Rosey Hurst, Founder, Impactt

If you are thinking of doing something, start your sentence with ‘wouldn’t it be laugh if we…?’ and then work on it.

Then I think it’s good to be mission-focused, and that mission needs to be a motivating idea. You also have to check back on that mission regularly and to test it all the time. Is what we are doing actually getting us any closer to what we want to do?

Finally, you have to resist systematisation. It is a tension: not everybody likes to work in totally unsupported environments but the interplay that tension creates is very creative. You need the free thinking for new ideas, and you need to make them into some legacy that people can move forward with.

I would like the notion of job quality to replace the notion of compliance to job standards — No one ever says ‘do you know what I want? I want a job that is fully compliant with international norms’, while the whole industry has been focused on compliance to these norms. And I would also like to see improvement of people themselves reporting for themselves.

Rosey Hurst is the founder and CEO of Impactt, an ethical trade consultancy focusing on labour rights. Impactt is a global company with offices in the UK, India, Bangladesh, China, Thailand and Turkey. You can watch her TEDx talk here.