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We've talked about a lot of ideas about how to think differently about business.
Everything from the problem with the dominant narrative in society.
And now, I hope you know how you can begin
to think differently, see business differently, expect it to be different.
And, I want to focus this week on things you can do.
Maybe start your own business.
Things you might be able to do as a customer, an employee, as a citizen.
I want to orient this week around something
I'm going to call becoming a stakeholder entrepreneur.
Now, one of the models we've seen emerge in the past, really, ten years
is this idea of, social entrepreneurship. And social
entrepreneurship focuses on people who primarily care about doing
good, not so much about making money. One of the
originators was a man who won the Nobel prize, the Nobel Peace Prize Dr.
Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh.
Yunus started a bank called the Grameen Bank that
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whose motto is poverty belongs in a museum.
It only lends money to the poorest of the poor who have, who have no collateral.
So they broken every rule in the banking industry.
And as a result, they've raised millions of people out of poverty.
Now,
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these are not interest free loans.
In fact, the interest rates are actually quite high.
But the emergence of microfinance really came
out of Muhammad Yunus wandering through a
village near Chittagong and Bangladesh and saying, why does it have to be like this?
Can't we figure out a better way
than money lenders for these incredible craftspeople
to finance their businesses? Now, I want to argue
that social entrepreneurship and what it really does is very much in keeping
with what we've talked about so far, that it's about finding
some stakeholders and creating value for them.
And it doesn't matter whether it's for profit,
like the Grameen Bank, or not for profit, like the Ashoka entrepreneurs.
Again, if you go to the Ashoka, Ashoka website, you'll find out more about
what they're doing, in a book by David Bornstein called, Building a Better World.
So, I want to redefine this
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this idea of social entrepreneurship, reorient it around the
story of business we've been creating. A stakeholder entrepreneur is somebody
who starts or improves an organization by making it responsive to a stakeholder's
needs or a set of stakeholder's needs. You can be a stakeholder
entrepreneur in an existing business or you can be one in
a start up.
Stakeholder entrepreneurs understand that their
organizations are firmly set within society.
They're not in some free market land,
and they're not just doing government programs.
They're set in society where they have clear stakeholders and clear purposes.
They also understand that they have to have a
business model that satisfies stakeholders and generates self-sustaining funds.
And it doesn't matter whether these funds go to shareholders, whether they is
satisfaction to donors but you gotta be able to essentially pay the bills.
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Stakeholder entrepreneurs want to make the world better, and
they have to make money to sustain that.
It encompasses both traditional
entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship.
So I'd like
you to look at a brief video from someone who I think
is a paradigm stakeholder entrepreneur Blake Mycoskie from Tom's Shoes.
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What Blake Mycoskie's done is he's identified
some points of, of pain in a society. Children need shoes to be safer.
And he's identified something he has passion about.
Helping these
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theses children. He's managed to figure out how to work
with over 75 partner organizations. They've donated over two million
pairs of shoes, while at the same time, addressing the challenge
of doing business in often not
very well developed parts of the world. Tom's makes shoes in
places that are quite poor and they've been criticized for that as well.
But they're committed to making those communities better.
They've recently started a program for eyewear as
well, where you buy one and they donate one.
The one for one business model that Tom's has developed,
you can see combines elements of philanthropy, social responsibility and
thinking about stakeholders and purpose.
What I'd like you to do is think about two or three businesses.
Can you find two or three businesses like Tom's Shoes?
R. Edward FreemanUniversity Professor; Elis and Signe Olsson Professor of Business Administration
