[Unpopular Opinion] Why B Corp Leaders must move beyond the triple bottom line

Thank you to Nicola Kemp and the team at Creative Brief for publishing this - your commitment to championing women leaders does not go unnoticed!

When dissenting voices rise, it’s an opportunity to change and grow. It is with this spirit that I put pen to paper on the back of the B Leaders Summit in Rome which I left just a week ago.?

I had a few sleepless nights processing the experience, which I want to say from the get-go was truly invaluable. I have a pocket full of business cards with hot leads, I exchanged ideas with world leaders and I connected with some truly incredible human beings.

However, I have to offer the community some reflections. Too many speakers were old, white, and male. This doesn’t reflect the world we live in, nor the new leaders offering us radical pathways towards genuine regeneration.?

We need new voices and new leaders to take over this movement?and we don’t want to be called upon to ‘disrupt’ the stage, we want to be invited and handed the microphone.?

Addressing the fallacy of the triple bottom line

I love BCorp. It’s one of the few tools in the established business worlds that really demands shareholders think about people and the planet, but, I feel compelled to urge that the time has come to stop with this triple bottom line nonsense - pursuing profit on equal pairing with the planet and people has only led to degradation and confirmation we are now well beyond a 1.5 degree pathway.?

I want to offer the BCorp Leaders a point for reflection that was actually aimed at myself two years ago. The day I became an activist.?

During Cannes Lion 2019 I was excited to share the mission of my impact consultancy?The Humblebrag ,?where I only work with green clients and I have the specific mission of amplifying the voices of diverse leaders. I was so excited by my own mission, convinced if only enough people could buy my services that we could change the world, when William Skeaping from Extinction Rebellion turned to me and said:

“Change will not come from consultants. The problem with people working in sustainability is that they have too much to gain from the problem to really challenge and change things.”

This hit me hard. Was I really putting my money where my mouth is? How could I trust my clients to really be green? What does green mean anyway? Were my efforts accelerating change or stalling progress through celebrating tweaks to business as usual? Was I part of the problem guised as the solution??

Challenge for change

Needless to say, I faced a crisis. The criticism hit hard, but then I realized it was an invitation. When dissenting voices rise, it’s an opportunity to change and grow.

This interaction changed my life. It drove me to launch?Creatives for Climate , a community of impact frontrunners in the communications industry learning from each other and holding ourselves accountable for what we communicate.?

And I want to offer this reflection to the BCorp community too. I’ll give you a tangible example of something that happened during the conference where I felt a lack of diversity led to stagnation.?

After opening the corporate activism track with an incredible workshop (if I may say so myself), I headed over to challenge myself to a different kind of conversation, one on impact investment and the prospect of BCorp starting its first impact fund.?

I sat silent for 40 minutes; there were a lot of established experts in the room, and let’s be honest -?finance isn’t my main interest. However, I noticed a certain type of profile dominating the conversation and statements creeping in, such as: “Well, let’s be realistic, if we can’t prove aggressive ROI, the fund simply will not work.”

I spoke up. Communities in India are dying as they risk their life for water. The government of Sri Lanka has just granted people an official day off to grow food. 1 in 25 homes in Australia are now officially uninsurable. We must find new ways of measuring impact, of valuing things in life, and of using business as a?‘tool’ to build a better system that works for all.?

Have you seen that comic in which people sit in the desert and look to the sky and an older person says: “For a beautiful moment in time, we made a beautiful profit for our shareholders.” This is where we are headed.?

By the end of the Summit I was exhausted by the old guard ‘telling me how the world is’ - and that’s why we need new leaders within this movement.?

We need imagination, creativity and new ways of thinking to really drive this new concept of business as a force for good, and I champion Peter Blom, CEO from Triodos who had the courage to support my comments questioning that the measure of success should still be profit saying:

?“We’re not pricing things at their true cost. We need an economy where the true cost is reflected, and in which we start to price and value what matters.” Amen.?

Challenge for Change: How B-Corp should evolve

With making progress?in mind here are my suggestions to make this incredibly community, and this incredible movement, even stronger:

Set Quotas: diversity drives solutions?

My suggestion is to set a quota for diverse voices to attend (quotas can actually work well) and then reduce the barrier to entry, such as cost. We need more diverse (young, people of color, indigenous, women, disabled) voices in the room - and for the skeptics this isn’t just about ‘doing the right thing,’ it’s about driving solutions.?(DICE? can help with providing a framework of what good looks like)

Invite more dissenting voices in

I was honored to co-design and facilitate the opening session for the corporate activism track with Tessa Wernink from The Undercover Activist, and I am absolutely thrilled to be invited to share my ideas and given a platform as a ‘dissenting voice.’ However, I hope to set an example and not be relegated to the ‘activist’ in the room. As Tessa says:

“We occupied the role of the ‘dissenting voice’ during the Summit, but of course this voice should not be relegated to one person. The dissenting voice is a role everyone can and should be able to take on. It is necessary, and right now it demands bravery and courage - and risk. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’ is an adage for a reason, and an important one.”?

Ask yourself: ‘Am I benefitting from positioning myself as an activist more than I am working for a cause?”

I noticed many corporate leaders were incredibly comfortable self-identifying as activists for simply doing their jobs and taking action to reduce the negative impact of their companies. Fantastic work - yes! Are you an activist? Not so much.?

I encourage everyone to be careful not to hijack the authenticity and efforts of frontline activists as this label gets thrown around. Speaking frankly, at times during this conference I felt the term activism was being hijacked, and I’ve never seen so many corporations so confidently claim to be activists.?

Less narratives of exceptionalism and heroism and more detailed plans

I’m a good person, you’re a good person too. We’re better than those evil bastards right!? Look, even psychopaths think they’re great people. Speaking candidly: As someone who has earned their bread and butter from reputation building in the purpose-driven world, I can tell you every CEO wants to tell you why they, uniquely they, are more empathetic and values-driven?than the rest.

We all have a ‘why we’re good leaders story’ (I do too), but that’s not what will change things. It’s us against them language and, honestly, it doesn’t contribute to conversations around the solutions we need.?

In my humble opinion, this movement desperately needs to shift away from indulging in the why of business action (and a discussion of who will lead it) and move into the how, The big questions such as: what is our 1.5 degree pathway action plan? How are companies decarbonizing their supply chains? You get the picture.

Gosh. I feel so much better for getting this all out. If you have made it this far, you’re my hero. I want to round up by saying:?We cannot give up on BCorp. I’m not here to give up on BCorp. But, if the BCorp community doesn’t diversify and embrace more radical voices - it will lose new minds like my own - a younger generation, tired of being told how the world is.?

I look to the BCorp community as the most advanced and successful movement to drive change within business - but myself, and many others of my generation, are about to lose hope. If this community cannot step up to really paint a picture of what building a NEW system could look like, we will give up.

Oh, and one last (activist) question inspired by: why are creative agencies that work for oil and gas firms still allowed to get the BCorp status?