From SoCap to Large Cap

Corporate leadership can learn a great deal from the social capital marketplace. But will they? Or will new leadership be required to ensure true sustainable change…? Currently, the world of corporate sustainability tends to fall, generally, into a few camps. One is the ‘do no harm’ principle. Another is government compliance- making sure no laws are broken.

Yet another is ‘monitoring and evaluation’ which is fairly ominous. This is for psychiatric patients, not proactive business efforts. And yet another is the ubiquitous annual report. Time and again the format of the report dictates the activities undertaken.

All of the phenomena noted above have at least one thing in common—they are not connected to any sort of systemic change. They may help managers prevent damage but do not leverage the best that companies are capable of doing to help the world and its people.

Though we have seen some incremental change in corporate thinking in recent years, a paradigm shift remains distant and elusive. Will large companies be able to reinvent themselves as entities that derive revenue directly from environmental and community benefit? Doing so will take a new brand of leadership.

Next month, the 2nd annual Social Capital Markets conference (SoCap 09) will take place in San Francisco, bringing together investors, social entrepreneurs and others blurring the lines between business and 'doing good' from around the world to discuss making change through markets. The speaker and attendee lists are a who’s who of this space. While SoCap promises to be instructive with A-list experts– and fun in a class reunion sort of way– the question it must address is how to get its message to the greater business community- the same one that is capable of knocking global economies off-kilter and rewards profit at any cost.

The Social Capital marketplace, of which our company is proudly a part, is just a first step. Events like SoCap provide a loudspeaker for for-benefit business to speak to the greater world; to create case studies of corporate success in a language that makes sense on Wall St– an audience that most would say is usually much less receptive to progressive thinking than the business leaders on the West Coast.

The challenge lies equally within two often-opposing aims: those of us who aim to create positive impact via profitable activity in the social capital marketplace have to apply our small-but-significant successes on a much greater scale; and corporations that aim to generate profit regardless of impact must fundamentally revamp their leadership, not simply to instill beneficial practices from the top down, but to create corporate cultures where innovation of processes and products that work toward environmental and community improvement is a required element of success.

SoCap has the opportunity to channel the collective voice of its constituents to the traditional business community; a community that will need a lot of help manifesting new leadership and the philosophical underpinnings that can fundamentally change corporate thinking. SoCap can provide that leadership assistance should it’s organizers and participants choose to do so. It’s off to a great start, but in subsequent years the event should move from a forum for sharing ideas to path for actively changing a broken corporate system through leadership training and case study/business case development.

This entry was originally published on the Skoll Foundation’s SocialEdge.org website on our other blog - SVT on Impact.