Two-Minute Drill

Social responsibility is becoming an increasingly popular measure of corporate success

David Stangis is Intel's first director of corporate responsibility, a position that brings together disparate socially conscious initiatives, from aggressive strategies for "going green" to actively promoting strong ethics, diversity, and the health and safety of employees and customers throughout the company's global operations. Stangis started his green-focused career working at Ford Motor Company's environmental control office. In 1996 he came to Intel to work on global worker health and safety initiatives. After the green piece of the corporate responsibility puzzle "exploded" at the end of the decade, he moved into his current role that emphasizes improving Intel's overall "footprint" on the planet.

Q: What exactly does your job entail?
A: We believe it's critical to talk to people who might not be familiar with Intel's work in social responsibility--particularly with regard to human rights and environmental standards. A major part of this involves seeking out investors, activists, and other concerned citizens, understanding their issues, and making sure internal stakeholders at Intel take action on them.

Q: How important are corporate responsibility issues to the investment community?
A: Increasing daily. And Intel is one of the top companies in every social responsibility investors' index out there. In fact, Intel has been in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index since its inception eight years ago, and the No. 1 technology company worldwide for six of those years. We depend on all the organizations and analysts and researchers who cover this area to help us find ways to improve. Just as we hold quarterly analyst briefings on our financial status, I hold regular corporate social responsibility briefings to keep investors up to date on our initiatives and progress.

Q: Can you give an example of how Intel has managed to do well by doing good?
A: When constructing three new factories in Arizona, we negotiated an agreement with all regulatory agencies--local, state, and federal--and the community--in which we promised to meet environmental standards for air, water, and waste in exchange for a single, all-encompassing site permit. This was a significant breakthrough on the part of these regulatory bodies. And, since we were able to successfully deliver on our commitments to the community--which included publicly posting all emissions and other environmental metrics quarterly on the Web--we did not need to get a single additional permit for the future phases of the multi-billion dollar project. The bottom-line dollar impact on our operations from avoiding that red tape was enormous.

Q: How committed is Intel to its triple bottom line?
A: We've just redrafted our employee code of conduct to include it. Our message to everyone in our organization is that it's not just something nice to think about, but that they must constantly come up with new ways to implement socially responsible initiatives, both for the short and long term. Some recent initiatives include committing to making future generations of chips lead free and spearheading the Climate Savers Computing Initiative in collaboration with Google. The goal of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative is to reduce global computer C02 emissions by 54 million tons per year by 2010--equivalent to the annual output of 11 million cars or 10 to 20 coal-fired power plants.

Q: Who has most challenged your thinking on environmental issues over the past decade?
A: That's a tough one. There are so many. Gordon Moore, one of Intel's founders and the creator of Moore's Law, instituted an environmental culture at Intel that remains today. And over the last several years, John Elkington, who coined the phrase the "triple bottom line," has really pushed the envelope in environmental thinking and is at the top of my list. The triple bottom line refers to a growing awareness that in addition to the traditional bottom-line criterion--financial success--corporations must demonstrate that they are socially and environmentally successful as well. All three components must come together to get a full picture of how well a company is performing.