11Step 8.When Social InvestingShould Be Postponed

If Step 7 puts a knot in a CEO’s stomach, Step 8 should help untie it. This is corporate social investing’s emergency brake:

Step 8. Postpone some or all corporate social investing if projected business conditions warrant such action.

What a company budgets for social investing this year is largely a shadow of the corporation’s past; it’s the by-product of profits generated over the previous three years. When a corporation runs up a string of successes, everything is rosy. In the afterglow of its financial achievements, a company calculates how much it should be spending for social investing in the year ahead and plugs that amount into its budget.

But what happens if a company’s sales and earnings ...

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