I’ll call it “The New Bottom Line”

I was writing an article for McKinsey’s Long Term Capitalism challenge, agonising over a suitable title, when it struck me. What I’d written, based on our late founder’s work, referred repeatedly to taking the bottom-line past shareholder value to people.

He had in fact argued in his original treatise that there was nothing to prevent a business from putting people, the local community, before shareholders , if agreed to by shareholders and directors and written into the company charter. It might be described as “People over Profit”, the converse of “Profit over People” as Noam Chomsky later described neoliberalism.

I soon discovered that The New Bottom Line is the title of a book, about people-centric business.

I then discover “The New Bottom-Line” may have been coined earlier by rabbi Michael Lerner and the Network of Spiritual Progressives, who say:

“Instead of a bottom-line based on money and power, we need a new bottom-line that judges corporations, governments, schools, public institutions, and social practices as efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent they maximize money and power, but to the extent they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and our capacity to respond with awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.”

- Rabbi Michael Lerner

Another spiritual leader, Pope Benedict had reasoned that profit should be “a means for achieving human and social ends”

“This is not merely a matter of a “third sector”, but of a broad new composite reality embracing the private and public spheres, one which does not exclude profit, but instead considers it a means for achieving human and social ends. Whether such companies distribute dividends or not, whether their juridical structure corresponds to one or other of the established forms, becomes secondary in relation to their willingness to view profit as a means of achieving the goal of a more humane market and society. “

At the same time as his ‘Caritas in Veritate’, we heard this from the UN General Assembly:

“The anti-values of greed, individualism and exclusion should be replaced by solidarity, common good and inclusion. The objective of our economic and social activity should not be the limitless, endless, mindless accumulation of wealth in a profit-centred economy but rather a people-centred economy that guarantees human needs, human rights, and human security, as well as conserves life on earth. These should be universal values that underpin our ethical and moral responsibility.”

(Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, the President of the United Nations General Assembly speaking in 2009)

For people-centered economics it was a matter of how we calibrate progress:

‘Economics, and indeed human civilization, can only be measured and calibrated in terms of human beings. Everything in economics has to be adjusted for people, first, and abandoning the illusory numerical analyses that inevitably put numbers ahead of people, capitalism ahead of democracy, and degradation ahead of compassion.’

“Is Compassion the antidote to neoliberalism?” I asked more recently, reflecting on what had influenced our founder’s thinking and activism, until his death in the struggle against those who profit by perpetuating human misery, in ‘Death Camps, For Children’

It was General George Marshall speaking at Harvard in 1947 who warned that “governments, political parties, or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States.”

When Terry Hallman had completed his strategy paper — A ‘Marshall Plan’ for Ukraine, he’d realised that what he’s written was in fact in the spirit of the original 70 years earlier. He appended it to the title and included the quote from George Marshall.

With the leaders of two major faiths, the UN and US government “on side” one would imagine this would gain their support.

Then things began to change, in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis.

The concept of Creating Shared Value emerged in 2011, arguing for an aligment between business and society which could yield greater profit for corporations.

It was a shift from the argument of “Profit for Purpose” towards “Profit with Purpose”, perhaps even “Profit from Purpose”

Some years ago, the social enterprise community in the UK rose up in protest when Salesforce, a corporation began to describe itself as “The Social Enterprise”. Understandably they saw what they stand for, the brand they gave it, being diluted.

There’s been no similar uprising against the dilution of profit for purpose. Do they not understand it undermines them too?

“First they came”

Pretty much any form of enterprise can be described as ‘profit with purpose’ since it will create some form of benefit for society, but it won’t target those who fall between the cracks where trickle-down ideology fails to reach.

Writing of “Inclusive Capitalism” in Huffington Post, Mark Goldring of Oxfam argued that “People Should Replace Profit as the Bottom Line”

Jumping on board “profit with purpose” just this year, is Arianna Huffington who introduces Price Waterhouse Coopers, B Corporations and Paul Polman among others.

Polman made some interesting observations soon after “The New Bottom-Line” which I’d included in the comments

“When people talk about new forms of capitalism, this is what I have in mind: companies that show, in all transparency, that they are contributing to society, now and for many generations to come. Not taking from it.

“It is nothing less than a new business model. One that focuses on the long term. One that sees business as part of society, not separate from it. One where companies seek to address the big social and environmental issues that threaten social stability. One where the needs of citizens and communities carry the same weight as the demands of shareholders.”

Within months, social stability in Ukraine gave way to violent conflict

One of the last things Terry Hallman did before his death was to contact PWC and ask them to respect the IPR of the ‘Marshall Plan’

B Labs, who conceived B Corporations, had told us in 2009 that they had no means to certify us as a UK based organisation.

Eclipsing both is Huffington Post itself, which published another ‘Marshall Plan’ for Ukraine, concieved by oligarch Dmitri Firtash while held in Vienna, pending exradition to the US to face charges of corruption.

Sergei Leshchenko, anti corruption activist and member of Ukraine’s Rada, describes The Firtash Octopus and the influential Western figures who have joined it.

“Dirty money from the East has become a resource for dozens of European structures and politicians. Sergii Leshchenko reports on some of those that are only too happy to open their doors to a Ukrainian oligarch willing to invest millions in cleaning up his image.”

We are at risk of sleepwalking into the clutches of some of the greediest capitalists in the world under the banner of “Doing Well by Doing Good.”

The ‘Marshall Plan’ for Ukraine took a stand for people and their needs, with priorty for those in greatest need:

‘This is a long-term permanently sustainable program, the basis for “people-centered” economic development. Core focus is always on people and their needs, with neediest people having first priority — as contrasted with the eternal chase for financial profit and numbers where people, social benefit, and human well-being are often and routinely overlooked or ignored altogether. This is in keeping with the fundamental objectives of Marshall Plan: policy aimed at hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. This is a bottom-up approach, starting with Ukraine’s poorest and most desperate citizens, rather than a “top-down” approach that might not ever benefit them. They cannot wait, particularly children. Impedance by anyone or any group of people constitutes precisely what the original Marshall Plan was dedicated to opposing. Those who suffer most, and those in greatest need, must be helped first — not secondarily, along the way or by the way. ‘