And I'll start with my full disclosure,
which I always do obliterate the term social entrepreneurship from the vocabulary and just focus on entrepreneurship,
because all entrepreneurship should have, as we're finding out, social, environmental and governance components if it's going to be sustainable.
Let's talk a little bit about future proofing.
If I say. How can you futureproof your house?
What would you think I was talking about? How would you futureproof your house?
Anybody? Yes.
Open windows and vinyl Saturday. And don't.
Did everybody hear that don't big loud loud open windows and vinyl siding.
I used to sell them door to door and that was our pitch. So your future proofing your house?
Why was that future proofing your house? The windows, they are very strong.
Supposedly, they were related to something that was used on a NASCAR shuttle.
And boy, you're a great salesman. I would buy everything on a vinyl siding.
It protected the wood from sun and wood. Okay.
How else? How else would you futureproof your house?
Yes. Ensure it. Okay.
Good point. Hopefully your insurance won't be around so that it pays back.
Anything else? So if you're going to futureproof your house,
you're really looking at what could happen eventually in terms of something that would threaten your house.
Maybe you live in an earthquake friendly zone, let's put it that way, or a flood friendly zone or whatever.
And you would be looking at that? Well, we talk about future proofing business.
What I really want to do tonight is give you a sense of where we're going with business today,
what are the trends that I see, and then give you some very concrete tools.
If you are going about building a business,
how do you actually incorporate what seems to be very complicated aspects into thinking about how would I future proof my business?
And let me let me just start with this and hopefully you're going to have to put up with my absolutely horrible technique.
Okay. What's the new normal? The new normal is this.
We know that we are going to be living in a hotter,
much more re and we are already much more resource scarce world and a much more
transparent world so that everybody knows whatever is out there in terms of,
you know, disclosure around corporate, you know, misbehaviour or government misbehaviour,
anybody misbehaviour, it's out there, whether it's true or not, it's out there.
And then the other aspect is, of course, everything is unpredictable.
We can no longer predict the patterns of the future by looking at what happened in the past.
Things are accelerating at such a rapid pace that this is really something that, you know, if you look at CEOs,
which I often deal with, they're scrambling to figure out what is what does this mean for a company?
Where should we be going? And so that really is a completely different way of looking at things.
And so they're beginning to think about what how should we be reacting to this?
How should we be preparing our business so that it is future proof?
Okay. And some of those aspects are very challenging because business has been used to thinking about the short term.
And anybody who has ever run a business knows that cash flow is very important.
Your financial health is very important, so you tend to focus on that.
But all of a sudden they're going actually the short term. I need to start thinking for a longer term because a lot of these other issues that
I've never had to deal with are going to be affecting my shorter term bottom line.
So that's the first main challenge is a total way of looking at the world in a different way, or at least in business.
And this is where it really is tough.
You know, business has really been used to and we've all been used to something that Steven Green has has talked about.
Steven Green was the former chair of HSBC.
He's an Anglican priest, which many not very many people know about.
And now he is a minister in government, in charge of trade or some very fancy British name.
And what he but he basically he wrote this book called Good Value.
That's really very it's very philosophical.
Of course, he went to Oxford and he basically looks at the history of business and he looks at how things have been done.
And he says today our biggest ill is that we divide where how we live our lives.
This is my work person and this is my family person and this is my church person and this is my volunteer person.
And a lot of times those things don't come together. They don't resonate, and that is one of the great he says.
This is one of the great ills of of life. And so it really allows us to make that clear, which are well,
that's why you have people who are just wonderful community members and wonderful church goers, and yet,
you know, they may be part of the Mafia, etc., etc., you know,
so we tend to be able to compartmentalise the idea of future proofing businesses, how do we bring this together?
And it's not just about business, it's about our lives.
How do we actually end up pursuing what we really want to do with our lives and what we really value with,
you know, with our time, the time that we're here, you know, on on earth.
So put it rather cynically. So business as usual is this is where I make my money and this is where I do good and never the twain shall meet.
That's a little bit exaggerated, but that's often been the case.
And what we're looking at when we talk about when we when businesses begin to say, you know, we really need to look at this in a different way,
it really is moving from CSR, which stands for Corporate Social Responsibility, which is kind, sort of what you do to tick the boxes.
In the most cynical viewpoint, some CSR programs are much more integrated,
but basically people who run CSR units, etc. are like a little wart on their corporate.
I mean, that's a horrible thing to say, isn't it? But anyway, the point is, they're kind of like a little satellite hovering around there,
and everybody else is like it's like, you know, it's like the person who's in charge of diversity.
Oh, yes, you shall have diversity or you shall have gender mainstreaming.
And then there's some poor women trying to change the entire way that the company works.
So CSR is very much like that. It's a tipping of the hat without and in general that is the case.
But now more and more CEOs are realising that that doesn't work.
And I'm going to give you a couple of ideas in terms.
But first of all, even the most, you know, radical activists like McKinsey and MIT are basically doing, you know,
some studies that are actually proving that you want to know what future proofing your business actually pays.
And these are some of the major studies of the major publications that have come out.
And as you can see, they're pretty recognisable in terms of saying this actually pays off and this is what we know.
Goldman Sachs in their study has found that companies that futureproof their business and by this we're
going to get into get away from the jargon of future proofing business and tell you exactly what that means,
that they actually have 25% higher stock value than their counterparts that haven't gotten that rapid.
So basically what's happening is more and more, although I don't want to tell you that this is a pandemic, it's very slow.
It's very slow. But more and more, we're seeing companies that are beginning to really take a hard look at this,
a hard look at their supply chains and how they do business, a hard look at who do they work with, how do those people work and under what conditions.
And really putting it out there in terms of knowing that because the world is more transparent, they can get into trouble like that if they're not.
If anything, it's great that they're running scared because they are being forced to do some of the right things.
And these are some of the key components to improve short and long term profitability.
And we're going to get into each one of those and I'm going to be giving you
tools for how do you incorporate this so you don't need to be taking notes,
I think. Isn't it like that? Aren't these all going to be up on. Yeah.
And I'm going to give you some links so that you can begin to think about this,
because I know that after this of starting your business comes building your business.
And this session actually I'd want to say bridges both of those both of those sessions because as you begin to think about starting your business,
you'll find some of these issues will make you reflect.
And then as you build your business, you will find that you will actually have tools to be able to incorporate.
So governance immediately, when people say governance, people think of boards, don't you?
It's so much more than boards. And you'll find out exactly what that means.
Workers. These both things to workers and community are part of the social component.
How do you treat your workers?
If you look at a company like Wal-Mart that I find absolutely fascinating and this is the schizophrenia of business, Walmart, huge company,
employs millions of people and basically is doing all of these campaigns around,
you know, helping women in developing countries get employment, etc., etc.
And meanwhile, how does it treat its workers? Not real well.
So there is this schizophrenia in that in a sense that still needs to be worked out.
And community, how do you how do you actually support the community?
We're going to show you a couple of little film clips of what companies are doing around that.
And then finally, of course, the obvious one environment. What is your environmental footprint?
Even if you are a financial institution, even if you are have you'd say, oh, I have nothing to do with environment.
You actually do. So those are the big four components.
Now, why would why would people want to do this?
Why would you know? This is a lot of work.
But the interesting thing is that many of the CEOs I talked to today are saying and if you really in the financial institutions,
they're going, nobody wants to work for us anymore.
What do we do? How do we motivate people to come?
People want to work for organisations, for companies that are basically fundamentally innovative, philosophically positive and morally compelling.
That's what everybody wants.
And that is a tough act to follow or a tough, you know, a tough thing to do if you are not really honest about what you're doing.
So the CEO wants to attract and retain the best talent.
How do you do that? Many ceos go when our h.r.
People go out to actually interview many of the mbas or the post grads or whatever.
What we're finding is they're interviewing us and saying, so what do you do about x, y or Z?
And they're finding that a very interesting flip of the coin or the CFO wants to attract investors and save money.
That's another reason why they're interested in doing this or h.r.
And we get this all the time. Human resources goes. How do we motivate our employees to do fun?
You know, it's kind of a sad thing that people go to work and they don't feel motivated by
what they're doing and have to go out and do something totally different to,
you know, get them excited. But this is one of the big things that we get all the time from big companies.
We want to engage because we want to motivate our employees, want to give them a reason for working here.
And the sales team wants to increase consumer trust.
Some very interesting lessons learned there that I could go into in terms of some of the ways that big companies have done that.
Operations managers want to save on on on efficiencies, etc.
And then, you know, there's always the marketing team goes, hey, a good opportunity for us.
You know, anyway, these are some of the motivations why people are beginning to think about how
do we actually show that we are good citizens in this world and not just,
you know, wanting to save. So one of the things that questions that I get and all the time and and I was working with Goldman Sachs in an initiative
that they did here in the UK called 10,000 small businesses where basically went to about five of of UK's big urban hubs,
Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, etc. and looked at and and they selected entrepreneurs who were just starting.
And when we would talk about this, they'd go, hey, come on, you know, I'm just a start up.
I can't afford to do this kind of stuff. This stuff is for the big guys.
It's not for little ones like me. I'm just trying to make you know, I'm trying to make ends meet.
I'm trying to pay my workers. I'm trying.
And in fact, what I'm going to show you is that across the board, this isn't something that you do from one day to the other.
This is a progressive, a progressive process that I will give you some tools to be able to follow through.