On September 6, a panel of experts gathered at the Design Museum in London, UK, for the second Principal Voices roundtable of 2006. The guests discussed the collaborative corporation and business social responsibility in front of an invited audience.

An essay about the discussion can be read here, and there is also a full transcript of the event here.

Following is a short series of key quotes from the participants:

Victoria Hale, founder of non-profit pharmaceuticals company the Institute for OneWorld Health

"The beauty of the pharmaceutical industry is its power and ability to have tremendous impact. Who is the industry impacting, we have to ask ourselves? At this point, new medicines that are being developed are for us, us who are in this room. That's great for us but there are people who have diseases that we don't have and if pharmaceutical companies are the only one capable of developing new medicines then what about those people, the people at the bottom of the pyramid?"

"The problem is that when you have great, profitable opportunities -- let's say blockbuster drugs -- that you can have in your portfolio, and then you have a drug for malaria, or diarrhea, cholera let's say. You could take one more drug into your portfolio this year. Which one are you going to choose? It's because drugs to treat people in the West, to treat ourselves, bring back such a profit that it bumps out the other diseases, the other drugs."

"I argue that young people, the youngest and brightest minds, can choose any sector they want to go into. They can choose any educational path they want to go into. And if you want the youngest, brightest, most passionate individuals, who are going to work the hardest and be the most creative, you have to offer them more than just the opportunity to make a living."

Richard Reed, CEO of socially-conscious UK-based drinks company Innocent.

"We don't call it CSR, corporate social responsibility, I feel slightly uncomfortable with that as a phrase. We just try and do business in a way that we think business should be done. But first and foremost we are doing business."

"What it (Innocent's socially-conscious attitude) has delivered to us in terms of commercial benefit is that intelligent, talented people stay part of the company. I've got this incredible retention of what I would see as incredibly intelligent, committed people."

"I think society makes an assumption that big business is bad and small business is good. We get a lot of PR credit just because of the fact we're small, so we must good. It doesn't work like that. Good is good and bad is bad. There's plenty of bad small companies and plenty of brilliant big companies. I think what every institution, what every entity, what every individual has to do is do what they can in proportion to themselves, to the scale of their resources and their size."

"As a business we are designed to chase profit, so we go where the action is, we go where the consumers are. It's consumers that ultimately hold the power. A company will respond to a change in consumer trends a thousand times quicker than it will a piece of government legislation."

"I think that what it all comes back to is that all you've got is yourself. You've got to be true to yourself. And that's what a company has to be -- it has to be true to itself, its published values, its collective personality... If you don't really care yourself, if you don't really feel it, you're faking it rather than making it, I believe it will come back and bite you on the backside at some point."

Malini Mehra, founder and director of the Center for Social Markets, based in India and Britain.

"We think that for far too long, well-intentioned individuals and non-governmental organizations and the global business community has focused on the West and not on the rest."

"It's not about being able to wheel out the correct statistic, it's about being able to have a discussion about values. If you have a leader of a company like Richard (Reed), they are only going to be able to transmit what the social, the cultural ethos, the vision of the company, should be, if they believe in it passionately. They're not going to be able to do a better job if they have someone who is an ersatz CSR manager who then wheels out 10 arguments making the business case for sustainability and making the business case for CSR. That is just cosmetic, and that will never actually transform the cultural values of the organization."

"You find that there is a huge disconnect between what people aspire to when they join companies and what they accept as operational practice when they are actually in that institution. And the only way that you can sustain values over time... if you have a very conscious effort of institutionalizing that as a culture, where people are ingrained in that and you have sanctions and penalties, reward systems, for getting people to do the right thing."