Saturday interview: Samantha Barber - Iberdrola�s first non-Spanish director is relishing the opportunity to generate fresh ideas

Samantha Barber lived and worked in continental Europe for seven years before being appointed chief executive of Scottish Business in the Community in 2000 at the age of 31.

However, the Dunfermline girl who was brought up in Dundee never imagined being able to pick up her French and Spanish again from a director's chair on the board of one of Europe's major companies.

Iberdrola, the Spanish utility which owns ScottishPower, last week picked Barber as its first non-Spanish director, overlooking her fellow members of the new ScottishPower advisory board - among them Charles Miller Smith, the utility's former chairman, Sir Tom Farmer, Lord Kerr, Lord Macdonald, Sir Muir Russell and Susan Deacon.

"Corporate responsibility is very important to both ScottishPower and Iberdrola," Barber said this week. "When I looked at the composition of the advisory board, I could see they had brought me in as corporate responsibility', but also as someone who has lived and worked in Europe and who is a Spanish speaker."

In her 20s Barber studied at three universities in France for a degree in European community law, then worked four years in Brussels as a political policy adviser to the parliament's economic and monetary affairs committee.

In 1998, she returned home as director of Business for Scotland, an SNP-backed forum for debate on constitutional reform which flushed out some surprisingly radical views from many leading figures in business.

"It was about engendering a dialogue with the business community."

Now, she says, the minority government offers a different challenge to lobbyists. "We all have to review how we manage our government relations a minority government means we have to be more constructive and collaborative and challenging."

Before Scottish Business in the Community appointed Barber as its youngest chief executive and first woman leader, SBC saw itself as promoting community investment and volunteering among its 200 corporate members.

"When I came in there were only about two or three of us, and our income was £200,000," she recalls. Now the organisation, funded 50% each by the public and private sectors, employs 30, has an income of £1.4m, engages with more than 400 companies, including many non-member smaller firms, and offers consultancy and training.

Barber saw the opportunity to create a Scottish centre for corporate social responsibility, modelled on its London-based big sister Business in the Community. Within two years, she had sharpened the focus of SBC's work onto employability and education, workplace health and the environment. Marks & Spencer, Royal Mail, Sodhexo and Wood Group, for instance, have shown what can be done in getting the least employable into work.

"The beauty is we provide the training to upskill' inside the business, so they are better equipped to support and manage a placement for a more vulnerable individual within the workplace," Barber explains. "We also facilitate businesses sharing and learning experience from each other, so it becomes collaborative, not businesses doing things in isolation. SBC can't do everything nor should we, our unique selling point is that we understand what a business needs in this area to deliver the outcome."

She adds: "Why write a person off? Why not think how can we integrate people who might have a history of mental illness, for example?"

The first wave of the Ready for Work programme in Scotland was the most successful in the UK, with almost two-thirds of those placed in work - some of whom might not have worked in 20 years - still there after six months. "Those outcomes can't be achieved unless the private sector is engaged," said Barber.

For the private sector the message is that corporate responsibility impacts on the workplace, the marketplace, the environment and the community. "It is not an add-on, it has to be completely built into your business, part of the DNA, a better way of doing business."

Thanks partly to SBC's proactive approach, Scotland appears to punch above its weight in the UK's good corporate citizen awards, and has also proved that small companies can make it with inspired leadership.

"We are a small nation," Barber says. "Technically and potentially, our ability to effect change should be greater because of our scale. Small nations can stand out from the crowd. There is also something in the Scottish psyche - we understand that we want a better society and economy for all.

"I think there is a much bigger market in Scotland than the one we penetrate at the moment. For instance, some companies who work with SBC are beginning to use us on a consultancy basis, and we charge them a non-member rate for doing that."

But surely in a gathering economic storm, the softer values will tend to be pushed down the agenda?

"We will see two different types of reaction," Barber says. "Some companies will revert back to the tactics of the early 1990s and what they are familiar with in terms of a downturn in the economy. But they need to realise that the expectations of key stakeholders in particular consumers and employees - are vastly different from 15 years ago. Those companies where corporate responsibility is truly embedded will use it cleverly and smartly to help and support them through difficult economic times."

SBC is actually enjoying increased demand for its employee-sponsored volunteering, which is structured as personal development and team-building. "Rather than taking everybody to a hotel, this actually achieves better outcomes," Barber says.

When the call came from Bilbao last week, Barber realised she had to update her conversational Spanish. "They didn't have words for website and mobile phone 15 years ago," she said.

Now settled in Edinburgh and a mother of two children aged three and nine months, she is unexpectedly renewing her European credentials.

"Several things are fantastic about this appointment," she says. "First of all is the commitment of Iberdrola to corporate responsibility, the fact that they want that skill set on their main board. In this climate I think that is a really good signal from a major company.

"I also think Scotland has a very good track record in corporate responsibility, SBC is one of the oldest organisations of its kind in Europe, going back 25 years, most have been founded in the last 10 to 15 years or less. Now I am looking forward to bringing back some of the learning on how they approach this in Spain, because nobody has a monopoly on great ideas in this area.

"It is a wonderful opportunity for me personally, a great opportunity for SBC, and a great opportunity for Scotland."