The power of visions for the future

In 1939-40, during the Great Depression, General Motors created a dynamic and positive vision of what America could be in 1960: a highly car-centred society with automated highways and vast suburbs. The vision was presented on the exhibit Futurama at New York World’s Fair to show the world 20 years into the future, and it made such a deep impression that it has shaped urban development in the United States over the past 70 years.

An updated version, Futurama II, was presented at New York World’s Fair in 1964-65, this time depicting life 60 years into the future. Scenes included an Antarctic ‘Weather Central’ climate forecasting centre, a ’Hotel Atlantis’ for underseas vacationing, desert irrigation and land reclamation, building roads in the jungle and a City of the Future. The exhibit proved to be the most popular with more than 26 million people attending the show in the two six-month seasons the Fair was open. Once again the exhibit was sponsored by General Motors.

On June 1, 2009 the credit crisis closed General Motors, which is now owned by the United States Treasury and Canadian governments, a symbolic mark of the end of the industrial era. Today it is time for a new vision.

The Future We Want

One project is already working on offering a vision of what the future will look like, guided by principles of sustainability. It is The Future We Want™, facilitated by William Becker, former executive director of the US Presidential Climate Action Project, and supported by a wide range of project partners and advisors leading the field of sustainability and climate change research, including UN’s Global Compact network.

William Becker – who is also among the endorsers of my book The New Pioneers – recently told me about the three stages planned for the project:

1) A global conversation using crowd sourcing and social media, in which people from around the world express their ideas for what a sustainable future would be.

2) An exhibit at the 2012 Earth Summit in Rio that depicts these ideas using videos, computer animations and other advanced communications technologies.

3) Worldwide dissemination of these products in several different formats from educational curricula to apps, and a web page that provides toys and tools for professional planners to engage the public in sustainable community development decisions.

William Becker also told me that, ‘we’ve found that creating a realistic yet hopeful vision of the future is an idea taking hold in many different parts of the world and by many different groups. We hope to become a portal through which policy makers, designers, planners and lay citizens can connect with and participate in these efforts.’

Why not kick-start the New Year by  sharing your vision for a sustainable future through The Future We Want™ ? – and in the meantime I wish you a prosperous and sustainable 2012, I look forward to sharing it with you. Happy New Year!

The immoral aspects of greed, selfishness and short-term profit thinking are just some of the causes that have been proposed as the root core of the current financial crisis. And with the recent ‘Occupy Wall Street movement’, the civil voices of protest against bank bailouts, corporate greed, and the unchecked power of Wall Street are gaining foothold.

Meanwhile, six G20 countries have recently made their voices heard with a warning of a looming new global crisis in a letter to French President and current G20 President, Nicolas Sarkozy: ‘We have not yet mastered the challenges of the crisis. Global imbalances are rising again. External risks to the stability of our banks and our economies are reaching pre-crisis levels. And volatile and high energy prices are hurting our citizens and acting as a drain on world growth.’

The letter, signed by leaders of the UK, Australia, Indonesia, Canada, Mexico and South Korea, calls for coordinated action from the world’s leading nations to stimulate economic growth and create initiatives to aid economic recovery. And as always when faced with an economic calamity, ‘recovery’ is a crucial goal and ‘growth’ is the means.

But now may very well be the time to listen to the words of forward-thinking economists, who have long argued that governments must move beyond reactively initiating stimulus plans designed to raise consumption and trying to put things back to the way they were. Instead, we should rather start asking fundamental questions about the adequacy of our current systems and measures – and invest in new market solutions and infrastructures fit to meet 21^st century needs.

As German Chancellor Angela Merkel concluded a couple of years ago, if governments ‘are not in a position to show that we can create a social order for the world in which such crises do not take place, then we’ll face stronger questions as to whether this is really the right economic system’.

History repeats itself

‘Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; …the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone… Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men… They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers… The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit….’

This quote could well have been a present-day description of the current state of the world. But these are the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he assumed the office of President of the United States in the midst of a deep financial and economic crisis in 1933.

Similarly, many of the growth challenges that are being discussed right now are not new. We can go 20, 30, 40 years back in time to find warnings and revelations of the flaws in our current systems’ design.

According to economists like Belgian professor of international finance and former banker at Belgian Central Bank, Bernard Lietaer, the current design of our monetary system is at the root of most societal problems, because it is programmed to meet industrial values and goals of economic growth at the expense of environmental and social sustainability.

A flaw that Senator Robert Kennedy pointed out in a speech in 1968, and which the creator of GDP national accounts, Simon Kuznets, also warned about back in 1934 (see more in my blog post ‘Measuring happiness – progressive or pointless?’).

The father of capitalism, Adam Smith, even cautioned about the limitations of relying entirely on market economy and profit maximization back in the 18th century, and emphasized the importance of broader values that go beyond profit, such as humanity, generosity and public spirit.

Forever blowing bubbles?

Important steps have been taken to move the world beyond ‘business as usual’. For example, the United Nations Green Economy Initiative is designed to assist governments in ‘greening’ their economies by reshaping and refocusing policies and investments. The Green New Deal initiative from nef (the New Economics Foundation) includes major structural changes to national and international financial systems, including taxation. And the Global Marshall Plan originally devised by Al Gore works for a socially just green economy.

Nevertheless, in many cases it still seems as if companies are stuck in maximizing shareholder value and short-term economic returns. Just like bankers are going back to their usual ways of rewarding themselves, using the billions of dollars that governments spent bailing out failing banking systems for bonuses and pay structures that are still widely defended by the big banking bosses.  Economists are now even starting to warn of a ‘green bubble’ because of the narrow government and investor focus on cleantech and greentech as the golden gate to renewed growth and wealth.

So the question is whether we will remain in the already familiar boom-and-bust-cycle, so we in a decade or two can dust off the 1933 speech of Franklin D. Roosevelt again and repeat the warnings of Adam Smith, or whether we will be able to move beyond it and make a change toward lasting, sustainable growth? And if so – how?

The new ‘philanthrocapitalists’ – also known as venture philanthropists, new donors, high-engagement philanthropists or social venture capitalists – don’t talk about ‘funding applications’ or about ‘giving back to society’ but about ‘business plans’ and ‘social investments’, because that is how they view their contribution. Sometimes they even start their own foundation or an organization to make sure that social issues and development challenges are resolved in what they believe is the best possible way.

Philanthrocapitalists are proponents of a business-oriented view to addressing social objectives. In their search for efficiency and visible concrete social returns they adopt a high-impact, entrepreneurial approach to their giving.

Like Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, who calls for ‘creative capitalism’ by using the power of the marketplace to help the poor. Together with his wife he co-chairs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which manages the world’s largest fortune – around $60 billion – earmarked for charity.

Or like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who shook the traditional philanthropic world by converting a foundation established by his wife and himself in 1998 into The Omidyar Network – a hybrid of philanthropy and venture capitalism, where the money is not merely invested in traditional, non-commercial organizations but also in commercial businesses.

Former eBay director, Jeff Skoll, is also following the same venture philanthropic route. In 1999 he established the Skoll Foundation with the mission to ‘drive large-scale change by investing in, connecting and celebrating social entrepreneurs and other innovators dedicated to solving the world’s most pressing problems’.

Today, the Skoll Foundation’s online platform – the global online community socialedge.org – connects social entrepreneurs with a shared passion for constructive problem solving and social change.

Over the summer, I have been presenting points from The New Pioneers as a guest blogger on Social Edge, where you can also find a library of articles written by experts in the field covering philanthro-capitalistic issues ranging from business models and business development to funding and philanthropy.

More on philanthrocapitalism at www.philanthrocapitalism.net.

Everywhere there are signs of this quest, which coexists with a growing collective interest in handing over a better world to new generations.

Privately, some citizens follow in the footsteps of philanthro-celebs like Bono, Angelina Jolie and Bill Gates and engage actively in good causes and charitable organizations. Others donate money through websites such as DonorsChoose, GlobalGiving or SmallCanBeBig, which enable direct, personal and specific donations. And yet others volunteer their time – some even volunteer their holidays.

‘The 1960s were all about relaxing vacations; in the 80s vacations were all about being active or seeking adventure. Now people are seeking meaningful vacations. People have a very quiet but desperate need to find meaning in their lives,’ explains managing director Ross Wehner from Volunteer Adventures.

But volunteer work is not only for the private citizen. Corporate volunteering programmes that involve employees in community work (employee volunteering) are gaining ground in companies around the world.

Companies typically offer two explanations for engaging their employees in voluntary work: They offer employee volunteer programmes as an immaterial fringe benefit to strengthen their employer branding. Alternatively, the program is part of an overall CSR-strategy, aimed at boosting the corporate brand.

But as IBM, among others, has discovered, employee volunteering has an even greater strategic and financial potential: When integrated into a company’s core business strategy it can boost innovation and benefit the bottom line.

Win-win-win

IBM uses its volunteer program – Corporate Service Corps – to realize the company’s vision of creating a “globally integrated enterprise”. Since 2008, IBM has dedicated 1,000 of its top management prospects from over 50 countries to bring professional and social competences to development projects in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

Through their voluntary work, IBM’s high performers are exposed to essential learning in fields crucial to any global corporation: markets under development, cultural diversity, global teams, beyond-the-office thinking and public expectations to responsible and sustainable business practices.

There is, in other words, a “triple benefit”: leadership development for the IBMers, a philanthropic contribution to the communities, and greater knowledge and enhanced reputation in the growth markets for IBM.

As IBM’s Vice President of Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs, Stanley Litow puts it: “It’s not just philanthropy, it’s leadership development and business development, and it helps build economic development in the emerging world.”

More links on corporate/employee volunteering:
www.deloitte.com/us/community
www.ibm.com/ibm/responsibility/corporateservicecorps/
www.handsonnetwork.org
www.volunteering.org.uk
www.worldvolunteerweb.org

Long before terms like “values” and “sustainability” became business buzzwords in the West they were already being implemented by an Indian corporation: The Tata group, founded by Jamsetji N. Tata in the late 1890s, is today going on over 130 years of emphasizing themes of governance, sustainability, values and ethics.

Jamsetji N. Tata wanted to build a pioneering enterprise that willingly shouldered nation building and community development. Early in the 20^th century, when India was still ruled by the British, Tata group built India’s first steel plant, first hydro-electric power plant and the first luxury hotel in India, the now famous Taj Hotels. The group also funded the Indian Institute of Science.

What Jamsetji N. Tata wanted most of all was to help the Indian people to “improve the quality of their lives through the medium of business as an institutional mechanism”. But business was more than just business to the founder of Tata group, and he made sure his views were integrated and shared by establishing his ventures on sound ethics, values, human considerations and an aim to enhance the well-being of the employees.

Jamsetji N. Tata expressed his belief in the – probably to many in the commercial business world – thought-provoking sentence: “the community is not just another stakeholder in a business but the very purpose of the existence of an enterprise.”

Since its conception the Tata group has been run according to its founder’s beliefs. Recently, Anant G. Nadkarni, the Vice President of Group Corporate Sustainability, Tata Council for Community Initiatives, has written a short paper about some of the pioneering efforts that have shaped the company from within and created a model that the new pioneers of today can be inspired by and learn from.

You can read Anant G. Nadkarni’s inspiring paper here.

On his blog, CSR International, Wayne Visser compares the Top 40 to the The Top 50 Sustainability Books published by the University of Cambridge in 2009 and drawing together key thinking from the last 50 years. These are some of the noteworthy changes  listed on the blog:

• The ‘All Time Top 50’ list included a fairly balanced coverage of social and environmental issues. By contrast the ‘2010 Top 40’ list is heavily skewed towards environmental challenges, and dominate by climate change.

• The Top 50 contained numerous treatise on capitalism and globalisation, while the Top 40 (in the wake of the financial crisis) has shifted almost exclusively to a focus on the economy.

• The Top 40 also has a much stronger emphasis on business responses and creating change. In fact, it is altogether a more pragmatic list, with titles that contain words like ‘plan’, ‘how to’, ‘strategy’ and ‘guide’.

• There is an increase in the number of female authors (28%, as compared with 17% for the Top 50), although the gender imbalance remains worryingly low.

When Wayne Visser talks sustainability and CSR, he knows what he’s talking about. Visser, founder and director of the think-tank CSR International, has authored nine books on the role of business in society, and his work has inspired some of my conclusions about corporate sustainability practices.

In Visser’s most recent book, The Age of Responsibility, which came out in February 2011, he calls for companies to shift to CSR 2.0 – where success is judged by improvements in the overall socio-cultural, economic and ecological systems. If not, CSR will continue to fail, argues Visser.

With an array of cases he guides his reader through the evolution of business responsibility – from the Ages of Greed, Philanthropy, Marketing and Management to the Age of Responsibility – and shares the five principles of sustainable business actions. Wayne Visser’s The Age of Responsibility is stuffed with insightful, hard hitting case stories and is at the same time a compelling personal story about the possibility of making a difference through CSR. It is an important book – and well worth the read.

Already in 1968 Senator Robert Kennedy pointed out in a speech that the gross domestic product (GDP) as it was designed then – and still is today – ignores all non-monetary aspects of the economy. It ‘measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion, neither our devotion to our country.’ In short, it measures ‘everything except that which makes life worthwhile’. And even further back, in 1934, the creator of GDP himself, Simon Kuznets, warned that such a limited, one-dimensional metric should not be used as an index of overall social progress.

Today’s need for new metrics to measure and redefine growth is reflected in corporate concepts like the Triple Bottom Line – also known as People, Planet, Profit or the Three Pillars of Sustainability, which capture an expanded spectrum of economic, ecological and social values and criteria for measuring organizational (and societal) success. But one of the most progressive and interesting concepts in recent years springs from an unexpected source:

In 2008 the small nation of Bhutan pioneered the concept of gross national happiness (GNH) to promote sustainable development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment and establishment of good governance. See more about the concept here:

Who would have believed that this would be recognized as more than a quaint Buddhist exercise in a small far-away country? Nevertheless, new measures of life quality and wellbeing are gaining ground in the Western world – like the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI), the European Commission’s Beyond GPD initiative and French President Sarkozy’s Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.

Progress is being made – but none of the new measures, initiatives or systems have been taken into the mainstream yet. As economist Hazel Henderson and system theorist Fridtjof Capra point out in a report on qualitative growth, the global transition to sustainability is no longer a conceptual nor a technical problem, but remains a problem of values and political will.

What is your experience? Is happiness measured in your country or company? And if so, how? And if not, should it be?

More and more business students are taking an interest in responsible capitalism. These students drive change by demanding more focus on socially conscious management, and schools are responding positively. In fact, the percentage of business schools worldwide that require students to take a course focused on business and society has increased steadily from 34 pct. in 2001 to 69 pct. in 2009, according to the Beyond Grey Pinstripes survey conducted by the Aspen Institute’s Center for Business Education.

As Rakesh Khurana, a Harvard Business School professor, explained to The Economist last year: “Students are saying they want business education to operate in a different way and that they want higher expectations from faculty. Just telling them to maximize shareholder value does not satisfy them any more. They want to get away from the cartoon image of business that they are taught in the classroom, to get useful practical advice on how to lead a firm in the 21st century.”

The old business school mantra show me the money is being replaced by the new mantra doing good and doing well.

Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, for example, has redesigned its curriculum largely based on student input from members of the US-based organisation, Net Impact, founded in 1993 for networking purposes by a group of business school students who want to use the power of business to address social and environmental challenges. Today, the network encompasses more than 10 000 young business leaders in 120 local chapters scattered across the whole world.

Nevertheless, corporate responsibility and sustainability have not yet become fully embedded in the mainstream of business-related education, which is why the United Nations has developed its Principles for Responsible Management Education (UN PRME) for business schools and universities worldwide. The aim is to support the development of ’a new generation of business leaders capable of managing the complex challenges faced by business and society in the 21st century’.

Back in September I spoke to over 800 Danish and international business students particpating in Responsibility Day 2010 at Copenhagen Business School. It was a full day dedicated to issues of responsibility, ethics and sustainability in both corporate and student life. During the day, I caught two of tomorrow’s business leaders to interview them about their sustainable student organization 360 and about what they call a ”bottom-up revolution” in business education. Watch the interview here:

EIRIS contributes the growing success of socially responsible investment to increased consumer interest in issues like climate change, fairtrade, poverty and human rights. More people, writes EIRIS, are looking to put their principles into practice when managing their finances.

Socially responsible investing (SRI) is putting more focus on corporate social and environmental practices through both positive screens, i.e. identifying companies that somehow benefit society and negative screens, which weed out poor SRI performers, including those who pollute or offer poor working conditions.

Large pension funds and other investors around the world use screening agencies like EIRIS to assess how companies tackle issues like eco-friendly practices, human rights, and corruption.

Interestingly, corporate scandals and the recent economic crisis have only proven beneficial to this trend: during 2008, when the crisis seriously started making its mark, the number of signatories to the investor-led and UN-backed initiative Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) more than doubled to 381 as a response to the crisis. In 2009, PRI had increased to 560 investors managing a total of 18 trillion in assets, including private equity firms.

So even during the height of the financial crisis, while other fields of business suffered brutally, SRI was on the rise. The following figures underlines the growth trend: According to the Washington D.C.-based Social Investment Forum, SRI has soared a startling 5,000 pct. in less than two decades. Where in 1984 SRI was a 40 billion dollar market, by 2003 it had morphed into a 2.16 trillion industry. In 2005 almost one dollar in ten under management in the US was invested in SRI funds.

What we are seeing is this: More and more companies are realizing that short-term shareholder value creation cannot stand alone. As a result, companies are responding with attempts to reconfigure their DNA as pure profit seekers through responsible and sustainable business actions.

But as I point out in an earlier blog post: When old world logics meet new world practices – paradoxes emerge. And investors face tough questions about what is really consider socially responsible. ‘Sustainable weapons’ is a case in point.

It is examples like this that mark a dividing line: Critics say that socially responsible investment is so broad that it’s meaningless. On the other hand, pragmatics argue that SRI is incremental and a movement for social change – an evolution not a revolution.

So, is SRI an important first step or a meaningless waste of time… what do you think?

The new business revolution is, in fact, being driven both top-down from some of the world’s largest companies - and bottom-up from entrepreneurial activists and social changemakers. Because hardcore business people are realizing that they can increase their profits by incorporating social responsibility as a part of their business strategy, and heartcore idealists are recognizing that the use of market methods gives them the opportunity to create even more social value.

To them there is no doubt: the blended value proposition of social, environmental and financial value all being parts of one essential value is the future way of thinking value creation, as already promoted in CSR, social investing (SRI), venture philanthropy and indeed social entrepreneurship.

As a result, both are navigating in the crossfields between business and humanism, although they have different aims and motivation for doing so, ranging from altruism to enlightened self-interest or pure profit-seeking. Together they are contributing to an increasingly powerful ‘business force for good’ that is not only changing the world – it is also changing the face of capitalism to a renewed version where profit is reconciled with our inner values.

With an accelerating convergence between what first-mover corporations are already doing, what mainstream companies are striving to do and what social entrepreneurs are showcasing in their field, there is a growing potential for fruitful ‘cross-fertilization’ through partnerships and upscaling of solutions.

Cooperation and partnerships will infuse all parties involved with new perspectives and new knowledge that may lead to better results than they would be able to create individually.

Big mainstream companies, for example, may gain access to new markets or new product and service innovations or even new business models that build on corporate social innovation more easily and at greater speed, because the smaller social ventures may have spent years or even decades designing, testing and implementing their social innovations as well as building a relationship of trust, local knowledge and credibility amongst their users or customers.

The social ventures, on the other hand, may leverage their innovations with less risk and may release extra capacity to either replicate or even start up more new social ventures because the big companies may provide management skills and resources to explore potential spill-over effects and synergies.

This is how Grameen Bank has succeeded in expanding its microfinance activities into, among other things, communications, technology and nutritional foods with companies like Telenor, Intel and Danone to meet its overall vision of reducing poverty by providing business and employment opportunities.

So if social entrepreneurs and mainstream businesses can overcome the potential barriers and difficulties that may follow because of, for example, differences in values, the amount of capital costs and resources needed to establish and manage the partnership and the patience, perseverance, time and effort that must be invested, such partnerships can result in a multitude of benefits for all involved.

As these two fields of practice continue to evolve it will, however, become increasingly harder to distinguish the two from each other, because social entrepreneurship will become more of a mindset around blended value creation rather than a specific category of start-up companies.