Purpose Economy: Saying no to collaboration

Reading recently about the Purpose Economy brought back to me how much effort we'd made over more than a decade to find support for our work on an alternative to capitalism.

In 2008, It was my since deceased colleague, asking "What is social enterprise?" who wrote

"Allowing that some people do not matter, as things are turning out, allows that other people do not matter and those cracks are widening to swallow up more and more people. Social enterprise is the first concerted effort in the Information Age to at least attempt to rectify that problem, if only because letting it get worse and worse threatens more and more of us. Growing numbers of people are coming to understand that “them” might equal “me.” Call it compassion, or call it enlightened and increasingly impassioned self-interest. Either way, we are all in this together, and we will each have to decide for ourselves what it means to ignore someone to death, or not."

From publishing online to engagement on the early social enterprise networks of Skoll and Omidyar would. Later the conventional business networks would provide another platform.  I wrote You, We, Me, Ethics and People-Centered Economics when some interesting developments at the Vatican and the UN came to my attention. 

It goes back to our 1996 paper which was published online free to use as a model for social purpose, sayng

"We are at the very beginning of a new type of society and civilization, the Information Age. Historically, this is only the third distinct age of civilization. We lived in an agricultural age for thousands of years, which gave way to the Industrial Revolution and Industrial Age during the last three hundred years. The Industrial Age is now giving way to the Information Revolution, which is giving rise to the Information Age. Understanding this, it is appropriate to be concerned with the impact this transition is having and will continue to have on the lives of all of us. In that it is a fundamental predicate of "people-centered" economic development that no person is disposable, it follows that close attention be paid to those in the waning Industrial Age who are not equipped and prepared to take active and productive roles in an Information Age. Many, in fact, are scared, angry, and deeply resentful that they are being left out, ignored, effectively disenfranchised, discarded, thrown away as human flotsam in the name of human and social progress. We have only to ask ourselves individually whether or not this is the sort of progress we want, where we accept consciously and intentionally that human progress allows for disposing of other human beings."

Here for comparison, is The Purpose Economy

In 2004, we established in the UK using the term profit for purpose to describe our approach to economic development which by then had delivered proof of concept in Russia with the Tomsk Regional Initiative.

At that time, we were calling on the social enterprise community and government for support, saying:

"Traditional capitalism is an insufficient economic model allowing monetary outcomes as the bottom line with little regard to social needs. Bottom line must be taken one step further by at least some companies, past profit, to people. How profits are used is equally as important as creation of profits. Where profits can be brought to bear by willing individuals and companies to social benefit, so much the better. Moreover, this activity must be recognized and supported at government policy level as a badly needed, essential, and entirely legitimate enterprise activity.”

In the last couple of years, I've take the opportunity to write on Mixmarket about our work which focussed on poverty and chidcare reform.

Reimagining capitalism for people and planet was followed by Every Child Deserves a loving family and about 6 monhs ago, The new bottom line.

Over the years I made direct contacts to introduce our work aiming to gain support. This included Sab Miller, Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Unite. Erste bank, Grameen Creative Labs and B Labs,  to name but a few. Not so long ago, I described it to Arianna Huffington in one of the Skoll conversations about Empathy.. She appeared to be disinterested.

There was an earlier discussion in 2006 about Profit for a Purpose,  

I started the Linkedin group for Social Business and For Benefit Corporations in February 2008 and joined many others as complentary ideas like Consocious Capitalism began to surface. I described the for purpose business to all of them. We shared our proposal for Ukraine with USAID, The EU Citizens Consultation,The British Council and The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and many online discussions  One of these was CSRWire where I'd frequently responded,  describing how our approach was not CSR but a business with embedded purpose.

To say I was gobsmacked to read about the Purpose Economy is something of an understatement.  After all our efforts to leverage support, particularly for institutionalised children in 'Death Camps' who our founder, the originator of 'profit for purpose' business refused to give up on..

How ironic that the act of sharing would end in our exclusion. 

The CSRWire promotion offers a list of 100 pioneers and a yet to be published book which doesn't include us.

With the self-aggrandising promotion typical of CR initiatives, they brush aside the real pioneers. I've never seen such a blatent arttenpt to pass someone else's work off as one's own.

The Purpose Economy is where  some matter less than others, which has inevitable consequences  

 

 

 

 

 

        .