Rewards of ethical business

Doing good is good for business. This is one of Capitalism 24902’s founding premises: that we need to take a new approach; that doing social and environmental good can become the driving forces of capitalism. And an exciting new generation of entrepreneurs is reinventing how we think about entire industries. One such leader is Jeff Skoll, who is turning the film industry upside down as he uses this medium to drive change. When Skoll, now 47, was growing up in Toronto, he always wanted to tell stories that would get people interested in important issues and motivate them to take action. He decided to become financially independent first, and while attending business school at Stanford, he became friends with Pierre Omidyar. 

 

Soon after Skoll graduated in 1995, Pierre pitched him an idea for a person-to-person Web site with an auction format. That company became eBay; Skoll was its first president. Skoll quickly went from sharing a house with five guys to managing his unexpected and rapidly growing fortune. He began to think about how to share this blessing with the world. He spoke to John Gardner, the architect of the Great Society programmes under US President Lyndon B Johnson in the 1960s, asking him, “What am I going to do with all this money?” Gardner said, “Bet on good people doing good things.” In response Skoll set up the Skoll Foundation, one of the world’s leading supporters of social entrepreneurs. Many of those it has empowered have gone on to make a huge impact: people like Matthew and Jessica Flannery, the founders of Kiva, which helps small lenders to donate to microfinance institutions, and thus to entrepreneurs around the world.

 

By the early 2000s, Skoll had started thinking about the movies that had inspired him as a child and young man: Films like Gandhi and Schindler’s List. During regular visits to Los Angeles, he discovered there weren’t any production companies focused on the public interest; Hollywood studios were investing their money in action thrillers, superhero stories and sequels. The big studios only wanted to entertain because they thought that was all audiences were interested in, while bad news didn’t sell tickets. Skoll founded Participant Media in 2004, and the following year, the company released its first slate of movies: North Country, Syriana, Murderball and Good Night, and Good Luck. Collectively, these films garnered ten Oscar nominations and an Oscar. Each film had an advocacy and activism programme built around it so that people could learn more and discuss their concerns through Participant’s online social action network and its partners in the social sector.

 

North Country starring Charlize Theron, for example, helped to influence the successful renewal of the Violence Against Women Act in the United States. As a result of Participant’s social action campaign for the movie The Cove about the mass slaughter of dolphins in Japan, there has been a slowdown and at times even a cessation of dolphin hunting in that country. Participant also distributed or fully funded and produced a host of other films such as An Inconvenient Truth, Charlie Wilson’s War, Countdown to Zero and Waiting for Superman. All these films sought to encourage people to do good and to drive change, and Skoll set up an organisation called TakePart that helped people to take action. All of the organisations Jeff Skoll has founded share a common vision of living in a sustainable world of peace and prosperity, and work together toward that goal. For example, the Skoll Global Threats Fund—a foundation he launched in 2009 to address major issues such as climate change and proliferation of nuclear weapons—acted as a consultant on the Participant film made with Warner Bros, Contagion, about a pandemic. 

 

Participant almost always includes social entrepreneurs from the Skoll Foundation in social action campaigns linked to the movies, while the Capricorn Investment Group, which Skoll also founded, invests in companies with an environmental and social mission. Where the group chooses to focus its efforts depends on factors including the breadth and scope of the issue, the timing, the relevance of the organisation or project that will deal with the issue, and sometimes just being opportunistic and entrepreneurial. I once remarked to Skoll that he had based Participant’s entire business model on telling inconvenient truths. Skoll—a pretty shy guy—said he hoped so. He wasn’t looking to make money when he launched his film company, since he valued the message he was delivering above profit. What he hadn’t anticipated was that his movies would make money simply because he and his team were doing the right thing.

 

Richard Branson is the founder of the Virgin Group and companies such as Virgin Atlantic, Virgin America, Virgin Mobile and Virgin Active. He maintains a blog at www.virgin.com /richard-branson/blog. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/richardbranson. 

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