James Bushell and Bart De Vries on the need for ethical business
Tucked in a back corner of Olive cafe, James and Bart chatted with me about supporting ethical businesses to create a better world, the perspective gained by sailing a traditional Fijian vaka through the pacific ocean, and how simply neutralising the damage we create isn’t good enough anymore.
What is MOTIF ?
Bart: At MOTIF we provide strategic advice, investment and representation for ethical companies.
It’s been around for almost four years now, and started off as a general business advisory, helping ideas come to life. Over the last 18 months we’ve started to redefine our work and zero-in on the areas that we really enjoy and will make the most impact in the world; for us that’s growing ethical business. So we’re going through a bit of a shift in direction, and purely focusing our work around how we help ethical businesses with good strategy, good commercial business advice, but also an understanding of people, profit and environment.
What does ‘ethical’ mean to you?
James: Ethics is something that’s constantly changing — what was ethical 20 years ago is no longer ethical today. For us, it covers three main parts; environmental sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. But there’s a very different challenge between what we think ethics is academically, and how we actually put that into practice in the real world.
I’ve heard about Green-washing, is there a similar problem with ethical-washing?
J: There is certainly people who talk about what they do which isn’t as accurate as what they describe it to be. It’s definitely a problem. Back in the day, companies used to position themselves as ethical businesses, and that was their main function. Whereas in today’s market that doesn’t work. It’s the quality of your product that comes first, and making sure that it is the best product in the market. That you do it ethically is just part of it. It’s just that market shift and positioning. We think that because we treat our staff and the environment better, that enables us to get a better product. People that care more about what they’re doing will be more involved, and that gets us the highest quality product so we can sell it for a premium in the market. There’s that depth of story behind it. If it’s doing things that are genuinely positive for the planet, then people are more keen to get behind it as well.
There’s also a difference between an ethical business and a business that has a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy. There are some companies that donate lots to charity — huge amounts — which is great, and I’m really supportive of that. However, the way that they make their money is actually more detrimental to society than what they then give back. So rather than getting to a stage where we create damage and try and fix it, how do we create our produce or our products in a way that is beneficial to people along the way so we don’t need to go back and fix everything that we’re doing — so that we’re fixing it as we go.
The world’s so far past neutral. It’s just not going to cut it. You have to be regenerative in the way you approach things.
B: Business is a developmental framework. It’s is a chance to develop the world and the people within it — and that’s from the broader stakeholdership, the people who you’re working with. How do you make them healthier and smarter, how do you make them feel like they’re a part of something that they really want to be a part of.
J: One of the challenges of working with communities is that a lot of them don’t want to work with business. Business is seen as evil. That’s one of the constructs I really want to break down. Business is a neural entity and it’s just about initiating trade.
Trade in itself is a fantastic thing. It allows us to survive, it allows us to do everything.
It’s just that some people have used it in a way that’s not beneficial for society, so it’s got a bad name. The challenge is re-shaping that vision of what business actually is and what it could be used for.
Is New Zealand behind or ahead in the world of ethical business?
J: There’s been a study based on corporate integrity and ethical businesses. There is a lot on the anti-corruption perceptions index, and around IP that we give away, so there’s a lot of different studies that you might be able to form a view of where New Zealand sits. Generally, we are pretty good, though we are slipping in terms of corruption perceptions. We’ve become complacent. We were number one for a long time but we haven’t actually kept striving to get better and better whereas other countries are taking over and putting in more effort. It’s a brand proposition and it really tracks business that people can come in here and do business easily and fairly.
How about with our clean/green image?
J: It used to be ‘100% pure’, but we’ve moved away from that. We’re looking at things like kaitiaki — resourcefulness and integrity. I’d love to say we’re 100% pure but if you look at our waterways, we’re certainly not that. We need to try and get back to what we said we were. It’s making sure we’ve got the policies in place early on to ensure that we do keep going that way. If we don’t, our society will probably continue in the way that we’re going. Spreading information and educating is one of the most important things. Part of our role through MOTIF is speaking out, advocating, and this is a very new part of the business. I’m quite introverted generally, but it’s something that I feel really strongly about. We’re doing more talks and representing the sector as a whole a lot more. We also work with government around policies. Through Transparency International we made 120 recommendations to government on how they could improve their policies and they’ve agreed to address every one of them over the next wee while. We’re also helping out behind the scenes with the Open Government Partnership, and we’ve written an economic growth strategy for New Zealand based on national integrity systems, showing how we think we can get there.
What will the future be for how businesses operate in regards to ethics?
J: The aim is that ethics is the status quo and that everyone does it. But also, I want business to be leading the ethical front as opposed to relying on governance and compliance. When you look at government and what legislation was put in, a lot of the atrocities of the world were completely compliant with what the law said. Slavery was completely legal….the holocaust…so it’s really important that businesses are actually at the forefront of showcasing where ethics needs to go. Business is a lot more agile so we should be the ones pushing, and it should be government catching up to legislate. It shouldn’t be companies *just* doing enough to be compliant to get through. It should be us pushing the sphere of where ethics needs to go, having close relationships with universities, academics, and with civil society, to understand what the actual challenges are and how we can address them.
My dream is to write a global strategy. We’re writing for New Zealand’s corporate integrity strategy at the moment. The whole idea is that we can get National, Green, Labour, any party, behind that because there are inherently certain values and visions that are non-partisan, that any political party can get behind. I’d love to be able to do that like the climate change COP 21. Actually address what is going to be better for the planet as a whole. Currently we are very much looking at how we create the best environment for New Zealand, but how do we improve society as a whole as opposed to just our own individual nation? We want to alleviate some of that individualistic nature of our current governance structure for countries.
How do you measure the impact of strategy?
J: On a macro level, we’re looking at how millennials have much more awareness around ethical business these days, and are more willing to pay a higher price knowing where things come from. That’s done through surveys and a combination of other techniques as well. On a micro level for one of the communities that we’re working with, we can look at the domestic abuse rates, the education levels, the average economies. With a smaller community it’s a lot easier to do because you can see the direct impact you’re having and you can measure that later on and you actually know straight away, just from purchasing from them, you’ve already improved their economic livelihoods significantly. We’ve then been able to see those people create an industry, just from this one business. You can also see because of the training that you’ve been doing around family planning and family strategies, the effect it’s had on domestic abuse. In Papua New Guinea, 95% of women are domestically abused, and so we can start to look at how that’s changed, what are the effects. On a micro level it’s a lot easier, on a macro level it’s more challenging.
B: Also, if you look closer at the companies that you work with you’ll notice a whole bunch of changes as well around staff turner over, sick days, mental health days. When companies have a strong, heart-felt mission that they’re striving for and the people believe in it and connect with it, you get a lot more engagement and engagement surveys from big places like IBM showcase that. You’ve got less staff turnover, because people are getting paid to a level where they are happy and they’ve got everything that they need, working for a mission that they believe in and can see the change happening. They are being respected and looked out for in regards to their own personal health and wellbeing. It’s just a smarter way to do business in the end.
How did you both end up doing what you do?
James: I’ve been running businesses for a wee while, and I was doing a lot of strategy work in the corporate scene and also a lot of charity work. I got to the stage where I found that the charity work I was doing was having really positive environmental and social effects, but we were often struggling economically — we were always relying on grants — it’s unsustainable. Whereas on the other side these companies were making plenty of profit but on the vast scale a lot of those businesses were actually contributing toward the challenges that we were trying to solve with the charity work. I thought, it doesn’t have to be that way. Why can’t we just have businesses that do the same thing? And can we prove that we can use this model and be a for-profit company that has positive effects on the environment and positive effects on people? Not necessarily neutral, but actually investing in creating new economies and developing better gender rights or having projects that we try and do through the course of business. That’s why we shifted MOTIF to be what it is.
Bart: I worked in physiotherapy for about seven years, and intermittently went over to Europe to play hockey as well. After coming back from having some time away in Holland, I wanted to have a contribution to New Zealand, especially in seeing the health deficit that New Zealand is in compared to a place like the Netherlands. I had a decision point where I had to choose whether or not I committed the next 5–7 years to hockey. I was on the edge of making trials for the New Zealand team and I was playing professionally in Holland, so if I’d stuck at it I would have had the chance of going to the olympics. The idea is to get to the point where you have a profile that you can do something with. But in hockey you’re only good if you’re in the spotlight — if you’re one of the top in the world — and you’re only in the spotlight for the one or two years that you’re in the team. As soon as you’re out, you’re out. I had the realisation that I was going to have to start something when I was 35/36/37, and I just made a decision; if I’m going to start it then, I may as well start it now. With physio, I could probably treat about 140,000 people in my lifetime if I worked every day for 8 hours a day and didn’t have a break for the course of my working career.
But I wanted to get away from the bottom of the cliff
where I was, as a physio, catching people and seeing first hand the effects of our society and how our environments affect health.
It’s always been around health and wellbeing, but the thing that really caught my eye was the effect of business environments. The physical environments that we work in — at desks and on computers — but also governance and leadership styles have massive impacts on people’s health and how they perceive their life on a day-to-day basis. I was seeing the impacts on people’s pain and recovery rates and getting to hear their personal stories of what’s happening at home. I got the chance to work with and manage physio clinics and started looking at culture and governance and interior design. Business is the area that I was seeing as being one of the massive opportunities of having an impact in the world and so I took the plunge and shifted into entrepreneurship and business.
Why do you care about doing good?
J: The quick selfish answer is that if you do good, you get more positive endorphins as a person giving good than actually receiving it. I’m sure there’s certainly a small element of it that takes a part. I also think that I was afforded every privilege. You look at the statistics and I am a white, upper-percentage class, male. If you are afforded with these privileges, you have a responsibility to stand up for those people who haven’t. There’s something inherently unfair that because of how I’m born, or the culture I’m in, that I am likely to have a more privileged life than others. For me it was about trying to create more equality within society, so that no matter where you’re born, you have the right to express yourself in the ways you want to express yourself, freedom of choice, access to basic health, education, human rights, so that you can make the decisions that you want to make. If we can get to a place like that, then we can reduce a lot of the conflict in society today and generally have a more prosperous world.
B: Caring is a part of my life in a number of regards. My parents are both therapists and artists, so I grew up in an environment where that was the general case, people coming in and being cared for. It’s what I was used to. But when you go down the physio route, the more and more you start to realise that there are severe injustices and there are quite disparate lives that people are living in local locations. The smallest thing can make someone’s life very difficult. My time in Holland gave me the opportunity to zoom out and get a bit of a bird's-eye perspective of this rock flying through space, and question the point of it all. At the heart of it, why the hell would you not care? When you’ve got a limited time to use your energy for certain things, why the hell would it not be for the benefit others? What have you got to gain, just for your own benefit? Seeing the systemic stuff that’s causing some of the issues, and then knowing that I’ve got another 65,000 hours of productive capacity left in me, where can I apply that that will have the widest positive effect? There’s a certain level where I could do that at the coal face, but for me it was starting to look at the more strategic aspects, and building my skill set and capacity and networks and everything else that you need to have an influence at a certain level.
J: It is that perspective. The times that have shaped me the most were the times when I’ve been isolated. I’ve sailed a traditional sailing vaka all through the pacific for three months.
When you’re out there navigating by the stars, you’re so reliant on what the earth is deciding to give you that day. You feel incredibly small, and in that same instant you feel quite connected to all the species and this planet.
You realise how small you actually are. You feel sort of paternal and maternal towards the human race…and you try to keep that perspective throughout your decision making.
What’s been a favourite moment for you so far?
J: The vaka trip. When we arrived in Bougainville the reception we got, the hospitality, and learning about the effect that we’re actually having on those communities.
B: Working with people that are willing to tackle the challenges, to see the change in the world that you want to see. It’s not only the belief factor, it’s the action factor when people take that belief and take that vision and go at it, and we get to work with some incredibly motivated people doing that.
How can people get in touch if they want to work with you?
Contact us through our site or flick an email to hello@motif.world
