B Lab Forces for Good Podcast: How Can Business Act with Purpose?
How Companies Are Rethinking Mission and Accountability for Impact Beyond Return on Investment for Shareholders
“Purpose-driven company.” You’ve likely heard these words, but what does it actually mean for a company to act with purpose? In the inaugural episode of B Lab Global’s original podcast, “Forces for Good,” we tackle how growing social and environmental conscientiousness in the business community has led many companies to rethink their mission and become increasingly accountable for impact beyond return on investment for shareholders — including how their processes and output affect workers, customers, communities, and the environment. We’ll also hear that not all purpose-driven companies are alike, and experts from B Lab, consulting firm SYLVAIN, and software company Novata offer key tenets companies must account for when driven by a newfound purpose. And you’ll get a glimpse of those businesses that are leading from the front. The host is Irving Chan-Gomez of B Lab Global.
This episode aims to answer the following questions:
- What does it mean for a business to act with “purpose?”
- What mechanisms do successful purpose-driven companies use?
- How do we move beyond buzzwords to creating an economy that acts in accordance with stakeholder governance?
Guests:
- Gail Bradbrook, Founder, Extinction Rebellion
- Anthea Kelsick, Former Co-CEO, B Lab U.S. & Canada; Senior Advisor, Novata
- Dan Osusky, Head of Standards & Insights, B Lab Global
- Alain Sylvain, Co-founder and CEO, SYLVAIN
Listen to the episode now across all major platforms and find excerpts below.
What does it really mean to be a “purpose-driven company”? What steps can businesses take to identify their purpose, and truly be held accountable for it?
Alain Sylvain, Founder, SYLVAIN: This is about who are you as a human? And are you consistent as a human in every aspect of your life throughout life? And so for me, you know, work is just one part of that whole picture.
I think for us, what was really clarifying at the very first step was defining what our purpose was. And we did that work for a lot of our clients. And we thought long and hard about why are we doing this work, why are we motivated by this work? What do we all have in common? And it was the idea that we want to leverage the might of corporations for the greater good.
It can be hard to define exactly what purpose means in a business context. Many companies are looking for ways to use their power and influence for that greater good — as they become increasingly aware of how their processes and output affect workers, customers, communities, and the environment.
Dan Osusky, Head of Standards & Insights, B Lab Global: A purpose-driven business is defined as a business that is not just about financial performance. A purpose-driven business could be an organization that actually has a singular, specific mission that in most circumstances is also distinct from a company’s financial performance, but is about delivering one specific, unique goal for the world and therefore actually is a presumption of a sort of comprehensive approach to an organization’s impact.
An important distinction is that purpose-driven does not mean perfect. Not all businesses are born purpose-driven, and the pathway to change can be incremental.
Osusky: There’s also always a tricky balance between the need for real, meaningful transformational action on the part of individual companies as well as a broader system, as well as the acknowledgment of where there’s the need for incremental change as well as the the acknowledgment of where there are imperfections and mistakes that are to be made.
With shareholder primacy, companies are incentivized to maximize profits for stockholders. But progressive campaigns at large corporations don’t necessarily mean these businesses as a whole are no longer concerned with profit.
Anthea Kelsick, Former Co-CEO of B Lab U.S. & Canada; Senior Advisor, Novata: The challenges are largely the structures that were in place for many, many years that enabled companies to maximize profit. Some of those structures are legal structures and regulation that a company has to maximize value for shareholders in the form of profitability or it’s not doing its job.
Once upon a time, the role of a business was to maximize value for shareholders — that idea of shareholder primacy. I think we’ve now evolved to a point where it’s also part of our normal lexicon where stakeholder primacy or stakeholder capitalism is now more of the norm.
One roadblock on the way to finding purpose? If companies don’t back up their intention with action, they become involved in purpose-washing. But purpose can and should go even beyond action around concrete issues, pushing for broader systems change at a time when it is most needed.
Gail Bradbrook, Founder, Extinction Rebellion: Businesses, in my estimation, are organizations that are really good at getting things done. So what’s yours to repair? There’s a bit of a story that we can have green growth. And this is really important for the B Corp movement, I think, to wrestle with. You cannot have green growth if you can help some companies growing that maybe need to grow but you can’t carry on having economic growth and call it green.
So now we have to tell ourselves a new story. And each of these businesses can be part of that, telling not the story of consumerism but the story of togetherness and of repair and who we really are as human beings here to make the world more beautiful.
Listen to the full episode now across all major platforms.
A version of this article was originally published at https://www.bcorporation.net. The views and opinions expressed are those of the interviewees and do not reflect the positions or opinions of the producers or any affiliated organizations.
B The Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
