Dear Reader.

A recent trip to Blackwell's stunned me. I stepped back from the shelves in order to get an overall perspective on the ideas and conversations that business people will pay money to read. On this occasion, about 30% of the titles were related to corporate ethics, or governance, or sustainability, or CSR, or partnerships, or business's role in economic development. Good news!

But adding a time dimension to this view of the bookshelf would reveal periods where Re-engineering, or Total Quality, or E-transformation would have dominated the shelves. So are we seeing a paradigm shift, the beginning of a change in corporate consciousness, or a fad? How can we tilt it toward one or the other of these extremes?

One of the things that research reveals about management fads is that their conceptual claims far exceed their delivered results. TQM had huge successes (arguably changing the entire corporate culture of Japan in the 50s and 60s). It was rigorously researched by hundreds or academic followers, and was a conceptually rigorous blend of the hard and soft aspects of organizations - the technical and the human. It was a very robust discourse - yet where is it today?

What I believe to be true about management fads is that any truly radical and worthwhile idea will be much easier to conceptualize than it is to implement. That includes (especially) Corporate Responsibility. This produces an "implementation gap" with gurus and pundits making big promises and organizations on the ground under-delivering. Disillusionment sets in and publishers, writers, consultants, and managers are looking for "the next thing".

Why does this under-delivery and disillusionment happen? Because change is hard. Policy is orders of magnitude easier to develop than it is to implement. Cynics who attended Johannesburg bemoaned an "implementation gap". While their cynicism is not welcome, we need to get better at helping organizations make material their noble policies, be those the Global Compact, or an internal Code of Conduct, or an environmental management system. My observation of the "new paradigm" world is that change skills are very thin on the ground. We are better at advice and recommendation. But, as my grandmother used to say "that and sixpence will get you on the bus."

If change is hard, culture change is even harder. TQM and BPR [Business Process Reengineering] both required significant cultural changes in organizations to deliver their results. In accord with the paradigm of the time, the results they promised were entirely financial. Yet even with the imperative of financial results driving the change - many of these programmes were abandoned without results.

In the worlds of "Corporate Citizenship", "Business Ethics" or "Corporate Social Responsibility", we are often playing for non-financial results and the financial imperative can be less clear. Yet, for our work to succeed we will require a cultural change every bit as great as that demanded by TQM and BPR.

From Future Considerations' perspective, as experts on leadership and culture change, this is that rabbit that we are going to have to pull out of the hat. My "exam questions" for you to ponder while reading this Annual Review are:

• What internal changes will need to take place in your organization to manifest the external changes you wish to see?



• What are the change implications of the policies you espouse? How will these be addressed? What are the behavior changes that will drive the change?



• How will the culture changes required be achieved in your organization?



• What kind of leaders do you need and from where will you get them?



• Is your organization ready to engage in value-based and moral conversation that lie at the heart of Corporate Citizenship?



• Do you have the tools to engage in dialogue across widely divergent worldviews and seemingly opposite stakeholder objectives?



• While we don't claim to have easy answers to these questions, we want to engage with others in finding answers to them. So please enjoy this Annual Review, which has been a privilege to support.

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