Making Good Making Money: Hack the System to save the World
Feeling suspicious about this headline? Hold on and bear with me. We know the problem: While the World is getting better in many respects, with really positive advancements such as how aggregate health and wealth are spreading across all geographies, we all know there is something BIG we are doing wrong: Big, thorny issues such as climate crisis, access inequality and many other (as captured in the UN sustainable development goals), where our progress is too little, too late, despite most of us feel the urge to solve them. Our best shot to save the World from this challenge is to change our behavior as consumers:
- We are moving too slow to solve them. It’s hard to make progress, not helped by the complexity and decentralization of world decision making in which existing institutions and politicians are trapped.
- Society is aware and wants solutions. Most citizens agree on top world challenges such as climate crisis, and there is a widespread trend towards a more responsible and less materialistic society, with an explosion in solidarity vocally amplified in social media.
- However, our daily habits are still dominated by compulsive consumption: we remain trapped in the “boiling frog” experiment. The need for speed of the challenge makes good gestures not enough. It urges to change what we do, not only what we say. Given that our consumer society works extremely well to influence our behavior, our best shot is taking advantage of its levers and incentives to align our minds and actions.
How can we achieve this? How can we trigger a change towards a responsible and sustainable consumption that minimizes waste generation and maximizes solidarity? Can we achieve this fast and decisively enough to face these threats?
We as consumers are ready for a silent revolution to shift our habits towards a circular economy driving a more sustainable world. We have become less materialistic and look for self fulfillment and rising to the next level in Maslow scale. It’s not about things, but experiences. It’s about empowering us to have an impact doing good. But we need to turn the “what” into the “how”.
Entrepreneurs are uniquely equipped to come the rescue. Doing what they have always been best at: understand unmet needs and deliver solutions. As masterly codified by Naval Ravikant, they “give society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale”. Or, in Steve Jobs words, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. Curious minds able to turn these pressing social needs into business opportunities and deliver the right user experience fast. Thinking exponentially to solve big problems as time runs out quickly. Being the partner to society and consumers to empower this shift.
Having spent time in this field with inspiring role models, I am optimistic on how entrepreneurs may help society to trigger exponential changes:
- Social entrepreneurship is flourishing, as I have witnessed since 1996, when I started collaborating with Ashoka, the pioneering organization in this field, currently supporting more than 3.000 leaders. Social entrepreneurship is increasingly becoming a vocation for outstanding leaders around the world, who are challenging the social & business boundaries to scale their mission.
- Scale unlocks massive social impact, as I have witnessed in more than 10 years working at Google. It is hard to imagine the world without the positive impact achieved by Google organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful to anyone for free with equal access, through products such as Search, Maps and Youtube. When social good meets scale driven by profit, unbelievable things happen.
- Pivoting to “for profit” business models enables shooting for more ambitious social goals. I have helped some social entrepreneurs on this path. Like the founder of Spotlab, who is aiming for the goal of making health diagnostic universally accessible (or, in his own words, “offering 1 million diagnostics at 1 euro, and not 1 diagnostic at 1 million euro”) through an integrated imaging diagnosis platform, reducing distance, time and cost by leveraging competitive crowdsourcing & AI solutions enabled by the cloud. Or the founders of Liberia, who are extending their voice communicator suite to make it accessible to as many speech loss patients.
Massive social impact requires massive scale. To achieve that, sustainable business models are the fastest fuel to make good causes global and speed up solutions. Turning social needs into attractive profitable products is the hard part. Good news is that there is a pressing need to solve these problems and that’s what entrepreneurs have always done best.
I expect this trend to accelerate. In fact, it is the field where I have been focusing my efforts over the last year and plan to continue so. I am very inspired by tackling challenges such as climate crisis or responsible consumption and translating them into compelling user experiences. If you share these challenges, don’t want to stand still and have the hunger to tackle them with solutions that scale, would love to hear from you.
