What if impact entrepreneurship and corporate intrapreneurship were a genuinely two-way street?

The interconnected challenges of the climate emergency and deepening social inequality are the symptoms of a system that doesn’t fully account for impacts on people and planet. Historically, the fundamental purpose of creating a product or service has been to create profit — not only that, but to pursue maximum profit for a small group of people, which necessarily depends on externalizing social and environmental costs.

As pressure mounts on all sides, there can be no long-term future for any business that’s seen to undermine the health of the very social and environmental systems on which we all depend. The tables must turn if business is to live up to its claim to be part of the solution. It must reimagine what it’s for, reframing the fundamental purpose of business as profitably solving the problems of people and planet, and not profiting from causing them.

As Paul Hawken writes in Regeneration, if we’re to succeed in engaging the bulk of humanity in ending the climate crisis, we need to create a world worth saving — one that addresses current human needs and injustices, not an imagined dystopian future. This means enshrining social justice, economic inclusion and environmental regeneration as intertwined design values and operating principles for everything business does. It means innovating new products, services and business models as the vehicles for advancing these principles, and solving the defining problems of our time. And it means redefining success, with profit not an end in itself, but the means to scale (and what flows from scaling) equitable access to those solutions.

This is where impact enterprises already live. Impact entrepreneurs make it their business to identify the causes of exclusion and marginalization; to develop, test and scale new value propositions with the potential to disrupt that status quo; and to forge a new state that creates long-term value for society and builds the ecosystem to sustain it. If impact enterprises signal the future of business — and I believe that they do — then we should be doing everything in our power to see that they achieve scale and prominence as quickly as possible.

Helping impact enterprises to reach true scale and prominence isn’t just an end in itself, though. Nor should it be seen or understood as a one-way act of benevolence. That’s because providing undeniable examples that there’s a different way to run successful businesses that solve society’s toughest challenges is also the means to achieve something bigger — to encourage businesses of all sizes to think and act more like impact enterprises.

When the ingenuity of social innovators meets the scale of large corporations, that’s when we shall finally reach a tipping point. So, to paraphrase JFK, let’s not only ask what large corporations can do for impact enterprises. Let’s also ask what impact enterprises can do for large corporations.

There’s a reason we find many of the best ideas and boldest actions for tackling inequality among impact enterprises operating in low-income and marginalized communities. It’s because necessity is the mother of invention. This is where people are at the sharp end, not only of inequality, but also the impacts of climate change that threaten to deepen it still further.

Likewise, there is a reason the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) also go by the shortened moniker of the Global Goals. While challenges are certainly more acute in low-income countries — where billions of our fellow human beings are still denied equitable access to life’s essentials, such as clean water, reliable energy and dignified sanitation — inequality is not unique to those contexts.

Feelings of being left behind by the forces of globalization, and frustration at the lack of meaningful action to avert runaway climate change, are rife throughout societies all around the world. If business truly wants to be seen as part of the solution, and not the cause, then it must recognize the interdependence of economic, social and ecological systems. It must understand that all three can only thrive when social justice and environment regeneration are embraced as essential to long-term economic prosperity and business success.

For corporations wishing to better understand how to weave those concerns into every aspect of their decision-making, who better to work with and learn from than impact enterprises?

Mindset matters

Just over a year ago now, I wrote about the vital importance of ‘metaskills’ as an (possibly even the most?) important avenue of intervention if we are to equip young people with the chops to succeed in an ever more complex and rapidly changing world.

A good place to start this post is exactly where I left off last time, with a thought-provoking extract from Marty Neumeier’s excellent book, Metaskills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age.

Today we find ourselves caught between two paradigms – the linear, reductionist past and the spiraling, multivalent future. The old world turned on the axis of knowledge and material goods. The new one will turn on the axis of creativity and social responsibility. To cross the gap we’ll need a generation of thinkers and makers who can reframe problems and design surprising, elegant solutions. We’ll need fearless, self-directed learners who embrace adventure. We’ll need teachers, mentors and leaders who understand that mind shaping is world shaping – who give learners the tools they’ll need to continually reinvent their minds in response to future challenges.

If you’re anything like me (and since you’ve found your way to this post, I’m guessing you are) you’ll be nodding in vigorous agreement with everything Marty says.

I mean, think about it…

Kids starting school in 2015 probably won’t retire until 2070. Our education systems are meant to be preparing them for this life ahead, yet we can’t even predict with certainty what the world will look like five years from now. The U.S. Department of Labor apparently estimates that 65% of children currently in grade school will end up in job functions that don’t even exist today. Meanwhile, research by the Oxford Martin School on the future of employment suggests that as many as 50% of current corporate occupations will disappear by 2025 as a result of computerization.

How on earth are we supposed to help our children prepare for, and succeed in, such an unpredictable world? For folks like Marty, education gurus like Sir Ken Robinson, and my friends at the Network For Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), the answer is as plain as day…

The secret has to lie in fostering agility, adaptability, and applied knowledge and imagination. That means helping young people to develop typically entrepreneurial skills and behaviours such as initiative and self-direction, communication and collaboration, and creativity and problem solving — fundamentally human characteristics that can help our kids to stay ahead of the ‘robot curve’ (as Marty puts it), to be able to adapt to constantly changing circumstances, to better recognise opportunities, and to remain confident and resilient in the face of challenges.

The teaching of these very sorts of skills and behaviours – fully integrated into the school curriculum – is one of the main reasons my wife and I chose our daughter’s school, and I’m constantly reminded of the difference it can make. Every year, I take part as a judge in the school’s Dragon’s Den-style event (Shark Tank in the US?), where girls as young as six pitch their innovative ideas for new products or services. They never cease to amaze me – not just with the quality of their ideas, but with their confidence, self-assurance and ability to think on their feet – and it seems so obvious that it’s this emotional intelligence, more than their recall of history or trigonometry or whatever, that will stand them in greatest stead in the future.

Cards on the table, this is a fee-paying school and I fully appreciate that these sorts of programs are a luxury not afforded to the vast majority of students. But then that’s precisely why I’m so excited by NFTE’s work on an Entrepreneurial Mindset Index – an emerging methodology for measuring and evaluating the presence of an entrepreneurial mindset among young people and, potentially, to influence policy in such a way that teaching it is given much greater prominence in all our schools.

I’m excited because, IMHO, learning about this stuff shouldn’t be the exclusive preserve of a privileged few. Mindset matters. It should be available to everyone.

If you’re interested in learning more, NFTE is hosting an Entrepreneurial Mindset Summit in New York on 27 October. Check it out.

Generation Jobless: How do you make a dent on youth unemployment?

Add together not only those officially classed as ‘unemployed’, but also those who have simply given up looking for work and those who are part of the ‘working poor’ (i.e. earning less than $2/day), and the number of young people between the ages of 15 and 24 without productive employment apparently reaches an eye-watering 600 million.

That’s one in two of the total global population of 15-24 year olds. If they were citizens of a country, it would be the third most populous in the world, behind only China and India.

Gross oversimplification though it is (we are, after all, talking about the product of a major collision of demographics and global economic recession), my inner MBA can’t resist the temptation to categorise possible interventions using the time-honoured 2×2 matrix…

Boxes 1 and 2

Looking through the lens of sustaining innovation (improvements within the current paradigm), and seeing youth employment as predominantly a supply-side problem (an insufficiency of appropriate skills), would suggest interventions to improve young people’s readiness for the world of work.

That might include anything and everything from improving access to a quality education for people from disadvantaged backgrounds (creating equity of opportunity), to greater availability of internships and apprenticeships (providing more practical work experience), to better careers advice and guidance on things like CV writing and interview technique (improving chances of converting opportunities).

[A brief aside: equity of opportunity and richer work experience are where initiatives like the Akasa Young Pioneers program – which also happens to be linked to sustainable development – are to be wholeheartedly welcomed and supported, IMHO.]

Viewed as predominantly a demand-side problem (an insufficiency of appropriate jobs) might direct one towards equipping young people with the requisite skills and knowledge to consider setting up their own business, as an alternative to the ‘traditional’ corporate career path.

Indeed, development of a more entrepreneurial mindset might well be a bridge between supply and demand-side views of the problem. As EY Chairman and CEO, Mark Weinberger, alluded to in a recent piece for Forbes, studies suggest that the sorts of skills and behaviours typified by entrepreneurs – e.g. initiative and self-direction, flexibility and adaptability, communication and collaboration, and critical thinking and problem solving – are precisely those that employers currently deem most lacking among millennials.

All of the above are definitely areas where, as Mark says, business can and should be looking to lead and make a tangible contribution. That said…

Boxes 3 and 4

I can’t shake the feeling that the biggest inroads will only be made with systemic change – tackling profound questions like ‘Are we even teaching our kids the right stuff in the first place?’ and ‘Do our tax and economic policies really incentivise job creation?’

Admittedly I’m no expert, but I’ve unsurprisingly found myself nodding in vigorous agreement with a couple of passages that I’d like to share with you, the first of which comes from Metaskills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age – yet another outstanding and profoundly thought-provoking book from the brilliant Marty Neumeier (@MARTYneumeier):

“With the exception of language and math basics, the subjects we now teach at school are the wrong subjects. The right subjects – the ones that will matter in the 21^st century – are metaskills. Students today should be learning social intelligence, systemic logic, creative thinking, how to make things, how to learn. What we now think of as subjects – sociology, trigonometry, physics, art, psychology and scores of others – should become ‘drill-downs’ from these metaskills – specific disciplines, designed to explore the higher order subjects…

Today we find ourselves caught between two paradigms – the linear, reductionist past and the spiraling, mutli-valent future. The old world turned on the axis of knowledge and material goods. The new one will turn on the axis of creativity and social responsibility. To cross the gap we’ll need a generation of thinkers and makers who can reframe problems and design surprising, elegant solutions. We’ll need fearless, self-directed learners who embrace adventure. We’ll need teachers, mentors and leaders who understand that mind shaping is world shaping – who give learners the tools they’ll need to continually reinvent their minds in response to future challenges.”

The second passage comes from Walter Stahel, founder director of The Product-Life Institute, in a contribution to A New Dynamic: Effective Business in a Circular Economy, published by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation:

“Sustainable taxation should reward desired developments and discourage unwanted effects of activities. In a sustainable economy, taxes on renewable resources, including work – human labour – are counterproductive and should be abandoned. The resulting loss of state revenue could be compensated by taxing the consumption of non-renewable resources in the form of materials and energies, and of undesired wastes and emissions. Such a shift in taxation would reward a circular economy with its low-carbon and low-resource solutions.”

Having always felt that the tax system would provide a far more effective tool to incentivise the right behaviours than the blunt instrument of regulation, that makes intuitive sense to me. What do you think?