What the World Needs Now From Your Business
Think about this question: what does the world need from business?
What does the world need from business? It’s not a question business leaders ask very often, beyond asking what our customers need. The business community is good at communicating what WE need. We’re good at telling local governments what tax breaks and free services we’ll need to open a business in their area. We’re good at telling state governments what infrastructure we need to keep our costs down and what concessions we need to be able to hire more people. And we’re good at joining together in industry groups so we can pay lobbyists in Washington to tell the Federal government what laws we need changed so we can go about our business with the minimum hassles from regulators.
We’re good at telling the world what WE need. So maybe it’s time for us to ask what the world needs.
Who is the world?
We need to be very specific about the language we use. If we ask, “What do people need from business?” then it sounds like we’re talking about our employees or our customers. But the world is bigger than that.
If we ask, “What does the community need from business?” then it sounds like we’re talking about our town or our local charities. And the world is bigger than that.
If we ask, “What does our society need from business?” then it sounds like we mean our nation, our American society. The world is bigger than that, too.
And if we ask, “What does the planet need from business?” then it sounds like we’re talking about polar bears. And the world is definitely bigger than polar bears. The world is all of that and all of us. And right now, the world needs business to think a little differently.
The world needs business to be different in three ways.
It needs us to be Social.
It needs us to be Serviceful.
And it needs us to be Sustainable.
The world needs us to be those three things … not “by the way” or “on the side” or “after the fact.” It needs us to be all those things at the core of our business models.
The world needs business to be social
The world needs business to be more social. What does that mean? It means that all business is about people. The people who work for you. The people who buy from you. The people who supply you. The people who invest in you. And the people who know the people who do all those things. The world is asking business to understand that we have a social responsibility to all those people. And, that business will be held accountable for actions that are “anti-social.”
The Coca-Cola Company has a hundred year history of careful management of the water in their bottling plants. The quality of their product and their ability to maintain their market share depends right out of the gate on the quality of the water they put in it. Then one of their plants came under fire from the people of Kerala in India. They were in the middle of a drought and the people of the region came to believe that Coke was part of the problem. They thought they were taking all the water, putting it in Coke and exporting it to the rest of India.
First they tried to explain. “No, we get our water from really deep wells that don’t affect the local watershed.” But nobody believed them. So then they decided to get “social” and admit that if there was a water shortage problem in their state then it was their problem, too. And they moved from water management to watershed management. First in Kerala, and now globally.
They now understand that their operations have a major effect on the watersheds where they’re located and that those watersheds have a major effect on the future their operations. They’re saying, “We can’t just care about the water quality in our plant. We have to be part of the solution for the water quality in the entire watershed.” That’s their social responsibility.
Every business lives in a “social watershed” in which we depend on the healthy flow of people, ideas and economic growth. The world needs business to take responsibility for the health of that social watershed. That means cultivating human capital inside our companies and outside. We need to seed our communities with really smart and successful people — I don’t mean billionaires, I mean normal people who hold jobs and build businesses. Who can build your business or who can be your customers.
Business is no longer in an age when it can float on top of society and siphon off profits. We have a social responsibility to work for the health of the world in which we do business. That’s what the world needs from us: a business culture that’s also part of the social fabric of life.
The world needs business to be serviceful.
The world needs business to be serviceful.
We live in a time when Government is gridlocked in a partisan standoff where compromise and reconciliation are considered dirty words. Business had a hand in creating that situation. And now the world needs business to roll up its sleeves and solve some problems. Because in business, we know there’s nothing that can’t be negotiated and we know the best negotiations are the ones where everyone wins.
Business can’t sit on the sidelines and say, “We only care about the economy. The rest has nothing to do with us.” That’s nuts, because you can’t separate the economy from the environment or the quality of schools or the basic social fabric of the communities in which you do business. And you can’t separate those communities from the rest of the world.
These days, what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas anymore. Same with what happens anywhere in the world. We’re in a global economy now. Business can’t be a suckerfish on the belly of society. It has to serve. That means more than just asking if the world wants fries with whatever your selling. It means reframing your business strategy to serve the common good. These days, it’s not enough to donate a little money to charity and call that “social responsibility.”
Zappos has made a business of “delivering happiness” and has tried to extend that beyond just their customers. A few years ago, they were out growing their facilities in Las Vegas so they began the typical search for some land to build a nice suburban campus. But then their CEO, Tony Hsieh ask if there was something the city of Las Vegas needed from them.
It turned out there was. Downtown Las Vegas was an empty shell of a town, with vacant lots and empty buildings. So Zappos bought the old city hall building and some other buildings in the downtown area and moved their company there. Then they started developing the blocks around them. Today, that area is beginning to turn into a vital downtown area, with apartments and stores and buildings full of start-up businesses. They took a stand for making their city better.
Today, the world wants your business to stand for something. They want to see that your business model is designed to help your customers make a better world. If you can’t stand for something that resonates, people won’t want to buy from you and they won’t want to work for you. To resonate, you have to stand for something bigger than your bottom line. You have to stand for something that serves the world.
The world needs you to be sustainable.
The world needs business to be sustainable. A couple of years ago, the CEO of Unilever, one of the biggest consumer products company in the world, revealed that their ‘sustainable living brands’ delivered stronger and faster growth. He was talking about brands like The Body Shop and Ben & Jerry’s.
He said, “These brands accounted for half of Unilever’s growth and grew at twice the rate of the rest of the business.” And then he announced that they were going to convert every single brand to match the sustainable brands. Because it’s very clear to them that that’s what the world wants.
Now, in the United States, many of us in the business community are skeptical about climate change and the benefits of going green. But your customers aren’t. And neither are a lot of your investors. The President can pull the United States out of the Paris Accord, but Unilever can’t leave the Paris Accords. Neither can Apple. Or Google. Or Ford. Or Boeing. Because they do business in all the other countries that are still part of the Accord.
The economy is part of an ecosystem that depends on the continuing health of all its parts. And right now, our ecosystem has some health issues. Half the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day. Climate change is threatening drinking water supplies. In the U.S., the middle class is falling behind. And, as we’ve learned in the last decade, things that happen in far away places can have a profound affect on what happens here. Business has to be part of the solution.
Study after study shows that companies which focus on creating sustainability in their use of resources outperform those who don’t. Sound counter-intuitive? The world rewards those who give it what it needs.
And there’s another kind of sustainability, and that’s the sustainability of companies that are built to last. Great companies continue to provide value to their customers and their communities for generations. They sustain the public good. When we put pressure on companies to maximize short-term gains at the expense of long term growth and survivability, we put the world at risk.
Not just the economy or our society or the polar bears … the world.
If business doesn’t fulfill these needs, who will?
The answer is, nobody. Nobody else can.
If you haven’t read Walter Issacson’s book, The Innovators, I recommend it. It shows how our technological world was created by a vibrant partnership between government agencies, academia and the business community. They were all engaged in creating something totally new, something that changed our world. And we all benefitted from it. The businesses that were part of that revolution — Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and hundreds of others — were interested in the bottom line, but that’s not what drove them. They were driven by the idea that they could change the world if they could get a computer on every desk. That was the passion that kept them up at night working on solutions. And that passion made billions and billions of dollars.
The world wants us to have the same passion now. What if we went after this idea: that business can solve the problems of poverty, hunger, ignorance and fear? That we can work with government agencies and academia and NGOs bring everyone into the global economy as full participants? And that we can do that not as charity but as our business model? Because business that are social, serviceable and sustainable are delivering better results to the bottom line. In fact, they’re delivering a triple bottom line: they’re better for profits, better for people and better for polar bears.
And here’s the thing: IF you can pivot to a new business model that is social, serviceful AND sustainable, the world will beat a path to your door.
Originally published at daindunston.com.
