Is doing good good business? I have always wanted to think so. And when I read a post a month ago by Seth Godin on Responsibility, it made me think about these issues again. So go read that post and all the great conversation it precipitated. (I’ll wait right here for you.) It’s taken me, however, a while to get my thoughts together, but I finally have.
I think that Seth is absolutely correct about what he is saying—we all need to believe in what we do. He believes that it would result in a better world because we’d produce fewer things that are harmful (I do, too), but I think there’s another reason too—we’d all just be a little more passionate about our jobs. We’d all do better work.
Maybe it’s just me, but I see too many people who spend lots of time at work but aren’t terribly happy. Now I understand that we all need to put food on the table, but I think too many of us stop when our monetary needs are satisfied, rather than other needs. If you market a product, you need to believe in it—to think it really is something that helps people.
But it goes beyond marketing and beyond products. Everyone should believe that they are doing something good on their job. If you feel that the only way to sell your product is to mislead your customer, that’s a problem. If you feel you must mistreat workers to keep costs down. Or pollute the environment.
I don’t mean to come off as a Pollyanna here. If you are the most hard-bitten business type ever and won’t be swayed by any ethical or moral arguments, or any calls to be passionate about what you do, think about this. The Internet is holding up the biggest flashlight of all time on everything companies do.
In the past, you needed to be a big company doing something egregious to be newsworthy. Now a hate site can be set up for free that reveals your sins and gets a top ten placement on Google. A blogger can disclose bad behavior on the smallest scale. And it’s no consolation that the blogger has just 100 subscribers when they are your best customers—the ones most likely to spread the word to the rest of your customers. It doesn’t matter that the group that set up the hate site are “a bunch of nuts” if they have their facts.
So, if doing good sounds too expensive for you, try calculating it against the new expense of doing it the old way. Because the old way depends on secrets and those secrets get harder to keep every day.
