In these terms David Grayson and Adrian Hodges explain the purpose behind Everybody's Business, a practical guide to managing corporate social responsibility in the global society to be published next month.

Grayson, a long-serving director of Business in the Community - the UK organisation that promotes responsible business activities - and Hodges, who directs the Americas operation of the Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum, describe their stance as "pro-business, but not business as usual".

The two authors have 40 years' combined experience of corporate social responsibility from a variety of perspectives and Grayson - speaking to the Financial Times - reflects that, while progress continues to be made, it is insufficient.

"Good practice is not spreading fast enough in the context of the big debates over globalisation. But corporate social responsibility is a fundamental part of putting a better globalisation strategy in place. So we need not just redouble our efforts to promote social responsibility, but multiply them."

The central theme of Everybody's Business is that issues such as human rights and the environment, once regarded as marginal areas of business decision-making, are now not only mainstream but loaded with serious risk for companies.

Everybody's Business's central audience is those managers who, very often, continue to regard business ethics as a rarefied specialist function divorced from daily operational activity.

For managers, including some sympathetic to the cause who may still think of corporate social responsibility in narrowly philanthropic terms, Grayson and Hodges begin by setting the issue in a massively broader context.

Demographic changes, the digital divide, the rise in the importance of brands and the decline in deference towards large corporations and governments all form part of the backdrop against which the issues are presented.

The implications for business of all these "multi-dimensional and interconnecting global forces for change" are distilled by the authors into a call for management attention to four issues: ecology and environment; health and well-being; diversity and human rights; and communities.

For many managers, the core benefits of the book will come from a proposed seven-step process for "minimising risks and maximising opportunities" as companies find themselves having to respond to ever-wider expectations about their contribution to society. These involve:

• spotting triggers for action which may, like new government regulations, not be of a company's own making;

• winning the support of colleagues by building a convincing business case for action;

• developing a risk-opportunity assessment of the social, ethical and environmental issues facing a company;

• committing to action that will minimise risks and maximise opportunities for both business and society, "while recognising their interdependence".

• integrating strategies for action into existing business processes;

• engaging outside stakeholders and building partnerships;

• monitoring and reporting on whether a social responsibility strategy is meeting its targets.

Every manager concerned with the profitability of a unit or enterprise, argue Grayson and Hodges, needs to be concerned with the prosperity of the communities that feed those profits. But not only for social reasons.

"The biggest impetus for change in business practices is not a growing sense of social responsibility, but market forces - concerned customers, vocal employees and pragmatic investors who are worried about the value of their holdings. What was once regarded as nice-to-do has now become have-to-do."

Or as the Prince of Wales, president of Business in the Community and the International Business Leaders Forum, says in a foreword to Everybody's Business, global communications can present every aspect of a company's operations to its customers in stark, unflattering and immediate terms.

"Those customers increasingly believe that the role of large companies in our society must encompass more than the traditional functions of obeying the law, paying taxes and making a profit. Survey after survey reveals that they also want to see major corporations helping to 'make the world a better place'. That may in some respect be a naive ambition, but it is, nevertheless, a clear expectation, and one that companies ignore at their peril."