Reshaping Markets - Who and How?

23 Jan 2008 – Sophia Tickell

At Thalwil, the closest station to Ruschlikon, John and Elaine (Elkington) went east to Davos and I came north to Zurich and then home (Oxford, UK). The journey gave me the chance to ponder the closing story of the Social Entrepreneurs Summit, recounted by Paulo Coelho, told to him in turn, by his dentist as he sat open mouthed in the surgery and powerless to intervene. The story was of the five Jews who had changed the world: Moses, who brought us a rules-based system; Jesus Christ, who argued for the supremacy of love; Karl Marx, for whom love was all very well, but what about money?; Freud, who close on his Marx’s heels reduced it all to sex; and finally Einstein, whose thinking was personified, perhaps not wholly accurately, as describing it as ‘all relative’. That all the key protagonists were men was not lost on me, but hilariously delivered – particularly the bits on the role of sex, Coelho was making the point that the social entrepreneurs he was addressing at the Schwab Foundation Summit are re-moulding how business is done, the values that underpin it, the relationships that hold it together and ultimately its purpose.

And indeed they are. Two days at the Schwab Social Entrepreneurs Summit had left me reeling with a heady sense of optimism and inspiration. Not daunted by the magnitude of the social and environmental challenges we all face, the Summit provided a chance for this growing community of creative, driven people to share ideas, swap notes and support one another. It was also underpinned by a fierce determination to reshape markets so that they become fit for purpose for all – capable of providing access to goods and services to all who need them and to do so in a way that allows this life-giving planet a chance to regenerate itself.

The stories are incredible. The work of many of them is featured in The Power of Unreasonable People, John and Pamela Hartigan’s forthcoming book. But absolutely intriguing to me is the impact they’re beginning to have on the mainstream. First, on talent: social enterprises are pulling in some of the brightest, most hard-working and thoughtful people around, to whom a challenge is a problem to be solved. All the people I asked about this at the Summit said that, by far, the greatest number of applications to work with them is from people working in multi-national firms, which have often invested substantially in their training. And the number is growing, meaning that the talent pool from which companies and social enterprises draw their people is one and the same. Second, the money. The financial community was out in force and more people with this expertise are present at every social enterprise event. Some of them work in niche departments within their companies on a not-for-loss or pro-bono basis, others have down-sized personally in order to dedicate their time and skills to supporting work like this and still others are setting up new businesses that are profitable but not necessarily profit-maximizing. The third impact, the approaches of social enterprises to resource management, and the fourth, innovation, are closely linked and are where social enterprises are undertaking some of the most ground-breaking work (no pun intended). Fifth, their creative and non-discriminatory approaches to enable new consumers to access goods and services that meet their basic needs out-dazzle even the mighty Prahalad.

For those people well-versed in debates about globalization these five issues: – talent, money, battle for resources, emerging consumers and innovation – will be familiar as a somewhat distorted take on an Accenture’s report of last year, The Rise of the Multi-Polar World, and the five dimensions that report argues all successful businesses need to understand and manage in the globalized economy. In SustainAbility’s own piece on the topic, Raising Our Game: Can We Sustain Globalisation, we identified the need for a new type of leadership with profoundly different approach to value and success. You could do worse than to draw upon the contributions of Coelho’s dentist’s five Jews to put together a new approach to markets that refuses, on ethical and financial grounds, to ignore social and environmental needs. The combination of hard and soft skills, financial and emotional intelligence, communication and trade-offs competition and cooperation is a hard ask. The evidence at Ruschlikon showed that such multi-tasking can be done and that you don’t – necessarily – have to be a woman to manage it.