CSR for HR - reviewed in German

My German is a little rusty, but I can just about make out the gist of this review of CSR for HR which appeared in the informative German professional journal Human Resources Manager, which is, for those of you who understand a little of the lingo:

die offizielle Publikation vom Bundesverband der Personalmanager (BPM) und vermittelt auf 110 Seiten aktuelle Informationen rund um zentrale Themen des Personalmanagements wie Führungskräfte- und Personalentwicklung, Arbeitsrecht, Employer Branding, Rekrutierung, Mitarbeiterführung und in­ter­natio­nales HR-Management.

Here is the review that appeared in the hard copy of the magazine:

Anyway, what I have managed to understand from this article, is that Personalmanagement ist eine der Schlüsselfunktionen in der Gesellschaftsverantwortung von Unternehmen. which roughly translated means HRM is a key function in CSR. Sure takes longer to say it in German!  I also managed to get that a Weckruf is a wake-up call (as in "HR Managers, Wake up!!! It's time to embed CSR!"). The review finishes with the words: Ein ungewöhnliches Buch – aber dennoch lesenswert. Which I think means... "this is rather an unusual book, but still worth reading".  I wonder if the reviewer meant unusual = highly creative or unusual = totally weird. Being an eternal optimist, I will assume the former ha-ha.  

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices. Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en

Ralph Thurm reviews CSR for HR

There's somethng wonderful about reading a great review of a book you have written. It's more than feeling great about getting positive feedback. It's more about the fact that, when someone takes the time to read a book, and is driven to write about it afterwards, you feel that your efforts have not been in vain and that your message is getting through. I have been fortunate in that many respected and accomplished people have read and reviewed CSR for HR, and the most recent is Ralph Thurm.

Ralph is a mover and shaker in sustainability. He is a leading professional in sustainability strategies, operational sustainability and sustainability reporting. With more than 20 years experience working for major corporates, industry federations, governments and NGOs all over the world, Ralph adds value as a consultant, trainer, moderator or writer on a huge variety of sustainability topics. Ralph spent years as a sustainablility leader with Siemens, three years as Chief Operating Officer of the GRI, and is currently Director, Sustainability Strategies at Deloitte in The Netherlands. Ralph is always at the centre of whatever is going on in sustainability circles. Read his post about his meeting with Al Gore and you can get a sense of the breadth of Ralph's appreciation for core issues, or read his entry in the Harvard e-book on Integrated Reporting (part VIII - perspectives on an action strategy, page 218),  and you get a glimpse of his vision and hopes for corporate sustainability and reporting strategy.

This is Ralph's review in full, which you can find here, posted on his blog A|HEAD|ahead.

"If one looks at the development steps of CSR in the last decade it became painfully clear that the paradigm change towards sustainability needed to be implemented in all company’s functions. Overcoming the silo thinking to empower better and a more holistic awareness-building and integration of CSR was/is obviously needed if an organization will also thrive in the future. All in all we need to admit that we have been extremely busy with the technicalities part of this task, often forgetting the people part of the story. It is so easy to believe that if an organization has done its homework on management systems, data systems, governance, reporting and measurement, one could wait for the outcomes to simply come as a given. One of most often forgotten pieces in the puzzle was the Human Resources function of an organization.

Finally there is help! Elaine Cohen, one of the most active bloggers in the field, living in Israel, and running Beyond Business Ltd., a small CSR consultancy there, has created an enormously useful baseline through her book ‘CSR for HR – A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices’, a must read for everybody who either works in the HR function and wants to develop a view on how to support CSR in their daily life, or for everybody outside the HR function looking for arguments why the HR function has an important role to play and needs to overcome some genuine mental stereotypes.

Elaine uses a nice plot for a whole array of protagonists that would argue for and against a role of HR in CSR: her main protagonist Sharon is actually one of those. Over a couple of weeks Sharon goes through a metamorphosis from being an HR Manager and more and more becoming a CSHR Manager. The nice way of telling the story in a plot like this is that more or less all arguments that one could run against in this challenging metamorphosis comes back in the book, and in that sense delivers refreshing yet convincing arguments any reader can use from the next day onwards.

Another important point to make about Elaine’s book is that she has interwoven the plot with a lot of readymade materials (slides, checklists, book summaries and articles) that can be used as blueprints for readers to start their own pilgrimage. In essence, reading Elaine’s book saves the reader a lot of time reading other articles and books.

One of the main takeaways also having read Michael Porter’s newest article ‘Creating shared value’ in HBR 1/2011, is how the book already plays very well into the needed change that HR also needs to make, namely the shift form ‘HR as an impact ON staff’ towards using the HR function to ‘create an impact OF staff’.

To sum it up: Elaine Cohen’s book is the right book at the right moment, written in a very useful way that makes it ‘ready to use’ from day 1 onwards. There is no excuse any longer for HR practitioners to ignoring CS’HR’ due to the lack of a ‘cooking book’ of recipes. The roadmap how to embed is included in the book as well – of course! "

I would like to express my thanks to Ralph for reading and reviewing CSH for HR.  I am sure his influential voice will help spread the message that it is time for HR to wake up to CSR!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices.  Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en

CSR for HR is rather jolly

Another review of CSR for HR, this time by the creative, dynamic and very influential Solitaire Townsend, founder and leader of Futerra Sustainability Communications , a leading light in all things to do with making the concept of sustainability more accessible, intelligible and authentic. Solly is a true powerhouse in this space, and her voice carries much weight, which is why I am honoured to see her review of CSR for HR on the People Management Magazine website.

The review starts off like this:

Elaine Cohen has been a powerful voice in the corporate social responsibility and sustainability movement for many years. Turns out she also has a secret aptitude for fiction.

That could be a rather sarcastic start to a review of her new book, CSR for HR. Except that this is an overt work of fiction, and a rather jolly one at that. We follow the story of Sharon, a fictional HR director who sets out on a journey of CSR discovery. This is a fantastic ploy to entertain the knowledgeable, while filling in the gaps for the new entrants to CSR.

 

Sharon delves into the definitions of CSR, learns from the real-life achievements of Body Shop, Gap, Nike, Microsoft, Ben and Jerry’s, Google and energy company Vattenfall. The book is stuffed with mini-articles, models, a road map to get started and interviews between Sharon and real leaders in CSR.

and finishes up like this:

Nevertheless, this is a must-read for HR professionals, students and those interested in holistic management. It’s rare to find a business book where you learn as much from the protagonist’s chats with her daughter as from the case studies. Enjoy.

You can read the full review here.

My thanks to Solly for taking the time to read the book and for the wonderful review. Anyone who helps get the message out to the HR community that it is time for HR to wake up to CSR is a VSP (Very Special Person)  and I am highly appreciative. I hope the HR community will be, one day, too!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices. Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en

CSR for HR: more buzz from Business that Cares

Another wonderful review of CSR for HR just published by Lalia Helmer on the Business that Cares blog. Lalia is the founder of Luminis Consulting, and she is a coach, trainer and facilitator, helping people to create value for themselves and others, using Positive Psychology and Appreciative Enquiry. Lalia has written a fabulous, insightful review of CSR for HR. You can follow Lalia at @laliahelmer. Here is some of what she says:

"Reading CSR FOR HR by Elaine Cohen has successfully answered some key questions that have I been chewing over in my head. The book follows the very engaging format of a fictionalized character, Sharon an HR executive, guided by another fictional character named Arena, who initiates her into the world of CSR. As the main character meets and learns from other CSR practitioners, that serve as her teachers and guides, the various functions of CSR within corporate organizations, she also learns what role and responsibility HR can take in changing corporate culture by integrating a CSR perspective into all of the its functions.

As though I was initiated too, this book was an eye opener for me to view what I have considered to be primarily HR functions as a form of Social Responsibility....Having worked as an organizational development consultant, facilitator and trainer I have seen how the role of corporate culture change often falls on the shoulders of HR. Now CSR practitioners are also change agents banging on the doors of the traditional corporate mindset to become more aware of their responsibility to bring about the kind of social benefits that affect their companies, the employees, and now the world.  An alliance of these two change agencies may be just the line of attack to bring down the some of the barriers to change that many companies still hold up."

You can read the full review here. 

 
Thank you Lalia for reading CSR for HR and for taking the time to write such a positive review. Thank you for helping spread the mantra : It is time for HR to wake up to CSR! 
 
I will be doing more spreading the mantra in Ede in the Netherlands on March 8th 2011 (yes, International Women's Day, what a great day to talk about CSR and HR) at a conference for HR and CSR professionals. More about that in due course.

In the meantime, time to catch up on your reading ? :)

 

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices. Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en

Aequology and CSR for HR

I woke up this morning to a wonderful surprise: a fabulous review of CSR for HR by Frederic Page, a business consultant, trainer and coach with interest in  Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability, Environment and Human Rights. Frederic lives in Barcelona, one of my favourite cities, and he also writes the Aequology blog, where he published the aforementioned review. Frederic is also a frequent #CSR Tweeter at @carbonimpact, and I enjoy his often humorous and always interesting tweets which appear daily on my Tweetdeck. One more point -  Frederic was one of the winners of the CSR for HR book giveaway sponsored by CSRwire.com last month.

Frederic writes in his review : 

"CSR for HR is a very meaningful book by a knowledgable author whose effective storytelling provides the compelling evidence that “a partnership” – between HR and CSR – is needed to advance “responsible business practices”. Although the Author has included few fictional characters to support her point, the situations, comments and people described in the book are absolutely realistic and will sound familiar to most of the readers. Along with those fictional characters, Elaine Cohen mentions and quotes some of the most well-known experts working in the fields of HR, CSR and Sustainability such as Julie Urlaub of Taiga Company, Chris Jarvis of Realized Worth or Cathy Joseph. Finally, it’s nice to see that the Author has managed to stay away from any technical jargon and smartly uses humor and anecdotes all along the narrative."

Frederic then goes on to describe the apporach and key areas covered in the book. But the best paragraph of all is this:

"Yesterday I met up with my friend Victoria, a young and talented HR manager, working with a multinational IT company and I asked her what she knew about Corporate Social Responsibility and if it was part of her role and responsibilities. She, almost literally, answered: “I have to admit that I don’t know what corporate social responsibility involves. I’m not sure why it’s important. ” We enjoyed our Cookie Dough ice cream, chatting about other topics, before having a walk along the sea in Barcelona. When I went back home I ordered a copy of HR for CSR. It will be the perfect Christmas gift for Victoria and, hopefully, the beginning of a great journey!"

You can read the full review here.

The nice thing about that last paragraph is that it validates the  message of CSR for HR. That message is, as you know by now, it is time for HR to wake up to CSR! Frederic's friend, Victoria, admitted not to knowing what CSR is all about and why it affects her HR role. This is the basic tenet on which CSR for HR is based - the fact that HR professionals have not caught up with the way sustainability is changing businesses and what they have a responsibility to do about it. I am thankful to Frederic for passing the message on, and glad that CSR for HR will, through him, reach another HR professional. I hope Victoria gains new insights from CSR for HR, which will lead to changes in  HR processes in her company. In the meantime, I was wondering, well, errr,  what does  Cookie Dough ice cream actually taste like ?!  

I would like to thank Frederic for taking time to read CSR for HR, and for writing and publishing a terrific review!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices. Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en

CSR for HR in Poland

What a wonderful surprise! CSR for HR's first review on Amazon.com from Pawel Szaradowski of Poland.

Here is the review:

Corporate Responsible Business (CSR) and Sustainability Development (SD). What does it mean? What is hidden behind these terms? Who is responsible for creating, running and control CSR strategy in company? How many time will take company to become responsible. A year? Five years? Which strategy is better? One huge project, or "slice by slice".

You will find answer here. Please read story of fictional HR director - Sharon. When we met her she knows nothing about CSR. We are witnesses of honing her skills in this subject.

It's easy to read book. Full of dialogs. (I know it's very rare in business not adventure books). Such construction helps readers to understand CSR and SD. For instance Sharon - main character asks questions which we wish to ask.

Interesting book with full of ready to use examples.

It contains facts and arguments for implementing CSR in company.

It shows how much important role have HR department in each company not only in global corporations.  

Actually, Pawel wrote to me to tell me that he had posted this review and also mentioned that the company he works for in Poland is now just starting some CSR activities.

There is something really special about reaching a beginner CSR practitioner in a different country with a different language with a book that help create new insights and lead to new actions in a business. If there is a reason to write about CSR, this is it!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices.  Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en