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Soapbox: Simon Zadek

There have been many changes in corporate social responsibility (CSR) over the past decade, all of which are signs of maturity – some good and some bad. On the good side, we understand far more about how business can be encouraged to respond to a growing set of social and environmental challenges and interfaces.

On the down side, the rapid professionalisation of the field has stripped it of much of its politics. That's a sign of success but also a source of some concern, because if one goes mainstream too quickly one is absorbed by the mainstream rather than transforming it.

As a civilisation we have no choice but to push CSR boundaries. The question is, are we doing it in a smart way or is it just a mess? The answer is a bit of both. We're bringing things into the business equation that have not been part of it historically. In fact, they've actually been systematically excluded. Business traditionally made profit by externalising costs – so dumping battery acid in the stream is not casual activity but a source of value added.

You have to show businesses money can be made by not dumping battery acid in the stream.You have to work out how to make money by recycling. We have to invent a radically new way of doing business, where internalisation, not externalisation, adds value. Standards are trying to do that in their own niche area, but they're compliance focused, not value-added focused.

The essence of the quality movement is the difference between standards movement focused on accountability as compliance, and a movement that understands that new models of quality enhance productivity and value added to an organisation, whether they're a business or a non-business.

Quality is the technical manifestation of value added. This generation of standards needs to move into the quality paradigm, where the connectivity between internalisation and value added becomes more manageable, more measurable, more communicable, and therefore more effective.

Quality managers have to step back and understand the bigger picture, to understand the change that's going on, to stop looking at one standard, one process, one issue, one procedure, and realise that extended accountability is the new quality paradigm. You need to understand that you're part of the solution, you're not only there to investigate the problem.Your mandate is probably wrong and you need to get it changed.

You need to find more people who don't think like you. Look at the magazines in the rack in a typical canteen and you see the problem in an instant: if it's DeBeers it's all about diamonds, if it's GE it's all about money. To grow the competences you will need for the next generation of your work you have to understand that you've been brought up to exist within a certain type of knowledge core and that needs to change.

The core competency of many people working in the quality area is about how standards work and the variety of different kinds. As well as being active individually, they need to encourage their associations and professional bodies to embrace the connectivity between CSR issues, processes and value added much more directly

Simon Zadek is chief executive of AccountAbility. He has advised the United Nations on CSR and published many books on the subject. For more information visit www.accountability21.net