IA05 Reflect on a guest speaker

At the beginning of the semester, We had Dr. Macagno come in to talk to us.  Dr. Tom Macagno is an Assistant Professor of Sustainability and Business at Chatham.  He attended the University of East Anglia in the UK and obtained his Ph.D in Sustainable Business. Dr. Macagno is the founder and director of See, Believe, Act! which is an online tool for managing Corporate Social Responsibility, the tool helps with stakeholder engagement, employee engagement and CSR reporting. During Dr. Macagnos lecture, he talked a lot about CSR (corporate social responsibility). Dr. Macagno described what CSR is, which is a responsibility among firms to meet the needs of their stakeholders.  The stakeholders are impacted by organizations, for profit means that the investors get money, which are primarily the stakeholders.  He talked about the factors of production which are, Entrepreneurship, Land, Labor, Capital, and Outputs (goods and services).
The perfect competitions would be many sellers, standardized products and many consumers.  He briefly went over what an Oligopoly and Monopoly are.  Oilgopoly is two sellers. Seller A, Seller B and consumer groups A, B, C. A monopoly is one seller, but consumer groups A, B, C, D, E.  Energy is considered a monopoly and so is the internet. Dr. Macagno also talked about measuring world economic goals, which could be growth-gross domestic product, high employment-unemployment rate, the price stability-consumer price index. He also talked about the Business Cycle. Prosperity (high), Recovery (high), Recession (low) and Depression (low).
I really enjoyed having Dr. Macagno as a guest speaker. I felt that I learned a lot from him and can relate it to other things in the Business world.  I could not really relate CSR to the business world once we had the lecture because I was new to business. However, now since we have done a lot of research for our team projects, I learned that CSR is very important and makes your company stronger.
Helping the community is a big part of business.  I can relate CSR to the Harvard Business Review because a lot of their articles talk about how CSR is important to every company and can provide support to people in the community as well as organizations.  The stakeholders want to see a certain thing done in the company they have invested in and CSR is what those things are.
Some important things to consider when thinking about CSR are the company level, produced level and individual level. Its also good to consider questions like this: Why do companies exist?, What is a company?, What is a non-profit company?, What is a for profit company?.  As I learned more about Corporate Social Responsibility, I learned how it is an important part of business. I am glad we had the chance to meet Dr. Macagno and I hope to learn more from him at another Business event, we have connected with each other on LinkedIn so I can keep in touch with him.