People who know me will tell you that I am a major advocate of socially-responsible business. Recently, I read a thought-provoking piece in The Economist, where Schumpeter [Sex, drugs and hope, April 13, 2013] describes how actions taken in the corporate world – in this case by a large mining company – addressed a desperate social problem that was decimating their work force.

In the early 2000’s, South Africa was facing what could only be described as an HIV/AIDS epidemic. From 1992 to 2002, the proportion of HIV-positive adults had increased exponentially from 1 percent to 17 percent. HIV testing was not routinely available, and drugs that were being used by HIV-positive people in the developed world were completely unaffordable for most South Africans. Confounding the situation even more was the inexplicable insistence of South Africa’s senior leaders, including then-President Thabo Mbeki, that HIV did not cause AIDS. The result was that people were becoming infected and dying in massive numbers.

As Schumpeter points out, “The story of how apocalypse was averted has many heroes, from health workers to AIDS activists. But big business also played its part.”

Some industries were far more vulnerable, and mining was one of them. Miners, many of whom were migrants, lived in hostels that were surrounded by prostitutes. HIV infection spread with alarming speed, and skilled workers were dying slowly from the ravages of AIDS. The situation became so dire that companies were training two people for each critical job in the mine – an insurance policy for the day when one became too ill to work. The loss of productivity threatened the very existence of the business.

In August 2002, Anglo American, one of the giants of the mining world made a bold policy decision. Without knowing what the ultimate cost would be, Anglo announced that it would provide free HIV testing for any employee who wanted it, and free treatment for those who tested positive. Anglo is no charity, but, as Brian Brink, their chief medical officer put it, “in the end it was a moral decision.”

Anglo started to measure how well each mine performed, with the metric being the conversion rate (how many people who were HIV-negative last year are HIV-positive one year later). Senior managers receive daily emails with their mine’s statistics, and how they compare to other Anglo mines. The trend is positive. At their New Vaal coal mine, nobody who was negative last year has become positive this year.

It appears that, along with a host of other factors (including effective lobbying by AIDS activists, the drop in cost for antiretroviral drugs from around $10,000/year in the late nineties to around $100 today, simplification of taking the drugs from a fistful of medications to a few every day, etc.), corporate HIV/AIDS programs in South Africa are paying for themselves in terms of reduced absenteeism and staff turnover, to say nothing of improved morale.

Dr. Brink’s statement makes me wonder. Was Anglo’s motivation purely altruistic or was it motivated by what’s good for the business? I think the answer to that question is a resounding “Yes”! You see, I believe that whatever motivates a business to address a critical social issue – in this case a moral responsibility to its employees in combination with taking action to address an ever-worsening productivity problem that threatened to raise the cost of doing business until it could put Anglo out of business in South Africa – the company is acting in the spirit of Corporate Social Responsibility. We need to change the way that we think about CSR. It doesn’t have to be “either/or”; in most cases, it should be “both/and.” I like to think of it as enlightened self-interest at work.

There are those who argue that, although enlightened self-interest provides a logical business reason for pursuing CSR strategies, it tends to produce weak programs open to accusations of “greenwashing”, PR-spin or stakeholder manipulation, and that the only true CSR programs are based solely on altruism. I believe that it depends on the motives behind the actions. If a company’s intent is PR-spin, stakeholder manipulation or greenwashing, that removes “enlightened” from the equation and focuses solely on self-interest. If, on the other hand, the intent is to balance profit, people, and planet…

In future blog entries, we’ll continue to explore the role that enlightened self-interest and both/and thinking plays in sustainable business success.