Do Good vs. Do Right

Last week I wrote a piece (just a screen below) on ‘enjoying your work’ … and I do work for a cool company in SAP. One of the things I love is their leadership position around corporate responsibility and sustainability. We even named a Chief Sustainability Officer last year – Peter Graf.

As a software company, we not only sell solutions to help companies manage their carbon footprint and fulfill various regional reporting requirements, but we also strive to be a leading example of a company ‘doing the right thing’. In leading by example, SAP has recently produced our 2009 Sustainability Report. Now this is a cool piece of work. Check it out, click through the easy navigation, or take a video tour. It is one of the first, if not the very first, interactive Sustainability Report available, highlighting where SAP is making improvements in reducing our own carbon emissions.

I started with the title of Do Good versus Do Right. Our co-CEO Bill McDermott used this phrase in a video and it really resonated with me. In the past, that was an “either / or” proposition. Companies either “did good” by their stakeholders, or they ate into their profit margin to “do right” things, like build LEED certified buildings or spend extra on adopting green practices. But it seems, thankfully after years of environmental pioneers paving the way, that doing the right thing is now also seen in corporate America as doing a good thing by your stakeholders. We are still only at the beginning, but this is the opportunity to continue to push environmental responsibility. Doing good IS doing right.

Enjoying Your ‘Work’

Confucius, who lived around 500 B.C., said 'If you enjoy what you do, you will never work another day in your life.' Well, I work for a pretty cool company (SAP), and we just had our customer conference - SAPPHIRE NOW. It was a truly slick event, as it was held simultaneously in Orlando, Florida and Frankfurt, Germany. And not only that, it was blogged and tweeted and satellite broadcast around the world.

The consensus is that there was an energy coming from those events, based on the strategy that was shared and the direction our company is going. Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group and former vice-president Al Gore, were both keynote speakers and shared wonderful insights about how with great opportunity, comes great responsibility.

All of these inputs and insights and discussions and blogs, led me to appreciate the company I work for. Are we too busy? Yup. Do we work crazy hours? Who doesn’t? But I am fortunate to really enjoy, not to mention learn from, the people I work with and those that I manage. If you are reading this post, I hope you enjoy the work that you do. If not, find parts of it that you do like and do those to the best of your ability. You never know what doors that will open.