Thursday, September 8, 2011

Free at Last

As many of you know...(many, like there's thousands following this)...I've been in the throws of creating a new business for some time now. It's been an incredibly challenging endeavor and for the last three years my partners and I had been stuck inside and organization where we were unable to speak freely about our hopes and dreams and ideas for this new business. Well at long last we've been liberated! As such I thought I'd just post a piece I wrote at the beginning of this journey to give anyone who's  interested a view into what we hope is to come. Enjoy!


Investing in Companies with Soul:
Soul is when you have the ability to make other people feel better about being alive, regardless of their condition”
Wynton Marsalis:


In his book, The Executive's Compass: Business and the Good Society, James O’Toole of the Aspen Institute posits a concept of “The good society.” It is a place where the citizenry feels at Liberty to pursue their own goals, where there is guaranteed Equality of opportunity, where efficient markets drive wealth creation and constantly increasing standards of living and where we care for our natural resources and engage in human interconnectedness so that Communities can flourish and create an ever improving quality of life. In other words, O'Toole's concept of the good society requires a state of "concinnity" among Liberty, Equality, Efficiency, and Community. Concinnity is an ancient English noun, rarely used today, that means "a skillful blending of the parts achieving an elegant harmony."

We firmly believe that capitalism has the greatest potential to breathe life into O’Toole’s concept of the good society. Capitalism is the engine of wealth creation and personal opportunity. It provides us with the resources to pursue our own goals, and affords us the ability and time to devote to community. Absent capitalism, the good society is unattainable. However traditional capitalism has historically levied what were seen as unavoidable ills on society as well.  Pollution and the depletion of resources, exploitation of workers and an ever increasing gap between the very wealthy and the poor even in countries with the most efficient private market economies has been seen as inevitable and justifiable for the sake of shareholder wealth creation. For capitalism to take root, basic conditions such as the rule of law, property rights, financial infrastructure, economic freedom and political freedom must exist. Admittedly, our ability to convince or influence countries to adopt these basic conditions is very limited. (Though we will strive to support individual organizations with a stated mission to do so.) However, what we can influence is the way capitalism is practiced within environments where the right conditions exist. We believe a new form of Conscious Capitalism, one that smooths the rough edges of traditional capitalism, is required for capitalism to flourish, spread and create the good society.

We believe strongly that in the era of Conscious Capitalism, great companies will be those that strive to create value for all stakeholders by operating in a state of concinnity in which stakeholders (customers, employees, communities, suppliers, investors) are sustained by the sublime experience of interacting with each other in elegant harmony. In their book, Firms of Endearment, authors Raj Sisodia, David Wolfe and Jag Seth, offer stark evidence that operating from this more holistic perspective can do more to increase shareholder value than operating from a more self-focused (i.e., shareholder dominant) operating model. These companies have accepted responsibility for becoming “instruments of service to society” in addition to their obligation to make returns for their owners. We believe this view of capitalism will be more readily and globally embraced and thus increase the likelihood of achieving the good society for more and more citizens of the world. 

Peter Drucker surmised that profit is not the goal of a business enterprise, merely a measure of the validity of its business model. Profits are a lagging indicator of what is in the hearts and minds of customers. We believe the hearts and minds of customers are yearning for companies that understand doing good and doing well are equal partners in capitalism. We believe in a model of evolutionary capitalism which aims to be an engine of value creation and service by tending to the interdependent needs of all stakeholders as a means of achieving the good society.

No comments:

Post a Comment