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Zachary Hongola ... Digital Manager at The B Team
Top Contributor
'Sustainability has a bigger future as a business opportunity than it has as a moral quest...'
While profit is sometimes seen as a dirty word, here's a compelling post on the importance of the business case for sustainability.
Any Thoughts?
Making Sustainability Pay sharedvalue.org
Some say that the future of profit is purpose. Paul Polman at Unilever, Emmanuel Faber at Danone, Jim Stengel from P&G, have called the business world to its sense of responsibility. After all, business today is probably the biggest force in the...
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Hans Lak, Ellen Martin and 1 other like this
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Grattan Donnelly
Grattan
Grattan Donnelly
Executive coach and group facilitator, enabling people to clear space for what's important
Hi Zachary, Thanks for sharing. I think our current thinking is limiting.....it's often sustainability or profit.....how about sustainability and profit.......which is effectively what the article is arguing for. I have recently written two articles which are linked and along similar themes. These articles can be found by cutting and pasting the links below....and uses B Team examples and more.....it's about reframing the business narrative, a la Plan B, Firms of Endearment, B Corporations, etc.
http://acbulletin.com/Global/201407/plan-b-the-times-they-are-a-changing.phphttp://acbulletin.com/Global/201407/socially-responsible-business.php
Be curious to get your thoughts.
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Peter Burgess
Peter Burgess
Founder/CEO at TrueValueMetrics developing Multi Dimension Impact Accounting
Zachary ... the piece by Fauconnier Christophe is interesting, reasonable right, but terribly superficial. Certainly there is a need for change, and the change needs to be quite rapid and very substantial.
The 'shared value' movement starts with the premise that the corporate organization will be more successful (i.e. profitable) if there is a shared value between the stakeholders ... but for me, the framing of the question is wrong, and accordingly the answer is also wrong.
The purpose of economic activity is to give people a better quality of life and standard of living. A high performance organization is one that does this while doing the least damage to the planet.
The agricultural and industrial revolutions were pretty successful at raising the standard of living for many people ... but in the process there were more and more negative impacts on the planet (resource depletion and environmental degradation).
If everyone on the planet is going to have a decent standard of living using the business model of North America and Europe the impact on the planet will be catastrophic. This is a risk that should not be taken ... and we should do what needs to be done to get a better quality of life for people and at the same time do it in ways that are very much less damaging to the planet.
Paul Polman is articulating this idea quite well. In my view, now the challenge is to have an accounting system and top level economic metrics that embrace this idea. Conventional money profit accounting is not enough and metrics like GDP growth are pushing decisions in the wrong direction. We have to value everything that matters around the lives of people and we have to value everything that matters in connection with what is going on with the planet. In the middle we need metrics for all the organizations that are using resources and creating something so that we know what they are doing both in terms of good for people and damage for planet.
The corporate organizations have a huge role to play. They are big and they have the technology and organization to do big things ... but it would be nice if the big things they do were measured in a way that is multi dimensional, rigorous and comprehensive.
When we know how well the organizations are performing, then it is reasonable to expect that investors will support the good ones and dis-invest from the others.
Work is being done to develop and deploy systems of metrics that will do this ... it won't happen overnight, but the ideas are emerging and significant progress is being made.
Stay tuned ...
Peter Burgess ... TrueValueMetrics ... Multi Dimension Impact Accounting
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