to be that Connection between Earth and Sky. We each need to find our own sense...

I wonder what you thought of when you saw this title - Connecting Earth and Sky? Well, for me, there are three ideas or questions which come to mind: Firstly, it is the story of creation - how did the earth and sky come to exist in the first place, and how do they fit into the grander scheme of things? Secondly, there are the environmental issues surrounding our earth and sky - what impact are we...

With the rich texture of African soil once again beneath my feet, the warm sun on my back, and the Cape South Easter wind tugging at my hair, my body and soul have unmistakably returned home.  My mind, however, still drifts back and forth between this land and another, the ancient land of the Celts, where I spent the past year studying and experiencing human ecology. A year earlier I had left Sout...

After various world summits on sustainable development, we should take care not to mistake this single event for the greater symphony of change that it heralds. Like fleas on an elephant, we need to jump back and see the greater whole – the challenge of creating a sustainable world. However you want to define it, in the end, it comes down to our ability to endure. Those that understand how social...

This episode deals with the crucial debate that is beginning to emerge about corporate social responsibility (CSR), which acknowledges that the sophistication of stakeholder challenges and corporate responses has gone up a gear, but questions whether CSR itself is too little too late, or even a red herring. Is CSR a distraction from the more fundamental transformation (perhaps revolution even) of...

As the new millennium looms large on the horizon, speculation about humanity’s recent progress are becoming ever more frequent.  Even more so are whisperings that humanity might be teetering on the threshold of a new phase in its evolutionary development.  Not surprisingly, a search for new images and metaphors to serve as positive visions for the future has begun in earnest.  The purpose of this...

Surprisingly little has been written about the search for meaning in a workplace or business context, and nothing, in my knowledge, has made the explicit link to corporate social responsibility (CSR). It is surprising, partly because meaning has been a serious topic of research and application for at least fifty years now, following the seminal work of Viktor Frankl and others, as have the fields...

In this episode, I want to explode a few myths about corporate responsibility in developing countries. Most of these myths exist as a result of the feeding frenzy that inevitably occurs every time the media has hunted down and sunk its teeth into one or other juicy story of corporate exploitation. The myths are also sustained, however, by whole legions of largely well-intentioned people in develop...

In any war, one of the mantras that has been repeatedly chanted by the military and media alike is the so-called “battle for the hearts and minds”. Take the Iraq war for example. The more cynical commentators have dubbed this the “propaganda war”. It strikes me that today’s multinationals are engaged in a very similar battle – to win over the hearts and minds of a growing number of sceptics and cr...

It is not uncommon to hear our present global economic system being compared to a predatory natural environment. We might imagine the market as a great African plain where competition for scarce resources dominates the life of every species. We can see successful companies as the supreme hunters in this eat-or-be-eaten world, like the awesome lions of the bushveld . It is certainly a compelling an...

There are a growing number of critics who claim a direct link between the advancement of industrial development based on neo-classical economics thinking and the erosion of communities. This erosion has in turn exacerbated numerous other social problems and created negative effects such as economic dependence, community disempowerment, cultural breakdown, social diseases and environmental destruct...

Ethical investment – also called social investment, socially responsible investment and green investment – is an international trend which refers broadly to the conscious use of investments to achieve social, ethical and environmental performance objectives, over and above the usual financial returns. The relevance of the ethical investment movement lies in its potential to deliver good financial...

The world we live in is exceedingly complex. We use indicators to simplify things. Indicators work in the same way as a map. They are meant to be a guide, a representation of reality, which help us to understand the lie of the land. The scale of the map and what it is trying to measure will determine how accurately and completely it approximates reality.  It is the same with indicators. Some indic...

Many see the “failure” of most African economies in terms of a neglect of their peoples to foster home-grown indigenous business cultures that are in harmony with the African soil and soul.  And they are working hard to rekindle native values in business contexts, to provide the sparks needed to transform the economy into a blazing sun of new traditions in Afrocentric management. In this episode w...

In our modern economies and businesses, unlimited growth is constantly striven for, institutionalised, almost idolised.  We hold it up as the measure of success.  Yet, by doing this, we could be sowing the seeds of our own destruction.  We know this because in nature, unlimited physical growth is almost nowhere to be seen. When it does occur, we call it cancer, or imminent species collapse, or eco...

For me, the image of the phoenix from Native American Indian mythology rising up from the ashes of its dead body symbolises our potential to transform the dying metaphor of business as a ‘rational machine’ into a new metaphor:  business as a ‘living whole’. This idea arose out of one of my business lectures at university some years ago in which Peters and Waterman’s famed bestseller, In Search of...

Although it is heartening to note the growing worldwide interest in building sustainable communities for the future, it is at the same time disconcerting that so many of these community visions provide no place for the potential role of business within their working structure. What shapes and forms might business take if it were to be integrated into the community vision, with its implicit goal of...

There is a growing body of literature on what could be loosely described as explorations in ‘new paradigm’ thinking. Included in this is an implicit belief about the nature of transformation.  It is that revolutionary change is more often the result of new ways of thinking about things (i.e. changes in perception) than new ways of doing things. This episode attempts to apply this thinking to busin...

Season 2 of Purpose Inspired is based on the book Business Frontiers: Social Responsibility, Sustainable Development and Economic Justice. Why business frontiers? Well, business operates at the frontiers of society – seeking out new territories to explore and exploit, imagining fresh new ways to meet age old needs, innovating the artefacts that become the legacy of civilisations, reinventing the r...