E057: An Introduction to Responsible Business

now on to this episode. Hello. This is James, and this is Jane, and

here we are again with another episode of a world of work podcast. In fact, it's not just a new episode, it's a new series. It is. You referred to it as a Micro Series. It's a Micro Series, that's right, a little, a little micro series looking at responsible business. This is a series eight for us, which is kind of fun. And in it, we're going to explore responsible business. We've got four episodes lined up for this. Today. We're going to be doing an introduction of responsible business, and then we're going to do another episode, which is the two of us discussing responsible business. And then we'll have a couple of interviews about responsible business, one from the sort of charitable nonprofit sector, and one from an actual business. So that'll be fun. Yeah, I'm really looking

forward to it. I think it's a really interesting topic. And I think that even if you don't have any work that relates to responsible business. As far as you know, there are stuff you can take from it as a consumer and stuff that you can take from it as when you're deciding on what sorts of organizations you want to work for. Yeah.

So before we get into it, just a reminder. You can get in touch with us at the WoW podcast, or you can email us at Hello at World of work.io you can check out our website, World of work.io, and a special request, if you could write us a review, leave us some stars on on your podcast player, whichever one you're using, that'd be really helpful. That stuff all really works for us, and it's also really nice to read,

isn't it? Yeah, I want to do a shout out, because I hadn't looked at our reviews for a while, and I went on, and the most recent one is by someone called Ruthie redhead. I don't know who you are, Ruthie redhead, but I was having a really bad day when I looked at your at your review, and it really made me smile. So thank you. That's

nice. It makes it makes it, really does. Yeah. So what are you even up to? Anything there you want to chat about quickly?

No, I guess the only thing I'd mention is we started doing online workshops. Oh, yeah, well, actually, we did one test one last month, and we did another one this week. And I really enjoyed that, and I'm quite excited about that. Yeah, it's fun, isn't it? Yeah, it's really fun, nice, and there's great interaction with people. It's just good to really connect

with people. And yeah, I was pleasantly surprised by how people, how much people, got involved and just got stuck into the material. Yeah,

it's really good. Okay, so we're about to get into the content. What we'll do is, it's just for two of us today, so no guest, and we'll use the usual format. So we'll have a definition discussion. We've got some definitions for you that we think are good. We'll do a bit of a research, round up a small list of a week, some stories from a keyboard, some final thoughts and top tips, and then we'll be getting out of your way and letting you get on with your day. OK, so let's talk about some definitions. We've got a handful of definitions for you today that we think are useful for responsible business. And the first definition is actually responsible business itself, and like all our favorite definitions, it's one we've made up ourselves. We've said that responsible business is operating in such a way as to benefit the wider world, including the environment, society, employees, customers and suppliers, while also attempting to make a profit, or if you are a nonprofit organization providing value for money. So yeah. So there we go. That's our definition on responsible business. Another one that we think is useful is GDP. It's something that we'll touch on a little bit later on. And GDP is a way that many countries measure financial performance, and it stands for your gross domestic product. The definition from Investopedia says that GDP is the total monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country's borders in a specific time period. So normally, you know, countries will look at GDP in a year, and even more commonly, people will look at GDP growth, sort of quarter on quarter, year on year, and that's a measure, you know, are you producing more each year or each quarter is GDP? Do you want to tell us about some definitions on your side? So

my first definition is shareholder capitalism, which I think is a really important concept to understand what we're going to talk about today. So the shareholder value model implies that the ultimate measure of a company's success is the extent to which it enriches its shareholders. Okay? And then slightly different from that is stakeholder capitalism, where this definition comes from. Investopedia. Stakeholder capitalism is a system in which corporations are oriented to serve the interests of all their stakeholders. And among the key stakeholders would be customers, but also suppliers, employees, shareholders. And local communities to the business.

Yeah, that's a nice definition. And then the last thing we want to talk about with definitions is something known as externalities. And you can have positive or negative externalities, and we get this from Oxford Dictionaries, and it says that an externality is a consequence of an industrial or commercial activity which affects other parties without this being reflected in the market prices, such as the pollination of surrounding crops by bees being kept for honey, or noise pollution from a local bar or restaurant. And Externalities exist all around us. They're really things that, as it says, are a byproduct of a work that we do that we don't factor into the costs that we charge people for what we do in our businesses. So that is our definitions. This week. We've got responsible business, GDP, shareholder capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, and externalities. Yeah, and externalities is particularly

it's really important to look around you and try and understand what businesses are creating terms of externalities. One of the greatest examples of that is back in the hundreds of years ago when half of London was covered in pollution, absolutely, businesses on the east end, and there was huge amounts of wealth for the country and particularly for the city, but there was also half the city was living in smoke. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And at some point, this is the society went, well, can't we have to do better than this?

Yeah, yeah. Another great example would be something like tobacco products, where now they're heavily taxed in lots of countries, but where they were not heavily taxed, a large externality was the health impact and the cost of caring for people and the health space. Okay, so let's jump on then and look a little bit more at responsible business in itself. And we're going to do this in two halves. We're going to start by trying to explore what responsible might mean, and then we'll go on and look at the role of business in this. So when we start with responsibility, if we speak to people about responsibility and what we want to do, I think a lot of people probably say that, you know, we want to make the world a better place. That's a responsible thing to do. We want to improve things. We want to make things less bad, whatever it happens to be, we've got that sort of directional movement towards making things better, right? But, you know, while nobody would really, I believe, disagree with that as being a good objective, where we tend to fall down is that different people have different views on what that might mean. We don't really have a clear measure of a better place or, you know, improvement. What does that really mean? It's kind of hard to define. And if we're not good at defining and measuring the things that are important to us in terms of the directions that we head in, we're not very good at heading towards them. So it's important to try and work out what these measures are that are important to us at kind of like a societal or cultural level, if we're going to be responsible and try and achieve them. So what we tend to have at the minute as one of the key metrics that defines the success of our countries is this sense of GDP. So this measure of our gross domestic product over a period of time, or more commonly, we look at the increase or decrease in that over a period of time, and that's a key measure of, are we being successful as a country? Are we being successful as an economy? Unfortunately, GDP is just a little bit too simple. It's a very useful measure in that it's simple and it provides clear directional and guidance. But unfortunately, it doesn't take into consideration a lot of things that are externalities. And also it's possible to have a business that produces positive GDP growth but leads to negative impacts on the people, you know, negative externalities that affect people's well being. So GDP, in itself, isn't on its own, a particularly good measure of whether we're being successful as societies and economies. Similarly, a lot of our organizations do something similar. So they tend to focus on net profit or something like that is one of the measures of, are they doing well as a business? And again, that's great. It's simple, it's directional, it's clear, however, it doesn't take into consideration the other impacts that they may be having on those around them, be their communities, their environment, their employees, all that kind of stuff. So again, it's just slightly oversimplified, and neither, you know, net profit or GDP take into consideration the systemic nature of a world that we live in, whereby some of the negative impacts that we we we produce, can come back to haunt us in different ways. So what can we do to be a little bit more measured and get a little bit more clarity around what a responsible set of outcomes are for organizations or for societies? Well, you know, this is a really interesting area of work, and a lot of people are looking at this. And we're going to look at three things now, and we're going to do it in a slightly linked way. So the first thing that we want to touch on is actually from a book by Kate Raworth, who's had a varied background in sort of economics related areas and the third sector. And she produced a concept in her book donut economics, which is the donut. And if you imagine kind of a ring donut with a hole in the middle, a core body and then an outer ring, that's really the model that. Her book, Donut economics is based around and what donut economics does is it tries to define the inner ring as something known as a social Foundation and the outer ring being the ecological ceiling. And what Kate says in her book is that we as societies need to survive and operate our businesses and produce and consume within the core of a donut. You know, if we fall below the social foundation towards the middle of the donut, towards the hole in the middle, then we will not be socially cohesive. We won't have a quality of life we need. We won't have health all those types of things. So we need to produce and consume a sufficient amount to be above the low level social foundation we need for survival and cohesion. However, if we produce too much, we bounce up against the ecological ceiling, and if we do that, we've got negative impacts as well on the world around us. We ever consume, we ever produce, and that leads to negative outcomes for us as well as individuals. So the core tenet of donor economics is that we need to live and consume as societies in that space between our social Foundation and the ecological stealing. And if we think about social Foundation, some of the things that are in here that we need to have to be able to survive are things like food, health, income, education, and if we think about the ecological ceiling, if we breach this, some of the impacts that we have are things like destruction of fresh water, air pollution, climate change, things like that. So really, that's kind of a donut economics piece, and that's just an insight into one framework that might help us conceptualize what responsibility is at a societal level. Do you want to take us through a bit more or tell us a little bit about where donut economics came from? Yeah. So

I think probably two of the really useful things we can do is look at one what the UN says about sustainable development goals, because that's what's inspired donut economics, and it also gives us a sense of where some countries are trying to get to, and the other is then just to look at one country in particular, which we're going to do in a minute. But we're going to start with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And in 2015 the United Nations agreed 17 global sustainable development goals for the year 2030 each goal has many underlying targets, and is broken down into different sections. And it follows on from a piece of work, which was, I think, called the Millennium Development Goals, unsurprisingly, designed for the millennium. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to efficiently and articulately read you through the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and because I think it's useful to understand what alternatives there could be to us measuring the success of societies beyond financial so one, no list. I love a list. I know you've got you've secretly chucked into extra

it's a list. Tastic episode, right? Sustainable Development Goals. One, no poverty. Two, Zero Hunger. Three, good health and well being. Four, quality education. Five, gender equality, six, clean water and sanitation. Seven, affordable and clean energy. Eight, decent work and economic growth. Nine, industry innovation and infrastructure. 10, reducing inequality. 11, sustainable cities and communities. 12, responsible consumption and production. 13, climate action. 14, Life below Water. 15, life on land. 16, peace, justice and strong institutions. 17, partnerships for the goals. So these 17 goals, as you can imagine, listeners got a lot of criticism. I mean, people like them, but they also have a lot to say about them, and I can understand why they feel they feel very difficult to achieve some of them, I'm not even entirely sure what achieving them would be. I think they're politically charged. I think there are some societies which would recognize those goals, and some societies which it feels a very long way from what their reality is. They're ridiculously expensive and they're a little bit unfair, in the sense that there are a huge number of countries that have had the opportunity to effectively create huge externalities and benefit from it, and there's a lot of other countries who are going through that now. So to ask them to focus on some of the higher level stuff is really hard because they just don't have the resources to do it. So, but I do think it's a really interesting list, and I do think it's a brave thing to try and articulate what a better society would look like than the one we have. That is measured by finances, right? And by growth. So. So the second part of what I thought would be useful, and James pulled this out, and I think it's really helpful, is to talk about how a country has taken Sustainable Development Goals and interpreted them into their own national outcomes. James introduced me to the acronym sin, which I'm not gonna make any jokes about, but that is Scotland, Iceland and New Zealand, and they are the countries that are trying to make this shift away from GDP as their measure of a successful society. So we're going to look at Scotland because we're in Scotland today, and that's where we live, and it's the one that's probably easiest and most familiar to us as citizens. So the Scotland national outcomes are as follows, children and young people. We grow up loved, safe and respected so that we realize our full potential economy. We have a globally competitive, entrepreneurial, inclusive and sustainable economy, Fair Work and business. We have thriving and innovative businesses with quality jobs and fair work for everyone International. We are open, connected and make a positive contribution internationally. Communities. We live in, communities that are inclusive, empowered, resilient and safe. Education, we are well educated, skilled and able to contribute to society. Health, we are healthy and active poverty. We tackle poverty by sharing opportunities, wealth and power more equally. Culture, we are creative and our vibrant and diverse cultures are expressed and enjoyed widely. Environment we value enjoy and protect. We value enjoy, protect and enhance our environment. And finally, human rights. We respect, protect and fulfill human rights and live free from discrimination. And I don't know what you think, James, but a I understand that is an incredibly challenging list of things to achieve. But even setting the direction and articulating clearly to your citizens, this is the kind of country we are working towards. Yeah, this is how we want to be measured for our success. This is

how we want to be measured because ultimately, this is what we believe will make us better, happier, and give us more satisfaction in our lives. Is a pretty cool thing. And I recognize my country in that I recognize because I think when you give big, audacious goals like that, I'm not saying you're going to get there tomorrow, but what you do is you empower the mechanisms of government and the organizations around the public sector and the third sector and businesses to say, Okay, if this is where we're trying to get to, let's look at how we can contribute to that. And it just means everyone gets it and starts pulling in the same direction. Yeah,

it gives, also, in my view, a framework for conversations with the population. So it gives you a really good way to engage with the general public about, yeah, it really

does. And I would give one, one specific example about that. When I lived in Scotland, 25 years ago, I did not particularly think of it as an incredibly inclusive and diverse place to live. I didn't it wasn't bad. I just didn't think of it in that way. I moved back two years ago, in part because it's reputation now as an incredibly welcoming country to LGBTQI plus community members, and when I got here, that's exactly what I found. And I don't mean there were big flags and whistles out I just meant there was an understanding that everyone got to live as they wanted. And I think, I don't know if it's got anything to do with setting national outcomes, but I don't think it can hurt.

Yeah, I'd agree. Well, let's chat a little bit now about maybe what the role of business is in this. So you know, what we've done so far is we've done some definitions, and we've thought about, potentially, what responsibility is like from a societal level. And I think that's really the core of what we need to consider when we think about responsibility, and the next bit when we think about responsible business, is, what's the role of business in supporting that responsibility? Where do we, you know, where do we think business comes in? What do we think the responsibilities of business are? What do we think their accountabilities are? How do we how do we create businesses that are responsible? If that's what we want to do. So we're going to do that, but first we're going to just do a little bit of history. So we mentioned in our definition to this idea of shareholder and stakeholder capitalism, and these are important frameworks to be aware of when we think about what responsible business is, and if we think about shareholder capitalism in itself, to some extent, the ideas behind shareholder capitalism were about responsibility as well. It was just a different way to look at what responsibility is. So in the 1950s somebody called Milton Friedman, who was a Chicago economist, started to talk more about and kind of was the genesis of this work around shareholder value maximization, with shareholder value theory. And really what he said and said sort of more forcefully as he progressed through his life and other people said as well, is that the core role of any business must be to maximize profits for its shareholders, right? And the reason that this is so important in the views of this argument is that only by being as efficient as you can be and focusing on. Your core task, can you make the best use of the resources that you have? So if you as a business, maximize your outputs from the stuff that you're doing, do it as efficiently as you can and generate as much output as you can, as much profit as you can, then that capital that you create will go to somebody else, and they will then be as productive as they can be in another area, and so by focusing on this area, everyone is incredibly efficient, and that's better for society, and we produce more and so on. So that was kind of what happened there. However, things like the shareholder value theory and shareholder value maximization didn't, in my view, and in views of others, lead to necessarily the positive outcomes that everybody was expecting, or this school of thought was expecting, and a lot of us was to do due to their failure to recognize externalities, which we spoke about earlier. And this is the fact that if you focus purely on profit, you might do so in such a way that it leads to negative costs for wider society. So for example, if you decide that you want to sell, I don't know, sandwiches really, really cheaply, and you do that, and you make them really, really cheap, and you put them in packages that are not very biodegradable, and sell them really cheaply, then everybody eats your sandwiches, and litter gets everywhere, and somebody else has to clean up that litter, and you're not accountable for that cost. That's an example of an externality. So externalities are are out in society as a result of some of ways that we work. And increasingly it's accepted now that that really what organizations should do is not just focus on their shareholders, but they should focus on all of their stakeholders. So in that example, to do with the wrapping for sandwiches, a key stakeholder would be your local community. It would be your local council. It would be your neighbors, and one of the people that you want to look after when you are being a stakeholder focused business would be your local community. So you don't only want to sell your sandwiches cheaply. You want to sell your sandwiches at a fair price and provide a good set of outcomes from your community for your community, meaning fewer bits of pollution for them and so on. So it's increasingly accepted that the shareholder maximization piece causes some problems, and that potentially stakeholder maximization, stakeholder outcome maximization, is what we want to focus on. And this has been kicking around for a while, things like CSR, which is corporate social responsibility and increasingly, environmental social governance. So ESG are phrases that are used to talk about responsibilities of business. And we'll talk about whether those are particularly genuine a bit later on. And then this summer, in quite a powerful movement, in this sort of set of discussions the chief executives Forum, which is a large body of really senior chief executives, pushed in an open letter for a shift towards a more stakeholder focused form of capitalism, as opposed to shareholder focused, which I think is good. And Larry Fink, the guy who runs BlackRock, which is I think the world's largest investment fund, at the minute largest capital manager said that they would no longer invest in organizations that did not have climate change plans. So there's stuff going on in that space. So that's a little bit of a history of where we've been and where we're headed in relation to responsible business. So if we think about responsible business itself, you know, we had our definition earlier, and we've also looked at some work done by an organization called business in the community and business in the community say that that businesses and society are linked, and that a responsible business puts creating healthy communities and environments at the heart of a strategy. So if we think back to the donut, from donut economics, we can think about healthy communities and environments in the donut. So our healthy communities is that social floor that we need to reach, and healthy environments is that ecological ceiling that we need to stay within. So it's very much the same thing, and we can really think of responsible business, then as a business that lives within the ring of a donut that does no damage towards those sustainable development goals. And then a super responsible business would be a business that doesn't just do no damage, but that actually starts to try and do good while making profit at the same time. And there's some great examples of those out there. So that's a little bit of a reflection on responsible business. You can read more and look at the work for business and the community do and other organizations. But carrying on with research Roundup, I wanted to touch on two or three organizations that are out there that support responsible business and that look to grow and promote and help define what responsible businesses are, and help businesses grow and develop a tool so they need to be more responsible. So I'm going to touch on something called B Corporations. And then I'm going to touch on something called zebras unite, and then I'll have a little shout out to the maturity Institute as well. So B Corporations are where we'll start. B Corporations are benefit corporations. That's what the B stands for. And B Corporations are organizations that are certified for. By an institution called B labs. And what this process of certification does is it assesses organizations to see if they meet certain criteria in relation to the impact that their decisions and actions has on their workers, customers, suppliers, community and the environment. So you know, this is clearly very similar to our other definitions of responsible business and similar to the categories of a sustainable development goals. B Corporations need to see for themselves and the business that they enter into as a force for good, and the process that you need to go through to become a B Corporation is two fold. So you need to be assessed and meet certain criteria from a sort of procedural and process level. So you need to have sufficient governance standards. You need to look after your workers. You need to have a reasonable social impact, environmental impact, good impact on your customers, and a good business model. But you also need to modify your legal structure and incorporate within things like your articles of association or whatever legal form you're in a legal requirement to behave responsibly and to be a force for good. So if you meet the process requirements and have legally bound yourself to be a business force for good, then that gets you through the hurdles of becoming a B Corporation. There's a bit more to it, but fundamentally, those are the two areas that are there, the actual process itself involves an online assessment that you do. You need to score 80 out of 200 points at the first pass on that. And if you get there and you feel like you're going to meet the criteria, then you go and have a review process with with certifiers, and they also do a documentation review to make sure everything's above board, and if you actually do, having gone through that meet the requirements, then you sign some some term sheets with them, and agree what you're doing and pay some fees, and that's you done. And then you recertify occasionally to make sure you're still there. And there are a couple of really large organizations that have gone down this route, which is excellent. So a few of them are Patagonia, Ben and Jerry's, who make ice cream, obviously. Hootsuite, who's a social media platform, scheduling platform, Danone, who make consumer food. Cook, who we'll talk about more, who make frozen food in the UK and eat cover, who make domestic cleaning products. So there are lots of them out there.

So that's B Corporations. If you're is coming a B Corporation, you can find out more at B corporation.net and think about that process. There's another organization we're going to touch on called zebras unite. And zebras unite are also, I believe, at their core about responsible business, and what they're really looking at is the kind of venture capital type world and and some of the pressure that comes with that side of things, and they hold themselves out to be effectively, the anti unicorn movement. For those of you that don't know, a unicorn is a privately held company valued at more than a billion dollars. And unicorns are the types of things that every venture capitalist wants to have in their portfolio of investments, because they've grown exponentially and generated lots of if not, profit, a lot of value for the early investors and zebras, what they say at zebras unite is that zebras are not unicorns. They're anti unicorns, where unicorns are about fast growth, 10 times multipliers of earnings, creating monopoly positions, being highly competitive, hoarding assets. You know, being a little bit risky, being, you know, being about creating value and growth, maybe more than profit in the short term, at least, zebras are something different. Zebras are about creating, not just about prosperity, but also sustainability. They're about, you know, trying to, trying to fit well within the broader ecosystem that we live in within business. They want to be pluralistic in what they do. They believe in win wins and things like that. So you can learn more about Jeopardy night there. And they're quite a fun organization. And then, just quickly, before we go on and then kind of start to wrap up our research round up, we did a podcast in the summer of 2019 where we spoke to Stuart Willard from an organization called the maturity Institute. And they work in this space as well, and they do some really good work around what it means to be responsible as a business, and how you can get some measure to that. So that's kind of me getting to the end of those organizations that support responsible business. There are some kind of watch outs to do with responsible business, though it's not always clear that people do it for right motives. Well,

I think it's complicated, like everything, and I think it's not, there's not a straightforward answer, because I don't think organizations necessarily, I don't think many organizations necessarily set out to deliberately, you know, become a B Corporation, or to ascribe to maturity instrument values, just to look good, but without question. Since the rise of reputation and communication and the way that we communicate in this world, reputation has become so important, and when what happens? Sometimes? Times is something that is often referred to as washing your reputation. You might have heard of it as green washing or pink washing or rainbow washing, or there's all sorts of ones. Yeah. ESG, yeah. So there's lots of ways of describing it, but fundamentally, it's when a organization tries to make itself look better

acting in a way that would be considered good or responsible in terms of responsible business. But they might be not doing it for the right reasons. Does that matter? Don't know, but certainly they might be bigging it up, is the only phrase I can think of, in comparison to the negative externalities they may be creating,

they don't need to change internally. They're just, I'm not up a COVID on top and absolutely

yeah. They literally whitewash their reputation. And I don't want to name names, because there's loads of them, and if I call that one, then I feel like I have to call out about a million Yes. I think pretty much every comms department has this conversation. Communications department has the same conversation at one some point. Yeah, but if you imagined a theoretical company that was industrial and by a river and had accidentally created a load of water pollution, but they might then invest in supporting a local natural habitat charity or wildlife charity or a wetland area, and they might spend a million pounds or a million dollars on that, and they may disproportionately invest in communications to make people aware of it, in comparison to the 15 million pound problem that they have created and tried to get out of sorting out, And that is quite literally greenwashing your reputation. Now I actually don't think it happens. Quite straightforward is that. I think what happens is businesses get themselves in a mess. Someone goes, oh, you know what would be better? And someone says, Well, that we'd be doing good, and we'd be making making, you know, ours look better. So that can't be a bad thing. And then somewhere along the way, they start to recognize that that's a way of getting out of stuff. And it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't happen overnight. And I don't think people set out to be bad people, but I do know that, having worked in the third sector a long time, and seeing people cross back and forwards from CSR roles, in house, in organizations, back to the charity sector and so forth, it is hard. It is a hard thing to navigate. And if you are a consumer or if you are working for an organization, it is really important that you understand what washing your reputation means, and you look out for it, and it goes very closely along with virtue signaling about certain things. So a classic, I would say, is about food. So there's been supermarkets that have done massive campaigns about not having certain ingredients in them, when it turns out that actually all of the other products on their shelves do, yeah, and they did a big campaign about it. There was one last year that did that, and everyone was telling me, oh, you should be shopping there. They're amazing. And I was like, well, they're not. If you go look, go and go and look at them, versus go and look at one of the supermarkets that is actually working really hard at this and has set out a whole timetable over five years of how they're going to get it out of their products. And I think it was palm oil. Palm oil. No, no, not the company the product. And I just, we need to be savior, right? We have to be Savior as shoppers, as workers, as employees. So that's that's just a plea to look out for it. The problem is, I'm afraid, once you see it, you cannot unsee it. You see it everywhere, information, disinformation. And there is a difference between people who aren't, who are deliberately doing that, yeah, and people who are like, Oh, well, I might as well do some good while I make I'm clear of this mess, and you need to use your judgment. It's a fact of life as well. I mean, it's where it is. Yeah, cool. Okay, so that's research Roundup, I think. Yeah, that's us. Yeah, very excited. Okay, so shall I crack on? Yeah, do you want to crack on robber list? Yeah, I

think that would be really good, because we've got unbelievably, even though I've done two, I've done all the lists today, James has chucked in another two lists List week. So there's actually two lists. They're quick, but they're super quick. There's only three things on each, and following on from what we said about washing, we thought the most thing, useful thing we could do is give you three things that you can do to help make your organization more responsible, and three things that you can do as a consumer individual to help responsible business, support responsible business. So list one first list three things you can do to make help make your organization more responsible. One, discuss with teams and leaders how important is being a responsible business to you, that's you as an individual and to you as the leaders and managers. That's a conversation worth having. If nothing else, you'll find out exactly what people think that you learn and two, understand your organization's vision and mission. Do they support sustainable development goals? Do they damage any do they create externalities? Our favorite word, you know, have a thing, you know, if you're creating a great new product, but there's a load of plastic alongside it, and no one's helping get rid of it, and it's not recyclable. All that's a negative externality. And finally, three, assess your organization's performance goals and metrics. Are you helping the world? Are you provide producing negative externalities? Now I'm not suggesting you write a 3000 word essay, and neither is James. No, but there is no harm in just being a little bit more aware about your organization and what they choose to do beyond your department, because if nothing else, when you come to choose a new role or a new organizations, if at some point you do, you might include that in your decision

making. Yeah, yeah. Think about some of your KPIs and metrics, right? I mean, your KPIs might just be profit at the minute or whatever it happens to be, but you might want to add some others in there that are aligned to national performance frameworks or sustainable development,

yes, and I'm just going to throw in on that that's really important, because quite often we take for granted that everyone will behave well and behave sensibly and behave with a way that's responsible. But actually, if the only thing you tell people that matters is the KPI of production, if that's the only number you've got, even if you don't say it's the most important, you just say it's the only one we measure. People will assume it trumps everything. So sooner or later, they will make bad decisions or decisions that are not in line with the rest of your mission and vision, because the only thing you're actually measuring is production. Okay? And the second list, three, and this is my favorite list that we've ever done, three things you can do as a consumer or individual to help responsible business. And the reason it's my favorite list is because we can all do something, and I know we probably need to do a lot more, but it's a start one appreciate and recognize that there is a cost worth paying associated with responsible, ethical products. If it's cheap, there's a reason, probably something or someone is, if not being exploited, at very least getting a rough deal

somewhere else. Yeah, that externality is there, and you're not paying for you're not paying

it so someone else is two. Learn about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and share them with others and share that you think they're important, right? If you think that's important, and if you don't think we should measure by GDP, talk about it with people. And finally, three, try and make consumption choices that support responsible businesses and support the sustainable development goals. And it's hard, because there is no organization that is perfect, because they have to make choices every day. But if you can find the organizations that, at the very least, are trying their best to reduce their negative externalities, that's a really, really big deal. So you know, if they're a little bit more expensive, pay it. Pay with pride, right? Think I am doing my bit to try and make the world a little bit better because I can afford to, yeah, see if you can. And you can't do it everywhere, and you can't buy them. I'm not saying the most expensive things are always ethical. Things are always ethical, either, but if it is the right choice, and if it is a little bit more expensive, know that you're doing the right thing to help us move forward as a society. Cool. So those are the lists

the week. That's nice. Nice lists. Yeah, I like the lists. Some pretty simple stuff in there. So a quick stories from a keyboard. I'm going to lead us off with just one, and it's, I guess, a bit of a reflection. And you know, when we talk about responsible business and we're talking about benefiting all stakeholders, not just shareholders, we just, we need to bear in mind that that's really difficult to do. You know, we've talked throughout this about things people can do, but it's not always that simple. So one of the challenges you have is that if an organization doesn't make enough profit, isn't profitable, then it will no longer exist, and that can have huge negative impacts as well. So I've worked in organizations where they've been loss making, and things need to change significantly to help that organization survive. And it's just a trade off, isn't it? And as you make that shift towards profitability and survival as an actual business, you naturally move benefit from some stakeholders towards shareholders, so sometimes it's just what happens. So as much as we're on one side of this argument, we acknowledge that it's complex and difficult, and that's kind of my my sort of story from a keyboard on where I've been working in organizations where that shift has been made to bring places to profit. Have you got anything you want to say, well,

I guess this is, as always, I tend to think back to my sort of sector, and I guess the one thing I would say is, so I've lived through the experience of working with sponsors on youth development charity projects, right? And they've been brilliant people who've worked in those organizations, yeah, and they've wanted to support us for the right reasons. And are they, is the whole organization as a whole, doing it solely for the right reasons? No, of course not, because that why they're not there to support our charity. They wouldn't have any money to do it if they weren't running their business. But without question, being vocal about what your charity stands for and what isn't okay in partnerships, yeah, and and being saying, Look, we understand you're a corporate business, but there are things that we won't be able to align to. And if that's what you do, fine, but we're out and being brave, asking that,

yeah. So a couple. Things have popped into my mind here, as you said that, and there are examples that hopefully people know of, Sackler foundation funding for any of the arts. So the Sacklers were prolific funders of lots of arts movement, but they also were some extent of a root of the opioid crisis, which had huge negative externalities, right? So cutting funding with them is a great example of where a art institution that's a charitable institution may need to draw the line similarly with fossil fuels as well.

But I also I get that if you're working in those organizations, you may not have the power or authority, and also you may not have the voice. And I would just encourage anyone who is in those positions that actually exist, be brave. Write down what's not acceptable, even if it's just on your pad, and start talking to your boss about it, because the more that you talk about it and create noise, the more that you avoid people sitting in a situation where they're actually faced with the choice of saying yes to money or no to money, because they'll never get down that pathway because they've got a list of things they don't accept. And the respondents have gone, oh, okay, that's not us. Then, yeah.

Cool. Any final thoughts from you before we wrap up? No one, one, okay,

I know that we sound sometimes, and I say we, I mean me a little bit earnest about this stuff, right? And I just want to shout, I am not in any shape or form great at this. Yeah, you know, I make bad choices that are not supporting responsible businesses every day, every day, every day we read, you know, we're putting a new heating system at the moment, and I am having massive meltdowns about what I should put in there and what's right for the building versus what's going to be right for the world and externalities. All we're trying to do is have a little conversation about it. We're not we're not trying to guilt trip you into doing anything, not at all, but if you want to, and you can, it's a cool thing to get involved in and understand a

bit more about, yeah, yeah, it's just about marginal change, isn't it? Just a little bit around the edges, keep getting better. And I think that's, that's what we're trying to do with some of this. In terms of final thought for me, for one thing I'd just say is that, you know, kind of similar to what you said, this stuff is hard. It's hard to do it's hard to change your habits. It's hard to change what your business does. It's hard to find a way that you can profit from making the world, you know, a more environmentally sustainable or socially sustainable place. Doing all of this is hard, but I think it's worth it as well. Can

I say one more thing? Yeah, I'm gonna hear James, because this is actually really important to me. There is one thing that some people, not all of some people, not all of us, because we don't we're not all shareholders, but if you are a shareholder of a company, or if you have a pension or an ISA that is investing in companies, right, it would not hurt you to have a look at what companies it's been invested in, because actually, whether the legal responsibility is with you as a shareholder or Not, you own those companies in part, and there is genuinely a conversation that shareholders need to have with themselves about whether they are really okay with some of the things that their companies do. Absolutely. So that is sorry. That is a massive plea to me. I went through that about six months ago. I went through my pension, and I was like, Oh, I realized what the sub funds of the sub funds were investing in. And I was like, that's tough. I like the sustainable growth of my pension, but I don't know if I can sleep at night with my money going there. Yeah, yeah.

Cool. Good. Shout out. All right. Well, let us wrap up and call it a day. Then I think we're, you know, we're trying to keep this at about 45 minutes. That's what we're aiming at with our podcast now, at least with these ones. So we will wrap up in terms of checkout, you can, again, you can get us out for Wow podcast on Twitter. All right. Well, that was fun. So that was part one of responsible business done. Three more parts to go. It's going to get it's going to get exciting, folks. It's going to get a little bit technical, it's going to get a little bit real, or something like that. Well,

we're going to get to talk to two cool people. Yeah, it's fun. All right, until next, see you next see you next time.