Article 3

Three simple ways to align your business success with greater social impact

1-2 minute read

THE CAPSULE SUMMARY – The three primary ways to align your business model to create more social benefit: create a business that is inherently good for the world, attach a social benefit to your existing business, or simply donate dollars or resources.

3.1  ‘Doing more good’ means increasing the amount of positive social impact being generated from the natural running of a business. We have made quantum leaps forward on this front. At this point, the number of company leaders who would publicly declare that their only responsibility was to generate shareholder gain (at the expense of society at large) would be very small indeed.


3.2 However, simply championing 4th Stakeholder balance does not mean you are actioning it to the fullest degree--you have to modify your business practices to match.

Maximizing societal impact will fundamentally change how you operate in many areas.


3.3 In terms of tuning your business engine to create a more positive 4th Stakeholder impact, companies have a wealth of tools available to them but they can generally all be classified into one of three high-level categories. Companies should simply iterate through each of these areas and ask themselves whether they have really pushed the boundaries of creativity in terms of what their business model can support.

3.4  You can think of these three categories as a very simple check-list for action:

  • Focus on products and businesses that have inherently positive impact

  • If that’s not possible, create an ‘attached’ societal benefit that grows in tandem with your business scale

  • Consider redirecting your profits or resources towards charitable or social causes.

Companies can generate massive societal good by pulling one or more of these levers.

3.5  In general, the positive impact generated from these levers reduces as you step down from the first to the third. The greatest impact relative to your company size is of course tuning your entire enterprise (and all its inherent scale and resources) towards a positive societal end-goal. Contrast that to companies that take a fractional percent of profits (which are only a fractional percent of revenue) and redirect it towards some social cause.

3.6  Still, each lever provides a positive impact and all efforts should be celebrated. Regardless of which lever you pursue, the bigger your business gets the greater the societal impact generated, which should be the goal.