Page 252 - The New Gold Standard

PRINCIPLE 5: LEA VE A LASTING FOOTPRINT
whether businesses “walk their talk” and if they achieve their
stated community objectives. Researchers Sergio Pivato, Nicola
Misani, and Antonio Tencati, for example, have demonstrated
that corporate social performance influences consumer trust.
That trust, in turn, is linked to the future purchase behavior on
the part of those customers.
Since the founders of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company in-
cluded social responsibility in their mission statement, the com-
pany has had a long history of community involvement. This
sizable philanthropy, however, was primarily reactive to the re-
quests individual hotels received from community organiza-
tions. Further, each hotel adopted its own community partners
without a consistent process for deciding which projects should
be supported. That changed, however, with the help of Baldrige
examiners, as corporate leadership came to appreciate the im-
portance of offering a unified and focused strategy for their com-
munity efforts.
The integration of community involvement initiatives was
realized in 2002 when Ritz-Carlton developed the Community
Footprints program. Prior to rolling out Community Foot-
prints, corporate leaders looked at the types of programs that
were already established at the hotel level. As might be expected,
they found that hotel staff had naturally gravitated toward so-
cial projects that were consistent with the overall values of Ritz-
Carlton. For example, many hotels were actively participating
in environmental conservation efforts. The impetus for this in-
volvement could be traced to the 20 Basics (see Chapter 2),
which guided staff to “conserve energy, properly maintain our
hotels, and protect the environment.” In addition to environ-
mental conservation, hotels had targeted their long-standing
community involvement mission in the areas of hunger and
poverty relief and services to address the well-being of disadvan-
taged children. Given established programs at the hotel level,
Community Footprints systematically focused on those three ar-
eas (hunger and poverty relief, the well-being of disadvantaged

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