Fast Talk: Hail, global citizens!

Debra Dunn

Senior vice president, corporate affairs
Hewlett-Packard Co.
Palo Alto, California

There has been a tendency in the business world to confuse citizenship with philanthropy. They're not the same thing. Enron was a great philanthropist, and clearly, it was not a good corporate citizen. The heart of global citizenship is about ethics and conduct.

It begins with the way a company thinks about its role in the world. Does it simply exist to make as much money as possible? At Hewlett-Packard, the question we ask ourselves is this: How do we consistently address multiple stakeholders, including customers, employees, and the communities we're a part of?

Collaboration between sectors is critical, and it's also the biggest challenge we face. Business, government, and nonprofit organizations all have important roles to play, but frankly, we have not done a fabulous job of working together. Many nonprofit organizations have staked their claim on pointing out the evils of the corporate world. All of that can be difficult. The first step toward progress is taking a seat at the table and then sitting there long enough. Trust takes time.

At HP, we put full-time people on the ground for three years in India to work with government and nonprofit organizations on a project we call "i-communities." One of our first initiatives is in a rural area named Kuppam, where one in three citizens is illiterate and more than half of households have no electricity. Early on, we asked community members, "What are the biggest problems here and how can technology help?" This wasn't HP saying, We've got a great thing for you. We can go off and innovate alone and maybe even do it faster, but the reality is that none of us has all of the ingredients required to create sustainable impact.

Tachi Kiuchi

Chairman, The Future 500
Managing director, Mitsubishi Electric Corp.
Tokyo, Japan

Are the needs of the corporation and the world in conflict? In the long run, they can't be. Today, 600 million of the Earth's inhabitants enjoy the material benefits of industrialism. Soon, 2.5 billion more--China, India, the former Soviet republics--will join us. The final 3 billion people will follow. To accommodate all those people in terms of resources today, we would need three planets. So how can the needs of the world be met in the future? The truth is, we can't build a sustainable economy. We can only grow one. That's a lesson I learned from the rain forest. The vitality of nature comes from its capacity to cultivate more advanced forms of life and then support them for billions of years on finite resources and a fixed flow of energy from the sun. That happens through a constant process of feedback and adaptation. In the global economy, the problem is, we are blocking feedback. As companies extend their reach, they become less tied to the communities they serve. Ecological and social costs and benefits never appear on our balance sheets. Feedback only exists in the form of direct financial returns. If there is not adequate feedback, there's no adaptation. No adaptation, no innovation. It becomes hard to respond effectively to change. We become vulnerable. People talk about businesses needing to be responsible as if it's something new we need to do on top of everything else. But the whole essence of business should be responsibility. My philosophy is, we don't run companies to earn profits. We earn profits to run companies. Our companies need meaning and purpose if they're to fit into the world, or why should they live at all?