Here, at last, is the third corner on the Triumvirate of Why I Keep Leaning Toward Being Green... okay, I'm not fooling anyone, that slogan's never going to catch on, but it did have some nice alliteration and I really like the word triumvirate... anyway, the point is that I keep thinking about the tension between Stockholders and Stakeholders.
I started thinking about this idea because back in May of this year, I heard a
story on APM's Marketplace about B Corporations. This guy, Jay Cohen Gilbert, and his non-profit B-Lab, started a movement called B (standing for "Benefit") Corporations. The idea behind setting up a company as a B Corporation is that the corporate governing documents set it up from the outset so that the business is "purpose-driven and
create benefit for all stakeholders, not just shareholders." Back in May, their site was only their logo, but now they've got a full site up and running -
check it out for the nitty-gritty details.
When I heard this story, I got to thinking about stakeholders. I'm a stakeholder in a whole slew of things in which I'm not directly financially invested. For instance, I have a big interest in the way The Big Giant Evil Corporation for which I work runs things on a macro and micro scale, but i don't own a big chunk of stock in it so my opinions don't count for much if at all. BGEC is accountable to the people who hold the purse-strings, stockholders who are expecting it to grow their investment. But even though I don't have a big money-covered dog in the fight, I do have my scrappy little this-is-8-hours-of-my-day-and-my-mortgage payment dog in the fight. The thing is, public corporations traditionally don't let that scrappy little one in the ring.
But B Corporations
do. The governing documents set the corporation up to survive the marketplace and still do good things for stakeholders - employees big and small, employees' families, the environment, the community, etc., etc.
Sure, you can start out with good intentions and a small little company, running it exactly how you'd like - like how it started here - but then when you're "successful," and BGEC buys you (because everyone has their price), things can change rapidly. Suddenly, instead of being a company that actually cares about an employees's well-being, that thinks about how to make the best partnership possible between employee and employer, it is a BGEC - it's a Wal-Mart or a ConAgra. It's best for the bottom line if the employee is faceless. It looks the best on paper when costs are displaced. Outsource to China, where you only pay $3 a day; cut your ingredients with melamine; use rBGH to make your cows keep making milk. You make your stockholders a whole ton of money, but you make the Chinese factory workers lie to keep their jobs, you make a bunch of well-loved pets ill or dead, you make a bunch of cows do something their bodies aren't supposed to do... and you make consumers complicit in these choices.
So all of these stakeholders - factory workers halfway around the world, pets, cows, the groundwater, consumers, anyone who breathes, kids who are still developing their brains, family farms, government entitlement programs, your body's hormone balance - they are all affected. But that doesn't show up in the BGEC's bottom-line dollar-amount. We're back to the problem of the tragedy of the commons - there's no one owner of the oceans, of the air... so it's not in anyone's dollar-amount interest to steward it.
Phew.
That was pretty intense. Like re-living "
SuperSize Me," "
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," and "
Fat Land" all at once!
What I mean by bringing up all of that - and there are plenty of instances of "big bag business" picking on the "little innocent guy" - is not to bad-mouth big business. I really think that people who have great ideas and a super-natural workethic (Sam Walton, for instance) should be rewarded with financial success. Financial success allows a person to have more choices - and, I think that that's the carrot I'm chasing - the ability to choose how I spend my days. The more financially success I achieve, the more I have the luxury of choosing from a wider variety of ways to spend my time on earth.
But
I don't want my choices to take away choice from someone else!
We're back again to my central goal in trying to "be green" - to try to not be so greedy. I would like to think that society has evolved beyond an animalistic scramble for amassing resources. Yes, resources are limited. But they are abundant, too! If we make respectful, thoughtful choices, lots of people can share in them and be sustained by them!
Yeah, these are all grandiose ideas. I feel silly, sometimes, thinking about them. But my ultimate goal is to be a happy soul on this planet, and I think that thinking about my choices can increase my chances of being happy. So here we are, faithful readers. I've got a lot of different choices to think about, so you'll be hearing a lot more from me. I hope I'll be hearing from you!
Labels: social responsibility, stockholders vs. sakeholders, tragedy of the commons
