By Ed Mayo ~ Values: How to bring values to life in your business

Jay OwenSRI/ESG News, Advisors' Forum, TV Series

One in four new entrepreneurs worldwide are values-driven

 

By Ed Mayo, Secretary General, Co-operatives UK; author, Values: how to bring values to life in your business; member, Ethical Markets Advisory Board

 

Let’s get practical on ethics. There has been an extraordinary and welcome surge in interest in ethical markets over the last decade, following the persistent and visionary leadership of people such as Hazel Henderson. There has also been a lot of in-depth work on key issues, from environmental risk through to gender equality and unconscious bias. But, there has been no real practical guide on how to bring values in life within a business. How do you recruit for values? How do you build values into your supply chain, your governance?

 

So, drawing on a range of case studies worldwide, looking at relevant academic research and the best professional tools, from recruitment to governance, I have launched a short book, Values, published by Greenleaf as part of its Do Sustainability series, which is a 90 minute read and a short guide to making a success of values in business.

 

One of the most revealing things to emerge from the research for this, is the extent to which being ethical is not something new or marginal. It is part of the culture in so many countries, and more evident in smaller enterprises than in large.

 

After all, an increasing number of listed companies proclaim a set of corporate values, on their website or in their annual report. What about businesses at the other end of the scale? Do many kitchen-table enterprises and small businesses count on values?

 

Rebecca Harding is an entrepreneur who is an authority on entrepreneurship. In the early 2000s, she co-designed the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Then, running her own business, she set out to explore the motivations of people like her, interviewing 2,500 entrepreneurs across 13 countries. The people she surveyed were running businesses that were older than two years but younger than ten. They had already achieved turnovers of US$300,000 or above (or national equivalent) and so were set on a ‘growth path’. Rebecca set out to discover what their values and motivations were for setting up in business. I helped her to develop and promote the results, which are included in the new book Values.

 

What she found was that one of the most common reasons for starting a business, cited by 47% of entrepreneurs from all countries, is ‘making a difference’. This includes factors such as social benefits, environmental improvement and creating jobs. Of these who cite ‘making a difference’ as one of their values, close to 43% say that it is their primary motivation. Where it is a primary motive, which is one in four overall, we can call these entrepreneurs ‘values-driven’. Where it is a secondary motive, ‘values-aware’.

 

Respondents in Germany and South Africa emerge as the most collaborative in terms of motivation to make a difference. Three out of five (60%) of growth-oriented entrepreneurs in Germany are primarily motivated to start up in business in order to make a difference (‘values-driven’). 84% of entrepreneurs in Germany say that this is a motivation, whether primary or not (‘values-aware’).

 

Rather than this being a trade-off, there is higher perceived business performance among values-driven entrepreneurs: they emerge as more innovative as enterprises than those businesses who do not have ‘making a difference’ as their primary aim. This holds too in emphatic fashion for entrepreneurs surveyed in the ‘BRICSA’ nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

 

The idea of ‘profit with purpose’, of a collaborative mindset, is miles away from the myth of the heroic loner, the John Wayne model of entrepreneur that is glorified by TV programmes such as The Apprentice. It is true for some. But to strip out values and elevate the story of the self-oriented lone entrepreneur into the only way to see entrepreneurship is an act of economic self-harm. The picture of the real values and motivation of entrepreneurs that Rebecca Harding paints is complex, rather than simple, and social as much as financial.

 

So, here is the potential: if we can get practical on ethics, if we can offer a better balance, with a recognition of the role of values in business, then we can start to harness the true power of entrepreneurship, to improve the world around us.

 

 

Ed Mayo is Secretary General at Co-operatives UK and author of a new book, Values: how to bring values to life in your business.

 

Values is published by Greenleaf and available on http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/online-collections/values