91. Building an organization according to your values

When I was growing up, I was given the impression by the predominant culture in the US that if you wanted to do good you worked for a nonprofit, if you wanted to do business, you worked for a business. And they were separate paths.

This was in stark contrast to the way that I had observed my grandparents in Eritrea doing business, which was a little bit business, a little bit community development. At least, the impression I got as a kid was that if you were building something in your community, it was a member of the community or a part of the ecosystem, whether you were building a nonprofit or a business. You were just building a part of the community. So giving back was automatically baked in, sustainability was baked in also in part because that was the predominant culture, but this was a different planet. This was another continent away. These were mom and pop businesses. At the time I didn’t realize that most Americans work for small and medium sized businesses. And that there could be parallels.

When I thought about business, I thought of corporations. I thought of IBM, Walmart, General Motors, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson. Those, in my mind, were “real” businesses.

And so I grew up in America feeling like OK well eventually I’m going to have to make a choice, whether I want to pursue making the world a better place, or working for a business.

Then in my early twenties, I discovered another option, a way to work for a business but also make the world a better place, the concept was called CSR, it stood for corporate social responsibility. And the marketing was certainly attractive to me!

The concept was that businesses obviously exist to make money BUT they could also consider how they affect the world. Do they give back? That was how I mostly heard the concept being discussed. Although the technical definition of CSR is more encompassing, I just didn’t find a lot of companies who were deeply engaging on their actual responsibilities to society. What I was reading and seeing were companies who were committed to “giving back.” And that meant making donations, sometimes encouraging their employees to also make donations. Sometimes that meant giving away money. Sometimes it meant giving away products that they sell for free. Sometimes it meant having employees go out and volunteer on the company’s dime. In fact, this just came back to me now, but one of my earliest memories is going to a Habitat for Humanity build with my dad’s job. He was a salaried employee, and was encouraged to use a work day to go out and volunteer with Habitat. So this was my introduction to CSR. Sort of an add on to a business. A business is out in the world, making products or services, and then on top of trying to be profitable, they also tried to give some time and money away.

As soon as I got a job at a big corporation myself, I started to look around and find out more about the company’s CSR efforts. It seemed like a win-win. I could create financial stability for myself while also doing some good in the world. And what I quickly realized was that first of all the office that did all CSR was incredibly tiny. For a company of let’s say 100,000 employees, there were, in my memory, about 5 that were doing the corporate social responsibility work. And 3 of them were support staff. And the 2 employees that led that work were older employees who had been successful in building the business in other departments and then as a “reward” as they approached retirement, they got to do this CSR work for the final 5 or so years before they retired. So I was advised to continue to grow as a professional and that in about 40 years, I would be able to join the CSR efforts. For someone in their 20s, this sounded unimaginable. I even went back to school and got a masters in a field that 100% lined up with the work they were doing and still the answer was, this is a “reward” position, you can’t jump into it as a young professional. 

So this was the CSR era that I remember. And then there was a lot of criticism about how it seemed like a big marketing ploy. And I kind of had to agree! I mean, I had been absolutely shocked when I realized that my corporation had about 5 employees working on their CSR out of a humongous corporation, especially given how splashy the marketing was. I don’t believe they ever lied about what they were doing at all, I just think that the impression was that the scale was much more widespread. They weren’t even lying or exaggerating how much money or product they gave away, it is just a problem of our ability as everyday people to scale things. When we hear that a billionaire has given away a hundred million dollars we are impressed with the hundred million dollars. We don’t realize that they probably make that in interest in a day. We have a problem with scaling things in our mind. And marketing agencies know that, and capitalize on it.

But I think the criticism started to grow and it grew out of fashion to brag about your company’s CSR and then around that time I started hearing industry leaders talk about their company’s double bottom line and then triple bottom line. This was in vogue at that time. The bottom line for a company historically was just how much profit they earn in a year. The double bottom line was ok now company’s ultimate measure is profit as one of the bottom lines and social responsibility on the other bottom line. And then the triple bottom line was profit, planet, and people. So the same thing, different way of articulating it.

And I think this was a more holistic approach, the ethos being what we measure is what grows and if a company doesn’t measure it’s impact on people or the planet, and only measures profit, obviously it will prioritize what it is measuring.

But even this sort of fell out of favor in the lingo. The sense I get now, and if you are currently in school and at that age where you are scoping out your choices and making career decisions, I’d love to know if my observation rings true for you. My sense is that nowadays it is sort of a foregone conclusion that of course workers and the community in general, want businesses to reduce their harm to the planet, do right by their employees and the community, not support crappy politicians, and in general be decent.

And that of course, if you are building a business, you want to create it in a socially responsible way. 

At the same time, I have seen a real skepticism about nonprofits, foundations, all of those organizations where, at least when I was young, a real skepticism about whether they are doing what they say they do. Or are they actually perpetuating the same harms as capitalism as colonialism etcetera.

So where are we today? What can you do if you’re building an organization today? Are there any options to try to make it an organization that lines up with your values?

Let’s get into it. And thank you to the listener who emailed asking for this topic to be covered in an episode. This is too much to cover in one episode, so there will be a follow up episode with the second part.

I think it can be tempting when you’re starting an organization, to just try to get it up and running and then to wait until later to try to instill your values into the way that your organization runs. But I think the issue with that is that a lot of founders never really get that moment to reset, that time to take a step back and think about how to reset some aspects of how you run your organization. Usually it is just a matter of survival for most founders and by the time that you can take a deep breath and the organization seems like it will be sustainable, it is often very late in the game to try to make changes. Bad habits are very hard to break. It’s easier to start the way you intend to continue.

When you think about hanging on during market shocks, when the economy dips, or when something happens that shakes up the organization, it seems to me that you will be more likely to hang on to your principles if they were baked into the organization from the very beginning, from the foundation. So from a sustainability standpoint of your culture and your values, I would encourage you to think these things through at the very beginning stages of your startup.

To start, I think it’s a good idea to understand what your values are. What your priorities are. Of course, you very likely care about many issues. You care about the planet, you care about worker’s rights, you care about social justice, you care about diversity equity and inclusion, you care about accessibility. But I want to gently encourage you to consider choosing a more limited scope as you get started. To help you focus and communicate your vision to everyone that you bring into your organization. In order to create an organization where everyone is on the same page in terms of what your organizations values are, you need to be able to clearly point to exactly what your values are. With as little ambiguity as possible.

When Google was getting started, their mission statement was “don’t be evil.” And it seems like it would really help to clarify all of the decisions that the company would need to make, but it wasn’t specific enough. First of all, what do you consider to be evil? What if your employees disagree with you about what evil even means? It’s just too vague.

So I want to encourage you to start there. What specifically are your values that you want your company to rally around?

And then from there I think you have some fun decisions to make! I’m going to group them into these categories, there are six. 

• Structure
• Employees
• Community
• Environment
• Governance
• Customers

I’m going to stop there for today. So far we’ve talked about the difference between adding social responsibility as an add on to your organization versus building it into the foundation of your organization from the very beginning from the roots all the way up as you build your organization. We talked about figuring out what, specifically, your values are going to be for your organization. We talked about the first 2 categories of decisions that you can make to create a more socially responsible organization- thinking about how to structure your organization and also how to think through employee decisions. Next time, let’s talk through Community, Environment, Governance and Customers. It’s going to be fun!

If there are other topics you’d like covered on the show, drop me a line anytime at spend donate invest at gmail dot com. If you want to enjoy the backlog of about a hundred past episodes, you can check out the website which is Spend Donate Invest dot World.

The biggest form of support you can provide for the show at this point is to share an episode with someone who you think might enjoy it. This show tends to be interesting to people who are wondering how to feel more aligned between their politics and their money. Their societal values and their money. Their concerns about the planet and their money.

I’m your host GG, I will come back soon with part 2 of this convo. Drop me a line in the meantime, let me know what you think of these suggestions so far and what you’d add.

Let’s talk again soon!

Links from today’s episode:

https://www.becomingdenizen.com/essentials/co-ops