Author Archives: devonthompson

Jason Saul was by far one of the most interesting speakers that I had an opportunity to listen to at Net Impact this year. His new book – Social Innovation Inc – emphasizes his message that instead of using business to drive social change, companies need to use social change to drive business.

As business leaders we need to be part of the solution! Its businesses, and not government or non-profit groups, that should lead the effort to eradicate global injustices such as poverty. Our society values social outcomes and there is now an economic incentive to address social issues. We need to find the economic possibilities within social issues. While charity and accountability are “nice” things to do, they do not have any business value. Right now businesses donate money with funds that are available after they have made all of their strategic decisions – but we need to ask ourselves, “ how can we solve social problems with leftovers?” This strategy is not designed to produce value and we have set the bar too low. Instead we need to change the paradigm of what we’re thinking because right now corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a support function and not a strategic function. To win, we need to fundamentally rethink social strategy.

Here is the big shift…

The Social Contract:

-Are we being responsible? Managing risk. Philanthropy. Support function. Leveraging the business to drive social change.

Social Capital Market:

Are we generating value? Impacting the bottom line. Social innovation. Strategic function. Leveraging social change to drive the business.

This creates a new definition of social innovation: an intentional business strategy, leverages the core business, creates economic value and positive social change. We should ask ourselves how do we expand the market?

1) Backdoor Market Entry

2) Pipelining Talent

3) Submarket Products – need to address an unmet need

4) Emotive Customer Bonding – people value impact

5) Reverse Lobbying

In order to leverage social change to drive business companies need to identify the pure business objectives, research the social change that will influence those outcomes, analyze their core competencies and assets, and then revolutionize business solutions to social problems. This requires a leap of creativity and innovation in order to find new ways to solve social problems.

This session included Jim Walsh (Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan),
Judith Samuelson (Executive Director, The Aspen Institute), and Dr. Srikant Datar (Senior Associate Dean at Harvard University and Author, “Rethinking the MBA”).  

There were several themes discussed in this session that made me think critically about the MBA degree as well as my current experience at Sauder School of Business. The general feeling from our speakers was that many business programs are not meeting all the needs in order to adequately prepare students for leadership positions. For example, there is not enough emphasis placed on putting our learning into practice. Moreover, the necessity of innovation is becoming increasingly important as is determining how we frame problems.

Business today touches more areas and we’re being asked to solve the problems of our time. We should view business as a world agent to solve these problems; however, we can also recognize that business is the source of many world issues. It’s competition versus a better world and we have a responsibility to create a better world. We must lead and teach by example. Moreover, we need to be critical of our education because we do not just need to learn the analytics but also focus on doing and taking action. Knowing is the foundation and once we get beyond knowing then we can become effective leaders who empower and lead people. We should recognize the lens with which we view our decisions and we should understand why we do things. There needs to be a fundamental rebalance of our thinking skills into integrative thinking.

We should have an optimistic view of management education. This past financial crisis has created an opportunity for us to step up and articulate how we want to run our businesses. It has also created a greater concern for our environment and where business fits within it. We each have an increased responsibility to understand these issues and the role of regulation. Our next steps are to determine how to bring this learning deeper into the MBA curriculum because the students should have a voice in how they want the shape of their education to look. We should also realize that there has been a measureable shift in our attitudes…it is now one of a confident humility because we don’t have all the answers. We have a choice to either save the world or destroy it and the MBA is an important tool with which to accomplish this.

The final thought these leaders left us with was “make others better for knowing you”. It was truly an inspiring session and gave me a lot of things to consider as I choose my path in this program.

One of my favourite sessions at Net Impact this year was moderated by Nick Aster from Triple Pundit (www. triplepundit.com – Green Business News) with representatives from Chevron, Angel Point, and Microsoft.

One of the key takeaways from this session was that business is a self-regulated conversation now and the web helps us develop this conversation, especially regarding corporate responsibility and what types of activities the companies is engaged in. Companies need to monitor their image on the web because it now places them at a disadvantage if they are not engaged in this practice. This feedback can also lead to valuable insights for the company and they should look for productive conversations online. A second key takeaway was that all messaging needs to be integrated with everything that the company does and it needs to be tied back to objectives and strategies. This creates a cohesive message that can be understood by their target audience as well as the general public. Additionally, social media allows companies to “tell their story” about how they are contributing to their communities and the environment whereas this was previously more difficult. Moreover, it forces transparency and reduces their capacity to manipulate the message.

There were also few best practices that were discussed in the session. Companies should not edit comments posted on social media outlets – they need to have thick skin because you have to understand that you will never please everyone. Companies should have a measured response to negative feedback but should not overreact because this tends to exacerbate the situation.  They should also recognize that different people want to be communicated to in different ways so they need to tailor it to their audiences. Additionally, consistency is key because each experience a user has with the company should be the same. Both Chevron and Microsoft also spoke about the necessity to measure social media with a balanced scorecard (both quantitative and qualitative) with broad and specific metrics. This emphasis on measurement ensured that they were focused on engaging the right audiences and looking at emerging trends.

In conclusion, social media is a necessary means to communicate with your stakeholders; however, it should not be the only way companies engage their target audience so they need to combine these efforts with traditional advertising methods. All of the representatives also recognized the importance of accessibility of the internet and social media and each company was thinking about different ways to make this technology available to more people around the world.