CSR and the 7 deadly sins

Today I attended a talk by Dutch Leonard, a professor at both Harvard Business School and at the Kennedy School (and who just happens to be my boss) - it was on the topic of "CSR and the 7 deadly sins." He said he's never had a topic attract so much attention simply from the title alone.

I'm excited to be able to post about this idea, because it's something we've discussed before, but I didn't think it would be fair to blog about it before it's been presented publicly.

The basic argument is that certain traits are part of human nature - and that's why we have moral codes against them. In the case of the seven deadly sins, these are Sloth, Greed, Wrath, Lust, Gluttony, Envy and Pride.

If you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, these traits are adapted to a much earlier environment - one that was calorie-scarece and didn't involve so many close neighbors. But today's world is quite different, and evolution is a slow process, so at this point they are mal-adaptations. They are human weaknesses.

In the business world, there is a school of thought which says that choice and freedom are inherently good, and more of them is better, consumers are rational, and if people make "bad" decisions they have the right to. I find this to be one of the more compelling arguments in the anti-CSR contingent.

However, when you look at human nature and the choices we make in terms of evolutionary weaknesses that have been hard-wired into us (or, if you take a religious perspective, that have been part of man's downfall for millenia) - then the "choice" defense isn't so air-tight.

Dutch makes the point that corporations can have several level of engagement with these human weaknesses. They can:

1. ignore them, but offer what people want to buy.
   
2. purposefully neglect to disclose some of the ill effects of products such as junk food and cigarettes.
3. proactively design products that exploit these weaknesses in order to activate customers.

In the tobacco industry, all of these things happened - and that may be why the public outcry was so intense. It's one thing to offer freedom of choice, but another to adapt your products to take advantage of people's baser instincts.

This is a new vein of research for him, so the "answers" are still in development, but he mentioned "consumer-driven CSR" as one key area that might drive companies to design products with better morals in mind.

Coincidentally, I've been working hard on my own article about just that! Stay tuned for more on that.