I had a quick breezy flick through "From Grain to Grass" as I am writing this note and it sure will gain my full attention. All credit to Leo Keily and Cornell Boggs for standing behind such an initiative. Not much to say here other than my eyes will devour the Miller Coors social responsibility report from cover to cover. I have a good feel about this, even though some of the intro wording felt a little like corporate speak, but overall at a first look it has certainly intuitively authentic qualities about it, enough for me to perk and spark my own personal interest - (thanks for the heads up link on this)...M.

Tonight I read through the first 60 pages of Larry Kane's book called "Lennon Revealed" and of course the 44 paged document "From Grain to Grass" from MillerCoors. The aha moment in this joint 100 page observation was Kane describing how John Lennon beat up Stu Sutcliffe kicking him repeatedly in the head in a moment of drunken rage. That was in the early part of 1961. Interestingly Stu Sutcliffe died of a brain haemorage in 1962 and Kane explained how much Sutcliffe meant to Lennon and how his death shaped the rest of the John Lennon's life. Reading this made me see that social responsibility is every action we take and that it has some kind of affect no matter if it is unintended consequence or contributory negligence. What made John Lennon "John Lennon" was his honesty, his truth. Reading through the MillerCoors document led me to see that there has been a tremendous effort to develop and bring to fruition MillerCoors social responsibility policies and practices, and reading it gave me a great sense of their business model, the MillerCoor commercial and partnership ecosystem and the broad umbrella thinking that shows that social responsibility is a true part of modern day business sense. I didn't get a sense in what went wrong in making things right at MillerCoors, other than a brief smidgeon about an air pollution problem that incurred a penalty and to be fair in today's world it is the "other guy" who tells us that particular story. What I did get a sense of was a wide array of responsibility initiatives that become corporate markers. Initiatives are a great step, they make good business sense and if John Lennon's image of "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine" defined how we see him, why wouldn't we accord MillerCoors the same privilege here? It would be nice to live in a world where there is no need for the production of social responsibility reports because then we would be living in the presence of dynamic forms of human partnership in all forms of endeavour. But we can't do that today, for very few of us can admit (let alone to ourselves) that we can be even a tiny bit flawed, but we generally know what we hide or would not want to disclose. What would I write in my own social responsibility report as an individual? Surely I would only be required to do that if we lived in a world that perpetuated a constant flow of distrust. That would be interesting to me because seemingly we are in a constant push to get others to explain themselves year in and year out, that if we reversed this process to ourselves, we would wake up to new realizations and wisdoms that I think simply would not occur to us today. To realize that trust is a two way thing is easier said than done. What I learned tonight is that I must pay more attention to the stuff that is working, because as far as I envisage it, I don't really want to become a very good little social brand politician, but someone who increasingly reminds myself about my own social responsibility. If I am true to John Lennon as I am to MillerCoors, then I will respect them for what they are good at by studying their efforts before the easy criticism and I will also pay attention when there is a movement in the right direction. There is movement in the right direction here. Is it perfect? I don't know, but I know its a start and it is a start worth paying some attention to . . . M.