How we can make corporate sustainability and responsibility work (5-star Amazon Review)

By Andrew Dalby

(Oxford, UK)

Visser has been involved in CSR for the last twenty years and even he acknowledges that so far it has often failed and been nothing more than window dressing and green wash. For the first part of the book he looks at the history of CSR by using examples such as BP and Cadbury. He has shown how in the past we have failed because we look at repairing the consequences and not dealing with the causes. The second part of the book looks how we can change CSR to CSR 2.0 with the change from corporate social responsibility to corporate sustainability and responsibility. He tries to take a very pragmatic and not an idealistic (Utopian) approach and he sort of gets there but I am not convinced that we will make it. Certainly many in the new generation of business leaders will live by the "Do no evil" motto, but there is still a large amount of business that will not change its methods. 

This book should be essential reading for any MBA course. With the right focus I think we can build the critical momentum for the change to CSR 2.0 to succeed, but I suspect that not enough people will get the message and the ideas will not be widely adopted, and so over-shoot and collapse will become inevitable and only through this will business change.