It’s business — responsible business — time
Whole businesses, whole people, whole systems
So I think I want to become friends with Carol Sanford. Two pages into chapter two of The Responsible Business, and it’s like she’s reading my mind. She talks about how she often uses an airport shuttle and they’ve taken to referring to riders as “guests.” When she asked why, the driver told her (what I can only assume is the company line) “We want you to feel at home in our vans,” to which she replied, “I’m not interested.”
Seriously.
And when he finally dropped her off, he thanked her for her support. “I wanted to tell him, “I don’t ride the shuttle to support you,’ she wrote,” and that’s when I knew that Carol Sanford gets it. You can call employees associates and community organizations partners but the change in title doesn’t mean anything and doesn’t really change anything because these titles and language adjustments are top-down. They’re assumptions without any deeper understanding.
Sandford’s story illustrates a very good point: organizations seriously need to focus their attention to a more holistic understanding of customers and consumers. Telling consumers what they should want just doesn’t work anymore — even if you paint it with a fresh coat of mollifying euphemisms. They need to understand what their stakeholders actually want. They need to treat their stakeholders like adults. The must trust them and give them agency to solve problems. Sanford believes that a responsible business must see stakeholders as partners, and accept its role in the co-evolution of communities and living systems.
Sanford actually makes an interesting connection between living systems and corporations in the following chapters of The Responsible Business. She says that “ecological and biological systems not only adapt to their surroundings, they also transform them.” And business and corporations work more or less in the same way. The long term-viability of an organization is closely tied with the relationships they make with consumers as well as advancing the welfare of the world. Following that line of logic, to survive and to sustain not only profitability but business itself, an organization must ultimately contribute to “a world of expanding life.” This isn’t corporate responsibility, mind you, it’s being a responsible business.
Sanford has a really interesting take on stakeholders within a sustainable framework, breaking them up into a pentad (AKA a five-pointed star) diagram of customers, co-creators, Earth, communities, and investors. At the top are customers, then, drawing a point down to the bottom right, we go to co-creators (AKA employees, staff, team members), then up and to the left to Earth (yes the planet is a pretty important stakeholder), then to community (which includes the local people and institutions that are affected by the presence of the business) and finally investors (the people who provide the capital needed to make the whole thing work). While Sanford lists them in this order, she clearly states that all stakeholders are necessary for a coherent whole.
Fragmentation is the enemy of ecology — so much so for market and financial success. Work with the wholes, is Sanford’s advice — whole businesses, whole people, whole systems. I really like the way that Sanford looks at business and sustainability holistically, and not in a touchy-feely way. “The world is made up of living systems,” she says. “All of which are working with the larger systems they are part of to create more value. A tree helps the forest become a forest. The forest helps the atmosphere maintain conditions the support life. People apply their creativity to making products, services, or systems that will improve life for those who buy them. Customers incorporate products into lives that serves families, workplaces, communities and the world at large.”
It all just seems so simple, like why haven’t we ever thought to look at businesses as part of living things? Even the most greedy would want to continue to make money — why not make it easier? Why not do it right so it’ll last longer?
If you pay attention to the people you’re selling to, the people who work for you, and the planet you’re living on, you can actually make more money. It’s not just business, it’s responsible business.
