In the rating era it is probably easy to be dazzled by the bottom line of the contribution and look away from the more fundamental questions, regarding the social responsibility of businesses known as CSR (Social Corporate Responsibility).

Questions regarding environment responsibility, employees & suppliers working environment, ethics and values are issues that in most cases hard to measure their immediate impact.

Therefore, some Israeli executives prefer to brag about the extent of community contribution and to ignore the profound influence of their company activities on the human and ecological environment.

European companies differ from the Israeli ones in that sense. 

A research held last month, by RSM University in Holland, in which 200 of the largest companies in Europe were asked; what are the most significant  \ important issues in the field of "corporate responsibility" (and not in the field of Social corporate responsibility) it turned out that social charity has long ago dropped down to the end of the list.

The impact on the environment and the business transparency were at the top of the list, followed by fair trade and employment as well as fighting corruption.

Many companies acknowledge that social charity is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of corporate responsibility and that they need to accept responsibility for all the fields included.

However, the real improvement will occur only if all the organizations' stakeholders, will put pressure on the firms (as clients, in the media or through regulation) and mainly draw the public attention toward the real important issues.

It was not by mistake that the "S" that stands for "Social", was removed from the CSR initials. This clears that the responsibilities issues are in the heart of the business doing, and not at the Social niche.

Executives at the business channel, are tested in the extent of their corporate responsibility and high marks in the measures testing them, constitute a measure for growth and company competitive.

The article was published at Israel's "the marker" newspaper (Nov 13th 2007)

The author is Ivry Varbin - CEO of 'Goodvision', an Israeli consulting firm in the field of corporate responsibility.

(Translated from Hebrew by Proletar.com staff).