Branson's B Team: Big Egos and Inaction

Looking back a year after the announcement of Richard Branson's B Team, Guardian Sustainable Business draws attention to the lack of any discernable progress since their pledge to make business "the driving force for social,, environmental and economic benefit".  .

As Henry Ford might have advised them. "You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do"

It's far worse than that, unfortunately.

The article was published around the same time as my open letter to the City of London's Lord Mayor on the matter of Inclusive Capitalism. I'd drawn attention to both their derivate thinking and the fact that a homeless man had managed to achieve more in this area than a group of global leaders with $30 trittlion in assets behind them.

It was 5 years ago when I wrote to Richard Branson's charity Virgin Unite with an offer. Branson had been speaking at an event known as the Ukrainian Lunch and among the audience were some of the B Team.  As a business already operating for social , environmental and economic benefit, we'd been collaborating with Sumy State University at their Economics for Ecology conferences and delivered a social business proposal - a 'Marshall Plan' for microeconomic development and social enterprise Ukraine's government.  My offer was to lead the way in Ukraine where we'd been active for 7 years,  as a purpose driven business.   

At the Ukrainian lunch in Davos, Richard Branson gave a talk suggesting that business should focus more on social problems.

This is what we’ve been doing in Ukraine for 7 years to reach the point that our efforts have persuaded government to adopt changes to childcare policy. We’re a small business rendering 100% profit to do something about the plight of orphans and street children in Ukraine.

One of my submitted suggestions was about raising funds to help the founder of a charity Happy Child who support sick and disabled children in Ukraine. She herself is disabled and in need of surgery.

Another suggestion is the proposal to create 10 models of excellence for the rehab centres Ukraine’s government agreed to last year. Little has been done since the announcement.

If the Ukraine lunch speech was an indication of intent to apply this in Ukraine, then we’re able to show the way.

It was my late colleague Terry Hallman who'd led this action and just before his death in 2011, I'd shared his achievements in an article on Re-imagining Capitalism for People and Planet with Guardian editors for both the social enterprise and sustainable business hubs.  

If you didn't read it there, I'm not suprised.  McKinsey however were more accomdating and supportive when I followed up with 'Every Child Deserves a Loving Family' and 'Re-imagining Capitalism: The New Bottom Line'   

This was ironic in that McKinsey had also had a role in undermining the 'Marshall Plan' in their service to oligarch Rinat Akmetov who wanted to develop a 'Marshall Plan' of his own. He got his way indrectly, with the help of USAID.  

I was writing about what had been done rather than what would be done and for some it was valued.

I'd forgotten about the McKinsey article a few months later when I read Paul Polman's widely endorsed article on 'Where our Moral Compass Meets the Bottom Line'.. Could it have been influenced by what I'd shared with McKinsey?

I'd also take the opportunty to describe it to Arrianna Huffington when sho hosted a Skoll discussion on 'Cultvating Empathy'

If you shoud read the comments on the Big Egos article, you'll observe the mutual appreciation between the editor and John Elkington who serves as an advisor to the B Team. He too has a new interpretation of capitalism which doesn't seem too far away from our own - aside from putting it into practice.

It may not be possible to build a reputation on what youre going to do, but it is possible to stifle the reputations of others by censorship. THis was my experience when commenting on an article on Creating Shared Value, again in Guardian sustaimable business  Mark Kramer had asserted that business could profit from solving social problems - i disagreed.

Sharing a an extract from our 'Marshall Plan' I'd pointed out that it wasn't a matter of profiting from a purpose, but applying profit for purpose. Profit maximsation had been at the root of the social problems we described and social unreast would eventually lead to an internationa crisis and armed conflict.

my comment was deleted and I was blocked from commenting on any part of the Guardian site for many months. Is Mark Kramer afraid of open discussion? I asked later. 

In a series of articles on the sublect of Death Camps for Children, Terry Hallman had pointed directly at the root cause, when he wrote:

Excuses won’t work, particularly in light of a handful of oligarchs in Ukraine having been allowed to loot Ukraine’s economy for tens of billions of dollars. I point specifically to Akhmetov, Pinchuk, Poroshenko, and Kuchma, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list. These people can single-handedly finance 100% of all that will ever be needed to save Ukraine’s orphans. None of them evidently bother to think past their bank accounts, and seem to have at least tacit blessings at this point from the new regime to keep their loot while no one wants to consider Ukraine’s death camps, and the widespread poverty that produced them..

The same people and their foundations will also be found as partners and donors to USAID's program of social enterprise in Ukraine in which PwC, The British Council and Erste Bank are partners. Our own application for partmership had been disregarded. It took a letter to my MP to discover eventually that the criterea for partnership with the British Council included the ability to make a financial contribution. Nowhere in any of their solicitations is this stated.

The Death Camps for Children articles were described as a breakthrough by Ukraine's civis leaders and there had been others who'd spoken up. Albert Pavlov a charity leader declared "It's not possible to keep silent' on the event of a child's death from starvation in a place called Kalinovka.

Years later, BBC 4 delivered a documentary which illustrates the severity of the issues that USAID had been informed about directly in 2008. Our letter described the wholesale neglect of children left to die in remote locations and a trade in body parts from aborted foetuses.

Though a man had perished in being the change, we'd be informed by the BBC that nobody had spoken out about the issues.

 

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Returning to Davos in 2014, with oligarchs politicians and development aid agencies getting very cosy with each other, we are still hearing from the same people talking about business making a better world.

Tony Blair is leading the conversation for Pinchuk in gratitude for generous F2F (Foundation to Foundation donation. As are USAID who have funded the foundations of Blair and his wife Cherie. That's the USAID who told us they had no budget for "handicapped and retarded" children. It's a dofferent story when i comes to using public funds for these well heeled charities and their vanity projects.

Truly, a crock of shit.

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