Your Values Can Drive Your Work

I was in the grocery store standing in the granola bar aisle when it hit me. These seemingly endless shelves are a metaphor for exactly what we as a global people don’t need anymore. How many energy bars, health bars, cereal bars, diet bars, meal replacement bars, granola bars and goodness-knows-what-other-marketing-names-we-give-them-bars do we actually need? Businesses are very skilled at convincing us that we need what they’re offering. And yes, competition is healthy, but many sectors have reached a level of excess while leaving so many of our actual needs behind.?

And not many of us are talking about it.

We have very real societal problems that need smart solutions. In fact, the UN launched 17 Sustainable Development Goals in partnership with 193 member nations in January 2016 to achieve by 2030. (Gulp. 8 years left.) Although these 17 goals are humongous, there are very specific facts and actions to take for each that opened my eyes quite a bit. (Like Goal 12: Ensure sustainable production and consumption patterns . Did you know that if we continue with our current consumption habits, by 2050 we’ll need three planets to source all of the things we think we need???) Governments and NGOs are only a piece of the solution. Porter and Kramer (HBR 2011) state that “companies must bring business and society back together.” In fact, they make the argument that many businesses are stuck in this idea of social responsibility, which is at the periphery of their business. Instead, the solution could (should?) lie at the core of business: Shared value. “Businesses can create economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing (society’s) needs and challenges. Businesses must reconnect business success with social progress. Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success. It is not on the margin of what companies do but at the center.”

Timothy Mohin, former EPA and Senate staff member and later corporate social responsibility leader at Intel, Apple, and AMD, in his book, Changing Business from the Inside Out , states that there are two ways most companies determine they should initiate a corporate responsibility function: The 2x4 or the epiphany. Firstly, “corporate responsibility usually starts with a whack–the metaphorical 2x4–upside the head. In these cases, the company is suddenly faced with a significant business risk that must be addressed through corporate responsibility measures.” Think back to the 1990s when Nike , Adidas, Gap, and some other textile manufacturers realized their goods were being made in sweatshops, many staffed by children, with gross labor and environmental violations. Or in the 2000s, when Apple and virtually every electronics manufacturer had similar labor and environmental atrocities made public. Suddenly, doing better became a risk play because now people know what’s happening, even if the company did or did not.?

And regardless of this 2x4 entry, big companies can make major impacts all along supply chains and partner networks with their buying power, so they’re not to be discounted in this movement for societal good. When Sysco Foods requires its farmers to supply bathrooms, water, and regular breaks for their field workers, farms change their way of operating for all businesses who buy from them. These acts become major forces of positive change. (Sysco’s 2021 CSR report , if you’re curious.) Granted, big companies can also use their weight to squeeze their partners, so they can be a driving force behind environmental and labor violations, too.

Secondarily, Timothy Mohin says that “the epiphany scenario is when the founder or CEO of the company declares that their company will be a leader in responsibility. Great examples of this scenario are Ray Anderson (the late CEO of Interface Carpets), Gary Hirshberg (former CEO, Stonyfield Farm), Dame Anita Roddick (the late founder of The Body Shop), Jeff Swartz (former CEO, Timberland), Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (the founders of Ben and Jerry’s), or Jeffrey Hollender (former CEO, Seventh Generation). Each of these business leaders deliberately set out to integrate corporate responsibility into their business strategies” and managed to focus on people, planet, and profits. “Businesses acting as businesses, not as charitable donors, are the most powerful force for addressing the pressing issues we face” (Porter and Kramer, 2011).

The above epiphany company examples lean into consumer products yet there’s a whole other level of epiphany companies focused on key societal problems. In 2006, Danone collaborated with Mohammed Yunus, Nobel Prize winning economist and founder of Grameen Bank to create a product that would very specifically address nutritional needs for poor children in Bangladesh. This collaboration achieved its business goals while addressing a very acute and devastating societal need. A more recent example is when Sealed recognized that homes in the USA are responsible for ~10% of greenhouse gas emissions and created a business model in 2013 that accelerates home energy efficiency adoption while also turning a profit. In the process, the business model yields some pretty cool positive ripple effects, such as an increased volume of labor contracts with local home repair workers across the USA and capturing consumers who typically wouldn’t be early adopters of climate do-goodism.

As workers, some of us have choices in who we are willing to work for while others may not be in a position (yet) to eliminate potential employer options. This whole post recognizes that this is a privilege. For those of us that do have choices, we can choose to dedicate our time and talents to:

1) Companies whose core reason for being is to solve our most challenging societal problems.?

• There’s no single path to find these companies. One way is to pick a problem you’d like to participate in solving and then research companies who are working in this space, from decarbonization and ocean acidification to empowering women, more preventative and effective healthcare, and bridging economic gaps.

2) Companies that are committed to acting responsibly and sustainably with executive support and real programs and metrics to back up their public stances. These companies may not have societal issues in their core business model, but they balance their attention across people, planet, and profits–they’re determined to do good. Some ideas to get you started:

• Prioritize B Corporations . B Corp Directory to find companies who are certified B Corps and a curated job site of all open positions across all global B Corps .
• Research company websites and public filing records to find ESG (environmental, social, governance) or CSR (corporate social responsibility) sections and have your greenwashing and bullshit sniffer ready. There’s a lot of inconsistency in what’s reported since not much is standardized (yet), so companies tend to report only on what they’re making progress on.
• Reference tools like the Net Zero Tracker to see how companies are walking the talk about their role in climate change.?
• Inquire if there are entry-level labor programs, such as internships or university hiring programs, or if companies are simply paying a lot to win the same already-financially-well-off talent that is often demographically skewed white and middle-to-upper class (in the USA, at least).?
• Find out if companies are investing in re-skilling jobs programs that help change access to equal opportunities and bring more economic viability to underrepresented minorities, neighborhoods, and/or global locations that have been left behind. A local one by me in Colorado is the one launching soon at The Pro’s Closet . They hope to change the demographic profile of certified bike technicians and open up life-long job opportunities for people who may not otherwise consider this employment field an option.

3) Companies who operate as business as usual, focusing primarily on profits and creating markets for their products, services, or experiences. (Some dark humor of this outlook, although it’s scarily true if you objectively analyze climate science from the past 800,000 years.??)

Companies in the first category are the ethical pinnacle: Businesses creating shared value and actively progressing society (of which the environment is a part). As these businesses become more successful so too does the world become a better place. The correlation of our daily work as employees to our impact on societal progress is direct and palpable. Personally, I can think of no better way to dedicate precious time away from my family and hobbies than being a vital part of the solution we’re all banking on. Or maybe it’s just midlife as Brené Brown thinks of it: “Midlife: when the Universe grabs your shoulders and tells you ‘I’m not f-ing around, use the gifts you were given.’”?

As many of us are considering making a job change in 2022, I strongly encourage us to consider how the role of society’s greatest needs plays into where you decide to dedicate your time and talents.?

Will you be a part of business as usual and the downward expansion of our problems??

Or will you be part of the solutions we so desperately need??

You can make a great financial living doing both–short-term, at least. Medium-term, I'm not sure as it depends on where we collectively steer our future and the decisions more of us make today.

P.S. I’ll be joining a purpose-driven company on 2022 Feb 1 and will be hiring. Please reach out if you have talents you’d like to dedicate for good or if I may help you in any way find values-driven work.