The experience of the Business as an Agent of World Benefit Conference left me reflecting a bit more deeply about some of the themes uncovered in my research to understand how successful, socially responsible managers think about their role as an agent of positive social change (see my post on expert manager’s mental model).
Conference participants came together — clearly — in an effort to progress and validate the idea that the purpose of business must be recast to include positive social impact on a equal footing with positive economic impact. That recasting emerges from acknowledging some core values as central to the way we think about business organizations: e.g., peace, dignity, health, and sustainability. At an individual level, I found these values (or similar) as part of the mindset of the successful, socially responsible managers I interviewed in my research. Collectively, the entire BAWB conference membership was abuzz with the same.
My net take away: It’s all got to start with an explicit acknowledgment of how we connect to these values. As one of my table partners at the conference suggested, we’ve got to get to a point where “discussion of the matters of the human spirit are no longer silly” in the context of business and society.
Secondly, the belief in our ability to innovate (another theme in my research) was the motivational force behind the conference’s positive outlook on the issue of recasting business to be more socially responsible. The scope of innovative thinking at the conference went far beyond some of the thinking I encountered in my research with successful managers. For example: Conference proceedings included reviews of successful, non-traditional business structures — lessons from which might be used to create new types of organizations, or incorporated as positive innovations in more traditional business structures. In either case, the lesson from the conference is that widely casting the innovation net will undoubtedly yield positive results.
Finally, the importance of deeply understanding the subtleties of the context in which you operate emerged as a consistent theme in the conference proceedings. Microfinance success cases are examples of this; the social context is as critical as the financial structure of the transaction. This resonates with a very similar theme I found in my research with expert managers. Underneath this, I am beginning to believe, is empathy. Or perhaps more useful for my interest in organizational practices — the concept of empathic design, which embeds empathy into a practice of producing a designed thing (product, system, organization).
