CSR - if you're going to do it, do it right

Exercising Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can serve many purposes for an organisation. One of the more overlooked benefits is the garnering of goodwill among your stakeholders, that can then be called upon in the time of a crisis. To make the most of this opportunity, the investment of time and resources in CSR needs to be well thought through. Mark Vernon and Craig Mackenzie offer 20 tips for an effective CSR strategy.

Read the story from Management Today here.

When facing a crisis, roll out CSR!

When British American Tobacco were hit by a huge lawsuit in Nigeria, they called upon their high profile CSR strategy to manage their battered reputation. Things did not go plan. Read on here:

Flat or Pyramid - How does your company look?

Organisations can have many different structures, and management theory suggests that there is no single best way of designing your organisational tree. Some benefit from a "commander" leader and others from group decision making. However, the type of management structure does have an impact on how a company will respond to a crisis, according to Donald Todrin.

For Donald's article, click here:

Text Messaging for Emergency Response

More companies are now switching from the use of pagers, and utilising the mobile phone to contact their key people in an emergency. Some schools are using this technology to contact parents if their school is closed or if an off-site trip is delayed. And now BAA have introduced SMS messaging to contact their crisis team in an emergency. Read on here:

Crisis Briefs

A comforting story from Germany this week for us Brits who thought our government had a monopoly on losing personal and sensitive data. A Berlin hairdresser discovered top-secret plans for a safety vault at the Bundesbank's Berlin branch in a bin, the German central bank said on Thursday.

Only four weeks ago, the bank's building in western Berlin was officially opened after renovation work which cost about 150 million euros (108 million pounds).

The hairdresser found detailed drawings of the safety arrangements at the bank, including the location of people detectors, stairwells, grilled gates and measurements with the depth of the vault's floor, reported top-selling newspaper Bild. "I wanted to throw away my rubbish and I noticed the plastic bag with the building sketches," Bild quoted the 26-year-old male hairdresser as saying. The bin was in a backyard in central Berlin.

A Bundesbank spokeswoman confirmed the Bild report, adding the bank was looking into how the plans could have ended up in a bin. She said she believed it would be impossible for anyone to break into the safety vault. (Reuters)

And finally... a frustration that anyone who has been on an organised tour can identify with. Macau riot police were called in to calm down 120 angry Chinese tourists on a wind-swept beach who had protested angrily to tour guides over an itinerary too packed with shopping. Around two dozen police with batons and riot shields faced off with the tourists from China's Hubei province for nearly five hours on Tuesday night in the booming casino enclave of Macau, Hong Kong cable television and the Apple Daily newspaper said.

The tourists, pushing and struggling with policemen who detained two men and a three women, protested that the tour guides had taken them to too many shops and pressured them into buying things.

The argument erupted after the tour guides took the group to the beach, and the tourists, complaining of cold, could not reboard their four locked coaches, the Apple Daily reported. Police arrived on the scene and called for reinforcements, and the stand-off ended when the tourists were persuaded to go to a hotel. (Reuters Hong Kong)