From the Shop Floor to the Board Room.  What is a deeply responsible business strategy? 

In this episode of The Inspiring Leadership Podcast, Founder Darryl Cooke speaks to Professor Geoffrey Jones, Harvard Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, at Harvard Business School.  

Professor Geoffrey Jones has written and edited more than 30 books on the history, impact and responsibility of business. His most recent books include Beauty Imagined A History of the Global Beauty Industry; Profits and Sustainability: A History of Green Entrepreneurship, and the book which brought Geoffrey’s amazing work to our attention, Deeply Responsible Business, A Global History of Values Driven Leadership. He joins the podcast from his home in Boston. 

Hear from Professor Jones and Darryl as they discuss what it means to be a deeply responsible business today. They tackle the progress of responsible businesses through the ages, from Cadbury’s, to The Body Shop, via Unilever, and the role of politicians. Discover how doing great business for global good is a long-haul commitment — and why SME’s have tough decisions to make about investment (at a time when freedom, flexibility, and context is everything). 

What do deeply responsible businesses have in common? Professor Jones explains how business and society gamechangers have three common characteristics. “They all chose the industries they went into carefully. They thought about how those industries added value to society, rather than detracting from it. They all treated other stakeholders with humility (they didn’t, you know, abuse their employees) and they didn’t abuse their position to lobby for special favours from government. They all tried to build communities: sometimes they gave money for schools, cultural institutions and so forth. They all had a sense that human beings needed communities to bind them together.” 

So, why don’t businesses recognise that they should have a greater responsibility to society? Explains Professor Jones: “I think the fundamental reason is that it doesn’t really pay. We like to think it pays in terms of improved brand reputation, all sorts of things. And maybe it does in the long term, but in the immediate term, you know, a deeply responsible business is in competition with businesses which don’t share those values. The problem became greater with the growth of young Milton Friedman’s idea about the responsibility of businesses to maximize shareholder value. The fact that money is held by large financial institutions which invest simply in terms of maximizing their returns. It has become worse rather than better, I think, in recent decades.” 

And while it might seem to us, the individual, that our impact is minimal, the Harvard Isidor Straus Professor of Business History explains how we have more power as individuals than we think. 

“Every age has challenges, but our age has multiple challenges, which are not really related to one another, but are all bearing down on our society and our political systems. I think it’s up to businesses and frankly up to everybody to sort of take this seriously and not just go on living happily saying ‘it’s all going to get better if we just do our regular lives’  — because it’s not. 

“These are problems that have to be addressed, and there’s very limited sign of it being addressed by governments, or business, or consumers in their behaviour.” 

Adds Professor Geoffrey Jones: “I have come to the conclusion that the world has to be changed one person at a time. It has to be changed from the bottom up, rather than the top down. So, I think that every time you speak out against injustice, or help someone in distress, or take a decision to walk or cycle rather than drive, you become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Change needs to start with each of us as individuals.” 

Listen to the conversation in full here.