GlobalCCU Press Room
Chief Learning Officer
Published December 2008
Corporate Social
Responsibility: How Can Learning Contribute
Annick Renaud Coulon
One emerging element in executive education has been corporate
social responsibility. How can the learning organization encourage
this sort of behavior, which ultimately has a positive effect
on the bottom line? The idea that education is the key to everything
isn't new. Plato was a fervent critic of the civilization in
which he lived, which was rife with corruption, and saw education
as a means of creating the ideal society. Confucius believed
that education not only offered a means to establish a reign
of virtue, but could also change human nature and improve it
in a qualitative way. In some ways, the world hasn't changed
much since antiquity. Human behavior - its foundations, selfishness
and selflessness - remain unchanged. Virtue is still a much sought
after commodity, and education is the best means of finding solutions
to the world's ills.
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CLO-Blog
Published June 2008
Corporate Social Responsibility
Revisited
Brian Summerfield
A few months ago, I wrote an article
for CLO magazine’s Executive Briefings newsletter about
the role of the learning function in corporate social responsibility
(CSR) initiatives. In the piece, I talked to Annick Renaud-Coulon,
who has promoted the idea of using the corporate university as
a means to CSR ends in her native Europe and beyond. (You can
find that article here.) In the story, I asked her if there is
any substantial benefit to employing the corporate university
in the service of social responsibility that goes any farther
than being a feel-good exercise. She said that pressure from
organizations’ stakeholders (in both Europe and North America)
to enhance and expand CSR programs is rising, and those organizations
would have to use existing resources in new ways to improve in
this area. Renaud-Coulon maintained that one of the best resources
for this is the corporate university, which is a powerful lever
for effecting changes in views and behaviors.
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Executive Briefings
Published March 2008
Can Corporate Universities
Play a Role in CSR? Should They?
Brian Summerfield
Members of
Generation Y — and to a lesser extent, Gen Xers — are
commonly said to desire two things from their employers: robust
development opportunities and a sense of social responsibility.
These corporate “carrots” are fine by themselves,
but never the twain shall meet, right? Maybe not. Annick Renaud-Coulon,
an international thought leader in learning and development and
the principal founder of the Global Council of Corporate Universities,
believes there can and should be a relationship between the two.
In fact, she’s spent a substantial part of her recent career
advocating greater involvement from corporate universities in
their organizations’ CSR initiatives.
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