I should have added to my last post that I have learnt that if you want to be successful at (business) school, you’ve got to remember your ABCs. Always Be Cool.

August is meant to be a gap month in our MBA calendar, but it is a busy as ever. Week 47 has already entailed a coursework deadline for a 2,500-word report on ECCO’s global value chain, several meetings on Barclays’ citizenship agenda as part of the CSR module, and the completion of a draft structure for the consultancy report on the work in Sao Paulo. We are meant to be on vacation! ABC.

The holiday period has also brought with it a spate of client conversations about website and blog design. There is a sense of take-stock-and-refresh in the air. I think that I have caught the bug too and plan to make some changes to Cass Reflections. Watch this space. All suggestions greatly received.

I look to keep up-to-date with current thinking in digital design and thought I should share the following guidance from Human Factors: 7 principles that make your website more engaging.

I am a believer in designing marketing messages around a clear, manageable number of vertical markets. It addresses the trade off between effectiveness and efficiency. To me, Principle 1 (‘Too Many Choices’) really helps underpin why we might avoid trying to appeal to too many perceived customer needs, and thereby, how we might spend less to get the results we want. Principle 2 (‘Social Validation’) is something I explored in Week 42’s ‘Earning attention’, but I am yet to test the food, sex and danger of Principle 4. Yes I though that would get your attention.

As an aside, I really like this format of animation and audio. It is great for educational videos. Earlier in the course, Tim, an MBA peer and friend, pointed me in the direction of the RSA Animate video on the truths about what motivates us. For those of you as interested in the potential of the format, it is exemplar.

Sometimes, timing is everything. This weekend we completed a module in corporate responsibility, which coincided perfectly with the phone-hacking scandal that is taking up every column inch of (nearly all!) the news media. It provided ideal currency.

On Sunday, we were split into teams by our lecturer and ‘corporate philosopher’, Roger Steare, and allocated a blue chip company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) statement/report. We had been asked to consider how consistent this communication was with the business we understood from its reputation, its treatment by the world of social media, and from its own marketing/investor communications e.g. annual report and accounts. Essentially, this was a deliberation of whether responsibility was part of an organisation’s DNA.

Way back, in week 5, I reflected on whether a business had a soul. At the very least, one can witness a set of decisions. And within these actions, there will be a distinguishable trend in behaviour. Mintzberg defined strategy as a “a pattern in a stream of decisions”. Was responsibility part of the company’s strategy?

Key learning points were as follows:

• responsibility is industry-defined – the industry you are in determines the set of cards you are dealt; the responsibility is in the way that you play them, and thus oil companies can be responsible too
• transparency versus accessibility – having nothing to hide is a sure sign of responsible leadership, however if you pick up a social report/review of 100+ pages, you start to get a sense that this is equivalent to a defence attorney sending boxes of files to the prosecutors offices; responsibility should be succinct, accessible and evident
• responsibility is hard to measure – very few firms employ a triple bottom line (profit, people, planet); M&S does and even then, profit performance is inevitably easier to quantify.

In Adrian Henriques article for the Guardian on 12 May, he argued that while CSR reports are not always revealing, because the News of the World had published no social report of any kind and did not discuss such issues in public, it had built no social capital on which it could fall back when times got hard.

On the face of it, I was not convinced by this argument. Having a CSR statement was no guarantee of responsibility. Action is louder than words. However, the more I think about it, Henriques may have a point. A social report is akin to the annual report and accounts. It provides a measure and a communication to stakeholders. If there is a worrying trend in profit performance, investors can build an understanding of where the business is at into their responses.

If we knew in our heart of hearts that the hacking was some misguided attempt by the News of the World to deliver on a communicated and measured aim to uphold the  truth (the means justifies the end, as it were), we, advertisers and politicians may have been little less unified in response. But just as importantly, it would have made the task of rebuilding a reputation much easier.

Reputation is a valuable commodity, hard won and quickly lost through irresponsible behaviour. Managing risk and reputation is vital. A social report is a corporation communicating about doing the right thing. And chewing over what it means to be responsible is not only the right thing to do, but it is also cheaper than having to pay for full page ads in the national press apologising for a the horse that has already bolted.