If you're one of the 171,000 people following Umair Haque on Twitter (@umaihr), you know he's exasperated by the state of Western economies. Legions of people are unemployed or underemployed, work has become a grind, and corrupt organizations are working diligently to tailor laws and regulations to abet further corruption—the list goes on. Haque thinks we can do better. Betterness is a his critique of the status quo and a crie de coeur for doing work that is more satisfying and more beneficial for everyone.
Haque contends that a lot of our present trouble comes from focusing on the wrong thing: a bottom line that measures the monetary accumulations of an organization, rather than the long-term health of the organization, its employees, its customers, its community, and the world at large. Haque would have us lift our eyes from our balance sheets and take a hard look at the world around us. We should recognize the rampant dissatisfaction, the talent being squandered, a natural world in decline, and plenty of unseized opportunities for individuals and organizations to make a difference. Metrics like GDP and stock dividends are too narrow to serve as guideposts for most meaningful work. We need broader indexes that accurately assess our general welfare. Haque proposes a new formula: "real human welfare equals natural capital, plus financial capital, plus intellectual capital, plus human capital, plus social, emotional, and organizational capital."
"Well," you might harumph, "this is all well and good, but a lot of this human and community welfare stuff (emotional capital?!) extends beyond the mission of our company. We're focused on shareholder value, after all, and we're legally bound to be so. We're not a 501(3)c). What you're asking for is even beyond the scope of traditional economics."
Perhaps that's a valid response, but Haque wants companies and the field of economics itself to broaden their scope. A hundred years ago, he points out, psychology confined itself to the curing of mental ailments. Now it's a holistic science that helps people live richer, more fulfilling lives. Haque wants economics to effect a similar transformation, becoming in the words of his subtitle, an "economics for humans."
Some organizations have already broadened their thinking beyond the balance sheet and are now generating what Haque calls "real wealth." He cites Apple, Google, Pepsi, lululemon athletica, Nike, Pixar, and Whole Foods as examples of companies that are working hard to achieve something greater than simply crushing competitors and reaping profits at any cost. Their idealism doesn't seem to be inhibiting their success. All these companies are financially healthy, Apple and Google extremely so. Of course, even these companies still wrestle with the demons of 20th century small-mindedness. Consider Steve Jobs' professed willingness to spend every last dime of Apple's cash reserves crushing Google for its supposedly perfidious development of Android. Even though the company spent around $100 million on this legal venture last year, at least for now the company's primary focus still seems to be building insanely great products. I don't know enough about Pepsi to understand why a soft drink manufacturer is sharing top-billing for virtue with a company like Whole Foods. But I agree with Haque that there are successful companies around that do distinguish themselves by thinking about the bigger picture.
Idealism can pay off. Customers are loyal to companies like Apple and Whole Foods in part because they feel that these companies share their values. People everywhere are looking for ways to make a difference, and they'll buy from companies that are trying to be virtuous. These companies are exemplars of capitalist organizations on the road to Haque's ideal of betterness.
How can other organizations follow suit? First, they need to re-orient themselves. Their biggest adversaries are themselves. Haque urges organizations to jettison their vainglorious, self-centered vision statements, mission statements, and strategic plans, and instead adopt an approach based on ambitions, intentions, constraints, and imperatives. Haque expounds on these terms, contrasting each one to its 20th century capitalist analog. Thus:
- "Ambition specifies higher-order returns concisely and precisely: which kinds of higher-order capital an organization will return and to whom it wishes to return them." Ambition is more than dominating a certain market or being thought of a certain way. Ambition serves consumers and communities, not just company share-holders. In that way it's broader and more inclusive than a traditional vision statement.
- "An intention expresses how, through the act of exchange, an organization will enhance the self-determination and sovereignty of its constituents by making them more capable of seeding, nurturing, and harvesting all the many kinds of wealth, not just sell them stuff that merely satisfies their short-term needs." With its more sweeping goals, intentions replace the traditional internally-focused mission statement.
- "Think of constraints as negative rights: rights that we, the organization, don’t have because they damage the potential of any or all of our constituents." Whole Foods carrying junk food, for example, or Apple selling products that they themselves consider mediocre, even if they would be highly profitable. For Haque, constraints are a virtuous replacement of 20th century corporate strategies.
- "Imperatives are timeless: they are actions we will always take." Imperatives are "daily commandments"—things people should do every day. For example, at Pixar employees work every day to create movies in which the story comes first.
Betterness is available at the Harvard Business Review.
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