Managing CSR Initiatives to Maximize Business Impact: Inside the Black Box of CSR Strategy

The debate on the relationship between corporate social responsibility and financial performance has been raging for decades. We propose to move beyond it, and to look instead at how companies can harness CSR for business impact. To do that, we suggest that we need to look at individual initiatives, rather than treat CSR as a single, unitary project. Through a multi-phase study of a large multinational company operating in the food & beverage industry, we propose that “impact” should be decomposed into direct, indirect and transformational impact. We further explore some determinants of income, and establish the importance of fit of the initiatives with the dominant stakeholder, the need for executive involvement, the merits of a balanced approach between social and business actions and the relevance of multiple mechanisms to transfer lessons learned.