The Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility at the Walgreens Boots Alliance Richard Ellis is happy with only two staff working on implementing the Sustainable Development Goals across the company. Nor, he told Devex, is he interested in having a larger budget.
“Let’s say I have 125 staff, and a budget of 100 million [British] pounds,” he said on the sidelines of the Responsible Business Summit Europe in London this week.
“Then I’d have to do quarterly appraisals, and I’d have to go to a weekly budget meeting,” Ellis said. But his exasperation at the prospect of more responsibilities isn’t out of laziness or even, he said, a dread of meetings or evaluations. Ellis explained that the most effective way to embed the SDGs is not to insulate corporate social responsibility efforts from the rest of the company “way up on the sixth floor” with a big budget and lots of staff.