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Alizia Farid
Bus 102
Section 24
25 May 2019

Rangan, K., Chase, L., & Karim, S. (2015). The Truth About CSR. Harvard Business Review, 40-50. Retrieved May
24, 2019.

Introduction:

This review intends to evaluate the article’s effectiveness in describing and supporting the author’s main arguments
about corporate social responsibility. In The Truth About CSR, Kasturi Rangan, Lisa Chase, and Sohel Karim state
how CSR in the most recent years has gone off track from its actual purpose. The authors claim that there is an
increasing pressure to have CSR set up as a business discipline and that every program to deliver business like
results. However, this practice of CSR is not appropriate for businesses because CSR outcomes should be a result of
“overspill, not their reason of being” (42.) According to the authors, CSR’s true purpose is “to align a company’s
social and environmental activities with its business purpose and values. If in doing so CSR activities mitigate risks,
enhance reputation, and contribute to business results” (42.) Since there is such as large discrepancy about CSR
practices, the authors call for a complete refocusing of companies CSR programs. For the past decade, the authors
have ran interviews with managers, directors and CEOs that were involved with a company’s CSR strategy. As a
result, the authors have devised a “systematic process for bringing coherence and discipline to CSR strategies” (42.)
Overall, I believe the article is effective in conveying and supporting the author’s argument.

Background Information:

Katsuri Rangan is professor at Harvard Business School and is currently the Malcolm P. McNair Professor of
Marketing. He received his bachelors, MBA, and PhD degree from Northwestern University. After graduating, he
worked on many executive education programs for a wide variety of non-profit enterprises. Soon after he joined as a
faculty member of Harvard business school in 1983. He has taught a wide variety of MBA courses in marketing
such as: First-Year Marketing, Business Marketing, Channels-to-Market, the Advanced Management Program for
senior managers, and, currently, Business at the Base of the Pyramid. He has 10 book publications and almost
double the article publications. His work has been recognized and appeared in many management journals such as
Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing and so on. He has also won many awards due to his publications.
For example, his most recent award was the 2014 Case Centre Award in the Economics, Politics and Business
Environment Category for his case "Alpen Bank: Launching the Credit Card in Romania.”

Sohel Karim was born in Mumbai India and received his MBA from Bajaj Institute. In 1987, Sohel moved to
Cambridge to purse his doctoral degree at Harvard University. For many years he worked at Copernicus Marketing.
In 2009 he established the Socient Associates that work alongside many nonprofit organizations.

Given the author’s credentials and many achievements I say they are more than qualified to talk about CSR. In fact,
their advice given in the article is very much insightful due to their experiences and research on the topic.

Summary:

As mentioned earlier, the authors believe that the current practices of CSR are very much out of line with the true
purpose of it. For instance, many CSR programs are uncoordinated and are being ran by a variety of managers
without the engagement of the CEO. As a result, many companies are not able to maximize the positive impact of
their social and environmental operations. In order to combat these issues, the authors call for a refocusing of CSR
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strategies. This is done by “developing coherent CSR strategies, with activities typically divided among three
theaters of practice” (43.) Theater one focuses on philanthropy, where programs will not focus on producing profits
but doing charity like work. Theater two focuses on improving operational effectiveness or in other words, “business
models (that) deliver social or environmental benefits in ways that support a company’s operations across the value
chain, often improving efficiency and effectiveness” (43.) For example, the reduction of resource use that is
beneficial to the environment but also reduces cost for the company. Finally, theater three focuses on transforming
the existing (or new) business model to in order to create shared value. After evaluating a firm’s CSR activities, then
they can take the necessary steps to bring discipline and coherency. The authors have created four steps in order to
do so, “Companies must prune existing programs in each theater to align them with the firm’s purpose and values;
develop ways of measuring initiatives’ success; coordinate programs across theaters; and create an interdisciplinary
management team to drive CSR strategy” (43.) After doing these four steps the authors believe that a firm’s CSR
should be aligned with the business’s purpose, the values of the shareholders, and the needs of the community in
which the firm operates in.

Evaluation:

After reading, The Truth about CSR, I believe the article has managed to do an exceptional job of conveying and
supporting the author’s main argument. Every claim, example, argument, was logically sound and presented in a
well-organized manner. I am very much in agreement with the authors when they state that CSR’s true purpose is to
“ align a company’s social and environmental activities with its business purpose and values. If in doing so CSR
activities mitigate risks, enhance reputation, and contribute to business results” (42.) Also, I believe their steps in
order to improve a firm’s CSR was very effective and can be applied to real life situations.

This article had many strengthens. One of its strengths was its realistic examples with actual corporations. When
explaining theater three and creating shared value, the authors used Project Shakti as their real example in order to
better convey the idea. As a reader, defining shared value isn't simply enough and the authors recognized this by
giving this real life example in order to better get the idea across. The authors do this many times throughout the
article which in my opinion, helped significantly strengthen it.

Another strengthen of the article was its four defining steps. Each step was logical and can be applied in order to fix
a company's CSR strategy. Also, each step had an actual example to prove that the step had actually worked. For
example the PNC bank and step one, where the bank had cut its old program and created a new program that was
better in line with the business. Also, each step was placed in a logical order that made the reader understand the
process as a whole even better.

The only small downfall of this article was its use of images in the article. Out of the seven images provided in the
article only two were beneficial to my understanding of the article. Other than those two, the rest were random and
did not contribute anything to my understanding. For example, there was an image of a tree in the article but no
mention of it, leading the reader to ask “why is it there?” I believe the implementation of charts, diagrams, or images
with subtitles would have greatly taken this article up another 5%.

Conclusion:

Overall I found this article to very informative and helpful. I believe any company that is struggling with it CSR’s
strategies should take a look at this article and use it as a guide. Also, I believe business students should refer to this
article because it very useful advice they can take into their career.