Mission, Inc.: The Practitioner's Guide to Social Enterprise

If you’re a businessperson who has picked up this book, chances are high that you already know something pretty important: we’ve got to change the way things are done.

There’s a big pile of problems out there: violence, poverty, environmental degradation, human rights violations, disease, and more. It’s a big and daunting pile. It’s so well chronicled that we needn’t repeat endless statistics about its scale and scope, nor endlessly debate how things got to this point and who is to blame. The point remains: we’ve got to change it—and change it fast.

The good news is, things can change. The pleasant surprise behind this book is that business—the same institution that by any measure must bear a fair amount of the responsibility for the current situation—is also the most potent force for turning things around. In fact, hundreds of businesses are already hard at work doing exactly that.

The business you run, the business you’re starting, or the one you’re simply dreaming of can change the world for the much, much better. Make that your aim, and you’ll be running the most successful business on earth.

The Power of Business

One way to understand the history of a civilization is to observe the history of its architecture. For long periods of history, the greatest power resided in the grandest seats of government and monarchy. In other epochs, the driving force of religion was 2located in the great cathedrals, temples, and mosques, none more magnificently than the entire city-state of the Vatican.

Today, fifty-one of the world’s one hundred largest economies are corporations. The vision evoked by the very title of David Korten’s seminal book, When Corporations Rule the World, has apparently already come true. In this age, the defining architecture of the world reflects the primacy of business, whether that be epitomized by the skyline of Manhattan, the Google campus in Palo Alto, or the emerging towers of Dubai.

Many would argue, and rightly so, that commerce in general, and capitalism as its most highly evolved manifestation, is responsible for the great advances in what is generally accepted as our improved quality of life. Whether you’re a fan of sliced bread or of the greatest thing since (as of this writing, the iPhone, in the authors’ humble opinion), you can chalk it all up to business.

The mantra behind every successful business is repetitively simple: find a need or want and then figure out how to fill it at a cost to the seller that is less than the buyer is willing to pay to satisfy the need. Put another way, find a pain and then offer an antidote to that pain at a price below the pain threshold.

But why would anyone go to the trouble of meeting all of these buyers’ needs and wants? Our system is built on the conventional wisdom that enlightened self-interest attracts sellers to the task of meeting needs. Thus, the pursuit of profit is the catalyst for the vast improvements we have seen in the human condition.

But what happens when human needs are fully met? What is the catalyst supposed to act upon then? Remarkably, it has learned to self-regenerate through a process of creating and filling new needs. Jerry Mander, in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, explains how this works:

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The only need that is expressed in advertising is the need of advertisers to accelerate the process of conversion of raw materials with no intrinsic value into commodities that people will buy… The goal of all advertising is discontent or, to put it another way, an internal scarcity of contentment. This must be continually created, even at the moment when one has finally bought something. In that event, advertising has the task of creating discontent with what has just been bought, since once that act is completed, the purchase has no further benefit to the market system. The newly purchased commodity must be gotten rid of and replaced by the “need” for a new commodity as soon as possible.1

Underlying the propensity of the need-inventing market system to propagate itself is a deeper driving force. That force is an insatiable hunger for continual economic growth that stems from ownership of the market system itself. Marjorie Kelly has devoted an entire amazing volume to this idea, aptly named The Divine Right of Capital. She argues that many different stakeholders have an interest in the course of the market system. But only one, ownership, is awarded a preeminent right that trumps those of the other stakeholders:

If we go rummaging through [capitalism’s] entire basket of economic ideas—supply and demand, competition, profit, self-interest, wealth-creation, and so forth— we’ll find most concepts are sturdy and healthy, well worth keeping. But we’ll also find one concept that is inconsistent with the others… and it is these four words: maximizing returns to shareholders.2

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Throughout this highly recommended work, Kelly crafts a powerful argument that the market system—the same well-intentioned organism that has broadly raised the quality of our life and civilization—creates havoc and ultimately threatens our survival by awarding “economic sovereignty” to ownership at the expense of employees, the community, and by extension, the natural world itself.

The primacy of ownership demands continued and growing returns. Business can meet this demand in only three ways: one, by inventing desire as Jerry Mander describes, despite the increasing raw material inputs and labor efficiencies required to satisfy those elevated passions; two, by focusing production on those who can afford to buy rather than those with the greatest unmet needs, creating vast and growing disparities between “haves” and “have-nots”; and three, by disregarding the real social, environmental, community, and human costs of production, or at the very least, by transferring those costs away from shareholders. In other words, by following the script of economic sovereignty for ownership, which does not require owners to pay their full share.

Business for the Common Good

But there’s a catch to this, of which more and more of us are becoming aware. We’re social beings. That means we have to live together. “Social,” simply put, means “living or disposed to live in companionship with others or in a community, rather than in isolation… of or pertaining to the life, welfare, and relations of human beings in a community.”3

Uh-oh. Being social beings creates a bit of a problem for business in modern times. Tasking the most powerful institution on earth with anything other than promoting the life, 5welfare, and relationships of human beings in a community just won’t do. Will it?

We started with the premise that there are some pretty big problems that don’t seem to be getting any smaller. It’s probably no coincidence that the challenges we face are growing every bit as fast as the institution of business. This should come as no surprise as long as the institution views the common good as an expense item that detracts from the primary purpose of creating shareholder returns.

We have to do things differently. So, what if we put the power of business in the hands of people who think differently? What if the purpose of a business were to fulfill a real human, social, or community need? What if the goal were to return value to the community rather than push off expenses on it? What if the obligation to employees were to elevate them rather than extract from them? What if the cost of a raw material were pegged to its...