BONUS CONTENT - B Better Purpose Virtual Summit Day 1 - Organisational Purpose Workshop

So the first part of the session today is you can be having a little chat with me about this thing called organizational purpose and just kicking off the summit, really getting to the basics of what is purpose, why do we need it, so on and so forth. So we'll just, we'll just kick into it. So.

What are we going to cover off exactly? Like I say, what, what is organizational purpose? There's different levels of purpose that will already exist within an organization. We'll just look at some of the, some of the reasons as to why organizational purpose is a thing right now. And then I guess importantly for you as business leaders, but also as consumers, as employees, as investors, helping you try and differentiate the difference between purpose and purpose light. Because there is definitely some purpose washing going on out there, which I guess would be the same kind of idea is greenwashing, where people are talking about credentials or things that they're doing that may or may not be as true or as deeply connected to purposes. They might say, awesome. So let's try and make this as interactive as possible. Why does any business exist? Let's see if Wendy, Christine or Claudia, who are tuning in, can give us any clues as to like, why does a. Why does any business exist?

Fastest finger on the buzzer.

I will leave you. Let you off the hook on that one. So the reason why a business exists is fundamentally to solve a human problem. That's why businesses were created. And one thing I like to think about is if you go back, way, way back to medieval times, and I get to do this because my degree was in medieval history, or you might know people even today who have surnames like Fletcher or Cooper or Shoemaker. We used to be so connected to the concept of how we contributed. There we go. Wendy's coming with the goods here. Serve the community. Christine, to provide goods or services.

Yeah, we used to be so connected to the idea of the need that we were solving that we actually named ourselves after the thing that we provided to our community. However, since those times, and I guess perhaps more so since the 1960s, 1970s, it's become more around utilizing business as a vehicle to maximize profit and shareholder return in particular. And, you know, this is why we perhaps have some businesses around in this day and age that are focused solely on that profit maximization and focused on, I guess, creating or solving not a true human need. They're solving what would be described perhaps as an artificially constructed need. And to sort of bring this into relief, I guess, would be to think about, well, let's look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Now, it's not a complete model, but it's a really useful just point to think about. And if we look back to countries like New Zealand that had a pretty hard lockdown to during the beginnings of the pandemic, you know, what businesses were deemed to be essential? Well, that's quite an interesting thing to posit or to think about for you and your business. You know, is your business actually essential.

Versus, you know, some of the businesses that were.

You know, claiming to be essential but perhaps weren't that central to humanity? And I think that's where in Maslow's here you can see, you know, that safety and security, physiological needs, those are really the true human needs that need to be looked after at the deepest level. Because the risk is if you start creating products and services around some of the higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy, you end up with products like this. Now this, to me, I just feel sums up modern humanity in many levels. So this is the pooch selfie. It's basically a piece of plastic that you attach to your phone that holds a tennis ball so that you can get the perfect selfie with your dog and every time. Now, I'm sure there are some benefits to, you know, people having some better health and wellbeing outcomes by feeling more connected with their pet, but do we really need to have designed and manufactured and sold and produced essentially a piece of landfill? Essentially, which I think these kind of artificially created products and services lead to what David Graeber described as bullshit jobs. So if you haven't connected to David Graeber's work, unfortunately he passed away. I think it was maybe last year or the year before. Very, very smart guy anthropologist who basically assessed that there were these five types of bullshit jobs. We got flunkies, you've got goons, you've got duct tapers, you've got box tickers and taskmasters. So these are sort of artificially created jobs that serve no real meaning to community, society, or to the individuals themselves. And that is leading to, I think, in no small part, this whole great resignation as people are perhaps realizing that their job might, might actually be a bullshit job, or they just don't have that connection of meaning and purpose to the role that they're doing now. When you are pursuing things that are unnecessary, when you start only focusing on profit maximization and trying to earn as much money as possible, that also can lead to some really negative outcomes. At a slightly lighter level, you know, a couple of years, 2013, I think it was, you know, Findus, a well respected food company throughout Europe, was found to be having horse meat in its beef and other lasagna and other burger patties and things like that. Now the reason that happened, well, horse meat is cheaper in Eastern Europe where they were sourcing their food from. So hey, we'll do that. It's all, you know, it was all about ultimately the end of their supply chain, providing a cheaper product so they could get more money out of it. So that's, that's the lighter end. But, you know, at the really tragic end, for those of you who've studied or had a look at the, the Boeing 7737 Max story, it's, it's pretty clear that it was cultural challenges. It was the change of the company to be focusing on profit maximization rather than culture and outcomes that led to fatal outcomes on the, the Boeing 737 Max flights. And that's something that also echoed by me in my own personal background working in the medical device industry, where it was clear that where companies pursue profit over people, you end up with bad outcomes. And this leads us back to Maslow, because not a lot of people know this, as Michael Kane would say, but before Maslow passed away, he had written or updated his hierarchy of needs, but it was unpublished. And in his unpublished, updated version of the hierarchy, he actually put at the, at the top of the pyramid, transcendental purpose. So the idea is that humanity thrives and is at its best when it is doing something on purpose. So this is really, really crucial for me and this is where we kind of need to help in my mind, get companies to get to is, is the pinnacle of being an organization of purpose. So getting onto that, then what is organizational purpose? So if you think about the world's most inspiring organizations, they all have one thing in common and that's that they are playing a game that's bigger than themselves in service of others. And that's really a big part of the crux of what is purpose for, for on an individual and organizational level, individual purpose and organizational purpose, the journeys to, to connecting to them and understanding them are both very similar. So this is the key though, at an organizational level, you know, beyond just making a financial return for your stakeholders, you know, what social and environmental impacts is your business making? Why should your employees, your customers care about what you're doing?

You know, like I say, go back to the first principles of where business started. The Fletcher, the Cooper, the Baker. You know, we've all had, we all had A part to play a role in the tribe, to make sure that the tribe thrived. And it's about you understanding how are you making the tribe, the tribe thrive as a business.

So my old mate Aristotle summed this up. And this is what I love. You know, like I say, I really love my medieval history and even before all that. And if you go back to some of the ancient philosophies, the ancient works that are out there, we've known what the answers are. We, we know, we know what we need to be doing. We've just been disconnected from it. And as Aristotle said, you know, at the intersection where your gifts, talents and abilities meet a human need, therein you will discover your purpose. So again, this is the sim exactly the same for individual or an organization. As an organization you have a set of unique skills, unique things that you can do. And somewhere in the world there is a problem that needs to be solved, that you could be using your skills, your unique genius to make the world a better place. And that it sounds really, really simple, but it's complex, it's tricky because you have demands. You need to be making a profit, you need to be doing all the these other things. We're all human beings, we're all frail, we're all failed at some level. So it sounds really, really easy. But it's not that easy because if it was easy, we'd all be doing it. And clearly we don't have thousands and millions of organizations of purpose yet because we still have some problems in the world.

This is a model from a good mate of mine, Zach Materio, who kind of pulling this together. So if you start thinking about the individual, you know, so your personal purpose, why me? Why am I here? Why am I in this organization? You've got the product or the service, you know, why this? You've got your world need. Well, who cares about what you do? And the nexus point of all of that, you've got this. Why us? So that's just a model of how to sort of think about.

Organizational purpose at a higher level. Another model just to throw in the mix if you sort of think about a spectrum of purpose. So historically, you know, charities will were described, I guess as the ultimate for purpose enterprise. And in many ways they still are. Whereas at the far end of the spectrum you've got bau, business as usual. So if you're the CEO, excuse me, if you're the CEO, leader of business, if you're a board member, your, your only fiduciary duty really currently, globally is for you to trade that business solvently and to make as much money as you can for the shareholders. That's, that's really your only duty.

So as we start to come in from both those extremes, you know, from the charity moving towards a more enterprise centered concept, you have social enterprise. So the idea of a mission driven entity, mission driven business where significant amount of the profits are put back into solving a social and or environmental problem. Coming back in from business as usual, we've got this idea of corporate social responsibility. And I'll talk a little bit more about that. Well, Beth will be talking a little bit more about the differences between CSR and B Corp tomorrow. But at a high level, you know, corporate social responsibility, we have large numbers of, of organizations definitely on the, the carbon, I guess you know, monitoring and looking at their carbon emissions. You know, net zero is, is a big movement within the corporate environment. Similarly, you might have a lot of businesses that are looking at making sure their supply chain is child labor free. You might be organizations might be looking at are we paying a living wage across our organization. So typically with CSR though, it's, it' many elements that an organization is having a go at getting better. And I guess the risk with CSR at that level is, you know, is it rigorous, is it independently verified? Yeah. Can you sort of prove what you're doing? And that's what leads us to B Corp. And I'm not going to talk about B Corp really on any depth today other than just to briefly introduce the concept. And if you want to learn more about B Corp, you need to tune in for day two tomorrow where hopefully we won't have any technical issues.

So B Corporation is for me the pinnacle of proving the purpose that you have in your business, at least on an operational level. And B Corporations are this new form of business that seek to balance purpose and profit. So rather than solely focusing on profit maximization, they consider the impact of their operations on their workers, customers, suppliers, community and the environment and increasingly are expected to enshrine legally a sense of corporate purpose and mission at a governance level. We'll probably touch on that a little bit tomorrow if we have time. So B Corporations are essentially these for profit businesses that have been independently verified to be meeting the highest levels of transparency and accountability around their social and environmental footprint. So that's where, you know, particularly here at Grow Good we feel that B Corp is the way forward for proving that you are truly a purpose driven company. And it helps you kind of galvanize and pull together some of the strings and tendrils of the good that you're doing on an operational level and helps bring it back, bring it to life.

Cool. So purpose probably already exists in an organization and there are kind of four levels of purpose that you can typically find within an organization and it typically would look like this. So at the basic level, a lot of companies will be doing some kind of corporate giving. So whether it's a donation, I mean, we do this at Grow Good. Instead of providing Christmas gifts, we typically make a donation to a charity at Christmas as a thank you to companies that we've worked with.

You know, that's, it's a great thing to do. We're not, we're certainly not saying don't help support charities. But the challenge is, you know, not every dollar spent in giving to charity is a dollar well spent. So it's an easy entry level way of connecting to doing some good. But you know, actually how much positive contribution is that donation making the next level up? Again, certainly not suggesting you don't do this, but just be wary. Corporate volunteering is very, very popular, you know, but again, having worked in the not for profit sector, I spent 12 months hanging out with a team at Kilmarnock Enterprises, based down here in Ototahi, Christchurch. And a very, very popular business for good, I guess, social enterprise. And we would be inundated with people from particularly professional services firms wanting to come and volunteer and come and hang out and do some work in the factory. So Kilmarnic Enterprises is essentially a sort of third party, sort of manufacturer outsourced facility that can do things like picking, packing.

Refurbishing, recycling of stuff. So we'd have all these, you know, corporate people that want to come and volunteer for the day. And we did it a few times. But you quickly realized that, you know, no offense to the corporate accountants, but a great corporate accountant, it doesn't mean you're actually good at picking and packing food and spices and putting them into a little 50 gram sachet and weighing them and measuring them and putting a label on straight. And quite often we'd find that you'd have to redo a lot of the work that had been done by your corporate volunteers. So you feel good having done some good for your local community or environmental thing. But quite often, you know, the charity that you've helped actually needs to go and redo the thing that you're doing. And also, you know, if you're a corporate accountant, I'm picking on the accountants. I'm very sorry. Um, you know, it might not mean that you actually like planting trees, because if you did like planting trees, you'd probably be an arborist. And so there can be a bit of a disconnect. So the next level up would be purpose light. And so this is where you might have individuals running some kind of purpose based projects. They've got permission to go and try and test some little projects on the fringes of the company. I'd also put into this section companies who are making some claims about doing some good, but you know, when you really scratch the surface, it's not really all that it's been made out to be. And then at the highest level you've got what at grow good we call purpose fueled performance. Where, you know, purpose is strategy. You know, you have a clearly defined and articulated purpose. The organizations and individuals are fully aligned behind it. You have this poor account. I know, Ivan, I feel very sorry. It's because I don't like maths. I pick on the accountants. It's just all my childhood trauma coming through. So feel very sorry that I'm picking on them. Yes, but your, your, you know, your true genius is being used for true human planetary needs. And that is where we want to get businesses to and we feel that's where we need to get businesses to for so many reasons. And that's really, yeah, part of what we're, we're trying to help companies with.

And I think shout out to a good friend of mine, loud and kier. This is his, his phrase, you know, it's not what you gave, it's what you could have given. And I think that really sums up the corporate giving kind of aspect. There are, there's a couple of companies here in New Zealand, I won't name them publicly, who have, you know, adverts running on TV talking about how much they've donated over a period of time. And when you do the maths you kind of go, well actually yearly that's less than what your CEO earns. And so you kind of go, well, could you have given more? Could you have done more? Yeah, you probably could have done. So this is where I think, you know, people are increasingly savvy about this purpose light and companies making platitudes, making some donations here and there to sort of morally and environmentally offset the core damage potentially of what their business is actually doing.

So let's look at some examples of purpose in action. Now Volvo, I think is actually a really cool example of purpose in action. If anyone knows anything about Volvo, the thing that they are most famous for is Making cars that are super safe. Now, if that is your sort of unique proposition as an organization, you would probably find that your intellectual property lawyers and marketing team would be pretty keen to keep that and ring fence that and say, no, look, we need to, we need to use that as our unique sales proposition, our unique marketing advantage. But Volvo didn't do that. They have chosen. This was from a couple of years ago. They, they shared 40 years of safety data that they'd been collected, that they've been collecting and they shared it with all their industry competitors because their purpose was to make cars safer for all. Now that's a great example of purpose in action because this is the thing, you know, if you're competing against your competitors, you're not on purpose. We talked about at the very beginning this idea that, you know, the companies and organizations that are purpose driven are doing something that is bigger than them, it's for the greater good. And so this is a really, really great example for me of purpose in action.

So maybe we will get some, put some comments as I trundle on through the rest of this presentation. But yeah, what other examples of purpose can you identify? Have you got examples? Maybe you yourself, if you are tuning in. I know, Wendy, you do some pretty purposeful stuff. Yeah. Like what examples have you. Can you recognize or can you see out there where there are. Yeah, good examples of purpose in action. Put some stuff in the comment.

Cool. While you're doing that, I will keep on going. So five levels of impact. Like I said, we've introduced this idea of business as usual, which is where businesses kind of come from. This idea that, you know, the businesses only aim legally across most of the developed world or most of the world, is that you need to trade in a manner that is solvent and you need to make more money this year than you did last year or this quarter than you did last quarter. We've talked about csr. That's kind of a next step up. But like I said, there's this risk of it being unverified, it being patchy, it not being holistic, which is that leads us to B Corp. So like I said, B Corp day is going to be tomorrow. But at the high level, B Corp measures your business's impact across five areas. It looks at your governance, it looks at your, how you treat your workers. It looks at your community impact, which is sort of supply chain and diversity. It looks at your environmental impact and it looks at your customer model or what it is that you actually make. And that's why.

I make no claims that B Corp is the silver bullet. It is not the most perfect system, but right now it's the best system that we've got out there for companies to truly measure their impact.

Holistically across all of their business. Now, within the B Corp, there's actually kind of two levels above B Corp. Within the B Corp assessment, there are ways that you can unlock more points and by having what's called an impact business model.

And that is basically where you can prove that you have gone out of your way to create more positive social and environmental impact than you have been, than you are legally required to do as a business. And ETH is the example that I always use of that. And we'll be hopefully talking to Brianne as part of our panel event after this, after this session just now where maybe we can. Well, I'll make sure that Beth asks us some questions about her impact business model. There we go. Beth, over to you on that one. But beyond an impact business model and where we ultimately need business to be getting to is for business to be a regenerative business because you could be a really good B Corp, but you could still be extracting something from the planet. And ultimately, if we are all even slightly extractive, we end up in a place of there being less. So that's kind of where we're at. So Wendy, shout out here to the B1G1. So buy one, give one community. They are a certified B corporation as well. So they make it really easy for companies to donate monthly as they, as you're going through your invoicing. So that's a great example of. Yeah, so, so that. That corporate giving, purpose in action. So go you, Wendy. Love your work.

Cool. So why is organizational purpose a thing right now? Certainly Beth and I think it's a thing right now. Certainly the panelists who we've got coming up will, I hope, will agree that it's a thing right now.

We live. This is, this is, I guess this is the interesting thing. Like we live in exceptionally good times for sure. Like if you're tuning in from New Zealand, Australia, the U.S. you know, any sort of Western democratized nation, life is pretty good for most people right now. But we do still face a number of significant challenges collectively as a species and as a planet. You know, so we've got the climate emergency, we've got biodiversity loss happening, we still have inequality, we've got mental health and addiction challenges. We've got, you know, I guess like the great resignation happening as a thing. There's uncertainty there's people feeling a lack of connection and meaning in their work. And so it's no surprise really to see that business leaders around the world are waking up to the opportunity of aligning their business to solve the big challenges of our time. Because this is the thing I love asking this question. Maybe someone can can try and put the answer in while I'm talking but without googling you, you will not get the answer. Like if I asked you, you know, who what company was listed number three on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2001, no one is going to know that answer. What people do remember though is what you did and how you did it. And that is the really, really key thing that I think underpins this purpose thing. Now this I can kind of shower you with many, many statistics that are out there in terms of why purpose is the thing. It's actually really hard to keep up with them because there are so many and they keep they're literally being updated almost on a weekly basis. But in essence, customers want you to be more socially and environmentally responsible. Employees want to feel that they are working for an organization that has some kind of greater purpose, that has some kind of social and environmental is taking some action socially and environmentally. Investors we'll talk about. We've got Carolina joining us on the the panel event coming up. She knows her way around ESG and the investment world. But you know, investors are increasingly looking to put their money in organizations where companies can prove that they're doing some good. We'll mention a good example tomorrow in terms of, well, actually we might not mention it tomorrow. So I'll mention it now in 2021. May, I think it was May 2021. ANZ bank from Australia and New Zealand. Australia, New Zealand bank. For those of you not in this region, they issued a 100 million dollar loan to Kathmandu, which is one of the biggest B corporations in the Australia New Zealand region that was basically indexed on Kathmandu, maintaining and increasing their B Corp score. So sustainable backed lending, so it's called a sustainably linked loan. You know, they are becoming a thing and I have no doubt Carolina will be able to talk to us more about that. Well, that's exactly why we bought her on the panel. So no pressure, Carolina, we'll be having you talk to on that. So you know, there are trends and like I said the panel event, we're going to really dive into some of these trends from the customer, the internal and the external push and pull factors that are driving this. But the factors are there like customers, employees Investors and supply chain as well. We've certainly helped a few companies recently go through the B Corp journey because they've been asked by their customers what are they doing in their business around their social and environmental impact. So there are multiple factors and they are increasing and they're just getting bigger. All right, but why other than sort of, I guess like the push factors. So, so people telling you that they want you to do this thing, you know, what are the actual benefits to your business? Well, what aren't the benefits to having purpose in your business is probably the easier question to answer because basically there is overwhelming evidence that if you get purpose at work in your organization, you are going to see amazing things like increased team performance. You can have increased team engagement, you will attract and retain the best talent, you will long term see increased profitability. You will gain utterly raving fans. And I think Brianne is going to be the one to be talking about raving fans on our panel event because Etique just has utterly raving fans. But most importantly for you as a senior leader, for you as a business owner, for you as a board member, you actually get to sleep well at night knowing that you've done the right thing. And that is priceless. And for me, that is what's sitting at the bottom of this great resignation of the great meaning crisis of the mental health epidemic that we have globally is people are lacking the feeling of meaning in what they're doing. There's some harrowing statistics. I think it was a YouGov survey from the UK around about 2017. It was about 30, 35% of employees surveyed felt that their job provided them with no meaning. And in fact it was more than likely contributing to destroying the planet. Now, you know, no wonder people don't want to go to work. No wonder people having mental health challenges, if that's how they're feeling for the 80,000 hours of their working life.

So from 2019, you know, Unilever have got some, some, some purpose led brands. They have certain sub brands that are B Corp certified. So Ben and Jerry's is a B Corp brand that is owned by Unilever. So in 2019 their purpose led brands grew 69 faster than the rest of their businesses and delivered 75% of the company's growth. And so this is the thing like purpose is this sort of super fuel that if you can connect to it in your business, it's going to really, really take you places.

On the individual level. Then what are the benefits to your team and for you as a, as A team member. So there are seven major life benefits for being on purpose. And I guess one of the things to think about for you is think of a time when you were on purpose. So when you were doing something that involved your genius, your, you know, you being the best version of you doing something that you love in service of something bigger than you, or doing it for someone else, think of those times for yourself. But on average, when you are on purpose, and I say on purpose because it is kind of like a drug, but it's a really, really cool drug that is only good for you and good for the people that you're. You're using your drug on, on average 63 increase in income, wealth and leadership effectiveness. If you are on purpose, on average a 42% increase in memory, cognition and executive function. And this is built also on the premise that you will have stronger mitochondria and DNA and so stronger, stronger cellular function, which could lead to an extra seven years of life. That's pretty cool. Purpose also gives you hope and meaning. On average, people who are connected to their purpose and living on purpose ex would express a doubling in overall life satisfaction and life fulfillment. Purpose gives you motivation. So motivation is, is kind of finite. You know, willpower is finite. You can go so far on, on pushing yourself to do something, whereas purpose is infinite. If you connect to the idea, like I say, doing something bigger than you in service of others, you just don't stop, you just keep going. It also gives you deeper levels of resilience. So again, on average, four times engagement and five times productivity on task if you are connected to the purpose of it. But like I say, the real thing, the real take home is the legacy. You know, if you are a business leader, business owner, if you're a board member on a company, like, what is the legacy that you're going to leave? And the question I typically ask rooms on this one is, can anyone give me the name of the richest person in the world? Sorry, the richest person in North America in 1968, 1969. I'm not going to leave it or wait to get the answers in because no one's going to get the right answer. No, no one has ever got the right answer. The answer that I found was it was a gentleman called Robert Wood Johnson, who was one of the founding brothers of Johnson and Johnson. So then if we elevate that question and say, okay, well, who was the richest person in the world ever? When we adjust for currency and inflation and all that kind of stuff. And again, I've had one person ever get this answer in all the times I've asked this question, the name of that person was Mansa Musa. And he was the reigning emperor of mali from about 1280 to the early 1300s. But if we flip it around and go, okay, well, can anyone give me the name of the gentleman who wrote and delivered a speech about having a dream for a group of Americans in 1968, 1969 without failure, everyone will say, ah, Martin Luther King or mlk. And again, this is the thing. People won't remember what you did. Sorry. Won't remember what you had in terms of your financial success. They'll remember what you did and how you did it. And, you know, that's kind of what we're all looking for ultimately as humans.

All right, so getting into some examples of sort of purpose maybe versus purpose light. So I pick on a teak because I just think, like I say, for me, they're one of the. They were the B Corp. Number two in New Zealand. They've been trailblazing this thing and genuinely, just a company that is hard to hate. And I think that's another way to look at your business through a purpose lens. Is. Is it easy for people to look at your business and say you're not doing everything that you could be doing? And like I say, Etique is one of those businesses where you just go, it's really hard to see how you could be doing any better than you're currently doing. And let's compare them to this company Monday, which kind of came out of nowhere a couple of years ago.

Yeah. You know, entry into the, the shampoo market is kind of. Really. Well, the barriers to entry are really. If you look at, look at Monday, you get a plastic bottle, you put some stuff in the bottle, you sell it as a shampoo, as long as it's meeting the basic requirements, you know, in terms of the natures of the chemical ingredients within the product. Happy days. And if we have a little bit of a further look, we can see here, you know, Monday, they talk here about how, you know, they have no SLS or parabens. They're sustainably minded. I don't know exactly what sustainably minded means. They say that they're PETA approved or PETA approved. They say that they're vegan and cruelty free and that they have natural ingredients. Cool. And the bottles are 100 recyclable. Okay, well, that's interesting. But, you know, is that true for the. In, in every country? I don't know that they're selling into versus when we have a little look at Ethique I I'd use Ethique products. Totally happy to say that you know this is the most certified shampoo bar you will ever use. These are just, these are the certifications that they have. So they are a certified B Corporation. 2% of sales go to charity. They are living wage certified. They are New Zealand made certified. They have direct trading in place. They are certified palm oil free. They are certified cruelty free and vegan free. They are 100% plastic free. Their packaging is 100% compostable. They are climate positive. They plant one tree for every order and they are 100 plastic free with cardboard chipping. So in terms of making claims and being able to back it up and prove the good that you're doing, I think this is one of the key things that purpose differentiates between purpose and purpose light. And again this is why B Corp is such a useful tool to kind of bring all this together and help you understand the good that you do but also prove it so that you can get the benefits of the, the communications that you're making to your stakeholders whether it's the customers, employees, investors and your supply chain and, and others in your supply chain, others in your ecosystem. Now this is an interesting one. We're, we're almost coming up to the end here, so have plenty of time for Q and A. So this was from May 2021. This was called the Purpose Tapes. So purpose driven leaders in their own words. And this is from NatWest CEO Alison Rose who said that their purpose is to champion the potential of people, families and business. Now as a purpose statement you kind of go really any business could have that. I mean grow good. We could have that as our purpose statement. I see we've got Lawrence sitting in the green room here waiting for the panel event. You know, Sinle could have that as their purpose statement. It's kind of a little bit wishy washy and doesn't really tell me too much about the organization and what you're doing. And I love this comment. This is from James W. Frick. He was former Vice President for Public Relations, Alumni affairs and Development at the University of Notre Dame. Is that, have I said that right? Beth, you're, you're going to be better equipped to tell me if I've pronounced that properly. And I love this, this kind of backs up that the same comment from a mate. Louder. You know, it's not what you gave, it's what you could have given. As James said, don't Tell me where your priorities are, show me where you spend your money and I'll tell you what they are. And this is an interesting thing. You know, NatWest faces criminal case over money laundering. So at one point you're talking about creating benefit to families and business and then at the next minute you're facing a criminal case over money laundering. And so for me that, that's kind of like the real acid test for, for purpose is, you know, can you genuinely prove the good that you're claiming that you're doing and are you doing it 100% of the time when no one's looking? So that's it from me. We have got a bit of time for Q A.

Hopefully people are tuning in and we've worked out the live stream stuff.

Let's bring Beth back in. Has Beth got any thoughts, comments, questions while we're waiting for the crowd to come up with something?

That was great. Thank you very, very much. You, you know, as you do, stole some of my thunder.

We knew that was going to happen because you like to talk a lot.

Anyway.

Reinforcing the learning.

Yeah. So let's see. We have a comment. Until we don't have clear regulations to avoid green washing, which will take a lot of time, certification as a B Corp is the only tool that can ensure we are buying a safe product. Is that a question or a statement? I think it's a statement. I agree. Yeah.

Go ahead, Tim.

I mean as I said, you know, I make no claims that B Corp is kind of like this silver bullet that's going to solve all the problems. But certainly when I discovered it and connected to it, it's the best that we've got and it's getting better year on year and the more, more people that support it and you know, as either as getting their company certified or as consumers, you know, you can start putting more pressure on B Lab, who are, who are the organization that run the certification program to update the assessment and, and make sure we're asking the right questions of companies to make sure that they are doing the right thing. So yeah, 10 out of 10. I 100% agree. I.

Anyone else?

Feel free to put some. Oh, here we go. We've got another one coming in. Just a comment. That's cool.

Yeah.

Anyone else.

See if I've got any other messages coming in?

I checked to make sure that the link was working. It looks like the link is working on LinkedIn for the people who got the new link.

Excellent. So maybe we'll just, we'll, I'll Post that liberally in a second. We've got Lawrence and Carolina in the room. Do you either of you two want to jump in with any pre panel comments on anything that you've just heard or are you keeping your powder dry? No, Lawrence keep you. Do you keep your keeping powder dry, Lawrence? She's nodding and shaking head at the same time. I'm just confused now.

How about Carolina? You got anything you want to.

I know Carolina was sharing the sharing liberally, which I appreciate.

No, I wasn't sure. So sorry. That's why I wanted to ask you prior. No, thank you for bringing the ESG challenges and I think someone mentioned greenwashing which is. It's absolutely true. I agree with the comment. I can't remember who made. I think Ivan.

Ivan. Yeah.

Yes. And I agree B Corp is a great, is a great way also, especially if you're new, if you're new to the, to the ESG environment as a new company and depending on the size of the company, if revenue is below $25 million, Big Corp is definitely the way to go. I highly recommend that.

So Claudia wants to know what a good elevator pitch would be. To summarize, can you expand on that question? Claudia, an elevator pitch to.

I think I know what she wants. I think I know her question. Convince someone to be Corp. Well, I.

Hope that Claudia is going to attend tomorrow because tomorrow is B Corp day and I've got a deck that's to going and just knock the socks off of anyone who wants to know anything about B Corp. But you know, the short answer is very easily deployable framework.

That is standardized over, you know, more than 70 countries, more than 150 industries that all recognize the same markers of, you know, impact and sustainability. And so.

We'Ll talk about roi Claudia, which is, which is key, right? For why should you, should you put the resources on becoming a B Corp and it's just a slam dunk And I have some. I'm gonna save my thunder for tomorrow, but I've got some pretty amazing metrics to share with everyone, especially around recruiting, retaining and promoting talent, which is.

What keeps CEOs up at night almost across the board.

I think the, the pitch for me would be purpose stroke. B Corp is just better business. Simple. Like if you want a better business, you need to have purpose. And if you're going to have purpose and you want to prove it, you should be a big Corp.

Like whatever the metric is, whatever you're trying to be better at. And that's why we call this to be Better and we, we have a, the community that we, of the companies that we're working with to help them come, B Corp. We call that the be better community because it's about businesses that wants to be better. Because if you are a better business, you, you will solve every problem that you like. B Corp. And Purpose will solve pretty much every problem that a business has. It's just that business leaders haven't considered typically purpose as a way to solve that problem. We've got a question from Ivan as well. How can you be sure that you're giving back to the environment and society what we were taking from it? Well, this, this is the million dollar question and the number of. I think this will probably be a question for Brianne in the, in the panel event coming up would be, you know, how many businesses out there are truly regenerative? Well, there's not many and because it's not something that we've pondered the best. One of the best examples that's documented is a company called Interface who make carpet tiles. If you, if you search YouTube for Ray Anderson. In fact, why don't we, we can do that for you. We could put it in the comments. What a crazy idea.

The late Ray Anderson.

The late Ray Anderson. There's a couple of really cool videos on YouTube where they, he talks about the journey that he went through and how they.

Yeah, you know, completely transformed the company from, from one that was massively extractive reliance on petrochemicals through to being one of the world's first truly regenerative companies. It's yeah, really, really inspiring stuff. I'll see if I can find some links to that and put them in the comments.

A comment from Bex here. You know, how do we.

How do we, you know, ensure that we're doing this stuff? Well, being a part of the B Corp or expiring B Corp community is definitely a game changer. I would totally agree with that.

If I could expand on the answer for Ivan. I think the short answer is that, you know, you can't be sure because we don't have an absolute global standard to measure what you're taking and what you're giving back on a one to one level at the moment. But what you're going to hear about from my good friend Carolina here is a little bit about how to measure.

You know, measure some of the, the. Well you could tell them ESG stuff. The. Yeah, governance and you know, carbon capture has come a long way. There are new standards that are coming out. You know, you're following the money SEC has come out with new standards for how to measure carbon.

Carbon extract, carbon emissions.

Yep.

Yes. And you know, it's really true and I say I, I had some metrics around, you know, money and impact investing and the size of that market and what is going on in that space and how, you know, you, you know where companies priorities are. Obviously if you follow the money and there's a renaissance going on at the moment around purpose and that is, you know, it's all good. But the, the answer to your question, this wasn't very eloquent.

Is you can't be sure. We can't be sure. We could just do the best we can and B Corp is an amazing step in that direction.

Well, the standards are, there's a lot of frameworks that's also a lot of confusion around the frameworks because there's so many different frameworks and business owners get really confused because this is not their cup of tea. A lot of times that's why they hire consultants to help them navigate the, the framework scenario. But if you're talking about carbon, I would look into cdp, the, the Carbon Disclosure Project. They normally have the base, the best data in their international organization. They're stationed all over the world. Some of it is amazing, some of it, it's not mandatory so it's actually voluntary. So again, you might be disappointed depending on the industry you're talking about. And I think Tim and I had a long conversation about 15 minutes before the whole thing started about what's going on in the carbon side of things. But again, everything is new. Every other day there is something new. That's a reason why I don't call myself an expert because I'm forever learning with this, with the developments that are going on in this industry, especially regards to the E. But TCFT just recently came up with a very good framework that's actually approved by the sec. SEC is recommending that framework to publicly traded companies which is I think is a huge leap forward. But again that's a personal opinion and I'll talk more about it and then when the group convenes for the next session, the five o'. Clock.

Nice.

Tim, I'm gonna take, can we take just a quick two minute bio break?

Yep, let's do that. Lawrence, just quickly, you go do that. I'll add Lawrence in quickly because she's had a quick, quick comment. And then once Lawrence has had her comment on what you were just talking about. Well, maybe just get Carolina. Yeah, when Beth's back, we'll get Carolina to kick off. She's got a short three or four minute slide just to kick us off into the session and then we'll bring the panel in. So. Yeah, Lawrence, cool.

Hi. Yeah, I just wanted to contribute to that question on how do we measure and how do we know whether we're giving more than we take back? From an environmental perspective, it is, I mean, curlyness, right? There are frameworks and it's all about measuring what we can. But there are a lot of things that we still don't know how to measure.

And, you know, typically, you know, climate change is really easy. We've got greenhouse gas emissions, water is easy, you know, cubic meters of water consumption or whatever. But when it comes to measuring biodiversity, for example, then it gets a bit tricky. How do we know whether nature is actually replenishing and thriving versus being depleted? Unless you actually get a guy out there on a field counting the number and, you know, the number of species and the diversity of species, because just one, a lot of one is not really the diversity. And so how do we, how do we do that at scale is very probably, well, not very problematic, but it's complicated, it's challenging in some areas. Same with animal welfare. How do you, how do you know that an animal is happy? We don't even know about humans or, you know, we don't really know how to define that yet. So. So in some cases it is, it is about measuring, but we don't know how to measure everything yet. That was just my contribution.

Totally. No. And this is the thing, you know, if doing good was easy, we'd all be doing it. It's. It's not easy, it's hard. This is the new frontier of business and we're pushing boundaries, we're testing stuff, we're trying to create this whole new way of doing stuff. So, you know, this is why it's hard and doing good isn't easy because it's relatively easy to maximize profit and just focus all in on that. But to start thinking about, well, welfare and regeneration, we've not done it before, not at the scale and the level of complexity that we've got here. I'll just, I'll do a shout out. A mate of mine, Mike Morris in the uk, he is CEO or he's head of program, sorry, at E Bio Atlas. I don't know if you've come across them, Lawrence, but you two should probably connect because they're all about helping measure biodiversity. And they, they do. He tried to explain it to me. I'm not a scientist but they basically measure DNA in the air so they can tell you how, like the biodiversity of a patch of land by capturing DNA from the air. Like that Sounds all like science fiction to me, but I will, yeah, add. Put a link into Mike and maybe connect you to. All right, we have got. Let's go. We'll remove Lawrence briefly. Thank you for your input there. We will add Carolina. We will add Beth and, yeah, Carolina, over to you to kick us off for the panel session. And Beth, over to you.

Thank you. Tim, can you hear me?

Am I coming through?

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay.

All right, I'm, I'm sorry, I'm new to this stream pipe and so I'm, I'm. I've got like zoom on the brain. Anyway, thank you, everyone for staying with us for the second hour of our summit. And that was fantastic for Frame to kick off this panel about putting the purpose that Tim described into action in real life. So I'm excited to introduce someone who's become a really great friend, Carolina Murphy. She is.

The foremost authority. I can't call her an expert, but she's an expert to me in esg. She has spent many, many years in the space. I'm not going to read your bio, Carolina, but she's very, very impressive. She attended cop.

The. The in Glasgow this past year. She has spent decades in the ESG space and sustainability and being an advocate for the planet. And so, Carolina, if you could just talk a little bit about what brought you to this kind of work, a bit about your background, and then we'd love to hear about how you view purpose from your ecosystem.

Absolutely. Thank you for. First of all, thank you for having me, Beth, Tim and the whole team.

I basically fell in love with sustainability when I was a young child. I attended as a Youth Ambassador, the Riot 92 Conference. This is a long time ago, but it was fascinating. At the time it was called the Earth Summit. And one of the things that really struck me at that point was the whole concept of circularity, which is coming back now, which is amazing. And again, sustainability has been around since the 70s. I jumped on that in the 90s and I've been following ever since. And it's constantly evolving. As was mentioned before, the metrics are. Sometimes they change the metrics for carbon, sometimes they. Also they've been proven that the data was sourced wrong or the data had to be replaced, depending on how scientific the method and how the scientific method is also questioned. But one of the things I learned that has the biggest impact and that's pretty, I think, relevant to the conversation we're having today. It's how the private sector and investors pursue their ability to change and also to improve the planet. Because at the end of the day, governments have been trying since the 70s, and I think we have a few few exceptions for the Montreal Agreement, which was fairly successful to curb ozone emissions throughout the world. Some of the other agreements have created a lot of challenges. Kyoto wasn't that successful. Paris, we're still fighting for it to try to make the 1.5 stay that way. Natural disasters won't become the norm, especially for the next generations. And this is the biggest goal, the Paris Agreement. But as you all know, the, the Paris Agreement a few years ago was put on hold. So when it becomes, when governments are in charge, unfortunately, things can become political. And when they become political, the lobbyists come to the room and they have a lot of power and we don't want that. So one of the things I got involved with most recently in the past decade has been ESG and the ESG movement, which all started with the unpri. I don't know if you're all familiar with the unpri, but is the principal for responsible investors, which is directly linked to the whole concept of purpose. Also big corporations, the whole movement of big corporations, I think stem from it as well. And the framework, the number one framework that we use to actually execute the PRI, which is the principles for responsible investing, is the GRI. And as of today, the GRI signatories, they're basically the PRI signatories that execute the GI framework. They're basically responsible for managing 130 trillion, not billion trillion dollars worth of investments. And a lot of those funds right now they had companies that they call ESG compliant, but they turn out they were not or they were not necessarily concerned about the environment, as Katie, Katie Vickers just recently asked on the chat. Yes, you're absolutely right. It's very hard to manage businesses that say they're focused on purpose and sustainability when the metrics are all over the place. And I agree with you. But one of the things that the GRI framework does extremely well is that creates the metrics that investors can use. And let me clarify, when investors know what they're looking for when it comes to metrics, it's much easier to hold the companies accountable. So this is the whole purpose around esg. When you see, when you hear about ESG Fund being disqualified by the SEC or being questioned be put to question based on the holdings of that fund, these are the Metrics that probably the shareholders are using. They're going ahead and they're basically saying.

Listen, we can't be relying on self disclosure or voluntary disclosure. That's very cute, but that doesn't work. And that's where the ESG framework comes to place. And hopefully I'll be able to walk you through all of that.

My presentation.

One moment, Beth. I don't know if it's live or not.

How do I do the, how do I put the presentation to go live? Oh, here it is.

I've just, I've done it for you. There you go. You should just be able to click on it now.

Sorry, I'm getting used to this software. So the whole question is what is your purpose? Right? And what is your company impact? Do you have a purpose? Does your company has a purpose? If it's a small company, I guess it's fairly easy to define your purpose. But the bigger the company, the harder the purpose is, right? And then truth to be told, a lot of the companies, a lot of publicly traded companies, main purpose is profit. You don't want to be, you don't want to pretend that's not the case because it is because shareholders hold CEO accountable based on profitability. And unless you change those metrics, unless the investors compromise and say, wait a minute, I want our CEO to also focus on sustainability. I want to hold him accountable for how he's managing his people. If there's equal pay, if there's inclusion in the workforce, if there's high levels of governance, unless the investors put pressure on CEOs and senior executives or boards. When I say investors, I mean investors or board members.

A lot of the company's focus, main purpose is still is profit. Either we like it or not.

So ESG overlaps with big corporations and pretty much everything. And the reason why is because one of the basis for B Corp. Is people, planet and profit. And basically the metrics, when we talk about ESG investing and ESG investments and metrics, that's basically what we're going through is the whole social strategy, environmental strategy and governance strategy. And in governance after 2008, we have done, there has been a major, I guess, evolution because when it comes to governance with surveillance Oxley, at least in the United States, the metrics have become a lot more clear for the industry, for money fund managers and also for investors to work with.

Environmental. When it's another area that I think the recent rule interpretation from the SEC was amazing because they were able to basically identify. Sorry, I'm having some issues in my computer. I have to close a few windows here. Sorry. They were able to identify a lot of areas where the TCFD frameworks can be used to measure environmental impact on corporations, which is great. And a lot of them are related to sourcing. A lot of them are related to who? Your suppliers, your supply chain. There's going to be a huge opportunity out there for those of you that work with supply chains. It's extremely complicated area to be in right now, but it's also. That's what a lot of opportunity will be. How do you measure or is that do you want to do, what kind of approach do you want to do bottom up or top down? So let's say if you're a Fortune 500 company, yes, you can do a top down approach because you can can basically write a piece of paper that says every single supplier we have is going to have to disclose or using this framework. And I want you to follow the GRI or I want you to follow the, you know, TCFD and, and I want you to become B corps or I want your suppliers to be B Corp. So middlemen are going to have to comply. Yes. When you're big and you have economies of scales, that's fairly easier. And I believe Salesforce has been doing that recently.

Recently.

Has done that recently. And also they also requiring all this, all the suppliers to basically disclose scope one, two and three, which is great. Now if you're a small company, that's far more difficult. But what you could do, you could join associations and groups that basically work with companies that are compliant. And a lot of those companies are big corporations across the world. A lot of the farmers, they are fair trade farmers. And that can really help your supply chain. That can really help you comply for the E in the supply chain. And when it comes to the S and social, as you've seen, especially after Covid in the United States, there's this huge push for employees to feel more appreciated, to feel respected, to feel empowered, to feel like they have a voice to be considered, to be part of the conversation. There is also a huge push for DEI regulation, which is amazing. California is in the forefront of that. They're pretty much light years ahead of the other states, but they're doing the right thing. Matter of fact, recently California has passed legislation that companies with, if I'm not mistaken, please don't quote me on the exact number, but if they have revenue over a billion dollars, they have to be compliance with the CFD as well as a few ESG metrics. Which is great. And normally when California does something, the other states follow. So that's good news for those of us that care about sustainability and climate change and also making sure Earth doesn't keep getting warmer. Now, one of the things you can do if you're trying to convince a CEO or trying to convince your investor, or as an investor, if you're trying to convince a company that you're investing in to have impact and to focus on impact, is to understand the demands and the demands of the employees and try to build the case.

To show you, to show basically the, the investors how important that is to the employees. And because everybody, especially in that situation, especially in times like now where there's the great resignation, I believe a lot of employees are leaving companies that, where they feel they don't, they don't have a purpose. There's, they're, they're basically abandoning companies whose main purpose is just profitability and where they feel like they're not being respected and well represented.

On the other hand, from an investor standpoint, there's a huge argument for ESG, I would say, because like I said, $130 trillion of investors commitment in fund by fund managers and asset managers from the pension plans.