As CEO of the socially conscious
telecommunications company Working Assets, I know something
about social entrepreneurship. Working Assets was founded
in 1985 to give people the means to spend in a socially
responsible way. When customers use our long-distance
phone service, wireless service, and credit cards, we
make donations at no extra cost to customers. So far,
Working Assets has donated over $47 million to progressive
nonprofits around the world. We also give our customers
the chance to communicate to leaders on key issues by
offering free telephone calls and by sending out preprinted
letters on our customers' behalf to these decision makers.
Clearly, Working Assets is committed to two goals: to
social change and to running a successful business.
When Working Assets started, there
were no role models of socially responsible businesses,
there were no business school cases about for-profit
companies doing good deeds and good business, and there
was no academic research on whether business could be
a force for social change. We broke new ground with
our business model, and for the past four years I've
taught a college course at Stanford University on what
I've learned from running Working Assets. The curriculum
was developed in collaboration with students and has
several elements. The introductory course is a pass/fail
lecture series in which students invite leaders of nonprofits,
foundations, and socially minded businesses to share
their experiences. The next course defines and provides
examples of social enterprise. The following two business
skills classes compare the difference between nonprofit
and for-profit enterprise structures. Those sessions
also cover finance, mission statements, marketing, and
advertising. Held concurrently with these classes is
the "collaboratory" I teach, in which student teams
create a business or nonprofit that solves an international
or domestic problem. Teams must develop innovative solutions
and write executive summaries and business plans. I
also encourage students to take advantage of classes
that help give context to social enterprise, such as
the history of philanthropy, nonprofits' role in civil
society, and other hands-on courses for developing products
that improve the world. Student teams also have the
opportunity to enter a business plan competition specifically
for social enterprises. The winners of the social ventures
competition share a twenty thousand-dollar prize.
Implicitly, these courses address
a larger question for undergraduates: "What values are
important to me?" I encourage my students to continue
to ask this question not only at the university, but
also in the workplace, the community, and throughout
their lives. In fact, the concept of taking our values
to work is not limited to a nonprofit or company that
openly shares its values. Instead, it means having the
conviction and the knowledge to prove that decisions
based on good values makes good financial sense. Take
the classic examples of Johnson & Johnson's reaction
to the Tylenol tampering versus the Enron power debacle
in California. In the first case, the company seemed
to know exactly what to do: Tylenol was pulled from
the shelves across the country and was reintroduced
once Johnson & Johnson had changed production and
created new tamper-resistant packaging. Compare this
to the deliberate actions of Enron to shut down a power
plant during the rolling blackouts of 2000–2001,
and the audio tapes capturing traders gleeful about
traffic jams caused by power outages and the chaos they
were perpetrating in California. After taking the course
series, my hope is that students will be willing to
make ethical business decisions when the next product
recall or energy crisis happens. And that they take
their good values with them wherever they go.
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