Just Good Business: The Strategic Guide to Aligning Corporate Responsibility and Brand

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) can help companies build customer loyalty, recruit and retain employees, and stand out in a crowded marketplace. But to be most effective, CSR must be intimately connected to the corporate brand—it must reinforce a company’s unique identity and be an integral part of how a company tells its story. How can your company make the most of this potential competitive advantage and business strategy?

Kellie McElhaney, one of the world’s leading experts on CSR strategy, offers a detailed process for seamlessly integrating your CSR efforts into your overall business objectives. “My goal,” she writes, “is not to tell you how to force your CSR strategy to be more authentic. My goal is actually to help you develop a CSR strategy that is authentic because of its natural linkage to your company’s mission, vision, and values.”

Just Good Business lays out a framework of seven principles that help you develop CSR initiatives that make good business sense and tell the world about them in ways that are compelling and memorable. McElhaney offers a wealth of practical advice on implementation, including how to measure the results of your CSR.

McElhaney draws on over ten years of previously unpublished CSR consulting engagements inside companies grappling with developing strategically aligned CSR initiatives. The book’s case vignettes, examples, best practices, and strategic recommendations span a host of industries and sectors and draw upon her work with leading corporations, such as McDonald’s, Nokia, Levi Strauss, Digicel, Birkenstock, Gap Inc., HP, and Pepperidge Farm.

Savvy companies carefully manage their brand in every area. CSR shouldn’t be any different. Just Good Business offers a detailed blueprint that any company can use to ensure that its CSR strategy delivers significant, quantifiable, bottom-line benefits.

Kellie McElhaney is the John C. Whitehead Distinguished Faculty Fellow in Corporate Responsibility and founding director of the Center for Responsible Business at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. She developed and launched the center in January 2003. She consults to many Fortune 500 companies and was named a 2005 Faculty Pioneer for Institutional Leadership in the Aspen Institute’s biennial report Beyond Grey Pinstripes.