The Corporate Mission Model

The Corporate Mission Model has the potential to transform our world, but it’s not as simple as:

• A One-to-One Model
• Adding a ‘donate here’ button on your website and agreeing to match donations
• Or even promoting a Corporate Social Responsibility Program

This model requires much more to make it work, and it is much easier to cause it to fail. There’s a reason that these ideas have come to the forefront of our conversations, outlooks, and strategies. A major part of that reason is a wildly successful, yet often overlooked, generation inspiring a do-good model and finding those spaces of innovation in places of purpose and unexpected associations.

The Corporate Mission Model is simple:

• Build Your Tribe
• Define The Problem You Are Solving
• Use Your Story Authentically And Extensively
• Learn To Scale In Context Of Your Stakeholders
• Innovate Your Model by Creating Smart Partnerships

I won’t go into great detail about each of these in this post, but I want to highlight the key aspects of each. Let’s start with your tribe. A tribe is a group if people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. In a society and workforce with a growing emphasis on purpose, it’s essential to create an environment that inspires and values shared purpose. This starts with making the workplace, the relationships, and the work more personal. We see a resurgence of our recognition of our humanity today, in millennials dedication to “experience” and living in the moment, in our growing understanding of how impersonal technology affects our lives and relationships with our noses buried, in the need for compassion and vulnerability in a globalized society. These are only a few of the factors influencing our lives on a daily basis and when business adapts to these changing values they will innovate first. Build your tribe around business that is personal, that is vulnerable and open. That’s what people long for first.

Your tribe will be most effective when your shared purpose is clearly defined. You’d be surprised how many CEO’s you can ask to describe their company’s purpose above the day to day operations and not get a straight-forward answer. The value of your work is what will ultimately drive profit. Defining where value lies and for which stakeholders is essential to effectively communicating your company’s purpose to the public, to investors, shareholders, and your tribe. This is how people start to buy in to a brand and learn about your purpose not just hear about it. “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it,” Albert Einstein said.

Using a crystal clear purpose starts with “Why” you do what you do. Not how you do it, or what you sell. It starts with “Why” because why is your story and it’s human nature to listen to a good story. We love being pulled in, inspired, and excited to share what we’ve learned. It’s wired into our brains and it’s becoming a lost art within society as we grow more and more dependent on snapchat stories tweets to express our experiences. But there’s a resurgence of stories in business and consumers crave it. Use your company’s story: how you’ve come together, the values you champion, and the things you’re inspired by. Weave these things into everything you do and build from there.

And when you build you look to scale. Scaling doesn’t just mean growing your company in size. It means finding ways to give greater amounts value to stakeholders through your work and using the growth of your business to support that value. And once again this idea of stakeholder value goes back to conscious capitalism where the value you create spans every aspect of your model from the actors in your supply chain, to the natural capital your product may or may not require, to your direct consumer, to the broader community you exist within and how you can make your presence personal and meaningful. Creating this value promotes profit, the two most vital agents of scale.

In this ideological shift in business there is so much room for innovation and collaboration. A mission inspires a community and today communities can be small and local to massive and global. The best place to start, NGO’s. Many established NGOs and Non-Profits have decades of experience working with under-served communities and, therefore, are a contextual database of knowledge and cultural awareness. They’ve developed trusted relationships that are often difficult for private companies to create, especially companies who usually look to develop quickly and bypass creating valuable relationships. NGOs and Non-Profits are masters of specialized knowledge, allowing companies to tailor their product or service to a specific target population and market. A prime example of this is Save the Children, who helps GlaxoSmithKline by serving on the company’s new pediatric research and development board. Their mission: to help design life-saving drugs for children in remote communities.

The Corporate Mission Model is not CSR, it’s deeper than that. And the economic benefit is there. The values is there. The last thing is exposure and widespread adoption. It takes a whole generation to even start to push these values on business and society. We are all thinking them, business it doing them. You have Larry Fink, CEO of the global investment firm BlackRock that holds and handles more than $6 trillion in assets, making it clear that if you want him to invest in your business, your business needs to be investing in the community and world.

This is the momentum of a movement, and it is definitely momentum when the world’s largest investor says aloud and declares that he plans to hold companies accountable. It is the scaling of the evolution of corporate America, and soon the global corporate world. BlackRock is adding staff to monitor how companies respond to this call to action.

Fink also points out that he is seeing, “many governments failing to prepare for the future, on issues ranging from retirement and infrastructure to automation and worker retraining,” He then adds, “As a result, society increasingly is turning to the private sector and asking that companies respond to broader societal challenges.”

When we change the lens through which society and businesses view themselves, the world will change. We are just the beginning, and it’s exciting.