All Roads Lead to China: Business News, Analysis, and Insights from China

If history is a guide for the future, than GSK (and others) really should have paid more attention 5-6 years ago when SIEMENS was caught up in a similar scandal involving their medical equipment.  Sadly they didn’t and a few months ago when the story broke that they were under investigation, it was clear to […]

Playing off my previous posts, Could a Shared Economy Work in China? and Do Chinese Consumers Care? Really?, a recent Edelman goodpurpose study, which surveyed 500 people across 16 countries, came to the conclusion that Chinese consumers are more likely than their U.S. counterparts to buy items that are “good” and support responsible businesses. something […]

Apple is committed to driving the highest standards for social responsibility throughout our supply base. We require that our suppliers provide safe working conditions, treat workers with dignity and respect, and use environmentally responsible manufacturing processes wherever Apple products are made. This is the FIRST paragraph for the 2012 Apple Supplier Responsibility report (download here) […]

A great clip from Jon Stewart on Foxconn, and a timely one given Apple’s recent revelations that its supply chain is still a clusterfu*k, Apple makes over a billion USD a day in profit, and in one of the last meetings with President Obama Steve jobs made it clear that Apple’s outsourced supply chain would […]

A few weeks back I was asked to speak at the BMW Europe Asian Young Leaders Forum on “How do cities organize communal life and maintain social harmony? What can business contribute to these processes?”  It was the week after EXPO, and everyone was in Harmonious society mode, but in developing what I thought were […]

Over the last couple of years, one of the firms that has popped up on the radar of firms whose labor conditions I felt were at some point going to come back to haunt them… and I think we have come a bit closer with the above CCTV report, an 11 and a half minute […]

This afternoon I was asked by someone why I am involved in CSR and sustainability.  It is a question that I seem to asked frequently, but one that I am not sure I ever answer with any measure of clarity as I have worked in a very wide range of issues related to these big […]

News of a 25 year old committing suicide at Apple’s primary China supplier (Foxconn) has once again brought to the front burner the difficulties of managing outsourced operations, and the risk to the brand that these arrangements bring when improperly managed. It is a situation that sadly I believe could have been avoided, and that […]