Magazine
Businesses the world over seem to be developing some compassionate form of split personality disorder. Suspended somewhere between the pursuit of profit and passionate quest for purpose, a new generation of conscious, forward-thinking business leaders — both young and veteran — are challenging the tired notion that social impact can only come at the expense of income.
Whether they’re responding to soft signals, public pressure, internal turmoil or ingrained generosity — or a blend of all four — a considerate new force of business is taking shape that we at ArtRebels want to explore more closely.
This isn’t to say that companies are only now discovering their purpose. In 18th-century America, at the dawn of contemporary capitalism, a corporation could only come into existence if it was oriented around a specific and outspoken social goal; like digging canals, or building bridges. Indeed, corporations themselves were an economic innovation to realise public projects that governments couldn’t themselves perform. But after centuries of lobbying and conscious intervention, the corporation emerged anew, untethered from its social ties, determined to gain, grow and profit — in some cases, despite all else.
Today, the tide seems to be turning once again. In 2019, the Business Roundtable — one of the world’s most influential clubs of corporate executives — radically broadened their official definition of corporate purpose. The end-goal of companies, in their revised vocabulary, is to deliver value not only to their shareholders but also to their “communities, customers, employees and the environment.” A bright new chapter of corporate capitalism was heralded, and regardless of whether they’re writing on the wall (or reading it), their social sentiment has been gaining momentum throughout the business world.
More and more, businesses are understanding that embodying an authentic social purpose doesn’t make for a trade-off with material profit — on the contrary, as we’ll see throughout this publication, they often elevate one another to entirely new dimensions.
But rewording a mission statement — no matter how imaginatively — does not make for a corporate transformation. Once a new path is charted, how do companies remodel their operations, products, services and supply chains to embody this higher purpose? How do they cultivate culture from within so that everyone, at every level, embraces and believes in the broader mission? How do they collaborate outside their normal spheres of influence? But above all: how do they tie these strings together to form a complete systemic reimagining of their entire organisation?
In order to explore these questions and more, we scoured the world for people and organisations embodying this paradigm shift towards a more generous, inclusive and regenerative flavour of doing business. The stories you’ll read in the following pages are neither exhaustive nor without criticism — but in order to transform deeply-rooted systems, we all need to take a bold first step towards something better.
Let’s take that step together.
