Archive for July, 2009
The Future of Corporate Human Rights Accountability
Many corporate counsel and human rights advocates will view last month’s $15.5 million settlement of Wiwa v. Shell, correctly, as further evidence that the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) is a viable tool for corporate human rights accountability. The future of corporate human rights accountability, however, is more likely to focus on human rights due diligence and reporting than human rights litigation. Companies and human rights organizations that hope to influence the business and human rights debate should devote resources to improving corporate human rights due diligence and to shaping human rights reporting requirements under national law.
Potential legal liability for corporate complicity in the worst forms of human rights abuse is now a permanent feature of doing business for most transnational companies. Some form of legal jurisdiction over the extra-territorial activities of home companies is increasingly common in OECD countries. For transnational companies doing business in the United States, the ATS provides foreign victims of the worst forms of human rights abuse a tool for holding corporations accountable for their actions abroad. (more…)
In Memoriam: Walter Cronkite, 1916-2009
Walter Cronkite passed away tonight.
And with him passed a generation’s reference point on what is important and what it means to be an engaged citizen.
Walter Cronkite and the Space Program
I have been thinking about Mr. Cronkite all week, as we approach the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.
Mr. Cronkite’s personal involvement in covering the space program brought it to life for Americans, and gave us confidence that it was worthwhile.
Worth reading: Booz & Company CEO Succession Survey, “Stability in the Storm” by Per-Ola Karlsson and Gary L. Neilson
A Leadership Test
Leaders are judged on how they deal with their most significant challenges.
As American Express CEO Ken Chenault said on the cover of the November, 2007 Fortune, “We have to remember that reputations are won or lost in a crisis.”
Each year the consulting firm Booz & Company studies CEO turnover among the 2,500 largest public companies in the world. Their report, published in Booz’ online magazine Strategy+Business, is worth reading, and provides not merely statistical data and trends, but also insights into the particular leadership challenges facing CEOs today.
The 2008 CEO Succession Survey, published this month, concludes that the financial and economic meltdown that began in the last third of last year is still causing CEO turmoil. Forced CEO turnover remained high in 2008, but those CEOs who kept their jobs aren’t out of the woods yet: (more…)
Bias and Social Media
Do you ever have one of those “A-ha!” moments when you find some piece of information that’s the missing piece of the puzzle to some problem you’ve been stewing over?
In mid-June I attended the 2009 New Media Academic Summit in Washington, D.C. It’s a conference for academics (from the U.S. and internationally) that’s been put on by Edelman for the last three years. (I was attending in my new role as an adjunct instructor in the M.S. in Public Relations and Corporate Communications program at NYU.)
One of the sessions was on employees and social media, “Employee Engagement: Encouraging New Conversations,” with speakers from McDonald’s, GE and Alcoa. (Full webcast of the session here.) In listening to Jason Greenspan from McDonald’s, I was stumped about how the average McDonald’s crew employee could interact with the company’s social media initiatives. I asked in a tweet, “How do McDonald’s employees interact with their internal social media if not in front of computer – expected on personal time? #nmas09″
Dawn Gilpin, an Assistant Professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Arizona State University, responded: “@laurelhart Your question touches on the rarely discussed hierarchy issue wrt internal social media use: white collar only. #nmas09″
(The hashtag for the conference was #nmas09. More info at its entry on wthashtag.com.)
We didn’t get a chance to talk about this issue during the employee section, but I’ve been concerned about issues of bias or potential bias in social media, and have been struggling with how to frame what seem to be some problematic issues.
Today, on a somewhat unrelated topic, I was reading Ethan Zuckerman’s blog post, “Activist Media and Selective Amplifiers,” and in talking about the information coming from Iran in the wake of the Iran election, he said, “We face at least three filters in the voices we hear – access, language and bias.”
The magical three.
“Access” was the filter I found most hard to understand in the McDonald’s example. Most of us have been in a McDonald’s store at some point in our lives. How would an average crew member have access – both in terms of time and technology? Is there a real or implied expectation that employees access these tools outside of normal working hours?
“Bias” is the filter that Dawn pointed out. How do we make sure that internal social media initiatives aren’t biased against blue collar workers – or anyone else for that matter – who might not be in front of a computer all day?
And “language” may be another or additional impediment for many employees.
These are questions that I’d wished we’d had time to explore, and in the case of McDonald’s, there may be very simple answers, too. But it’s something that as communicators we should be very aware of as more institutions adopt social media initiatives, and thinking of these issues in Ethan’s terms of “access, language and bias” could provide a helpful framework, both for internal and external communications.
What else might be still missing from this puzzle?
Complexity, Social Media & Iran
I’ve been hesitant to write about the Iranian election and the role (or possible role) of social media in its aftermath in the last two+ weeks. Initially, quite a lot was written about social media’s place in the demonstrations and calls for a recount or new election, with some calling it a “Twitter Revolution” (see Moldova’s so-called “Twitter Revolution.“) But it was unclear to me at that early stage what the final outcome might bring. “Social media transforms Iran!” just didn’t seem a likely end result.
These two pieces seemed to be a challenge:
First, I know very little about Iran – its politics or particular religious practices – but what little I do know has left me with the impression that it’s a complex mix of BOTH politics and religion, entirely foreign to most Americans. While in the days (and even week) after the Iranian election there seemed to be a small hope that either the political or religious bodies might accept the calls for a recount or new election, it seemed unlikely that BOTH would.