CSR as corporate penance
Alfred Nobel was horrified. Not so much because the obituary had got the wrong man — Alfred's older brother Ludvig had died, and the report had mistaken one Nobel for another — but because it described the inventor of dynamite and gelignite as 'the merchant of death'.
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Horrified by how posterity would remember him (he would die eight years later), Nobel developed a dread of being mistaken to be dead. But, more importantly, he became concerned about his reputation. Kenne Fant, in his 1991 biography of Nobel, writes how the businessman-inventor 'became so obsessed with his posthumous reputation that he rewrote his last will, bequeathing most of his fortune to a cause upon which no future obituary writer would be able to cast aspersions'. Thus was born the Nobel Prize, the most prized award doing the rounds since 1901 to foster and celebrate the sciences, literature… and peace.
As far as brand names go, 'Nobel' is right up there with 'Gandhi' and 'Dalai Lama' — the former never got a Nobel, the latter did in 1949 — when it comes to encouraging work that brings the 'greatest benefit to mankind'. The dynamite baron — who also owned Bofors, the Swedish armament company known to most Indians, for some time in the 1890s, and was a key player in its modernisation as a cannon manufacturer — may have genuinely thought that dynamite's prime use would be beneficial for progress.
