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Headlines have been challenging in 2025. Companies are under attack publicly and privately for policies viewed as too progressive or woke. The reality, however, is that most companies have strongly reaffirmed their sustainability commitments but less so their DEI commitments. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) works in the grey area between the two. Many affirming companies have opted for greenhushing, staying quiet about their strategies and leadership. There are pros and cons to that, but why are companies staying true to their goals and strategies? A simple but powerful answer: long-term value creation. Those staying the course have built strategies that incorporate and harvest business value from their commitments. Innovation in integrating CSR and sustainability has not been strong over the last 10 years. That is a missed value creation opportunity. Sustainability and CSR trends have not gone away for the long haul; they have just gone quiet. Competition across companies and sectors will continue to seek support from customers, shareholders, and stakeholders whether companies are communicating it or not. TRADITIONAL CORPORATE PHILANTHROPY There are two primary models today: traditional corporate philanthropy and strategic corporate social responsibility. Both are important to maintain, but given the climate companies are working in todaywith both shareholder pressure and government discontinuity in the policy environmenta value-creation model built on innovative win-win solutions could accelerate social progress aligned with business success. A great example of traditional corporate philanthropy is ExxonMobil. In public health, ExxonMobil made a long-term commitment to help eradicate malaria, making an impact through their collaborations and large philanthropic investments (exceeding $170 million over 25 years). This philanthropic, public health focus has largely been outward in its emphasis. While there are mentions of it starting from a concern that its African workforce had significant absences due to malaria, the efforts are not central to the oil and gas products companys overall business strategy. We applaud their long-term commitment and hope it continues for the benefit of millions of people. STRATEGIC CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY A timely example of strategic corporate social responsibility is Takeda Pharmaceuticals, a global R&D-driven biopharmaceutical company, headquartered in Japan. It has taken a different approach, innovating its commitments and implementation to drive company business success. Takeda has not approached CSR and sustainability as a program, but rather as a core strategy integrated strongly into all parts of the company: businesses, functions, and geographies. Takeda has a 240+-year company history, which is remarkable. Deeply embedded values at the heart of their longevity is PTRB,” which stands for patient, trust, reputation, and business. In that order, if they meet patients needs, they gain trust and reputation. Then the business will follow. This principled, values-based approach goes back to Takedas founder and is kept alive today, integrated in ongoing corporate and business strategy, including CSR. The key difference between a philanthropic contribution and the strategic CSR approach is how Takeda brought PTRB to life in its CSR and sustainability strategy: innovating the intersection between climate and health. For example, Takeda developed vaccines to prevent Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne health risk and unmet medical need that is becoming more challenging with climate change. They focus on public health challenges stemming from climate change as a core part of their CSR strategy. Takeda innovated the how of its CSR implementation through a unique grant-making program. The public RFP is developed annually to create win-win opportunities that align with Takedas corporate purpose, focusing on transforming health outcomes by investing in climateresilient health systems worldwide. Potential grantees make applications, which are first reviewed internally by Takeda employees. They look for proposals that are innovative, sustainable, and impactful for the grantee, the identified public health population, and Takeda. This is collaboration, not just check-writing. Then ALL Takeda employees can vote on which proposals to fund, typically for multiyear grants which extend the grantees impact across four to 10 years. This voting step has been critical in creating strong awareness within the company about Takedas sustainability and CSR focus, driving alignment and creating opportunities for each employee to align their personal purpose with where they want to make an impact. That is very rare. Awareness and employee alignment are critical to long-term company success. This is one area where Takeda has demonstrated innovation to drive results for the company and society. Takeda is not apologetic that their programs will create long-term business value. In fact, its leadership, from the board and executive team down to individual employees, makes this highly integrated approach work. This strategic CSR model is drawing attention. Side events at the 2025 United Nations General Assembly have been oversubscribed, garnering event replays and the attention of millions on social media. And recently Takeda received a distinguished award from the United Nations Association of Greater Boston (UNAGB). Takedas commitment to global health, advocacy for inclusive and sustainable innovation, and leadership in shaping the future of biopharmaceuticals make the organization a deeply deserving recipient of our Global Citizenship Award, wrote Caitlin Moore, UNAGBs executive director. VALUE CREATION IN A CSR STRATEGY It is truly amazing what can be achieved when the focus is large scale and long term (ExxonMobil), but also when it is innovative with full strategic integration into business and corporate value creation strategies (Takeda). In these times, we believe that the strategic approach should be replicated and practiced to benefit companies, society, and the planet. A companys value-creating CSR strategy will likely have the best chance to last and deliver value to shareholders and stakeholders. Barie Carmichael is senior counselor, Member International Advisory Council, at APCO Worldwide. Neil Hawkins is research advisor/graduate faculty at Harvard University Sustainability Masters Program.
Category:
E-Commerce
For as much as we heard about AI in the past year, the top two best places to work in the U.S. are decidedly AI-free. Crew Carwash, an Indianapolis-based chain of car washes with 55 locations in the Midwest, claimed the top spot on Glassdoors list of the best places to work in 2026. In-N-Out Burger, the beloved chain with 400-plus locations, also moved up one spot this year to rank as the second-best place to work in the U.S. From there, however, tech and AI companies dominated nearly one-quarter of Glassdoors ranking of the top 100 companies with Nvidia claiming the third spot. But this industrys representation on the list has actually come down somewhat in recent years, a reflection of shifting dynamics at some of these companies. “This is part of an ongoing trend where many tech employers are trimming some of the things that made the job so appealing over the last year,” Glassdoor chief economist Daniel Zhao told CBS News. “They are pushing harder and harder on efficiency and productivity.” In addition to Nvidia, ServiceNow and EPAM Systems rounded out the top three companies on an inaugural list of the best tech and AI companies. These companies are redefining what tech-first means and theyve scaled rapidly without losing a human element to the workplace, according to a blog post. UNCERTAINTY IN THE JOB MARKET The past year has seen some new career trends emerge that reflect the uncertainty many workers are feeling latelyincluding so-called job hugging, or employees who sit tight in their roles, and Shrekking, when some workers opt to take jobs that are beneath their qualifications. In 2025, U.S. employers added only 584,000 new jobs, down from two million in 2024, making it the worst year for job growth since 2020 when the COVID pandemic rocked the economy. Glassdoors annual ranking, now in its 18th year, honors those companies that its employees love working for based on feedback provided on the platform. It comes at a time when many employees are fed up with work, and overall U.S. employee engagement is at a decade low. “Even amid the uncertainty of 2025, these standout employers have shown resilience, sustaining high levels of employee satisfaction and trust as they navigate change,” Owen Humphries, president at Glassdoor, said in a statement. Bragging rights for those companies with 1,000 employees or more is based entirely on the anonymous reviews that employees posted on the site between October 2024 and October 2025, as theres no nomination process nor survey of employees. FOCUS ON WORKPLACE CULTURE While identifying those employers that are getting workplace culture right is inherent to the ranking, this years winners are maintaining high levels of trust and satisfaction among employees, even amid a shifting economic landscape, according to a blog post. Even though they span vastly different industries, the top three employersCrew, In-N-Out, and Nvidiashare a common theme: Theyve operationalized cultural values, according to Glassdoor. The best workplaces in 2026 aren’t doing anything revolutionary. They’re doing the fundamentals exceptionally welland doing them consistently, even when it’s hard. SHAKEUPS ON LIST Each year, some employers fall off the list to make room for new companies to make their debuta cohort that included Alaska Airlines and Dutch Bros. this year. There were some other notable shakeups in this years ranking. Bain, the top-ranked employer in 2025, fell to the No. 8 spot this year, marking the lowest-ever ranking for the perennial top-5-rated company. Other shakeups saw representation decline among San Francisco-area companies, with only 13 companies making this years list, down from 23 in 2025. Meanwhile, New York-area employers have been rising in employee satisfaction, gaining ground with 10 companies represented on the list, up from six last year. HIRING ACTIVITY In addition to charting such shifts in the industries and locations of the best employers, the annual list is intended to help job seekers navigate a competitive job market, according to Humphries. The number of weeks someone is unemployed has been creeping higher to more than 24 weeks, on average, as of December. Combined, this years top 10 employersCrew Carwash, In-N-Out, Nvidia, Ryan, Keller Williams, Mars, ServiceNow, Bain, Houston Methodist, and EPAM Systemscurrently have more than 11,000 job postings active on Glassdoor. These awards are intended to be a trusted guide for job seekers, Humphries said, by helping candidates connect with workplaces that reflect their values and career ambitions.
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E-Commerce
Below, Charles Knowles shares five key insights from his new book, Why We Drink Too Much: The Impact of Alcohol on Our Bodies and Culture. Charles is a Professor of Surgery at Queen Mary University of London and Chief Academic Officer at the Cleveland Clinic London. Qualifying as a doctor from the University of Cambridge, he continues to practice as a consultant colorectal surgeon. He has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed publications and contributed to several major international surgical textbooks. Whats the big idea? Problematic drinking is not a problem of weak will or low moral integrity. Why drinking shifts from choice to compulsion for some and not others depends on many complex factors. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Charles himselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Why do humans consume alcohol? A necessary starting point to understanding why some humans drink too much is understanding why humans consume alcohol at all. Our hominid ancestors evolved to metabolize alcohol over 10 million years ago, pushed by the need to safely consume rotting fruit from the forest floor. We have been deliberately manufacturing alcohol for over 15,000 years, and today it remains our most popular drug, despite many well-acknowledged downsides. Why do we continue to drink it? We cant still claim this as a nutritional necessity. The vervet monkey on the island of Saint Kitts in the Caribbean is one example of many animal species that consume alcohol, with individuals showing variable enthusiasm for doing so. This attests to a fundamental biological driver. It cannot simply come down to clever advertising, peer pressure, or the price being right at the liquor store. The brain lies at the heart of this. If we ask most people, they will tell us that drinking alcohol makes them feel good and that they have fun drinking it. This is because alcohol is a primary reward; it can chemically alter the levels of certain neurotransmitters in our brains. The combined effects of alcohol on dopamine, but also on endorphins and GABA, lead to psychostimulatory and relaxant effects, in fact, mimicking the effects chemically of cocaine, opioids, and Valium. It is these positive effects of alcohol on the brain that are the fundamental basis of why we and other animals consume alcohol. 2. The drinking scales. Although some people may find it hard to resist, ultimately, we consciously choose to drink. This is a cognitive process that takes information from our sensesthe time of day, where we are, who we are withand processes this information against what we know, using our ability to think intelligently before acting. The positive effects we get from drinking are based on alcohols psychostimulatory and relaxant effects. We then come to balance these pros against the common negative effects (hangover, cost, embarrassment, etc.). This balance of the pros and cons is what I call the drinking scales. Everyone has a slightly different balance depending on their positive and negative experiences of alcohol. And this balance changes throughout life with societal norms and values. Everyone has a slightly different balance depending on their positive and negative experiences of alcohol. If the drinking scales worked perfectly to provide a logic-based decision all the time, I wouldnt be writing this book. The problem is that all around us are people for whom the evident harm of drinking should have been sufficient years ago to outweigh any positives, but still they drink. In such people, we can think of the scales as being broken or bypassed. This happens because the brain is wired to allow it to happen. Survival programs deep in the old parts of our brain, based around the reward pathway and memory, promote behavior that once aided our survival in the jungle but which now leads to serious consequences rather than any useful purpose. This is the basis of addiction. The question then becomes: why does this happen to some people and not to others? 3. Problematic drinking is not defined by how much we consume. Why cant he drink like a normal person? We hear this said. Many people see problematic drinking as a black-and-white issue. There are normal drinkers, and then those who have a problem. But there is quite a lot of gray. The term gray area drinking has now become popular in community groups. But what do we mean by this compared to medical terms like alcohol dependence or alcohol use disorder? I would recommend that anyone reviewing their relationship with alcohol should look at what I call the three Cs: consumption, consequences, and control. While long-term consumption level may have some important ramifications for health or finances, consequences and control are much more important angles for looking at the problem. Consequences from alcohol range from common downsides (like a hangover) through to serious harms (car accidents, criminality) and chronic health problems affecting the body and brain. Control, however, is perhaps the most important. After all, if we could control our consumption, we could just stop when consequences started occurring. And this brings us back to considering a spectrum where white might be neutrality, a take it or leave it approach to drinking, and black is dependence. But what then is gray? I define gray area drinking as someone who relies on alcohol in a way that is making them concerned about the amount they consume and their ability to control it. And it brings in a new concept called alcohol reliance, a state of mind where consumption of alcohol has become a regular habit that is hard to give up, but has not yet led to the behaviors that define alcohol dependence. 4. Bad genes. It seems unfair. Why was I, of all my hard-drinking college buddies, singled out to develop alcohol dependence? This is what I call the why me question. Loss of control has very little to do with consumption. Although alcohol is clearly required, we dont actually drink our way to having a problem. It therefore poses the question of whether there is something biologically different between individuals, and this has been debated since alcoholism became studied as a disease in the 1930s. Twin and adoption studies show that alcoholism has a heritability of about 50 percent, meaning that about half of the risk of developing dependence falls at the door of genetics. Studies of mice breeds show that tolerance to, stimulatory response from, and therefore preference for alcohol can be genetically conferred. In fact, you can genetically engineer mice that mimic several behaviors of dependence. We also know that people with intolerance for alcohol (such as Asian flushing, caused by specific gene variants in liver enzymes) very rarely develop alcohol problems because the experience of drinking is deeply unpleasant. Twin and adoption studies show that alcoholism has a heritability of about 50 percent. The sort of experiments performed in mice based on stimulation from alcohol can also be performed in humans. An example is the San Diego cohort study. Measured doses of alcohol were given to young adults who were alcohol nave, and the amount of stimulation they got from it was measured. Those who were more stimulated went on to have a higher risk of problems later in life. We can define humans who biologically find it fun to drink versus those that rapidly slump in the corner. The latter are relatively protected while the former are at greater risk of alcohol dependence. But this doesnt mean there is a single bad gene variant. Alcohol related disorders are what we call complex diseases or traits. Theyre a mixture of nature and nurture, and the nature is a consequence of hundreds or thousands of subtle variations in our DNA spread across the two billion base pairs of our genome, and not just in the genes themselves. This means were looking for a needle in a haystack. In fact, one could say were looking for thousands of needles in a haystack, some of which look very much like hay. The results of this exercise are disappointing at the current time. Most genes found overlap with major mental health disorders and ADHD. Some newer discoveries are in taste and in the way our brains rewire throughout life. We do find some genes associated in mice with increased stimulation related to GABA. However, overall, we are a long way off having predictive genetic testing. 5. Bad luck. Despite the scientific fashion for all things genomic, how we turn out in lifeour success, happiness, hopes, and dreamsgenerally has very much to do with the environment we grow up in and the effects of human interactions on our psyche. What we are exposed to during childhood, especially during the critical period of attachment, plays into the sort of later diagnoses that come from a psychiatrist, such as anxiety and depression, but also important personality traits like self-esteem and our social fitness. Many psychological traits create a double weighting on the pros side of the drinking scales. Alcohol doesnt just seem fun, it also provides relief by its relaxant and, if we drink enough, sedative effects. These dissociative properties can suppress negative feelings, thoughts, and memories; this is particularly true when suppressing the barrage of thoughts that comes with problems like ADHD and neurotic personality. We may come to falsely associate these rewards with a survival advantage. But there is another twist here which returns us to thinking about how the drinking scales can be bypassed or broken by the fundamental survival-biased wiring led from our reward pathway. Survival for our ancestors had a great deal to do with social fitness: how we relate to other humans for protection, reciprocal behavior such as hunting, and romantic desirability. If, when we are young, we find a profound solution to fear and social difficulties by using alcohol, we may come to falsely associate these rewards with a survival advantage. Despite the illusion, our brain is still working from the ancestral jungle script. This is perhaps why disorders characterized by problems both of social interaction as well as negative thoughts are so strongly associated with alcohol dependence. Also, it may be no coincidence that the 15,000 years of deliberate alcohol manufacture quickly followed when humans started to live and cooperate in groups. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
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