ABSTRACT
Responsibility management is fundamentally aimed at fostering continual innovation and improvement in management systems that affect stake-holders and the natural environment. Four major processes can be helpful in thinking through the innovation and improvement systems: remediation, continual improvement, creating a learning organisation, and focusing on results. Remediation links to the foundational values agreed by the international community and the specific responsibility vision of the corporation. Remediation addresses specific problems by immediately eliminating practices that are intolerable under the foundational values and working towards resolving problems that stakeholders find unacceptable. Total responsibility management (TRM) approaches ensure that customer, community, supplier, owner, employee, activist and other stakeholder relationships are on solid ground and that trust is being built. A key component of responsibility management systems is that they establish an environment within the company for ongoing learning: that is, companies using TRM approaches become learning organisations.
