SALIM KADIBESEGIL / 2012

CONTENTS

I. FOR WHOM THE BELLS RING?

1. HOW WE SCREW THE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY?

• You either leave an honoured mark or a black stain in life?
• A gift of our irresponsibility’s; social responsibility!
• A wrong prescription!
• Responsibility is individual not corporate!
• How do you make money is social responsibility!
• How Titanic sank twice?
• How do you “buy” reputation!
• Social responsibility is not the decorative items of business
• Are social reports and indexes inducing us?
• What does “managing business responsibly” mean?
• Does managing business mean managing money?

2. WE ARE IN FAKE LIFE!

• The sun does not warm our hearts but our anxiaties
• Does money bring happiness?
• Credibility of the rating agencies
• The most favoured detergent; swiss!
• Lonely islands enjoy offshore banking accounts!
• If there is blood in the streets it is time to buy!
• The story re-written for plastic cards; Little girl wit red hat!
• The fairy tale of the share value which does not have value!
• Hollywood ending!
• Super power! How is US doing?
• How domino stones toppled down?
• “Lies, damn lies of EU”… Where are the values of EU?

3. WHERE THE SUN WILL RISE AGAIN?

• What if 1,5 billion Chinese own a car one day?
• The most crowed population in 2050; India!

4. HOW INDIVIDUALS GLOBALIZED?

• Globalized individuals asking justice
• Life with Google… Or a 24 hour without Google!
• New window with wikileaks!
• Michael Moore set the agenda
• Sour information of sour times
• How individuals globalized during playing bridge in the internet?
• Globalized individuals; what they are after

II. NEW WORLD- NEW INDIVIDUAL- NEW LIFE

5. HOW MUCH KG YOU ARE HAPPY!

• How much kg happy today?
• What is rational to measure the life?
• What would be the new yard stick of life and success?

6. THE TEMPLATES OF LIFE IS CHANGING

• We will be living two separate worlds at the same time!
• Business also leaves the templates of business
• Who will drive technology; people or technology?
• Big Brother is among us!

7. ETHICS; IT IS A PAIN IN YOUR STOMACH!

• An employer searching job for his employees
• Chairman of the board awaken suddenly in his sleep!
• What is ethical what is not!
• Corporations must also ethical as well as products and individuals
• Money were gained while purchasing once open a time!
• Relatives; fair trade and ethical trading
• How ethics transformed to fair trade?
• Ethical trading grow 20% per year
• Consumers reaction to ethical products?
• Ethics attracts investors
• From first social reporting to fair trade
• Standards of fair trade
• New agenda; unguilty products

8. NON GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS OR CLEAN SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS

• Which civic society which globalized individuals?
• Must be clean societ organizations not www.enviro.orgs…
• Good cops or bad cops: roles are changing!

9. SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS

• Who are social entrepreneurs?
• Their role in growth?
• Would they save the world?

10. BEING A GOOD CITIZEN BEFORE BEING A GOOD COMPANY OR A GOVERNMENT

• Victor Ananias…
• Art…Art…Art…
• Respect, reputation and life…

PREFACE

YOU MAY BE THE GENERAL MANAGER or one of the senior managers of a company. Or an advertiser, a public relations specialist or a marketing manager… An engineer making calculations for plants, facilities, dams or an architect designing residences… An installer, a machinist, a carpenter or even a “final presser”! A finance expert, a chemist, a doctor, a laboratory assistant, a corporate communications or human relations specialist… Or you may be on a ride that will add “meaning” to your career on the route of one of those thousands of professions that we haven’t even heard before.

But is your ride really “meaningful”? Are your career on one hand and your position in life on the other hand really “meaningful”?

Do all those things going on in the entire world especially in the last 20 years, the changes in our daily lives, the forecasts about the future, the changes in our relationship with our families which are our most precious assets look “meaningful”?

What do those saying “we are the 99 percent” mean? Do the desires and expectations of ten thousands invading Wall Street with this symbolic debut include ours? Why do the sounds reflecting to the walls of Wall Street created a tremendous impression throughout the world, accepted and caused thousands of people to pour out into the streets?

Waking up, having our breakfast with our family, hitting the road with our car or one of the public transportation vehicles, going to “our work” in cold, snow, winter, rain or 40 degrees summer heat, working; receiving our salaries at the beginning of the month, paying loan installments; making vacation plans for the weekend or our annual leave; children’s lessons, exams, making meticulous plans to prepare them for the future… Living everyday in a “routine” with the belief that tomorrows will be better than today!

In other words, being the 99 percent…

In 1984, human beings entered into the information age with the launch of Apple Macintosh. They said one day everybody will have a computer on their desk and they will access all kinds of information anywhere in the world from these computers. This vision came true before it even 30 years were over. In the end, 99 percent understood, learned and saw who they are and what 1 percent is.

Does a new period begin that will shape this century?  Will its symbol be 99 percent?

This book places a “mixed” content onto the table. Moving from the fact that life cannot be sustained in a world founded on “the mistakes” of the recent past, it tells everyone in the business world

• How the individuals are globalized,

• How these global individuals changes the dynamics of the civil society, what could the consequences of this change be in our business lives and careers,
• How it is not possible to build a new livable world from the lie of social responsibility,

• How we need to discover the “ethical” setup between life and self, and

• How “virtuous life”, which is the first stop in the ride of those like Victor Ananias, who I dedicated this book to, towards being citizens of the world, is the prerequisite for peace, serenity and happiness.

Victor Ananias, who we lost in the beginning of last year when he was only 39, had been pointing out to the different points of life loud and clear. The Wheat Association that he was leading introduced “ecological transformation” to Turkey. Ecological markets, ecological farms, farmer trainings, respective publications were all outputs of this new approach. But the most important thing he used to say was “being virtuous and living virtuously”. He was saying that these lands have the seeds of “a virtuous life” that will be enough for the entire world. He was trying to spread these seeds. If there is no “virtue”, there was nothing new to say!

Now, this book tells where and how we can find the values we lost within life. Defines the obstacles that prevent us to reunite with these values. Presents some clues about how the business life and those that shape the business life can “get their act together” on this path leading to a social structure where people can live like real people.

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

Two graphs, two photos and one illustration

THROUGHOUT MY CAREER, I rode on every route of communication from journalism to public relations, strategic communication to reputation management. The books I wrote until now for knowledge and experience sharing were all a search for “the new” in the way stations of this ride! Clichés such as “Public relations should like be this, not like that”, “Crisis should be managed like this, not like that”, “This is the real corporate communication” and “We don’t have anything more important than managing reputation” were the main contents offered to the readers with these books.

But when I look back now, I see the things that I couldn’t say while going all around the houses and mincing words or, in other words, “the big picture” I missed!

This is not a confession. May be my knowledge was not enough back then to say the things I wrote here boldly. May the political, economical and social conditions we were living in didn’t make it possible for me to make this analysis. Or maybe I was not at the focus of these discussions that will broaden horizons. However this is a fact that the things I wrote today were valid in those days, too. So, what changed? Did the conflict of the information in my head and my experiences cause me to wonder around these lines today by saying “Ok, that’s it!”? I don’t know, but I can honestly say this: The “conflict mediums”, which are faced within our daily lives by the concept we name as “reputation” that is at the end associated with “prestige” despite of its endless nature, caused me to reevaluate many things. At the end, prestige was “a system of values”. And values were changing within the social life. For example, 70-80 years ago, maybe those who had a lot of money, who were very rich, who live in luxury were extremely reputable. However now, we faced the reality that reputation has nothing to do with money. This confrontation enabled us to look at different areas of life for “prestige” and even to criticize ourselves.

The “two graphs, two photos and one illustration”, which I “insistently” use in the presentations I made in the recent years to company executives under the titles of reputation management, sustainability, corporate responsibility, social investment, employee brand, caused my mind to become clearer. These images I found on the internet by chance shaped the “central theme” of the book. When they are combined one after the other, they reveal the world we are in and thus “our state” very clearly.

This book tells the background of these five visual materials. Unfortunately the background doesn’t contain much pleasant things. We witness that none of those things imposed as “being the truth” until now is true and that we turned life into a mess with these “so-called” truths.

In the first graph, the population increase in the world as of 1800s is seen. The main problem in the distribution of the population of the planet that reached seven billion is this dramatic increase to concentrate on underdeveloped countries that couldn’t leave the “agricultural society” conditions behind and don’t have enough technique and infrastructure – countries that have underdeveloped health and education infrastructures, limited knowledge and awareness levels, and that are underdeveloped in the subjects of agriculture, livestock and nutrition.

Geographies where 10-15 members of a family continue their lives in so-called houses made from cardboards, cans and plastic materials…The same planet, the same resources, however only one out of ten people can use these resources as a human being deserves! And the remaining nine continue their lives just “by chance”.

 

The second graph is about the emission of greenhouse gases that threaten the future of our planet, it is a picture that reveals the state since the 1800s that industrialization began and spread. The point we arrive resembles the thin line between an emergency patient to bid farewell to life or to hold on to life in the face of an event that may be experienced during the patient’s transport to the intensive care unit.

We can question ourselves by looking at these two graphs. Leave aside the geography we live in this world or the career route we are riding on, can we say we wouldn’t be affected from the facts on these graphs? Leave aside the company, the organization, the position we work in, the education institute we are going to, can we look to our future with “confidence” while these graphs are present?

Can we say that our families, children and the geography we live won’t be affected from the facts seen in these graphs and that our lives won’t turn “upside down” as a whole?

As a result of the natural disasters, especially the ones lived in the last 20 years; lives of millions of people have changed completely.

Isn’t the main reason behind the incessant migrations all around the world is millions of people to beat a path to the door of developed countries just to breathe due to the dramatic living conditions in their underdeveloped countries? Don’t poverty, hunger and other poor living conditions cause untrained, unconscious masses of public to find the solution in killing the others with the guns they get hold of?

Who created all these negativities? Who should we call to account for this picture at this point we arrived? How we will pull off?

Well, one should look at the mirror first to answer these questions. And right at this point, the other two photos and one illustration I mentioned above step in.

Human beings lived and wanted to live just like this first photo!

 

They produced and consumed irresponsibly. Thought that the natural resources will never run out. And used mind and creativity while doing this! Developed technologies. Our brains were adorned with “American Dreams”. And science supported this impasse, too. Wars were declared / invented for this goal. Lives were imprisoned in “freak” cities.

Seas ran out, waters got dirty, and many animal species and arable agricultural fields were destroyed. And forests are still fighting for their lives.

Our planet turned into a disabled planet.

And the other one, an illustration. Even though we were aware of all of these, we named smoothing over the cracks a “skill”! We overlooked. We didn’t hear. We saw no evil, heard no evil, spoke no evil for the last 150 years!

 

 

And we quiet those who want to put these into words. We didn’t listen. We even “destroyed” them!

Even though we know all these, we advertised, we publicized, we communicated. We became the senior executives of the companies. We put our brands to the grass of global markets. We built factories on agricultural lands, we destroyed the forest, we consumed to make packaging materials for our productions, and we matched the animal fur on the shoulders of women with being “stylish and rich.

And to do these, we studied marketing, administration, engineering and architecture… We sent “gurus” to all four sides of the business world, they advised us about “how it could be worse”! We searched “success” in being able to do these. And moreover, we give those, who can achieve these, the medal of “reputation”!

I’m looking at the gurus attending to conferences, summits and forums. Just to see if they are saying something new about marketing, brand, competition or management… The newest thing they say is actually…

The ones that were told in 1990s. For example “innovation”! Before that there were customers, total quality management, performance management. And as “warm starters” that can extend wherever you pull them, concepts like leadership, globalization and sustainability were served! Seems like there is no room to say “something new” in 2010s. They are the all the common refrains of different songs.

The last image shows the hospitalization of our planet that we turned into a “patient confined to bed” all together! Is there a need to say anything else?

 

In summary, what do we have in our bag at the point we arrived?

Discomfort! Unhappiness! Our concerns about ourselves, our children and the world as a whole… Desperation, helplessness, regret…

None of us is happy about the course of events.

Regardless of our geography in this world, we are not in peace!

In one hand, we have the world that is given to us, and on the other, we have the world that we will give to the next generations. Let’s see which hand is truly yours?