Coke Cleans Up African Water

Chris McDonald - one of my favorite bloggers - just posted a story entitled, "Coke, CSR, and Water." (See The Business Ethics Blog) In it, he poses a challenging question about whether doing something out of self interest (i.e. opening the African market to selling more Coke) is an ethical approach to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) if the increased market also presents a threat to health. Whew! Admittedly, McDonald sees both sides of the coin (as he always seems to, by the way).

His challenge raises the issue in corporate ethics that goes deeper than helping some African nations. The question that I believe needs asking at Coke - and every other corporation including my own - is, "What do our actions say about our true and deeply held beliefs?"

I worked on strategic planning with a trade association of distributors of alcoholic beverages and was constantly blocked on trying to get them to look at the broader, longer-term issues. Even when asked in a totally self-serving way, the questions about whether the future may contain some threats to their livelihood and hold some opportunities to look at alternatives to distributing alcohol were simply not open for discussion. Their actions told me that their true belief was that distributing alcohol was the only business to be in. (A bigger problem may be that they are focusing on their product, not their business, but that's for another discussion).

Corporate Social Responsibility is not merely about how we spend corporate dollars or what programs we can create to help others. It is, at its core, about who we are and what we are doing in relation to the rest of the world - starting with our internal and external customers, and then going out to our stakeholders, local and global communities.

McDonald's confusion about Coke's CSR, I would submit, comes not from the dilemma of trading the good of clean water for access to more sugar in poor African communities, but from the bigger question about how products with potential dangers can be recreated so that they pose no threat. Or about how balance can be built in to their sale and use. Or about how consumers are educated about moderation.

Coke is not a villian here, but they may very well be missing an opportunity to make a much bigger contribution to society as a whole - even while serving the interests of their stockholders.