Article 4
Making your business and social impact one and the same
2-3 minute read
CAPSULE SUMMARY – For the lucky few, you can craft a business where the entirety of the company delivers against a key societal goal.
4.1 Build a business that has an inherently positive impact. If only every company could fit this definition. Of the three ways to tune your business engine to deliver positive social benefit, the first lever holds the most significant impact. It means that your business has a de facto positive societal benefit.
4.2 Obvious examples would include businesses focused on curing or preventing disease, businesses that move us towards more sustainable and clean energy, businesses that improve education levels, businesses that help lift the underprivileged out of poverty, businesses that provide personal safety, etc. The list is incredibly long and encompasses vast swaths of the companies on the planet.
Your company and positive societal impact can be one and the same.
4.3 Thousands of businesses in this vein are forming under a formal Benefits, B-Corporation, or Conscious Capitalism umbrella, and the pace is only increasing. However, a formal label or recognition is not required by any means as there are hundreds of thousands of businesses where the sheer act of gaining more scale creates tangible societal benefit.
4.4 The specific action for companies to take in terms of this lever is simple: think deeply about a stronger purpose-driven model when starting or scaling a new business or product line, and actively consider bolder ways to morph existing business models into this zone if you can.
4.5 The legacy automobile manufacturers are a great example of an entire industry taking both steps (albeit slowly), as the vast majority of new investment and innovation in that segment has shifted into carbon neutral, clean vehicle development. And consider Philips, a $50 billion+ conglomerate, moving purposefully and strategically from an industrial electronics conglomerate to one focused on making the world healthier and more sustainable via health technologies.
4.6 Of course, not every business or product will be able to fit into this model, even though many leaders or marketers will try to cram their business into a ‘purpose-driven’ positioning. That’s OK. Our economy requires a myriad of companies and services, many of which provide critical products and services that will never legitimately fall under this umbrella.
4.7 Leaders should be true to their business and must avoid artificially positioning it as socially beneficial when it’s clearly not. A profitable business making paper (literally, the kind you write on) is a great business in its own right. We need paper for many things in society. Still, it would be a ridiculous stretch to claim that your paper business was de facto socially good because it ‘provided improved communication by delivering affordable and portable communications.’
4.8 That being said, a company with core products or services that aren’t de facto “socially good” can still deliver significant impact, in particular by directly attaching social impact to its business model. We will expand on this and other paths to impact in the following two sections.