CRO POV: When CRO Gets Weird...
The weird go pro.
By Jay Whitehead
The other day in Chicago, I was reminded of the wisdom of Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s quote, “When the going gets weird, the weird go pro.”
Over the past six months, I have met with well over 350 executives that fill the role of corporate responsibility officer. My recent meeting in the Windy City was just like any other. Another Fortune 1000 company, another SVP of Something That Sounds Like Corporate Responsibility. I can’t remember, but I think the actual title involved Citizenship. Or maybe it was Compliance and Sustainability. Or was it Vice Chairman of Governance and Social Responsibility? Doesn’t matter, really.
Point is, with every day that goes by, Corporate Responsibility is becoming more of a recognized profession. When we started The CRO back in August 2006, we counted 12 corporate responsibility officers among the Fortune 1000. Today we count 55. And the number is growing quarterly, monthly, daily.
As a media organization, The CRO touches 20,000 subscribers six times a year with this magazine, over 150,000 a month with TheCRO.com, and about 750 a year on the CRO conference circuit. In addition, there are more than 100 corporate members of The CRO, most of whom are practitioners; pros who are card-carrying corporate responsibility officers.
Professionalization of a new corporate function is a rare event. The last time it happened on a grand scale was in the 1970s with the rise of the human resources role. The Society for Human Resource Management, or SHRM, was behind that rapid evolution. Before SHRM, HR people were known as “personnel,” “payroll,” or “administration,” and rarely if ever got the attention of the C-suite or corporate board members. Then SHRM came around and gave HR, as they say, a seat at the table.
Like HR leaders in decades past, corporate responsibility officers are now getting their seat at the table. The seat is being provided because of two mega-trends. First, the transparency movement, which is driven both by the piercing gaze of the Internet and shareholder activists who are demanding more stakeholder awareness from management than ever before. The second factor is the sustainability and anti-climate change movement, which was given an inestimable boost by former Vice President Al Gore’s Academy Award for “An Inconvenient Truth.”
In the days following Mr. Gore’s Award, The CRO saw a significant uptick in calls about corporate membership, and at least a dozen calls from national and international media, including ABC News, Conde Nast, Associated Press, MSNBC, CBS News, Figaro, Volskrande and the Financial Times. Coincidentally, I have also seen a notable increase in the number of resumes sent to me seeking corporate responsibility officer roles, including many from Europe. As a result, in the coming days we will be launching a job board on TheCRO.com, in partnership with CareerBuilder.
When the going gets weird, the weird go pro. Thanks, Hunter Thompson. When I first read those words 30 years ago, I had no idea that they would actually make their way into CRO’s business plan.