The Optimistic Cynic

Seth Godin isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but I think this blog from him is worth sharing:

A seat at the table

Short-term profits are a lousy way to build a sustainable community.

There’s always a shortcut, a rule to be bent, a way to make some more money now at the expense of the people around us.

The counterbalance to selfish Ayn-Randian greed is cultural belonging.

“No,” the community says, “we’re not proud of what you did, and you’re not welcome here.”

People like us do things like this.

It’s the community’s role to establish what “things like this” are. If you want to hang out with people like us, that’s the price you have to pay. To avoid the short-term and to invest in us instead.

The community might be wrong. The path of the person making change happen is often lonely, because change is frightening. But too often, the act of taking a shortcut or finding a short-term profit is confused with the actual long-term hard work of making things better.

Fortunately, the community often knows better.

Seth Godin 26/4/19

Someone on LinkedIn posted about “why CEOs’ are still missing the point on social impact” 

My view is that the answer is “how long is a piece of string” There is never one reason and never one solution but I did contribute a couple of views:

In our (NZ) context, SME’s can struggle to see how they can do good without it significantly impacting on their bottom line. A lot of information is floating around on what start-up social enterprises do and also what large corporates are up to – but not so much about the SME (I’m looking to publish some ideas in this space, if only there was 28 hours in each day…).

Another issue I have found, though more in the environmental space than social, is a tendency to preach to business. “You contribute to the problem now go fix it”. We need to get better at working alongside business to work through issues together. If we have the attitude that business activity can support so much positive change and that this is a great thing – maybe more businesses will come a long for the ride. CEO’s and business owners are always under so much pressure, we need to make ‘doing good’ easy for them to do. And it can be very easy.