The Institute of Directors organized a two day conference on Corporate Social Responsibility in Delhi recently and conferred the Golden Peacock on a range of companies, from Hindustan Unilever to Zensar in the private sector to Punjab National Bank and National Thermal Power Corporation in the public sector. While the companies recognized are very different in both size and scope of their core operations, the similarity in their CSR approach was the commitment to engage with the communities and distribute as many smiles as possible in the effort to make a difference. CSR like any other focused corporate activity can be managed only if it can be measured and common measures like the percentage of profits ranging from half to two percent allocated to CSR are flawed because it does not guarantee effective outcomes. In our own CSR projects, we have found that better metrics of effort are the number of associate hours deployed on projects and the only metric of successful outcomes is the actual result of all CSR efforts on the individuals in the community who are to be impacted. An example of outcome targeting in CSR is the area of creating employability. The Government itself has been doing a rather indifferent job in this area with the much touted Modularity Employability Scheme ( MES) delivering weak results. Our own efforts in supporting underprivileged community children through supplemental activities like multimedia learning support, English sensitisation through Akanksha Centres and post-school livelihood training has shown that a longitudinal plan of interventions is traverses the long path from awareness to skills to education to employment. There are many jobs in the industry today, from voice call centers to infrastructure management and support to simple application support through managed services arrangements where the skills needed are not esoteric and certainly do not call for the deployment of MCAs or engineers. Preparing young people who would otherwise not be considered by the corporate sector for careers in these areas can serve both the company and the community well. Two separate experiments in this area that we have found very rewarding are the Johannesburg centre we have started to support the Government of South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) initiative and the thought leadership that we are currently providing to the Hudson Valley Educational Consortium (HVEC) in New York which aims to prepare American students for careers in Outsourced Infrastructure Management. It is paradoxical perhaps that our investments in bringing this program to India are just commencing but the opportunity for scaling this initiative here are enormous. Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives are scalable only if they address some real needs of the organization and investments in initiatives in education, healthcare and employability should all be viewed through this lens. Our industry has many firsts to its credit and we should look at sound ways to demonstrate that there are sound hearts along with brilliant minds powering our companies!