Whether it's a mom and pop grocery store or a corporate giant like Xerox Corp., every business has a responsibility to reinvest in its community.
So says Robert H. Gudger, Xerox Corp.'s manager of corporate responsibility and vice president of the Xerox Foundation. It doesn't matter how much businesses give, he says, as long as they give.A small business that can't afford to buy T-shirts to give to Special Olympics participants can always provide something as simple as cups of water to thirsty athletes.
"When everyone gets out there, it's not who gives the most or gives the least. It's everyone out there together. Money doesn't solve the problems. It's the interaction of people with other people," Gudger said. Gudger was in Utah this week as keynote speaker of Utah Issues' Annual Corporate Breakfast.
Xerox, with 230 employees in Utah and 10,000 nationally, won the Malcom Baldridge Quality Award in 1989. This prestigious award is made annually to a U.S. company that demonstrates uncompromising quality in the process of its production and shows consistent responsibility to the community in which it operates.
Xerox Corp.'s Community Involvement Program, for example, provides funds to teams of employees for specific community projects. "It isn't done for the credit of Xerox. It's done because there's a need," he said.
Gudger said corporate ethics and a sense community responsibility were lost in the 1980s, which he calls the "me" decade.
Unethical yuppies who were far more interested in making money than improving the social condition were running amok, he said. At the same time, savings and loans crumbled, real estate prices plummeted and stock market bottomed out.
But Grudger said he believes there will be a resurgence of corporate responsibility in the 1990s. He called on university business schools to stress ethics.
"You don't need an ethics course. What you need to do is teach ethics with every course you have and not just give the feeling that the means justify the end at any cost," he said.