Your Mother Was Right: How business can repair the world

What are the solutions to the biggest hot-button global issues? I have one: your mom. No, that was not a bad attempt at a tasteless joke, but a serious answer to the problems facing the world.

Since we were small children, our mothers taught us about the “Golden Rule”: treat others the way you want to be treated. By applying that simple concept into core business thinking, we can repair the world.

When he spoke to Congress during his American visit in the fall of 2015, Pope Francis invoked the Golden Rule as an imperative for leadership. “We need to avoid a common temptation nowadays: to discard whatever proves troublesome,” he said. “Let us remember the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”

The Golden Rule encourages us to think of the needs and conditions of others when considering our actions. We have left the age in which businesses could get away with simply making money and have entered an era in which consumers expect business and its leaders to be as responsible as they possibly can with the influence they have to shape the world. Business should be about solving a problem in humanity, not about generating profit. As the Dalai Lama says, “Wealth should serve humanity, not the other way around.”        

As leaders, we should use the power we have in a responsible way. We can start by instilling a culture of care in business using the Golden Rule as a means to get there.

Companies need to invest continually in the community. We should stop looking at our clients as sources of wealth to capture, and our employees as an expense to minimize. Instead, see them as the human beings they are and succeed by finding ways to serve them.

An easy way to assess how well you are doing is to apply the Golden Rule to your business actions. Some major areas that can be used to grade your company’s impact are economy, privacy, community, government, the environment, and health. For example, do your employees have to take a second job to survive? Are you charging your customers outrageous prices for a product like Martin Shkreli did when he raised the price of the life-changing drug Daraprim? Are you engendering mistrust by failing to protect your clients’ information and privacy as well as you could?

If you are failing in any area, make it your mission to improve.

In the spring of 2015, I realized I was actively contributing to income inequality and chipping away at the well-being of my team. I was on a hike with a friend who was worried about how she was going to afford a $200 monthly rent increase. At the time, I was making $1.1 million, so I could not understand how a meager $200 could destroy a person’s lifestyle. Then it hit me. She was making more than most of my team at Gravity.

What was my team sacrificing? I later found that some were waiting to start a family, racking up student loan debt, and living in homes without adequate utilities. I was not doing right by them. I know the hard work, sacrifice, and character of my team, and I know for a fact they would not let me struggle if I were in a similar situation.

I had to do something. It needed to represent a significant shift, and the change had to be bold. There had to be a new floor, a new minimum wage at Gravity. I crunched some numbers. With some work, I could afford to pay a base salary of $70,000 a year. It was risky, but I knew it was a moral imperative.

I asked myself, “Am I going to do what I say I believe in?” Fifteen days later, I made the announcement. It is the best money I have ever spent.

Pope Francis said, “The yardstick we use for others is the yardstick that time will use for us.” If you can help someone, you should. If someone needs a home, give him refuge. If someone needs her voice to be heard, listen and if necessary, speak for her.

Although Mom’s Golden Rule is a simple concept, it reminds us of our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development. The privilege of holding a leadership position at a company provides us with an even greater responsibility to make a positive change in the world. As one philosopher said, “The ultimate measure of a man is what he does with his power.”

Are you using your power for good or for evil? This question is usually reserved for superheroes, but consider what could happen if all business leaders used their positions for good. Individually, we cannot solve all the world’s problems, but we can each make a small difference. And the more people follow the Golden Rule, the better the world will be.