Doing Good & Sustainable Business

I came into my Monday with Bruce Cockburn's song on my mind:

http://www.nme.com/awards/video/id/ZL4CdHd9ma4/search/lions

This troubador of the soul sings of a life lived without fear, but instead walking in joy and love. What does walking in joy and love have to do with the business world, if anything?

It is a truism that the markets are driven by fear or greed, and sadly this is often true of business dealings. But there is another way, something beyond the rapacious greed of mindless earning and consuming, mindless because somehow continuing to maximize bottom line profits, to maximize the successful lifestyle, that somehow these means are ends in themselves. Oh, there's some blather about not restraining market forces so they can make us all rich . . . but I'm talking about real world values now . . . not some mystical $ in the sky that will bless us all if only we pursue it freely with our whole beings!

But something else is going on now: we live in a shrinking, not expanding world - where consuming more means others have less, where consuming more is slowly, perhaps even quickly destroying the conditions for our ability to continue to enjoy life on this planet. Then there's the coming of age of the baby boomers, who once were idealistic and wanted to make this world a better place, and then got sucked in like most everyone else into the consumerist system, and now more and more of them with decades of work experience and wisdom want to create sustainable businesses, want to do good as part of doing good business. This is what we're doing at GLS dezign, and soon we will have our first announcements of this good business that does good.

But it was a lovely synchronicity to see the in the Harvard Business Review this morning an article on a book, "SuperCorp: Values as Guidance System" (link in subject line above) in which the author, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, writes of how IBM and others are moving into a sustainable approach to big business, perhaps finally closing the door on the General Motors style of capitalism (whatever is good for GM is good for America). More and more books are coming out now on the theme of doing good business, of doing good. (One of my favourites is David Berman's Do Good Design http://davidberman.com/social/index.php in which he enourages designers to integrate doing good into how they do good design and good business.)

Something important is happening in the world of business today. Businesses are being established explicitly to do good such as o3b networks who is already well into establishing high speed broadband services to the developing world through a network of affordable satellites.
(http://www.o3bnetworks.com/press_o3blaunch.html) People in their 50's are tired of being cogs in the consumerist system and want to consider something worthwhile with the most productive years of their life.

Join in! :) You don't have to be in your 50's, all you have to do is decide that making this world a better place is an important part of your business plan! :)