My personal response to forceforgood.com is that we have passed a watershed: this is an open forum to discuss and demonstrate how business could, should, can and will be a force for good.  And it’s definitely not to re-open the old debate - is it the business of business to get into these moral quagmires?  Isn’t “good” a church thing?  Isn’t ethics just west of Suffolk?

You think I exaggerate?

I have been on the fringes of the corporate responsibility movement for about 20 years.  It’s been a long courtship between business and society.  Slightly nervous.  Wary.  Sometimes positively fearful.  And never fully consummated.  (Readers of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach may connect at this point.)   

Why?  The findings of the Tomorrow’s Global Company report seem a no brainer.  Oodles of common sense.  Yet wrung out of painful discussions and even more painful experience by a group of business leaders who know what the right thing to do is, know the right role for business in the world today, yet find it hard to be allowed to do it.

My culprit: the business case.  Or more precisely, the “business case”.  The search for a business case is not wholly bad – there’s increasing evaluation of social and environmental impact, it’s a language that business people feel comfortable with, and it has definitely moved forward the debate and established a wider sense of understanding of what it is to be a sustainable business.  But it’s also infected and distorted that debate.  It’s allowed us to imply there is definitive proof.  And on the terms on existing business models, which, to be crude, are measured in relatively short term profit, and shareholder returns.

Crucially, it has prevented anyone using the blind faith and intuition of every start-up entrepreneur ever – that it feels right, it is possible, the basic data gives some helpful indicators, and I am optimistic it can work.  We need that optimism – faith that business can be a bigger force for good and create a world in which business thrives and drives success for everyone.

But the business case is unforgiving.  “If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it” really means “if you cannot prove it, it has no value”.  That’s why it has taken scientists over 20 years to persuade us of the perils of climate change.  And still there are sceptics and deniers (I have an assumption many of them also still smoke unfiltered cigarettes.)  

But the biggest cop-out of “the business case” is that it is values-neutral.  One of the distinguishing things about what Tomorrow’s Company has always stood for, is that a company cannot set its strategic course fully without knowing what its values are.  The hard-nosed measurable business case allows you to avoid any gut responses, any instinctive judgements, any applications of values.  Yes, the evidence is accumulating.  We can evaluate more and more true measures of success.  But it’s often difficult and fuzzy.  Real leadership cannot rely entirely on a dashboard of KPIs.  Real leaders occasionally say, simply “because it’s the right thing to do”.  Yet so many are afraid of expressing any moral certainties, any moral leadership.  But hopefully we can give them all a helping hand, and join in the debate on forceforgood.com.  If entrepreneurs waited for the level of proof that we are expected to apply to climate change, or assessing the consequences of social deprivation in Blackburn or Bangalore, then no-one would ever start a business.