In class last week we talked about valuing the social impact of our businesses, and how to do that. We layer out a plan for measuring the good we were doing and benchmarking our success, and we found ideas to steal from each other. I was specifically taken by the CareVan team. They ranked all of their social benefits based on importance. Their act of doing that made a big impact on me. Not all good is created equal. Some good is good, and some good is better. It made me look at our goals for good at Canvas & Hide. Very clearly two of the social benefits of our business were subservient to the third. In a way they were just means to the greater end. Realizing this will allow us to move forward keeping the perspective of what is the most important.
I also had a great experience this weekend with a new hat that I purchased from Patagonia. I love the hat, and was excited for as it was a long overdue replacement. A friend called me out on not really exhibiting any of the attributes of the patagonia brand. I don't spend a lot of time outside, I climb in a gymnasium, and I watch a lot of Netflix. I was a bit put out, and feeling like a poser. Later on in the evening a guy at a bar asked me what this "patagonia" was. I initially thought this was a second attempt to question my authenticity in the hat, but he was being sincere. I was able to tell him that it was the evolution of Chouinard Equipment started by Yvon Chouinard, and pioneered the concept of corporate responsibility. They created responsibly manufactured equipment for adventurers and that I believed in the way that they did business. At this point I realized that weather or not I become more of the outdoorsmen that I envision myself to be, I believe in Patagonia. I spend money on the hat and wear the hat because I want to live in a world full of Patagonias, not a world full of Nikes (though they've done better lately).
This brings me to a blog post I read this morning by Seth Godin on the true cost of environmental responsibility (here) He brings up the negative economic impacts of low minimum wages, and the cost that environmental degradation costs companies each year. I love his perspective. He frames his arguments away from the choir and towards the skeptics. I would suggest reading it. Its not a long read (unless you get sucked into the wisdom of his blog, which could take quite a chunk out of your day. I suspect though, you would find it to be a well used chunk of time.)
To bring this full circle to class on monday, we were talking about how value our social impact, and I argued that it all comes down to money (which, we almost all agreed that everything could be boiled down to money). The strong argument against this approach is that getting it down to dollars and cents takes a lot of time, and time is money; money which can be used to further the social good you are doing in the world. So where does this leave us on this process? I'm going to loop in an insight from Lloyd Corder's book Snapshot Surveys. Do enough to get a good picture of your trajectory, and move on. If you aren't doing as well as you'd hoped, then make some changes, but there is no reason to get hard numbers on this. Approximations are find. If you want hard numbers do a ten year audit (the U.S. Government only runs the census every 10 years, and that seems to work out for them)
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