Greed is a Good Thing
By Linda Nicholas
Editor’s Note: On April 25 a Social Enterprise Development Dialog was presented at the Pond-Deshpande Centre in Saint John. Several folks from Perth-Andover attended the presentation, the following essay is from Linda Nicholas, who attended the dialog.
Social Enterprise is For Profit Businesses creating Shared Values… it is the business model of the 21st century!
So, after we finally got off the merry-go-round that make up the streets of downtown Saint John and walked five minutes that felt like 20 in the wind driven slush we arrived late and thoroughly ruffled. In the warm room full of people, our first notable encounter was with tables filled with food. I collected a plate full of ‘one of everything’, then crow- plowed to a position where I could hear the closing remarks of the keynote speaker.
From the words I caught I learned that he was the guy who started the ‘Air Miles’ program. (yes, you know Air Miles that you get with every purchase!) Then he said that ‘greed is a good thing’. Huh? I moved closer.
Naturally, that statement generated a few questions, the answers that followed provided a pretty good understanding what he was saying.
Essentially he was saying that greed or the extreme desire for more is what drives commerce. We can probably all agree that greed is indeed what drives our world, and as far as I know always has, as basically we all want something more. Social Enterprise is no different. Social Enterprise is in fact no different than any other enterprise created to generate profit.
It is the organization of people to create an income for themselves. A busy-ness is then THE thing we do to gain a return. The idea would be then to make a bigger return. Greed.
Here is what all that made me think. Social Enterprise is no more and no less than any other business. The difference is that Social Enterprise is inclusive, based upon the idea that everyone involved is important, including the environment.
We have come to believe that the current business model, which is based upon the feudal system, is the only way business can work. The feudal model consists of lords owning the land, and therefore the profit from the business and financial income that the land provides. The serfs/people are then workers and pretty much owned by the ‘land lords’, which gives us the promise that only the owners should make profit, that workers are only the machines that do the work, and that the land is just a means to an end. This model has given us “big corporations”/lords that suck the resources, ( whether it is land, water, gas, etc) and abandon/forsake the serf/workers when the land or resources are used up.
So the thing that is different about Social Enterprise is the business model. This model gives us an owner (or owners) fully aware that the business totally depends on the health and well- being of every part of the business. This includes the owners themselves, the help or workers, the resources and environment, and the consumer. This focus on all parts of the business model being important opens the door to joint ownership/co-ops where everyone collaborates on how to make a profit and they share the profit while making sure that all involved are getting a fair deal.
The social enterprise model is changing the face of business all around the globe. It is being very successfully employed in everything from health care, to growing trees which revitalize impoverished communities, to selling fashion excesses, to providing healthy food, you name it, it is being utilized to giving us real useable bonus points for spending money = the Air Miles points. The Air Miles program is a Social Enterprise.
What will your idea become?
