Introducing: Lead With We: The Business Revolution That Will Save Our Future

Excerpt from Chapter 1, Lead With We

We Must Act Accordingly, Collectively

This is no longer an “us” versus “them” business landscape. It’s all about the collective us—We—together, effecting major change. The twin emergencies of the climate crisis and a deadly virus pose a real time and real world “acid test” (62) for this reengineering of capitalism, according to the Financial Times. It’s increasingly clear that the various ways that business leadership responds to this and other crises “will have a lasting impact on their reputation among both employees and external stakeholders for years to come,” according to Mark Cuban (63) and other business experts, such as Fast Company. (64)

This new path for humanity is a return to our natural state in terms of our neurologically hardwired connection to each other and the planet. It’s also a moral imperative, as the logical conclusion of the current path is our own self-destruction or extinction owing to the “natural” forces we have unleashed against ourselves. We must start with We. Begin with the collective, following the ways of nature that we’ll get into further in chapter two, “Urgency.” Not only by putting all stakeholders on equal footing, but also by considering them as one, as We.?

Each part survives owing to the success of the sum, as in a natural ecosystem in which the sum cannot survive with only a few of the parts intact. This We First mentality and practice subsume the individual stakeholders’ needs in favor of the ecosystem. Integrity of the whole comes first. We need to see how much leadership can accomplish when it works together, what competitors can do together, what partners can do together, what employees can do together, what brands and consumers can do, together. In short, what we can do when we Lead With We, and how we must if we are to survive.

The future of profit is peoples’ purpose aligned. But Lead With We takes leadership that quantum step further, to a mandate that today sits at the heart of all thriving business: to unlock the radically scalable and collaboratively effective Virtuous Spiral of not only “doing well by doing good,” but of doing so at an expanding scale, through which we drive business growth by solving the world’s most pressing challenges. To make decisions that take into account the whole web of entities that make up the collective We. To practice We First Capitalism, and serve the interests of all stakeholders, from investors and employees to consumers, local communities, and the planet itself.

This has been the focus of the BRT over the past few years. In August 2019, half a year before the pandemic hit us, the BRT announced (in grand fashion, in a full-page NYT ad) that “the purpose of business is no longer to uphold shareholder primacy, as its mission statement has declared for decades, and is instead to prioritize and care for all stakeholders.” (65) The COVID-19 pandemic really put the BRT principles to the test. Were companies moving fast enough, doing enough? What more can we all, collectively, be doing?

We are also seeing legions of new entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses launching ventures whose sole directive is to address social pain points. Companies like New York City’s Solgaard, which has so far upcycled more than 75,000 pounds of ocean-bound plastic into solar-powered luggage, bike locks, and other gear, recycling about five pounds of sea plastic for every product it sells. The company aims to halve the volume of plastic in the ocean by 2025. (66) Solgaard isn’t alone. Unburdened by the complexity of retrofitting purpose to profit, and inspired by the willingness of millennials and Generation Z customers to reward them for it, these new ventures are launching products, services, and industries whose whole raison d’être is to exert a positive impact on lives and our planet.

In short, leading companies large and small have recognized that the business and social responsibility cases are increasingly one and the same given the context of a planet challenged by social inequity and finite resources. They’ve seen how consumer activism through digital and social media can harm or destroy their credibility, and yes, even their bottom-line revenue. Consider H&M, Nike, and other retailers that in 2021 faced the dilemma of choosing between sourcing cotton from the controversial Xinjiang region of China—and weathering attacks in the West over forced labor and racist politics—or refusing it and fighting a boycott by consumers in the world’s second largest market, causing share prices to plummet. Experts predicted potential 4.4 percent drops in Stockholm and 5.4 percent in New York, (67) all of that action taking place in the venue of our pocket-based electronic court.?

Even social media companies themselves aren’t immune, especially when consumer activism is inflamed by celebrities who represent significant global brands in their own right. Take the 2018 case of Snapchat, which suffered backlash for an offensive and insensitive ad for its mobile game called “Would You Rather?” (i.e., rather slap Rihanna or punch Chris Brown). The former, and legions of her fans, called the company out for its ignorant and callous depiction of domestic abuse. The company lost $1 billion in market value within days. (68) And this came just one month after Kylie Jenner joined Snapchat users in criticizing its new interface, which had wiped an additional $1.3 billion in value. (69) Lead With We companies are constantly redefining and reengineering how business builds purposeful companies, effective cultures, and loyal communities that all deliver responsible growth and impact. The best news is that not only do conscious business leaders not lose profits for the effort, but their companies grow much faster than their competitors by expanding their overall markets and even stealing market share from their self-serving competition. (70) Mindful companies not only do good things for the world, they reward their stakeholders with extraordinary returns—more from nine (71) to fourteen times higher than the S&P 500. (72)

About the Book?

Discover an urgent prescription for a new business paradigm—one that better serves humanity and the planet. The global coronavirus pandemic has thrown into stark relief how “business as usual” is no longer serving us.?

Enter Simon Mainwaring, New York Times-bestselling author and founder and CEO of We First. A decade ago, he showed how business leaders and consumers could use social media to build a better world in We First. Now, after decades of research and field experience at the vanguard of the world’s most successful brand revolutions, he provides in Lead With We a blueprint for doing business better in today’s challenged world.

Timely and compelling, this book’s message is simple: The future of profit is people’s purpose, aligned. Lead With We not only examines why we must all conduct business differently in order to grow in today’s market, but provides the how—concrete steps any reader, wherever they find themselves in the business hierarchy, can take toward success.

Notes

62. “Call for code,” IBM, accessed October 30, 2020, https://developer.ibm.com/callforcode/.

63. “Call for code,” IBM.

64. Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff, “The rules of co-opetition,” Harvard Business Review, accessed January 25, 2021, https://hbr.org/2021/01/the-rules-of-co-opetition.

65. Johan Weigeit, “The case for open-access chemical biology. A strategy for pre-competitive medicinal chemistry to promote drug discovery,” EMBO Reports 10, no. 9 (2009): 941–5, doi:10.1038/embor.2009.193.

66. Weigeit, “The case for open-access chemical biology.”

67. John Fullerton, Regenerative Capitalism: How Universal Principles and Patterns Will Shape Our New Economy, Capital Institute, April 2015, https://fieldguide.capitalinstitute.org/uploads/1/3/9/6/13963161/________whitepaper9-2-2015.pdf.

68. Lisa Schnirring, “China releases genetic data on new coronavirus, now deadly,” CIDRAP, January 11, 2020, https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/china-releases-genetic-data-new-coronavirus-now-deadly.

69. William Falk, “Editor’s letter,” The Week, Dec 25, 2020.

70. William Hoffman et al., ”Collaborating for the common good: Navigating public-private data partnerships,” McKinsey & Company, May 30, 2019, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-analytics/our-insights/collaborating-for-the-common-good.

71. “Global homelessness statistics,” Homeless World Cup Foundation, accessed February 13, 2021, https://homelessworldcup.org/homelessness-statistics/.

72. Lilah Beldner, “How Lava Mae brings showers to people experiencing homelessness,” The Right to Shower, January 9, 2019, https://www.therighttoshower.com/make-difference/mobile-showers-for-homeless.