Jessica Alba says "It's not totally for profit"

Hardly a week passes now without a promotion of the Do Good approach to business. This week it's Jessica Alba and the Honest Company which has raised $70 million for a venture in baby products.

A few weeks ago, Richard Branson was in the crosshairs of the Guardian having declared a year ago that he was going to make business the driving force for social, environmentasl and economic benefit.  The B Team hasn't done much.

This however is another advert for B Corporations.

“Milton Friedman would have loved this," said Andrew Kassoy of B Lab, the nonprofit that certifies many B corps, when the Maryland legislation passed. “For the first time, we have a market-based solution supporting investors and entrepreneurs who want to make money and make a difference."

Well that's not quite true. Milton Friedman argued that the resonsibility of business was to return a profit to shareholders and in 1996 a new kind of business had challenged this Shareholder Value Myth arguing that business could make its entire purpose one of benefit the community. It was published on the web, free to use,  

In 2009, our focus was children, those disabled and living in institutions and I's called on Richard Branson's foundation offering to lead the way in business focussing on social problems..

I'd also approached B Labs with a view to collaborate, they couldn't handle a UK member I was told

Working in Eastern Europe we'd witnessed the introduction of detergent avertising. The babushka's were horrified "Look, they have to advertise this stuff, it must be terrible" they'd say.

We on the other hand, were seeking investment in childcare transitions as Axiom news reported:

Hallman is currently investigating the setup of a multi-million dollar fund offering split financial ROI if needed, that is, a portion to investor(s) and the remainder to P-CED.

The funds will be directed to concluding a project in Ukraine which involves funding the training of residents to develop social businesses. Included in this work is supporting children who have disabilities, many of whom have been left to die in secretive locations. P-CED is helping to move these children to safety and give them access to modern healthcare.

Though we didn't get the support of others or the investors, we did manage to shift the needle by imfluencing goverment policy leading to an increase in domestic adoptions. We had argued that Every Child Deserves a Loving Family.

Branson's B Team efforts had been dubbed "Big Egos and Inaction" by the Guardian could the samew be said of B Corps, for all their proclamations of "doing good" there's little evidence of actual impact.

Such is the tragedy od social innovation. Rather than working together for a common goal, it has become a 'my brand only' competition and the losers are those who fall through the cracks, as our late founder put it:

The term “social enterprise” in the various but similar forms in which it is being used today — 2008 — refers to enterprises created specifically to help those people that traditional capitalism and for profit enterprise don’t address for the simple reason that poor or insufficiently affluent people haven’t enough money to be of concern or interest. Put another way, social enterprise aims specifically to help and assist people who fall through the cracks. 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.