Ten years ago, advocates of so-called corporate social responsibility (CSR) coined an expression: You do well by doing good. They were wrong.

At the time, it was possible for organizations to do well by behaving badly — for example, by having terrible labor practices, employing “creative accounting”, being a monopoly, externalizing their costs onto society, having shady environmental behaviors, having lousy products, abandoning customers, and so on.

But increasingly, because of the new, open world driven by mass online collaboration, that expression for CSR is finally becoming true.

It is certainly clear that, these days, you are highly likely to do badly by being bad. If you cut back investments in safety — on an oil rig, for example — your business will suffer as a result. If you are a car company and have failed to invest in fuel-efficient technologies or hybrid vehicles, you will do badly; just as, if you fail to maintain your investment in producing quality vehicles, you will do badly.

The overwhelming reason for this step change in recent years is transparency. There is strong evidence that companies and other organizations are being forced to act with integrity, not just by regulators and institutional shareholders, but also because of the transparency of this networked age.

Thanks to a broad range of online technologies — such as blogs, social media and wikis — the public can very quickly and very easily find out what’s really going on. They can inform others, and they can organize collective responses.

Consequently, if your organization fails to invest in socially responsible measures, or even if anything about your business — such as a faked viral marketing campaign — is perceived to be phony, you will be found out. You will be tweeted about, and a Facebook Causes group will be created against you. As many corporate casualties have discovered, the result of such a campaign can be catastrophic to your firm’s reputation and ultimately to its bottom line.

Therefore, to avoid a public relations or financial disaster, integrity needs to be part of the DNA of every organization — not just to secure a healthy business environment, but for the organization’s own sustainability and competitive advantage.

It’s worth noting here that I believe the word “integrity” is preferable to the expression “corporate social responsibility,” as the latter puts too much emphasis on the notion that corporations should do “good” in the world and be “good” citizens out of some moral or ethical imperative.

Of course, that is absolutely true. But what’s new — and what organizations need to focus on — is the idea of integrity, as driven by transparency. Without it you cannot build trust, and trust is essential for competitiveness in this new environment. To put it bluntly, regardless of the moral arguments, there are now some hard, bottom-line business reasons for baking integrity into every company.

Four key aspects combine to create corporate integrity:

• Honesty  In everything from motivating employees to negotiating with partners, disclosing financial information or explaining the environmental impact of their actions, organizations must tell the truth

• Consideration  The interests of others must always be taken into account; you cannot externalize costs — for example, the true environmental costs of your entire supply chain must be acknowledged, as people are starting to become aware of such factors  

• Accountability  Quite simply, you need to abide by your commitments, and to be able to prove that you have done so

• Transparency  This is created when the previous three are combined — and is the foundation of trust. Companies need to move away from being closed about information or hoarding their intellectual property. They need to share some — but not all — intellectual property; not to be “good,” but as a matter of competitive advantage.

The financial services industry is a great example of what can go wrong here. Leading up to the global financial crisis, there were huge integrity violations: many organizations in the sector weren’t honest, considerate, accountable or open. And they almost brought down capitalism.

It’s not just the bankers

But the faults are not just limited to bankers. Every organization in every sector now needs to embrace these values and these principles if they’re going to build and maintain a successful business.

When acting on these values, the first thing corporate leaders, including CIOs, need to do is address their own behavior. It’s important you don’t just talk the talk, you must walk the walk. You set corporate culture by your own behavior, and should act according to these values at all times.

Second, you must ensure that these values are passed to the rest of your business. You need it in your IT so you can measure progress. You need it in your business processes. You need it in your compensation systems — people do what you pay them to do, so you need to incentivize them to act responsibly.

Once organizations have built a foundation of trust based on integrity, then their networks — customers, employees, stakeholders — will reciprocate with cooperative behavior. Customers, for example, decide to give companies their money.

A lack of trust, on the other hand, generates conflict, friction and inefficiencies, while consuming management time and resources with defensive activities.

Keeping up with society’s evolving expectations can be tough, but integrity shouldn’t be seen as a millstone. Get it right, and the promise is that you will build a business that is better equipped to develop solutions for enhancing the common good — and your own bottom line.

• Don Tapscott is a leading authority on the business and social consequences of mass online collaboration, and is chairman of the think tank nGenera Insight. He is also the author of several best-selling books, including Grown Up Digital and (with Anthony  Williams) Wikinomics. Tapscott and Williams’ acclaimed new book, Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World, is out now. Follow his tweets at @dtapscott.

• See also our in-depth feature on the role of IT in corporate social responsibility.