Friday 5: 1st June
Your weekly helping of five interesting ideas to take you into the weekend. Curated by Good Business and delivered straight to your inbox first thing on a Friday.
(1) ‘Doing Good’ is not enough
In a ‘post-Oxfam scandal’ era, the question we’ve been asking ourselves of late is whether the charity sector should look to corporates for the pathway out of the crisis. The answer among the team here has been a somewhat surprising, but resounding, yes.
This is largely based on the fact that corporates in the 90s have been where the charity sector is today. For those of us who can remember back that far, public trust in business had plummeted amid a string of scandals rife with mass abuse, gross malpractice and cover-ups at scale – from Nike, to McLibel to Enron. And whilst change took time, there was a concerted effort to address the issues and rebuild trust – which ultimately resulted in the birth of the modern ‘corporate responsibility’ movement.
Of course, the sector certainly isn’t yet in the all clear (think Carillion for the latest example), but we think that many of the practices and strategies that emerged as part of this movement would work just as well for the charity sector – from comprehensive impact assessments to clear management frameworks and transparently reporting on key issues.
At first thought it might seem counterintuitive for charities – who are innately associated with ‘doing good’, to turn to corporates – who are racing to articulate what they do in a way that demonstrates the value they bring to the world. But part of the reason the scandal has arisen is because charities have, to some extent, felt immune from the need to go through this sort of process, because of the nature of the ‘good’ that they do.
So, we’re calling for a new kind of CR movement – Charity Responsibility – and for the sector to start building bridges following the scandal by using the tools developed by its corporate counterparts over the past couple of decades. Read more in Giles’ full article on the topic here.
(2) An Open Future
When James Wilson launched The Economist newspaper in 1843, he said its mission was to “take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”
Still guided by this very liberal sentiment, it’s fitting that to celebrate the publication’s 175th anniversary, the media outlet has launched Open Future, an initiative remaking the case for liberal values and policies in the 21st century.
The Open Future site is a hub for discussions which champion liberal values in both subject matter and participation; it hosts online debates where contributors take sides on controversial subjects, and invites readers, whether critics or supporters, to vote and comment. The conversations have been organised around five themes. Open Markets will examine the future of capitalism; Open Ideas will look at free speech; Open Society will discuss the balance between diversity, identity politics and political correctness; Open Borders will focus on immigration and Open Progress will consider whether technology is still a route to human progress.
Here at Good Business, we believe true liberal values are perhaps more important today than ever before. In a period of rising nationalism and, in many parts of the world, growing authoritarianism, these values are increasingly being challenged. Amid anger over inequality, immigration and cultural change, basic elements of the liberal credo, from globalisation to free speech, are assailed from the right and left.
As we look forward to a more progressive and inclusive future, we believe there’s no better time than now for this open forum celebrating and demonstrating the true meaning of liberalism: a belief in human progress, a distrust of powerful interests and a respect for individual freedom.
(3) Never Knowingly Under-rented
John Lewis has announced a new benefit for its partners: access to a quickly-growing online service called Canopy that supports renters with their financial stability and capability.
In a consultation with staff, the much-loved retailer was told that renting is an area where its people needed more support. And it’s easy to see why. In England, renters spend an average of 27% of their take-home salary on housing, and in London this rises to an eye-watering 49%. Add to this the fact that, in a poorly-regulated sector, agency charges can be painful, quality poor, and disputes between landlords and tenants hugely damaging.
In Canopy, it’s great to see a new service created expressly to support this often un-championed group. The start-up offers a number of useful services: a ‘rent passport’ for preemptively dealing with references, a platform-wide trust score, and an innovative deposit insurance scheme to replace the lump sums often demanded by landlords and agents.
But it is yet another great innovation in Open Banking that is the highlight of the platform: a tie-up with Experian that allows the regular and timely payment of rent to contribute towards improving your credit rating. Promoting financial capability can often be about breaking a negative cycle and turning it into a positive one, and for many renters this could be the crucial intervention.
While it’s perhaps not surprising to see John Lewis taking a leadership position on an issue important to its employees, it is great to see it continuing to strive to live up to a broad view of its purpose: “the happiness of all its members”.
(4) Twitter Vibes
It’s fair to say that social media has had a pretty bad wrap lately, from data leaks, echo chambers, fake news, advertising scams…the list goes on. So it’s refreshing to read one example of how social media is being used as a force for good.
The town of Rochdale, whose reputation has also suffered in the public eye, is trialling machine-learning techniques to produce the Rochdale Feelgood Index to better understand public sentiment.
On top of its recent public scandals, Rochdale also suffers from high unemployment rates, a struggling economy and aging industries. But instead of only using traditional methods (e.g. consumer surveys, town hall meetings) to understand residents’ views on policy reforms and the impact it will have on their lives, the town is embracing technology to better inform town improvements. Thousands of tweets from Rochdale residents are analysed on a daily basis using machine learning to determine positive tweets from negative tweets, in a bid to avoid response bias on traditional surveys and increase efficiency. A huge advantage is not only lower costs, but also the provision of results in real-time.
And although results may not (yet) be revolutionary (e.g. people are happier on a Friday than on a Monday), the aim is that it will help inform local councils on how their residents feel about when it should hold events, the impact of regeneration projects, and how it carries out public services. Rochdale’s destiny will not be determined by a feelgood factor, but it goes to show you don’t have to be a FTSE100 company or millennial start-up to embrace technological innovation and use it to drive progress.
(5) Good Book Club: The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
At face value the idea of reading a book about the relationship between two psychologists who were obsessed with the human mind didn’t strike us necessarily as a must-read. However, as Good Business team members David, Claire and Eliza discover in this book, our decision making isn’t always great.
Michael Lewis has some way with words. And these two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, are not just any old psychologists. They are two geniuses who totally changed the way we think about the way we think. Lewis has this incredible knack of taking extremely complicated concepts and subjects (high frequency trading - Flashboys, the financial crisis – The Big Short, bond trading – Liar’s Poker) and turning them into something that pretty much anyone could understand.
The Undoing Project follows the relationship between Kahneman and Tversky as they work together, study together, write together and even go to war together, eventually parting with the death of Tversky. It is a story of how two great minds come together to challenge the foundations of accepted thinking about how we make decisions helping prove that basically we are not as rational in our decision making as we think we are (an understanding that has an impact on almost every aspect of our lives from how we choose a chocolate bar to how a doctor decides a diagnosis).
It is a wonderful introduction to the concepts of behavioural economics, and far more accessible than perhaps some of the work written by Kahneman such as Thinking Fast and Slow. However, what really stands out with The Undoing Project (perhaps even more than in Lewis’s other books) is the human dimension. He manages to bring the extraordinary friendship between two extraordinary minds to life in such an engaging and moving way.
As an introduction to how we make decisions and a tale of an incredible friendship, this book is the perfect way to engage your heart and your brain over the summer.