Purpose and Profit

If you want to run a successful business that leads with purpose, you had better be good at profit.

You have to know your business well enough to shred carbon out of it and inject humanity into it without blowing up the bottom line. Your company also has to be a star in whatever supply chain it’s in, because if you don’t impress your closest peers, customers and suppliers, then your sustainability programs probably don’t amount to much.

In short, if your company is succeeding with sustainability, it’s almost certainly well managed.

This seems so obvious, I started to wonder why we never hear it. Wall Street hammers companies that show evidence of bad management, and grants lofty premiums to the market value of well-managed companies. So why aren’t sustainable businesses taking advantage of this?

The reason is that it’s easy to say, but hard to communicate. We can easily deduce that sustainable companies are well managed, but companies can’t turn around and say that to customers and society and expect a warm hug.

Why? Because it sounds like bragging, or a con. If I say you should trust me, your BS-detectors go on full alert. If I tell you I’m good-looking, you immediately think there’s something wrong with my appearance, or that I need to get over myself.

This goes double in sustainability, because of the green-washing and double-speak corporations have wallowed in ever since Rachel Carson warned the world about pesticides. When British Petroleum changed its name to “BP” and hinted that the letters stood for “Beyond Petroleum,” snickers were heard around the world. Then came the horrifically bad management that cost the company billions from refinery explosions and oil spill disasters. The snickers would have become outright laughter, except that so many innocent people had to die for BP profits.

So there’s some skepticism at this point, even among those of us who believe that corporations are going save the planet in order to save their profits, while the government sector stands by wringing its hands.

Of course the status quo for many people in business is that profit and sustainability do not even belong in the same conversation. They believe that a company directing management attention to the environment or human rights, beyond the strict legal minimum, must be full of loose screws.

So if you want to communicate that your business has a purpose beyond profit – including being good at the profit part – how do you communicate it?

Emotively.

Logic and cleverness won’t work. You have to create a fusion of intellectual and emotional communication that links your values and aspirations to those of the people you’re talking to. Even die-hard fans of Milton Friedman (“The only business of business is profit”) do not desert Berkshire Hathaway when Warren Buffett goes all gooey on sustainability. They have bonded with Berkshire’s brand of patient profit-making so deeply that they willingly suspend their own logic when he talks about the need for corporations to protect the environment.

This is the power of emotive branding at work. It’s a wonderful thing, because it means that ideas about sustainability can infect non-believers like a virus and, eventually, kill the belief that purpose beyond profit is a mistake.

Maybe it’s not possible to become as influential as Berkshire Hathaway. But it’s possible to communicate authentically that your purpose beyond profit is proof of good management – using investor capital wisely, planning for the future, and demanding technologies and public policies that make the economy more sustainable.

As Dizzy Dean, a famous baseball pitcher, put it in 1934, “It ain’t bragging if you can back it up.” Today we might say, “It ain’t bragging if you have an emotive brand.”

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Image: Designspiration.net