The Road to Certified B Corporation

Profits will take care of themselves if you do the right thing

@RobertUCraven
Findaway Adventures Field Notes
5 min readJan 29, 2018

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December of 2015 was a defining moment for me. I had been a big fan of Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School professor, renowned for his work on supply chain and value chain, who had grown discouraged by what he saw as the widening gap between business values and social values. In 2011, he and Mark R. Kramer published a really important article in the Harvard Business Review advancing the idea of “shared value” as a solution for closing the gap.

This article is very well written and well worth the read. I’ve woven together several passages to capture the concept in a nutshell:

“Capitalism is an unparalleled vehicle for meeting human needs, improving efficiency, creating jobs, and building wealth. . . . The purpose of the corporation must be redefined as creating shared value, not just profit per se. This will drive the next wave of innovation and productivity growth in the global economy. . . . There are three distinct ways to do this: by reconceiving products and markets, redefining productivity in the value chain, and building supportive industry clusters at the company’s locations. . . . At a very basic level, the competitiveness of a company and the health of the communities around it are closely intertwined. . ..”

If you want to take a shortcut, check out Professor Porter’s 16-minute Ted Talk and you’ll absolutely get the essence: i.e., economic value + social value = shared value.

Fast forward to December 2015. Professor Porter offered a course in shared value as part of an executive program at Harvard that I knew I wanted to be a part of. I mean, here was a man who was an icon of the capitalist business world but had created a method that could change the world if enough people adopted it! It was application only, so I applied and was honored to get one of 70 slots from hundreds of applicants around the world. There were participants from over 30 countries, and some of the companies represented in the room were British Petroleum, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Amgen, Mitsubishi, Toyota and Nike. The chairman of Nestlé even flew in from Switzerland to participate in one of our case studies.

The Harvard program ran for three intensive days and employed the famed Harvard case study method of teaching. Here are five shared value concepts & learnings for me:

  1. Social impact + economic impact = shared value
  2. Incorporating social dimensions into your strategy makes it more sustainable (e.g. reduces costs, introduces new markets or opportunities, creates differentiation)
  3. Your growth engine is the intersection of social need, corporate assets & expertise and business opportunities
  4. Shared value produces a virtuous cycle: social impact leads to business impact which leads to innovation and the increase of social impact — the cycle repeats and grows larger
  5. NGOs, nonprofits and government will support your approach to shared value (producing more economic value like lower cost or larger opportunities)
  6. Everything must be measurable (as opposed to philanthropy or CSR where this can be very difficult at times)

We ate, drank, lived and studied in closely-knit teams, and by the end of the session I realized, “Hey, I’ve rubbed shoulders with leaders from some historically hard-headed companies who are already creating shared value.” It gave me permission to trust my gut and begin working on this myself.

And that’s when it all came together for me; I knew it was time to formalize our efforts around social impact and I also knew that we needed to truly formalize our efforts toward becoming a Certified B Corporation.

In case you don’t know what a B-Corp is, it’s the brainchild of an amazing non-profit called B Lab, which operates as a third-party certifier of benefit corporations; Certified “B Corps” meet additional, rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. Right now, there are 2,100+ Certified B Corps around the world that are working to redefine success in business.

After my experience at Harvard, I began to talk to my bosses — mine are the board of Pharmavite, MegaFood’s holding company, and ultimately the Board of MegaFood — about my hope of incorporating shared value as a business strategy that serves our customers, community, and employees while boosting our profit. I told them, and they agreed, that becoming certified as a B Corp was an important first step in turning MegaFood into a change the world company because it gives us clear guidelines and targets to shoot for allowing us to operationalize and express our passion in a number of ways.

Here five initiatives we are advancing to support our B Corp certification:

  1. We have revised our corporate bylaws to include social and environmental as well as economic diligence to ensure that short-term thinking or other financial factors don’t sway us from our course.
  2. We’re revamping our Farm Fresh program to help the farmers who grow our ingredients better align with the principles of regenerative agriculture and ethical sourcing.
  3. Closer to home, our human resources department, we call them our People Team, are doubling down on implementing deeper and richer professional development opportunities, ethics reporting and community building by developing more volunteer partnerships and offering health and wellness and even financial mentoring.
  4. For the first time, we are integrating social and economic impact as specific goals and objectives and have hired Sara Newmark to serve as our Vice President of Social Impact.
  5. We’re measuring. Our leadership team are learning to look at these activities, and others in the works, not as add-ons to what we do but as the core of what we do, baked right in to our daily operations. We’re all being evaluated on how successfully we implement them.

Our leadership rolled out our B Corp strategy in January at our MegaFood “Town Hall,” announcing we are targeting Expo West in March for our launch.. The reception was very positive, and we got an incredible vote of confidence from Pharmavite’s CEO Jeff Boutelle, who told the room, “The profits will take care of themselves if you do the right thing.”

Pharmavite CEO Jeff Boutelle (at right) addresses our Town Hall

All of us at MegaFood are extremely excited about the road we are on toward formalizing our social impact. We envision a world without nutritional poverty and we are doing our part to cure this issue in our lifetimeby baking social impact directly into our corporate strategies and partnering with B Corp to ensure we learn from our new tribe and continuously strive to do better we are certain to impact this world for good!

What steps are you taking to create shared value with your business?

Robert U. Craven, MegaFood CEO

PS: All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!

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@RobertUCraven
Findaway Adventures Field Notes

Robert is the founder of ScalePassion and the Managing Partner of Findaway Adventures. He has served as CEO of MegaFood, NewOrganics and Garden of Life.