B Lab Forces For Good Podcast: How Can Business Learn from Mistakes and Improve?
The B Corp Continuous Improvement Mindset: A Commitment to Learning, Accountability, Transparency, and Getting Better
B Corp Certification is a journey, not a destination. Making your business a force for good — and ensuring it stays that way — means constantly working to improve your practices. Whether or not they are part of the B Corp community, all businesses looking to improve their social and environmental impact can benefit from a continuous improvement mindset.
B Corps acknowledge that they are not perfect.
Their leaders, like all humans, will inevitably make mistakes and missteps in their business practices. And when they do, they recommit to mitigating their negative impact and striving to create a positive one; on people, communities, and the planet. They learn and get better — a process known as continuous improvement.
In this episode we hear perspectives on:
- What is continuous improvement and why is it important?
- How can B Corps acknowledge mistakes and continue to improve even after certification?
- What is the B Impact Assessment and how can it help your business become a force for good?
Guests:
- Femme van Gils, Sustainability Manager, Ace and Tate
- Chris Marquis, Professor, University of Cambridge, and Author, Better Business: How the B Corp Movement is Remaking Capitalism
- Kaye Matereke, Senior Partner, Lighthouse Capital, and Member, B Lab Standards Advisory Council
Listen to this episode of Forces for Good across all major platforms and find excerpts below.
In this episode, you’ll hear from a professor who teaches social innovation, a sustainable development investor, and a sustainability manager from a B Corp that discovered a mistake, acknowledged it, and made themselves better.
Femme van Gils, Sustainability Manager, Ace and Tate: We really realized through seeing the waste in our supply chains and the impact that every product, every happy customer has on the environment, that we wanted to do things differently. Being a B Corp also means that you naturally become a part of this community that all has its nose in the same direction and is reporting in the same way. So I think the added value of the community was also really important for us and still is today.
We tried to be really radically honest. And I think that’s an approach that we’ll continue to take. It’s really important to be honest about the process as well as the end result itself, like the trade offs that we needed to make in order to get to an end product.
No one person, no one team can tackle changing a business because to become a more sustainable business, you really have to turn it upside down and inside out and look at it from all angles. And that requires company-wide efforts. So I think in that sense, we’re approaching that in the right way. We’re definitely not there yet.
But it’s all about progress over perfection.
Continuous improvement is vital to push the B Corp movement forward. Chris Marquis is the author of the book: “Better Business: How the B Corp Movement is Remaking Capitalism.” He echoes Femme’s comments and explains why more companies are joining the B Corp movement toward purpose.
Chris Marquis, Professor, University of Cambridge: Entrepreneurs around the world are demanding a new type of company that better aligns with our values. And they’re taking what has been done before and introducing it to their context and improving it along the way. One of the really important continuous improvement tools that I’ve come across in my career is actually the B Impact Assessment, the BIA.
Many companies told me that it was really a learning tool for them.
Market conditions change. Technology changes. And if you’re just sort of standing still, if you’re not continuing to improve, then you’re actually probably going to be less competitive in the market and less of a fit with the business conditions. They see that actually having a purpose of delivering some sort of social and environmental value gives much greater meaning to their work, gives much greater meaning to their employees. It creates a culture where people want to work there.Being a responsible citizen and not just taking advantage and extracting from the environment and society, but actually giving back to it is essential for all businesses.
But I think the ones that really will succeed over the long term are the ones that where the entrepreneur has found or the leader has found a much broader purpose that people can rally behind and organize their work.
Continuous improvement means raising the floor and the ceiling. Social enterprises and responsible businesses, whose very business models create a positive impact — they set the bar, and they have to keep raising it. In turn, policymakers have to keep raising the minimum standards for all companies. And, if we’re truly going to transform our economic system for the better, all sectors have got to work together in this virtuous loop.
Kaye Matereke, Senior Partner, Lighthouse Capital: To do good is easier said than done. What we find is that there are a lot of Indigenous companies that are not supported from a consulting standpoint. A lot of the knowledge vehicles that exist, they’re designed to support much larger enterprises. So they do not get the same advisory support; so they don’t get to mature.
We want to see Indigenous businesses scale, and what we’ve found is the intention doesn’t solve the problem. It starts the conversation, which allows us to speak to different users about what is actually practically possible. And then we walk that journey with intention.
The idea of continuous improvement starts as a personal journey. And the thing that sometimes limits us from continuing on the journey is just the motivation. So you really have to put yourself in a positive state working on the things you care about.
Whilst revenue is a demonstration of the value created, it is not a demonstration of sustainability. Right? And so you need to look at are we contributing to our environment? Are we creating enough social value? Are we able to attract partners that will facilitate the growth of the organization?
The whole goal of growth is not necessarily to get things right, but to incrementally be better than yesterday.
Where we also find businesses struggle is they don’t allow for space to fail. But when we interrogate that thought, when we say we don’t want people to fail, we actually mean that we don’t want them to grow. … We will unlock tremendous value when we create high-trust environments.
Listen to the newest episode of Forces for Good across all major platforms.
This article was originally published at https://www.bcorporation.net. 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.
