The past decades have thankfully provided increasing examples of organizations demonstrating that things can be done differently. Look at Whole Foods. Look at what global carpet tile manufacturer Interface has done. They are companies that focus on creating lasting value for all stakeholders.
Creating lasting value entails delivering value for employees, for customers, for shareholders and for society.
They lack neither influence, nor the ability to use it. But there is one asset that business leaders at the World Economic Forum this week could usefully exploit further: the power to advance the wider interests of people and planet. With UN climate change negotiations under way and as the UN designs its flagship Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, business needs to engage.
Part 1: Social Entrepreneurship is Business’ Savior and Nemesis“A – always B – be C – Closing. Always be closing… You close, or you hit the bricks.”
Blake’s diatribe against ineffectuality reverberates in the eardrums of anyone who has dialed for dollars or worked the walk-in beat in a sales job. And for decades, revenue, and its even sexier cousin, profit, has been the object of managerial desire.
But somewhere in the rigor of sales, the greed of ambition and the lust for growth, the pursuits of private enterprise have pushed markets and managers to look beyond the bottom line to achieve competitive victory. Capitalism has evolved both its nemesis and its savior, called social entrepreneurship.
Bookshelves and business publications are rife with references to new age concepts and terminology – “Conscious Capitalism,” “The New Economy,” “The Shared Economy,” “Transformational Leadership,” and dozens of others that exemplify a new generation of popular business management literature (and managers) obsessed with making the case for doing well by doing good – or at least doing good while doing well.
At the third annual Sustainable Brands NewMetrics Conference at the University of Pennsylvania in September, the need for next-generation sustainability goals — which measure progress toward real-world goal-lines such as carbon budgets, water tables, and living wages — emerged as a key theme. To dig deeper, NewMetrics channel co-curator Bill Baue discussed this question of “endzone” goals with prominent voices in the field, including Allen White, of the Global Initiative for Sustainability Ratings; Andrew Winston, author of the forthcoming book, The Big Pivot; SustainAbility CEO Mark Lee, and others.
As stakeholders, we have been conditioned to expect corporate transparency to come in annual packages – annual reports, sustainability reports, and even a slow trickle of integrated reports that are now starting to gain traction.
There seems to be something magical about that 12-month timeframe which appears to satisfy our thirst for sustainability information. Or does it?
By the time we read sustainability reports, all the news is old, sometimes very old. The data is history and the stories are of a time long gone. If we’re lucky, a sustainability report contains commitments for the future, which remain relevant after publication, but practically everything else has passed its sell-by date. One the one hand, we want sustainability reporting to be a basis for dialogue and engagement. On the other hand, why engage around something that’s history and not here-and-now?
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