CSR Author Spotlight: Veronica Scheubel

Snapshot:

Born in: St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, Canda

Lives in: 'The Vermont of Germany,' the Red Hair Mountains (about 100 miles east of Cologne and north of Frankfurt) with German high school sweetheart, after 22 years apart.

Educated at: Educated at: Baccalaureate in Germany, Political Science at Concordia University in Montreal and Masters in Organisation Consulting at Ashridge Business School in the UK.

Favorite CSR Book: Adrian Hodges' and David Grayson's Everybody's Business, as it was the first book to educate the world about CSR.

Favorite non-CSR book: Kenneth Leung's The Zen Teachings of Jesus (it's not a religious book); Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual, Milan Kundera's Immortality.

Favorite movies: 'Il Postino,' 'Monsoon Wedding,' 'Smoke,' 'Smoke Signals,' 'The Royal Tenenbaums,' 'Gosford Park,' 'Lisbon Story,' 'Lost in Translation,' 'Eat Drink Man Woman'.

Favorite musician: Jazz trumpet player Chet Baker on 'The Best of Chet Baker Sings'

Favorite CSR report: SAP - for being accessible from mobile tablets, for the interaction and engagement, for the view of developing sustainability reporting as a journey.

If I could, I would ...: Go live in Buenos Aires for a year or two and then explore business opportunities in India!

This spotlight on Veronica Scheubel was first published on CSRwire.com on 4th May 2011

Having co-authored, with Nick Lakin, number 7 on the Cambridge University Sustainability Leadership Programme's top sustainability books of 2010, together with over 10 years of hands-on business practice and consulting experience, Veronica Scheubel, former Senior Corporate Responsibility Manager at Nokia, is a superstar amongst experts in how to mastermind and execute ways for businesses to engage with the community. Her book, Corporate Community Involvement: The Definitive Guide to Maximising your Business' Societal Engagement, (Greenleaf, 2010) is the most comprehensive, practical and well-researched guide available for those wishing to devise, plan, manage and succeed in delivering business engagement with local communities and employee volunteering programs. According to Veronica, there was a clear gap in the market for this kind of book: "Nick and I noticed that between the two of us, we had written so many internal company manuals on how to practice Community Involvement from inside a company. Nick asked why nobody had ever thought of turning this into a book, so companies don't have to re-invent the wheel. He convinced me that the two of us had to do that, so we set out to write our book. Working to a strict schedule, we got it done in 6 months. It helped that we had our previously-written manuals to refer to, and that we had all our personal experience from managing global Community Involvement programs to draw on."

Since publication, Corporate Community Involvement has generated positive reactions. Veronica mentions that "quite a few people have contacted us to let us know that they found the book really useful, particularly the Chapters on Strategy, Employee Involvement and how to operate as a company-internal change agent." According to Veronica, the most important messages in the book for succeeding in community involvement are: "Be strategic and contribute your company's core competencies, engage in real cross-sector partnerships in the community, and involve key functions in the company as well as employee volunteers."

The practice of community involvement is by no means uniform across all companies, according to Veronica. "As with so many other aspects of corporate life, there are the visionaries, the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority and the laggards. What strikes me after more than 10 years of my own work in this area is that we still have players in every field! We have visionaries like IBM, early adopters like Nokia, many companies in the early majority, but shockingly many companies still in the late majority that are still dabbling in philanthropy and are only just discovering Community Involvement. And then of course, there are laggards that still claim Community Involvement is not relevant to them and that shareholder value is all that counts ... The 'early' half encourages and enthuses me while the 'late' half creates the gap versus my expectations and shows me that there is still so much more work to do!"

Most of Veronica's professional time is spent in organizational change and corporate responsibility consulting, training, executive coaching, team development and Action Learning. She is also active in The Partnering Initiative at the International Business Leaders Forum in London which leads in matters relating to cross-sector collaboration. Veronica is an Associate, offering training, facilitation and mediation, including a three-day certification training in cross-sector partnering practice, offered in different countries. In addition, Veronica and her partner bought a home with a garden and, for the past two years, have been busy with renovation and redecoration. They both enjoy travel and the sun, hiking, cooking and nice restaurants, movies and good books. Every few days, they 'borrow' the neighbor's four year-old twin boys for a play session which is fun for all.

But this does not prevent Veronica from considering what her next book will focus on: "A few colleagues and I are really passionate about the opportunities of bringing organizational change consultants together with Sustainability Managers in companies, as we have experienced first-hand how much can be achieved for embedding Sustainability throughout an organization when both work together and pool their knowledge, resources and approaches. It is still a very new message out there, and we are a small cohort, but we'd like to spread the word and the practice, so there will have to be a book about it!"

Indeed, Veronica has a passion for making change in organizations more accessible. "The world is changing, and participative approaches within organizations as well as with stakeholders will become increasingly important and unavoidable. This is where I see a focus of my work - I'd like to support people in organizations, who might be used to the 'old ways' and perhaps a bit unused to and afraid of 'sharing power', in familiarizing themselves with new concepts, trying them out and experimenting with them. As a facilitator, I can help create a 'safe environment' for that." As Francois de la Rochefoucauld once said, "The only constant thing in life is change." Anyone who can help us navigate that is playing an important role in society, and Veronica, both in her practice and with her book, surely demonstrates what it means to be an agent of change.

I would like to thank Veronica Scheubel for sharing her insights and for her great guide to Corporate Community Involvement which features highly on my always-keep-close book list.

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices  Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en

Corporate Community Involvement: The Definitive Guide

Corporate community Involvement: The Definitive Guide to Maximising your Business' Societal Engagement

By Nick Lakin and Veronica Scheubel

Publisher: Greenleaf Publishing
ISBN 978-1-906093-33-4
This review was first published on CSRwire.com on 20th October 2010




Description

Companies around the world are trying to answer these questions. Many are asking the same questions even as, collectively, they continue to spend billions on their communities. How do they know which activities are really worthwhile?

Building on the authors' own extensive global experience at Nokia and E.ON, as well as the experience of many other experts in the field, this book offers the first-ever "how to" roadmap for managers on the comprehensive implementation of strategic Community Involvement inside their companies. It is designed to be practical - for those who want to act upon what they have read. It will fill a long-neglected niche as a day-to-day reference guide for practitioners.

Corporate Community Involvement demonstrates what to do and how to do it. The advice is backed up by inspiring interviews with best-in-class practitioners from businesses such as Microsoft, GlaxoSmithKline, Ericsson, and Deutsche Bank and leading international Corporate Responsibility and Community Involvement experts. The book highlights proven best-practice approaches, effective methods, and concise tools to help managers "get there faster" and get it right first time."

Commentary

Corporate Community Involvement (CCI) needs to be a part of every sustainable business strategy. A well thought through approach to CCI delivers true value that may be hard to achieve through other business activities. A quick flick through a few corporate sustainability reports will tell you that this is the section where most companies go to town, eager to relate how they are supporting local communities, how many employees are volunteering, what community partnerships they have created, and last but not least, how much money they have donated. This is usually the most colorful section of the report, and contains pictures of many people smiling. Rarely do we see a strongly strategic approach to corporate community involvement and rarely do we see any account of the outcomes of such activities. Companies are all too willing to recount what they did, but few evaluate the outcomes of what they did. Almost none cover the processes they applied to establish their CCI initiatives. With all this investment in CCI, wouldn't you think companies would spend a little more time and energy actually planning their CCI program so that it that delivers full strategic value rather than just a theoretical reputation boost? That's where Nick Lakin and Veronica Scheubel come in. Their book, Corporate Community Involvement: The Definitive Guide to Maximising your Business' Societal Engagement is the most comprehensive guide ever written to help companies and their internal CCI leaders do just this.

The authors have significant experience as CCI practitioners, Nick Lakin having set up the global CCI practice at E.ON, one of the world largest power and gas companies, and Veronica Scheubel having established and managed Nokia's global community program in more than 20 countries. Together they have developed a high-res guide book about how to conceive, plan, develop and manage Corporate Community Investment programs.

The book's 11 chapters start with how to develop a CCI program, build the organizational structure needed to put this in place, manage the budget and integrate CCI with other departments in the business such as Marketing and Operations. On the way, they explore the difference between a foundation and other charitable spending and ways to develop an approach for disaster relief. They continue with implementation tools, cross-sector collaboration guidelines, employee involvement, measuring success and internal communications. The book ends up with a look at challenges and change management. Woven into the different chapters are deep-dive interviews with senior practitioners from Shell, Telefonica, Ericsson, IBM, Deutsche Bank, Microsoft and IBLF (International Business Leaders Forum). The detail in this book is incredible, providing models, tools, frameworks, checklists, definitions, assessments and advice at every step of the way. Some are directly related to CCI programs but others are taken from more general management practice such as change models, strategic thinking frameworks, planning cycles, project management plans, SWOT analyses and more. Examples of different aspects of CCI from many other companies, small and large from around the globe illustrate the points made.

If I were to pick three key takeaways from this book, they would be:

Plan, plan, plan and plan your CCI progam. Treat it as seriously as any other business project and you will succeed. The authors say: "It entails devising a plan to achieve goals and objectives over the long term".

Use volunteering to build employee skills. The authors say that volunteering in Community Involvement projects can play an important role in employee and team skills development, helping to develop skills such as "planning and organization, leadership and management, effective communication, team-working, motivation and involvement of people, time management, creativity and innovation, diversity awareness, budget management, measurement and monitoring." I believe this is right and that these aspects of CCI have been largely disregarded by the HR departments in most companies.

Measurement and evaluation (of outcomes): The authors give three good examples of programs from Nike, Nokia and Adobe in which actual impacts were evaluated, rather than just the inputs and activities of the company. This is a critical point. It is not enough measure your involvement in the community. You have to measure the difference you make in the community.

This book speaks head on to those charged with developing CCI programs. For the novices, it holds their hand at each twist and turn. For the more experienced, it answers all the questions they have come across in their efforts to date, and provides new insights and approaches. There is much in this book that can help CCI Managers do it better. If they use it, we all benefit.

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices  Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen on Twitter or via my website www.b-yond.biz/en