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Driving social change
Published:
Thursday, January 12, 2012
We must change the way we do business. I keep coming across this message, whether I’m visiting a bustling global city, a small town in rural England, a South African township or a G-8 climate conference. Until now, business—or capitalism, for the most part—has been a means of making money for directors and shareholders, and rarely about doing good. It’s time for us to change that.Finding a way to create a new business or adapt an existing business so that it is more aligned with your values and your company’s values is an individual process. One of the first things to note is that a good, socially aware business doesn’t have to be big to make an impact. There are many small-scale businesses around the world—from organic vineyards in Australia to llama knitwear cooperatives in Ecuador—that are all changing for the better how business is done.At Virgin, as our group expanded through the years, so did our ideas about how to treat employees well, and how to take environmental impact into account. We launched one exciting business after another, and by 2004, I had gradually come to realise that we at the Virgin Group had a chance to tackle the challenges our society faces in a new, entrepreneurial way. It was time that we explored how boundaries between work and higher purpose could merge into one, how doing good could actually be good for business.But I didn’t want just to throw money at social and environmental problems; I wanted to offer targeted help and entrepreneurial thinking where it would be most effective. I wanted to find a way for Virgin to help drive dramatic change, making the world a better place and helping people.
Entrepreneurial energy
I decided to establish a foundation so that everyone working within the Virgin Group could pull together, but at that point, I had no real idea of what shape it would take. I discussed it with the managers across the group, looking for ideas. At about that time I met Jean Oelwang, an executive with a long track record in the mobile phone industry and of working with non-profits of all kinds. Jean wrote a plan and sent it to me. I was immediately excited. There was a huge opportunity to take all the incredible entrepreneurial energy across the Virgin Group to make positive change happen. Jean and I had long conversations about how we could turn typical corporate philosophy upside down, moving away from solely handing out money to bec
oming a true partner for frontline organisations and leveraging absolutely everything the company possessed in order to drive progress. We wanted everyone in the Virgin family to feel part of the community of change and to realise that every day, in everything they did, they could b
e thinking about what was right for people and the planet. We also knew we wanted to do what Virgin does best and go out and find the gaps—issues that no one else would touch—so that we could work with partners to come up with entrepreneurial solutions. Jean met with all of the Virgin companies over the next six months and spent a lot of time talking to charities. We didn’t tell them how we thought it ought to be shaped, but we asked them what they wanted to see and what they wanted from us. We then pulled the plan together and Virgin Unite was launched in 2004 at our annual company summer party at my home outside Oxford, Britain.
Going radical
I explained to the group that we wanted to do something radically different. Virgin Unite would not be just another charity, but would become an integral part of Virgin Group philosophy and at the core of everything we did as a group. Over the course of some weeks, we received good feedback from the thousands of people who work for Virgin companies and the hundreds of frontline organisations we met with in order to truly launch Unite. They wanted Unite to be an engine that connects people and entrepreneurial ideas to make change happen—to provide a means for the groups to connect with each other and then to link up with people across the planet in all areas. This was the beginning of the journey for many of our initiatives. Through Virgin Unite and our various non-profit efforts—everything from the Carbon War Room to the Branson Centres of Entrepreneurship in Johannesburg and Jamaica—we have joined and fostered a new wave of emerging entrepreneurs, along with leaders and workers at existing businesses, who are developing a business and making a living, and at the same time trying to do more to help people and to help the planet.
This reflects a vibrant and marked transformation from the way business used to be done, when financial profit was the only driving force.
Today, people aren’t afraid to say, “Screw business as usual!”— and show that they mean it. Are you?
(Adapted from Screw Business as Usual, by Sir Richard Branson)
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. Questions from readers will be answered in future columns. RichardBranson @nytimes.com. Please include your name, country, e-mail address and the name of the Web site or publication where you read the column.
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